Hunted (The Iron Druid Chronicles, Book Six)
Read Hunted (The Iron Druid Chronicles, Book Six) Online
Authors: Kevin Hearne
The Iron Druid Chronicles
by Kevin Hearne
“Kevin Hearne’s Iron Druid Chronicles has grown from strength to strength since its publication in 2011. Kevin’s writing style along with his characterization has made him the darling of urban fantasy readers all over the world.”
—Fantasy Book Critic
“They are clever, fast paced and a good escape.”
—J
ASON
W
EISBERGER
, Boing Boing
“It may be possible that Hearne and Atticus could be the logical heir to Butcher and Dresden.”
—SFFWorld
“Celtic mythology and an ancient Druid with modern attitude mix it up in the Arizona desert in this witty new fantasy series.”
—K
ELLY
M
EDING
, author of
Three Days to Dead
“Kevin Hearne breathes new life into old myths, creating a world both eerily familiar and startlingly original.”
—N
ICOLE
P
EELER
, author of
Tempest Rising
Hounded
“This is the best urban/paranormal fantasy I have read in years. Fast paced, funny, clever, and suitably mythic, this is urban fantasy for those worn-out of werewolves and vampires. Fans of Jim Butcher, Harry Connolly, Greg van Eekhout, Ben Aaronovitch, or Neil Gaiman’s American Gods will take great pleasure in Kevin Hearne’s
Hounded
. Highly recommended.”
—J
OHN
O
TTINGER
III, editor of Grasping for the Wind
“Filled with snarky descriptions … comradely characters, thumping action and a plot as stylized as a Renaissance Faire, this tale is outrageously fun.”
—
The Plain Dealer
“A superb urban fantasy debut … with plenty of quips and zap-pow-bang fighting.”
—
Publishers Weekly
(starred review)
“Fans of fantasy and urban fantasy will eat this one up.…
Hounded
is a series debut that is absolutely not to be missed!”
—My Bookish Ways
“For both the urban fantasy and non–urban fantasy geekoids,
Hounded
is a tremendous read. Fun, well-written, and entertaining.”
—Blood of the Muse
“A page-turning and often laugh-out-loud-funny caper through a mix of the modern and the mythic.”
—A
RI
M
ARMELL
, author of
The Warlord’s Legacy
Hexed
“Kevin Hearne … cranks out action and quips at a frenzied pace … in this fun and highly irreverent read.”
—
Publishers Weekly
“Hearne’s writing is fast paced and spot on …
Hexed
is steeped in magic and wrapped in awesome. It really doesn’t get much better than this!”
—My Bookish Ways
“The humor in
Hexed
is non-stop.… Hard to read without a smile plastered across your face.”
—Blood of the Muse
Hammered
“In this adrenaline-spiked third Iron Druid adventure … Hearne provides lots of zippy plotting and rocking action scenes.… Fans will be thrilled.”
—
Publishers Weekly
“I love, love, love this series, and
Hammered
is the best so far.… You’ll be turning pages in warp speed until the final battle, then you won’t be able to turn them fast enough.”
—My Bookish Ways
Tricked
“Kevin Hearne’s
Tricked
manages to combine the fun aspects of the previous books and give the saga a darker turn to make this book more akin to a thriller.”
—Fantasy Book Critic
“
Tricked
is packed with thoroughly engrossing characters, fascinating mythology, creatures that will make your head spin, lots of action, and a ton of heart.”
—My Bookish Ways
“Hearne understands the two main necessities of good fantasy stories: for all the wisecracks and action, he never loses sight of delivering a sense of wonder to his readers, and he understands that magic use always comes with a price. Highly recommended.”
—C
HARLES DE
L
INT
,
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
Trapped
“
Trapped
is another amazing book for the series. Kevin Hearne is on a roll and I can hardly wait to see what trouble Atticus, Oberon, and Granuaile get into next!”
—Blogcritics
Hunted
is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
A Del Rey eBook Edition
Copyright © 2013 by Kevin Hearne
Two Ravens and One Crow
by Kevin Hearne copyright © 2012 by Kevin Hearne
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
D
EL
R
EY
is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Two Ravens and One Crow
was originally published seperately as an eBook by Del Rey, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 2012
eISBN: 978-0-345-53877-2
Cover design: David G. Stevenson
Cover illustration: © Gene Mollica
v3.1
As always, please remember that while I provide these for reference, I’m completely okay with you pronouncing these names however you wish, because the entire point of reading is to enjoy yourself and not stress out about unusual names from mythology. If, however, you enjoy knowing how to pronounce them, here you go:
Irish
Aillil = ALL-yill (In
The Wooing of Étaín
, this name is held by both Étaín’s father and the brother of Eochaid Airem. It’s used here to refer to the brother.)
Amergin = AV er ghin (legendary Irish bard whose name is spelled and pronounced many different ways. The modern Irish spelling is
Amhairghin
and pronounced something like OUR yin, but the Morrigan would use the Old Irish spelling and pronunciation.)
Brí Léith = Bree LAY (the
síd
or home of Midhir)
Eochaid Airem = OH het EH rem (High King of Ireland once upon a time)
Étaín = eh TEEN (so epically hot they wrote an epic about her)
Fódhla = FOH-la (one of the poetic names of Ireland and the name of the Irish elemental)
Fúamnach = FOO am nah (Midhir’s wife)
Midhir = ME er (member of the Tuatha Dé Danann; half brother to Aenghus Óg and Brighid)
Orlaith = OR la (Yep, that –ith on the end is just to make it look pretty)
Polish
Dukla = DOOK la
Gościniec pod Furą = gohsht NEE etz pohd FOO roh (basically long
o
wherever you see
oh
)
Jasło = YAHS woh
Katowice = Kat oh VEET suh (city in southern Poland)
Pustków Wilczkowski = POOST kov wiltch KOV ski
Sokołowska = SO ko WOV ska
Wojownika = Vai yov NEE ka
Wrocław = Vroht SWOF
Żubrówka = Zhu BRUF ka (bison grass vodka, popular in Poland and available here, quite tasty mixed with apple juice or cider)
There is a passage in the novel where Atticus recites some verses from Dante’s
Purgatorio
in the original Italian, but he neglects to share an English translation. I have duplicated the verses here and followed each with a translation by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
From Canto V:
Là ’ve ’l vocabol suo diventa vano
,
arriva’ io forato ne la gola
,
fuggendo a piede e sanguinando il piano
.
There where the name thereof becometh void
Did I arrive, pierced through and through the throat,
Fleeing on foot, and bloodying the plain.
Quivi perdei la vista e la parola;
nel nome di Maria fini’, e quivi
caddi, e rimase la mia carne sola
.
There my sight lost I, and my utterance
Ceased in the name of Mary, and thereat
I fell, and tenantless my flesh remained.
It’s odd how when you feel safe you can’t think of that thing it was you kept meaning to do, but when you’re running for your life you suddenly remember the entire list of things you never got around to doing.
I always wanted to get blindly drunk with a mustachioed man, take him back to his place, do a few extra shots just this side of severe liver damage, and then shave off half his mustache when he passed out. I would then install surveillance equipment before I left so that I could properly appreciate his reaction (and his hangover) when he woke up. And of course I would surveil him from a black windowless van parked somewhere along his street. There would be a wisecracking computer science graduate from MIT in the van with me who almost but not quite went all the way once with a mousy physics major who dumped him because he didn’t accelerate her particles.
I can’t remember when I thought that one up and added it to my list. It was probably after I saw
True Lies
. It was never particularly high up on my list, for obvious reasons, but the memory came back to me, fully fantasized in Technicolor, once I was running for my life in Romania. Our minds are mysteries.
Somewhere behind me, the Morrigan was fighting off two goddesses of the hunt. Artemis and Diana had decided
that I needed killing, and the Morrigan had pledged to protect me from such violent death. Oberon ran on my left and Granuaile on my right; all around me, the forest quaked silently with the pandemonium of Faunus, disrupting Druidic tethers to Tír na nÓg. I could not shift away to safety. All I could do was run and curse the ancient Greco–Romans.
Unlike the Irish and the Norse—and many other cultures—the Greco–Romans did not imagine their gods as eternally youthful but vulnerable to violent death. Oh, they had nectar and ambrosia to keep their skin wrinkle-free and their bodies in prime shape, changing their blood to ichor, and that was similar to the magical food and drink available to other pantheons, but that wasn’t the end of it. They could regenerate completely, which essentially gifted them with true immortality, so that even if you shredded them like machaca and ate them with guacamole and warm tortillas, they’d just re-spawn in a brand-new body on Olympus and keep coming after you—hence the reason why Prometheus never died, in spite of having his liver eaten every day by a vulture who oddly never sought variety in his diet.