Hunted (The Iron Druid Chronicles, Book Six) (11 page)

No, Oberon. I need you to stay with me. Please? Let’s send him off properly
.

We will have whiskey as soon as we find a liquor store
.

Fragarach was lying a short distance away, so I retrieved it and placed it on the ground in front of him. I didn’t roll him over or anything like that. I couldn’t bear to see the other side of his head. The small black hole would haunt me forever as it was; I didn’t want to see anything worse.

I closed my eyes, pressing tears down my cheeks, and used my Latin headspace to contact the local elemental, Saxony.

//Druid needs aid / Bury body and sword here / Keep surface undisturbed//

//Harmony// came the reply. Atticus and Fragarach sank into the earth, and the turf nearby sort of stretched and closed over him, adjusting itself to make it appear as if nothing had ever happened there. No blood. No marker to indicate that the finest Druid to ever walk the earth ended his walk in this nameless field.

My voice wasn’t up to speaking aloud, so I spoke mentally to Oberon.
Here lies Siodhachan Ó Suileabháin
, I said,
known as Atticus to us. He changed my life forever—for the better—and I can never repay the debt I owe him. All I can do is honor his memory by protecting the earth
. I paused, confronted by the impossibility of doing justice to my memories of him, so I simply ended with,
I loved him and will think of him every day, no matter how long I live
.

I sobbed once and then did my best to weep silently so that Oberon would know it was his turn. He whined, indecisive, before he gave form to his thoughts.

Oberon said. backs and wriggle around in it and take a nap in the sun. He knew how to be a hound’s best friend. I loved him. I don’t think I’ll ever wag my tail again. That’s all.>

I petted Oberon and stood shakily. I sniffled and looked up at the moon. Its cold light gave me no comfort. It only reminded me of Artemis and Diana. I cast my eyes back down to the ground and shook my head. There had been no vampires waiting for us. Only a sniper, probably in their employ, determined to wipe out the last of the Druids. And even the vampires were being directed by some shadowy figure in Tír na nÓg.

I really need to run now. I need to get out of here
.

I shifted to a horse and found Scáthmhaide where I’d dropped it. Then I lit out for the Netherlands with Oberon as if we could somehow catch up with what we’d lost, as if the desolation we felt could be left behind and wouldn’t grow inside us with every mile.

A pair of horns blast behind me, I am chilled with a premonition of my own death, and I wish for the thousandth time that Atticus were here. Did he find horns to be harbingers of death and sorrow? I cannot ever ask him now.

Instead of “When the Saints Go Marching In,” I always hear “Taps” at funerals, and somehow the collective sorrow of so many final farewells builds in my mind, a great Jungian unconscious flood of tears and roses thrown on caskets and folded flags given to widows by a pair of crisp white gloves. That horn that plays in the John Williams score after Luke Skywalker finds the smoking ruins of his aunt and uncle—such a mournful sound, full and hollow at the same time, a surfeit of emptiness. And the call to charge never rouses me but rather signals that someone is going to die a violent death soon—or, if it starts a race or contest, it means there can be only one victor.

The horns that blasted behind me were dim, nasal, and stuffy sounds that nevertheless meant the goddesses were gaining on us, and they weighted down my legs, which were already straining, not from fatigue but from dolor. These were the sounds of horns and hunting that,
according to myth, brought Actaeon to Diana as she was bathing. He’d been lost in the woods and thought that by following the sounds of horns he’d be saved. But Diana had turned him into a stag and set her hounds on him instead. Those horns had called him to his death.

Is she still sounding the same horn all these centuries later?

And is there anything more horrifying to the hunted than the sound of horns? Even the baying of the hounds is not so terrible; they are animals and following their instinct and training. But the murderous intellect behind the horn, the creature coldly orchestrating my doom—that’s what makes me feel like prey and sets icy wings of fear fluttering inside my throat.

I probably would have given up already if it weren’t for Oberon. And he is probably thinking the same thing regarding me. In truth, we are running only because Atticus would have wanted us to. I think we are only marginally more scared than we are depressed, and we aren’t running as fast as we had been before. The urgency is gone. I don’t see how I can survive this if Atticus and the Morrigan couldn’t. The powers of a Druid are awesome, but the powers arrayed against me are too numerous and in a different league. I’m not going to quit, but I feel like I’m on a soccer team losing 3–0 with ten minutes left on the clock. While winning in that scenario is still theoretically possible, I don’t see a way to make it happen all by myself and I half-wish that the end would hurry up and get here, banishing the dread of its approach.

We crossed the border into the Netherlands, and the elemental directed me to turn sharply to the southwest to avoid the bulk of cities by the sea. We’d have had to turn south at some point anyway to reach the French coast.

It’s odd, sometimes, how a border can seemingly change the character of the land. The German landscape
had been sharp, clean, and precise, whereas the Dutch, even at night, had a bit of a gauzy filter over it, as if the ghost of Rembrandt had pulled his brush across it to soften the edges just a little bit. The colors I saw in my night vision, too, appeared subtly textured and mixed by the master, not so stark as they had been in Germany. Or perhaps it was no different at all, and only my melancholia made it so.

Noting the change of direction, Oberon said in a subdued tone,

He let some time pass, and all we heard was the pounding of my hooves and the pads of his paws on the earth. They beat out a rhythm of cycling thought, the percussive notes repeating
Atticus
over and over if you were inclined to hear it that way, and we were. Then he said,

The horns sounded again. Perhaps my imagination magnified the sound a bit.

Predator
? Yeah, I’ve seen it.>

I felt as if my eyes should be flooding with tears, but horses don’t cry the same way humans do. Oberon continued, not waiting for me to finish.

off his guns and meet the Predator with just a knife. I forget what his name was, but I’ll never forget what he did. Everybody was crapping their pants and scrambling for the choppah, but he was like, hell with that, homies, I’m not running from my problems. I’m going to face them, even if they kill me, but first I’m going to slowly cut open my own chest and make some crazy eyes. And then the Predator did kill him—and pretty fast too—but I always respected his decision to take that stand. He was like, fuck the choppah, Arnold! Oh. Will you excuse my language?>

I told him.

Oberon abruptly quit running, and I had to stop too. We were in the middle of a large barley field.

He turned to face the northeast and growled.

My instinct for self-preservation spoke up. It told me I could survive this. I could drop Scáthmhaide, abandon
Oberon, and turn into a peregrine falcon. I could fly straight across the channel to England, find a tethered tree, and shift away to safety. They couldn’t have pandemonium going on over there too, I thought. Somewhere in the New World, maybe even back in Arizona, I’d bind my amulet to my aura the way Atticus did, and then the playing field would be a bit more even.

Except I’d never be able to live with the guilt. And I’d never have the stomach to fight again if I didn’t fight now.

I had thought Oberon’s tail might wag at that, but it didn’t. He simply pricked up his ears.

The ears drooped.

I raised my right front hoof.

We ran, and I consulted the elemental about a suitable place to defend ourselves. Images of the path ahead flashed through my mind until I saw a likely spot.

//There / That place / Query: Where is that?// It was a small precipice—only fifteen or so feet high—but if we could get our backs to it, we would have a relatively unobscured line of sight and no one would be able to sneak up on us. There were trees on top of it, but at the base a small clear space before the trees broke up the view—and the approach was on a gentle slope as well, so we’d have the high ground.

//Remain on current path// the elemental said. //Will guide//

//Query: Distance to destination?//

Elementals are not excellent at using human units of measurement, but I figured it was about eighty miles to the southwest, skirting cities and keeping to rural areas as much as possible. If we sped up, we could make it in a couple of hours.

I told Oberon.