Hounded

by Kevin Hearne

  They were all gazing directly at me now, because I’d helpfully given them a direction to look by speaking again. They still didn’t see me, though.

  “How does he know what we’ve done?” Coppertone whispered.

  “I thought the Druids all died before Rome fell,” Coffee said.

  “All but one,” I said. “The Romans never found me.”

  “I still can’t see him,” Pinky complained in a frustrated whisper. “Can’t do anything.” That told me they would have thrown some juju at me already if they had line of sight.

  “Show yourself!” Coppertone shouted, taking a couple of steps in my direction. They weren’t shy. They’d made no move at all to cover their nudity.

  “I’m sorry for you ladies,” I said over the pained cries of the squirrel. “You obviously have some magical talent, and you might have turned out to be great witches. But I can’t let you have Kaibab’s power. It needs to be free.” I still didn’t know what kind of witches they were. The Seal of Arielis suggested a Kabbalistic background, but it had also been used by priests of Voodoo and Obeah and teenage girls who had found the damn thing on the Internet. Whatever they were, they were clever enough to adapt the Seal to their own purposes, and their purposes were not benign.

  “We can’t let him break the circle,” Pinky said, stepping toward me with her arms groping the air, and then she switched to speaking Russian, no doubt thinking I wouldn’t understand it. It would have been a good assumption if they were dealing with a young American guy, but they were dealing with a truly ancient Irish guy who spoke forty-two languages, some long dead. “Nam nuzhno ostanovit ego,” she said. We need to stop him. Coffee and Coppertone formed up on either side, searching with their hands for the source of my disembodied voice.

  Coppertone continued in the same language, “We should cast a speed spell.” Smart girl. If they couldn’t target me with their magic, they could target themselves and search for me more quickly. They switched languages again, to one I thought I recognized, but didn’t understand: It sounded like Romany. They spoke in concert and moved their right arms in a synchronized gesture, and afterward their movements blurred with speed.

  Creeeeeepy. And evidence that they were much more accomplished than I had originally thought. They were probably much older than they looked too: These were witches of the Old World come here to take on the power of the New.

  They advanced quickly, and if they got hold of me they’d probably do some damage. I didn’t want to find out how powerful they were by experimentation: If they could bind Kaibab, they could probably bind me too. There were several things I could do to bind them, but all of them would take more time than they would allow, and speaking the words at this point would draw them closer to my position. If I tried to run around them, they’d spot the movement and hear my footfalls, and I’d be dealing with Romany curses flung at my feet. The only solution was to knock them down and hope I had time to break Kaibab out of the circle.

  I let them get close and then I sucker punched them, and I’m not ashamed of it. People who try to fight fair with witches tend to die unfairly. Coffee and Pinky each took a fist in the nose, and as they were reeling backward, Coppertone swung a fist at the mirage of my camouflaged head. She was superfast, but not a trained martial artist. I had already dropped to the ground so that I could sweep her legs, and as she tumbled awkwardly to the forest floor I chopped down hard just below her ribs, driving all the air out of her lungs. She gasped and clutched at her midsection. She wouldn’t be casting any spells—or chasing me—until she got her breath back.

  Now that I’d established clearly in their minds that I had fists and knew how to use them, I changed my shape to make a break for the circle. I bound myself to the form of a sea otter—which I almost never take on land—and scampered directly toward Coffee and Pinky, who were trying to find me. They heard me coming, and they saw something moving near the forest floor as my camouflage tried to compensate for the changing surroundings, so they aimed a curse in my direction and let fly about three feet above my head, assuming that they’d hit me in the torso if I was in human form. I heard tree bark splintering behind me and was glad they had missed. I darted right between Pinky’s legs, proud of myself for not looking up, and leapt for the stone circle that bound Kaibab.

  The breath whuffed out of me as I crashed into an invisible barrier like a bird into a sliding glass door. Damn witches were much better than I had originally thought. As I thrashed myself back onto my short legs and looked for a likely place to retreat and hold still, Coffee and Pinky realized I’d gotten behind them and charged the circle. They saw the shadows of my movement near the ground, and this time they just tried to tackle me. Pinky missed me entirely, but Coffee got a lucky hand wrapped around my tail. I whipped around and bit her with my sharp otter teeth, and she let go.

  “Ow! What the—? He’s not human anymore!” she exclaimed as I scurried away.

  “What is he then?” Pinky asked. She expressed no disbelief; she just coldly wanted to assess the new threat.

  “I don’t know,” Coffee said as the two of them regained their feet and I ducked behind a ponderosa to the south of the circle. “Something with fur and sharp teeth. I think I grabbed his tail.”

  “All right, keep your eyes on the ground and aim low,” she said.

  The physical approach hadn’t worked, so it was time for me to try something else. I switched back to my human form and dug my toes into the ground. I concentrated on the soil underneath the circle of rocks and felt its substance through my bond to the earth. I heard the witches approaching on my six, but I couldn’t let that distract me. I spoke in Irish, the language used centuries ago in the ritual that bound me to the earth, and thus the language I use to work my magic on it: “Tabhair uaidh,” I breathed, sending the command down through my tattoos, and upon my word the soil caved in, spilling the rocks in all directions as the earth shifted, breaking the circle.

  A loud whump and a shock wave of compressed air announced the escape of Kaibab from the circle. The witches cursed in Russian and asked one another what happened. They looked back at the squirrel, and it appeared to be nothing but a normal, frightened rodent now.

  “No!” Coffee cried. “It got away!” While they were distracted, I moved slowly out from behind the tree so that I could see them well. Coppertone had recovered and joined them near the tumbled ring of stones.

  Pinky stamped her foot and balled her hands into fists. “How’d he break the circle?”

  //Kaibab thanks Druid / Freedom sweet / Binding unjust / Unbound now / Rage / Vengeance//

  “Make peace with your gods now,” I warned the witches as pine needles began to stir and whirl around them clockwise. “I don’t think Kaibab is going to give you a trial of your peers.”

  “Now, wait,” Coffee protested in my direction as she eyed the shifting ground, “we didn’t think it would go this far! We never expected to succeed!”

  “But you hoped you would,” I said, not buying her plea of innocence for a second. “You tried to bind a force of nature and take its power for yourselves.”

  Pinky turned back in my direction and snarled past a rising whorl of pine needles, “Spare us. If you’re a real Druid, then all you do is bind nature and use its power.”

  “No, that’s only part of what I do. As the earth is bound to me, so I am bound to it, and I must answer when it calls. Normally I’d sentence and punish you, too, because elementals aren’t supposed to touch humans, but there’s a self-defense clause in the rules of engagement, and I’m afraid you’ve triggered it. Kaibab can do whatever it wants to you now.”

  Pinky was so focused on me, she seemed unaware that she was standing in the center of a very strange vortex. She looked like she was going to hurl a choice curse or two my way, targeting my voice to see if the curse would stick, but at that moment the earth opened up beneath her feet and swallowed her whole, a swirling curtain of pine needles following her down before the crust collapsed shu
t, choking off her screams with finality.

  The other two witches’ eyes bugged and they took that as their cue to run, crying out for mercy as they fled the forest, heading for the meadow surrounding the lake—believing, perhaps, that it would be safer than staying underneath the trees.

  Coppertone never made it out. Branches from the surrounding ponderosas swung down, whipping and tearing at her bare skin, and she fought back with Romany curses, exploding branches and shattering trunks of trees. It only enraged Kaibab further, though, and eventually the tip of a well-aimed branch pierced Coppertone through one eye, silencing her curses forever.

  Coffee did make it out to the meadow, bloodied but in one piece. She quickly discovered, however, that she wasn’t any safer in open space. Kaibab sent the animals of the forest after her as she hurriedly tried to draw a circle of protection for herself near the lake.

  In those animated movies for kids, the beautiful heroine starts singing in the forest and the animals gradually gather around her and sing along until they’ve practically created a utopia with the power of their golden-throated warbling. This was sort of like watching what would happen if Edgar Allan Poe were in charge of those sequences. Birds got there first, pouring out of the surrounding forest from all directions: bluebirds, nuthatches, robins, crows, woodpeckers, even hummingbirds and a golden eagle. All of them harried her and pecked at her head, preventing her from completing her circle and giving the larger animals time to arrive and do some real damage. She destroyed a number of them, but there were too many to deal with and she got no respite. A coyote hurried into the meadow from the north, and a bobcat sprinted in from the east, apparently the only predators nearby. They nipped at her heels and legs and bloodied her, but she managed to kill them both before they could take her down. I was dismayed by that and took a few steps in her direction to help out, but then I saw it would be unnecessary. Their harassment, combined with the cacophony of the birds, had masked the charge of a magnificent bull elk from the south, who now rammed full speed into her back and sent her flying a good twenty feet or so. The herd of wild horses I’d seen grazing by the lake earlier followed up from the same direction. They mercilessly finished her off, trampling her to death in a mess of blood and mud on their hooves.

  //Druid help / Release small one / Gratitude// Kaibab said through my tattoos, and I picked my way past the tumbled stone circle to retrieve the metal cage. I carried the Kaibab squirrel to the nearest unscarred pine tree and opened the cage door near its base. The creature scampered out and straight up the tree’s trunk, no worse off than it had been when it woke that morning, though it would probably have nightmares when it hibernated.

  //Gratitude / Justice / Harmony// Kaibab said. The forest animals were gathered at the edge of the meadow, looking at me in silence. Once I’d turned to face them, they bobbed their heads at me once before Kaibab released them to fly or gallop away in whatever direction they chose.

  //Relief / Welcome// I replied. I set down the cage and tied myself to a hound’s form once more, then spent some time snuffling around the area where the witches had bound Kaibab. I found their velour tracksuits folded neatly nearby, and I dug up a hole and buried them in it, but didn’t try too hard to conceal it. Some bags of herbs were there, too, but I carried them off much farther and did a better job of burying them, along with the Seal of Arielis that had rested underneath the squirrel’s cage. Before I left for good, I lifted my leg on the seal carved into the ponderosa, ruining the smeared knotweed and dissolving for good any remnants of magical power it held.

  The police, when they eventually came, would have a merry old time trying to reconstruct this crime scene.

  My work finished, I extended my legs into the ground-eating lope for which wolfhounds are celebrated, across the bloody meadow to the forest road, where I headed south. I met Oberon several minutes later trotting up to find me. he asked.

  Had to help out a trapped squirrel is all, I said.

 

  Well, that’s the short version, but yeah.

 

  Well, we can take our time heading back to the car. Everything’s fine now.

 

  Really? I don’t think so, I said. To me it’s perfectly natural.