Read Hunted (The Iron Druid Chronicles, Book Six) Online
Authors: Kevin Hearne
Try to chew it slowly and enjoy it
, I said, putting the plate down for Oberon.
Glad you like it, buddy. There’s no shortage of bacon here. In fact, you can have mine
.
I love you, Atticus. If I ever have puppies, I’m going to tell them stories about this food. It’s legendary.>
A heated exchange of Polish boiled through the screen door, and my pork chops tasted of guilt sauce. We had to chow down anyway. Any meal at this point could be our last. The waitress and the cook eventually broke it off and she exited the kitchen, no doubt to inform her customers that their breakfasts would take a bit longer.
We were just about finished when two large ravens descended with thunderous backwings that sounded like chopper blades. Each of them had a familiar white gleam in one eye. They landed on the woodpile and squawked at me.
“Hugin and Munin,” I said. “To what do I owe the pleasure?” One raven—I couldn’t tell them apart—squawked and shoved his beak in my direction, then squawked again while pointing with his beak to the other raven.
“You want me to talk to that one? Hi there. Oh! I see.” It wanted me to mentally bond with the other raven. Activating my charm for magical sight, I had to blink a little bit at the intensity of white magic emanating from the two birds. But once I could focus, I found the consciousness of the indicated raven and reached out to it. Images slammed into my head, aerial views of Artemis and Diana racing across the Polish border near
Dukla, each of them in a fancy new chariot pulled by four golden-horned stags. They were running side by side, following our trail across a familiar alfalfa field, when the earth gave out from under them and they fell into our pit trap. They tried to leap out of the chariots and make it back to solid ground but weren’t in time; they’d been moving quickly, and the stags pulled those floating chariots down. A grind house of gore and screaming ensued. Though I felt sorry for the stags, I didn’t feel the least bit distressed at seeing the goddesses impaled on the wooden pikes we’d left at the bottom. They’d have to heal up from that, somehow get out of the pit, and get yet another brace of chariots and new teams to pull them. They’d be going a bit slower, but they would never give up now that I had personally wounded them. I needed a long-term solution more than ever, and I didn’t have one.
The scene shifted; Artemis and Diana in the gray sky of an early dawn—it must have been the same one we experienced a few hours ago—looking none the worse for suffering what would be mortal wounds to anyone else and gathering themselves to begin again outside the pit. They had new chariots, new stags, and now a pack of seven hounds each. I remembered the hounds from mythology; they had been gifts from Pan and Faunus. Each goddess blew into a horn, and the hounds leapt ahead on our trail. They waited for a few seconds and then followed behind in their chariots. If we tried another pit trap, the hounds would fall in first and the huntresses would be able to see that in time to avoid it.
But it had worked. It had taken us about eight hours to get from the pit trap to here, and it was about three hours after dawn now, so if the huntresses began at dawn, that meant they were about five or maybe six hours behind us now.
The link broke and the raven I’d bonded with—clearly Munin, since I’d seen a memory—pointed at the other
one, Hugin. Hugin’s aura was a bit more intense—the current thoughts of Odin would of course be more active than his memories. I didn’t think Hugin represented the totality of Odin’s thoughts, but it had to be a relatively huge chunk of his consciousness, or else it wouldn’t have put Odin in a coma for years when I’d speared the first Hugin back in Asgard. I had no idea how Odin thought of him, but from a Druidic perspective, Hugin was a headspace in Odin’s mind—with wings. And in a similar sense Munin was a headspace as well. Both ravens had to report back to Odin periodically to recharge and reunite all the fragments of his consciousness, but it wasn’t as if he sat with all the life of a mannequin while they were gone. Though they did embody the mind of Odin, they weren’t the full sum of it.
I connected with the bird’s bright threads of consciousness, and the aged whiskey voice of the Gray Wanderer filled my head with Old Norse.
That’s very kind. But how did you hear I was in trouble?
The Morrigan is dead
.
She foresaw this five or six years ago?
I let that eulogy pass unremarked.
Odin, how did you find me? I’m shielded from divination
.
She’s not mine. She belongs to herself
.
You’ve been watching?
What other gods?
Odin continued as if I hadn’t spoken.
Who can dictate this to the Olympians?
Thinking back to a particularly vivid dream I had twelve years ago in Flagstaff, I asked,
Might one of those gods be Ganesha?
Odin ignored me again.
So we are entertainment for the gods? We run for your sport?
What others?
So we’re not only entertainment, we’re a method by which someone gets to pursue a personal grudge?
I recalled. It was not my finest hour.
I suppose you won’t be helping us, then
.
The link broke and the ravens’ wings blatted into the morning sky like fat motorcycle engines.
The Morrigan’s assertion that we had to run the whole way made a bit more sense now. The gods had decided Europe was their Colosseum and we were the gladiators.
“No rest for the Druids,” I said. “Come on, let’s go.”
So much for my theory about faery tails. We were being watched constantly through divination, and Granuaile was the antenna. What Odin could do, others could do just as well, so Odin’s point that there were other interested parties was well taken. The reason we had a vampire and dark elves waiting for us near the Slovakian border was because someone in Tír na nÓg was coolly divining Granuaile’s location, quite correctly assuming I’d be nearby, and then dispatching assorted evil minions to slay us. They’d done this repeatedly in Greece while we were trying to get Granuaile bound to the earth; we’d shaken them for a while in the French Pyrenees, perhaps because we were spending nights inside a mountain and the scryer could not figure out where we were, but eventually they must have zeroed in on us. We’d left just ahead of an oncoming horde of vampires, if Oberon’s nose could be trusted, and it usually could.
After we raided Hel and killed Fenris, Granuaile and I had been left alone in Mexico for a couple of blissful weeks—why was that? I’m sure her presence there would have been as easy to divine as anywhere else, and I was most certainly very close to her during that time. It must have been because the puppet master, whoever it
was, couldn’t get minions out to us in Mexico. If that was correct, then that told me quite a bit.
I had bound Mexico to Tír na nÓg long ago, back when the Maya were still running around and building future tourist sites. The Fae could have shifted and found us in short order if they wished. And Mexico certainly had its share of vampires; if they had wanted to find us, there would be no reason for it to take two days to locate us, much less two weeks. So this mysterious person was not using local vampires and wasn’t shifting minions around using tethered trees. Instead, he or she was using a specific set of vampires—perhaps a specific set of Fae and dark elves too—and shifting them around using the Old Ways in Europe. That meant Mexico was safe territory. The whole New World was safe territory. And now that I knew that, Faunus had made sure that safe territory was unreachable.
It also meant that there was something important about the Old Ways that I was missing.
Eastern Germany had an Old Way to Tír na nÓg—several, in fact, hidden among the river valleys of the Ore Mountains, which divided Saxony from Bohemia. But the nearest was a wee bit southwest of the city of Hoyerswerda in Dubringer Moor, a wetland populated around the edges with birch, pine, and alder, spreading their roots in its marshy soil. Unlike the vast majority of the Old Ways, it wasn’t in a cave. A few, like this one, were open-air mazes without walls. Walk through the birches in a certain pattern, end at a particular alder tree and circle it thrice, and you’d be in Tír na nÓg. It wasn’t the sort of Old Way that you could collapse with an earthquake. You could clear-cut the trees or set fire to the landscape, and perhaps we would find something like that had happened, but it was more likely to be guarded.
Or not. How do you guard a place that’s open to the air—and open to the public—without generating some attention? With caves you can hide the guardians inside.
We had to turn due south to get to Dubringer Moor, skirting a huge lignite strip mine at Kausche but otherwise enjoying the mixed evergreen and deciduous forests that surrounded wee hamlets until we arrived at the moor. Trees grew out of some juicy ground around the edges of it, but near the center it was a swampy marshland. I stopped at a birch tree that had three knots reminiscent of a triskele on one side. After looking around to make sure we were unobserved, I shifted to human and drew Fragarach from its scabbard.
“Ready?” I asked.
Granuaile shape-shifted and held Scáthmhaide at the ready. “Yep. Go.”
In the magical spectrum the Old Way was plain to see, but Oberon couldn’t see it at all and I didn’t want him to step off. “We’ll go slow. Look and listen for guardians.
Don’t forget the treetops. And, Oberon, if you smell anything weird, let us know.”
“And stay close to us. Single file. No chasing squirrels or anything else.”
We advanced ten paces to another birch, directly south of the first one. “Walk around this counterclockwise,” I said, demonstrating, “and then we go west.” They followed me to the tree next door and then we turned south.