Hunted (The Iron Druid Chronicles, Book Six) (12 page)

Our minds are all that defend us from the horror of the void. The majority of the time we simply think about something—anything—else, and that itself is an act of defiance against the vast nothing of the universe. But minds break down and stop thinking sometimes. They feel instead: A looping, gnawing monster eats away confidence and goals and even a sense of duty until we are in a dry bleak place of ennui, unable to focus on the minutiae that used to keep us moving. Tongues taste chalk and ashes, and eyes see only gray washes occasionally penetrated by bright stabs of panic.

Depression is a prison to which you have the key except you never think to look for it.

I do not know how long I stayed in the gray, afraid of the nothing and cycling through the long list of my trespasses. I cannot conceive of a judge who could grant me forgiveness. There are some shames I can never outlive. What good would it do to continue? Had I not brought enough ruin to the world—especially in the recent past? But it was the panic that saved me. Panic that Granuaile and Oberon would die. I could not bear to have their deaths added to the vast number that already weighed down the scale of my spirit.

My eyes opened onto darkness, which was not precisely heartening but an improvement over the gray.
Adrenaline coursed through me as I attempted to get my bearings. Cold earth shifted under my right side, and I winced at the pain this small movement caused in my head. Stretching out with my left arm and feeling the boundaries of the space with my fingers, I quickly discovered that I was in a small chamber underground, obviously with some rudimentary air circulation. Fragarach rested in front of my face in its scabbard. Beyond that I had no idea where I was, except that Granuaile and Oberon weren’t with me. We had been running for our lives. Why was I not running? Why had I been reviewing my life with such self-loathing?

//Query: Carpathia?//

//No. Saxony//

Saxony was a German elemental. Why was I in Germany? We’d been in Poland, and Hugin and Munin had visited us. Then we’d run, and … yes, we had crossed into Germany. There had been that attempt to find an Old Way to Tír na nÓg, and then we found that envelope on the tree—Oh.

//Query: How did I get here?//

//Fierce Druid placed you here / Thought you deceased//

I blinked as I processed the fact that elementals had decided to refer to Granuaile as Fierce Druid. //Query: Then why do I have space and air to breathe?//

//I provided / Druid had not moved on//

No, I hadn’t. And apparently I didn’t rate an adjective in front of my title. I was just plain old Druid.

//Query: What happened to me?//

//Projectile impact to head//

Someone had shot me? So
that’s
why my head ached. My fingers trailed up to my head and gently traced their way around it. There was a dimple near my left temple that hadn’t been there before, and it was tender. I was sure the exit wound on the other side had been heinous,
but I didn’t want to lift my head and probe it. I was still healing.

I let my hand drop down to my necklace, where I groped for the last charm on the left side of my necklace, the one I’d never used before.

“Guess you worked after all,” I said.

Granuaile had asked me what it was for once. I told her it was my version of a soulcatcher. I’d made it in response to Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. I was a medic for the Russians during that time and saw what musket fire could do, what it meant for an old Druid who had protections against magic but not against high-velocity hunks of lead. I’d seen guns before that, of course, but had avoided them as best as I could. Joining the Russians had been a sort of fact-finding tour, with the sterling bonus that I got to wear those fun furry hats.

I decided I’d be able to survive most any hit to the body, given time to heal, except for a direct hit to the heart. I could armor myself against that. Shots to the head, however, presented a rather monumental problem. Brain death didn’t allow one time to heal, and the brain was the warehouse for the spirit. Punch a hole in that and you’d shuffle off your mortal coil right away.

Keeping your coil unshuffled was the problem. Healing of the gross physical body could happen on autopilot as long as my tattoos had contact with the earth; I didn’t need to consciously direct that, and it technically didn’t require a beating heart. But keeping my spirit anchored to my body with a hole in my head—well, that was tougher and, as it happens, entirely necessary to keep the healing happening.

It was sometime during the process of binding my cold iron amulet to my aura that I realized I was really altering the nature of my spirit, and if I could do that to my spirit, I might be able to do other things as well. I spent years perfecting my other charms, until I decided
in the nineteenth century to attempt the soulcatcher. (Despite the recent name I’d given to the charm, I am reluctant to use the word
soul
—it has some pretty awful baggage with it, the kind that’s been roughed up quite a bit and thrown around without any regard for what might be inside.) As I told Granuaile once, I had no idea whether it would work or not; to test it, I’d have to die.

And I guess I had died. With rare exceptions, people who get shot in the head do that. Granuaile wouldn’t have buried me if my heart had been beating. So the charm had worked precisely as I had intended.

All of my charms are triggered by mental commands; without them, I’d have to speak the words aloud every time for every binding, as Granuaile does. But you can’t very well trigger a mental command when your brain has been blown out. So I had triggered it back in the nineteenth century and hoped I’d never have occasion to discover whether it worked or not.

The charm executed a series of bindings, three of which were conditional: The first one bound my spirit to my corporeal form even if my heart stopped beating, a sort of soul cage using the framework I’d already established by binding my amulet to my aura; the second took a snapshot of my physical brain every five minutes, accounting for every synapse and neuron, and that had been ongoing since I triggered it in 1812; the third was a healing command, automatically drawing upon the earth (so long as my spirit remained) to heal my head in accordance with the last stored image of my brain, down to the last cell; and once those had been accomplished, the fourth slammed my spirit back into its mortal coil—my brain—and got everything working again. The theory was that my heart would start pumping, the lungs would start breathing, and I’d hopefully rise from the dead without fangs or a shambling gait and with my personality and memories intact.

So much could have gone wrong. Getting decapitated, vaporized in a giant orange ball of flame, or losing so much blood that I couldn’t ever get the heart pumping again. Getting shot on the roof of a building with no hope of contacting the earth. Heck, falling in the field in such a way that none of my tattoos touched the ground would have been disastrous all by itself. The charm was by no means fail-safe insurance against death. But the effort I’d spent on it had clearly paid off.

The gray wash abruptly returned to my vision, the black pitch of the earth fading. What would I do with a new lease on life? Find new and gruesome ways to doom everyone alive? Speak without thinking, make Faustian bargains with witches and frost giants? Save Granuaile and Oberon now, only to see them die at the hands of Loki later? That would be unkind. It would be more merciful to leave them to Artemis and Diana, who favored the quick kill.

I would never have allowed myself to think that way in the company of others. But one is never so alone as in the grave. I could feel all this and no one would overhear or suspect. For all that we may sometimes despise our fellows and be driven to rages and petty revenges, I think we are even darker creatures when we are alone. We can learn to fear our own thoughts more than the lash of the whip or the slap in the face.

At least that is how I imagine it is for people cursed with self-awareness.

Two regrets pulled me out of the gray. If I did nothing, I would never see Granuaile’s freckles again. Or those green eyes. Or smell her strawberry lip gloss … Well, okay, it was more than two regrets. Three. Three regrets. And damn if Oberon didn’t deserve a poodle or some kind of companion besides me. All right, four regrets. Probably more, the longer I thought about it.

A fair measure of pride had something to do with me
clawing my way to the surface as well. I couldn’t stand the thought of Theophilus smiling a smug smile and drinking a goblet full of blood, toasting the final demise of Druids on the earth. He had a metric fuckton of bad karma due him, and I hoped I’d be the one to back up the truck and dump it on his undead ass.

And, gods below, didn’t the Morrigan deserve a shred of effort on my part after what she’d done for me?

I clutched Fragarach tightly as Saxony helped me rise to the surface. //Query: Where is Fierce Druid and Druidfriend?//

//No longer in my realm//

They must have already left Germany. If Granuaile had decided to follow the plan, they could be in the Netherlands or even Belgium by now.

//Query: Plot straight line to them for me?/ Speak with neighboring elementals?//

//Pleasure / Harmony//

//Harmony / Tell Fierce Druid nothing// I didn’t want Granuaile and Oberon to slow down or decide to wait for me when the huntresses would be close behind. And since they were still probably being watched, I didn’t want to tip anyone off that I was walking the earth again.

//Harmony// Saxony said once more.

When I emerged into the air, it was deep night. If Saxony could trace Granuaile through a neighboring elemental, then it was probably the same night that I had been shot. It was entirely possible. Brain tissue is not so heavy or dense as muscle tissue, and I hadn’t needed to replace all of it—just the few ounces of a bullet’s path. Tracks led to the northwest—dogs and deer. The huntresses had been through here already, and their hounds were sniffing out Granuaile and Oberon.

Saxony pointed me just south of west. I shifted to a stag, picked up Fragarach between my lips, and ran,
more worried than I’d ever been. Once, when I’d taken a knife in a kidney and another between the shoulders from the Hammers of God, no less a deity than Jesus had told me the pain I’d felt then was a fraction of what I’d feel if I followed through with my chosen course of action, and while I’ve never worshipped him, I do know he’s not the sort of god who lies to people. At the time, I couldn’t imagine anything worse than my current pain, because I was out of magic then and damaged kidneys fucking hurt. But now I thought I knew what Jesus meant. Free of the gray wash of depression and thinking straight, losing Granuaile and Oberon would be … well, I didn’t have words for that kind of agony. Maybe I had my own dump truck of bad karma waiting for me somewhere ahead. I had certainly earned it, but I raced to avoid it if I could; there was no way I wanted to feel that.

Oberon and I run much faster now that we have a destination and a purpose, even though the Netherlands has proven to be something of an obstacle course. We have had many more roads to cross, and skirting the population is a challenge, but it’s aided by the night; millions of Dutch folk slumber in peace—spooning, perhaps, with someone they love, snoring the snores of the unhunted—and remain blissfully unaware that magic is real and a very old branch of it is doomed to perish in their borders.

As the sky broadcasts a pale gray warning of an incipient sunrise, I spy a sign welcoming me to Veluwezoom National Park, except that the Dutch spell it
Nationaal
—which I kind of like. The bonus vowel suggests abundance, as if their country is stuffed with a surpassing bounty of natural gifts. It is a not unreasonable conclusion. Veluwezoom is a serene stretch of heath and assorted trees, the latter huddled together around the perimeter of the park and giving shelter to innumerable critters that Oberon, were he not so forlorn, would have loved to harass. The leaves on the trees fly flags of red and orange and yellow, heralding with the brightest pageantry the decline of their vigor. Seeing that, Atticus
would be smiling and starting to talk about celebrating Samhain soon. If he were here.

Missing people in our lives are like wounds we reopen with thoughts.

Our destination lay at the far end of a field of grass and heather that sloped ever so gently up to it. Once there, at the base of the small tree-topped cliffside the elemental had shown me, I shifted to human and turned to survey our trail. I beheld a vista of fading green and pale lavender, contoured slopes of plants crouching patiently in the predawn gray, waiting for the first blazon of the sun to light their edges with fire and joy. Oberon turned with me, nose in the air, sampling its scent, and ears twitching at the sound of birds waking up for the morning’s natter. They were located in small handfuls of trees on either side of the cliff that constricted our view of the periphery. Perhaps they found the prospect of the heath as stunning as we did; it was a shy, muted beauty ready to be seen and applauded.