Hunted

by Kevin Hearne

 

  Then he’s misunderstood the nature of beauty. It doesn’t stay, except in our minds.

 

  We left the man and hurried to the sporting goods store, a place called Wojownika, which turned out to be only a few blocks away. I toyed with the idea of snagging some other weapons, but they were impractical in this situation. We had no way to carry them, and cinching me up with saddlebags would be a terrible idea once I shape-shifted to anything else. Our best bet was to stay fast and unencumbered.

  I didn’t like stealing, but I didn’t see an alternative. No one offers traveler’s checks for Druids on the run. I would prevail upon Atticus to send the targeted store an anonymous windfall later, if there was a later.

  Oberon bellyached a bit about carrying knives in his mouth again—a pointless complaint since Gaia’s strength ensures our jaws never cramp or ache—but he has been uniformly delightful otherwise. I think his ability to live in the present keeps Atticus from panicking.

  he said at one point.

  My theory is that Oberon might be a master of Tao. He always sees what we filter out. The wind and the grass and something in the sky, sun or moon, shining on our backs as we run: They are gifts that humans toss away like socks on Christmas morning, because we see them every day and don’t think of them as gifts anymore. But new socks are always better than old socks. And the wind and grass and sky, I think, are better seen with new eyes than jaded ones. I hope my eyes will never grow old.

  Chapter 7

  I really wish castles had never become passé. I didn’t shed a tear at the passing of the feudal system or the chamber pot, but I’ve always loved the castles themselves. They’re so much fun to invade and take down from within, and they often have secret passages and catacombs and a tower, ivory or not, in which Someone Important usually lives and rarely comes down. Sometimes they have libraries with old tomes written in a crabbed Latin script full of alchemical recipes or musings on the mysteries of magical arts, complete with idiosyncratic spellings. I get nostalgic for the old days whenever I see European architecture that evokes the age of castles, and Poland is liberally peppered with those sorts of buildings. Perhaps it was nostalgia, along with a gnawing rumble of hunger, that encouraged me to stray from the fields and enter a small town in search of food. Well, that and the insistence of my hound. Aside from a side trip into Katowice to snag some knives for Granuaile, we had run all through the night, and Malina’s coven—presumably with Loki—was more than two hundred miles behind us. Around midmorning, my hound snapped us out of the running zone we were in.

  Oberon said.

  I immediately felt guilty. With Gaia replenishing our strength and with so much else on my mind, I hadn’t thought much of food. Our ability to snag three squares a day had been destroyed. We had become opportunists, snatching melons or whatever we could along the way, and once we scarfed it down, even though it was never enough, we kept thinking we’d run across something else soon. Too often we didn’t.

 

  After a moment he added, obviously speaking to Granuaile,

 

 

 

 

  We were about fifteen miles southwest of Wrocław, crossing more farmland, when we came across a road marked E67. Looking south along the road, we saw some buildings; it was one of the many wee villages scattered throughout the country.

  I said. A couple of minutes brought us into a hamlet called Pustków Wilczkowski, and there we found an interesting rural hotel with a restaurant attached called Gołciniec pod Furą. It was a white building with black boards accenting it in diagonal slashes, Tudor style, which was a surprise in itself. Wagon wheels braced the sign, so I guessed the name of the place had something to do with wagons. Red and pink flowers in hanging pots dangled from the eaves, and the property thrived with burgeoning hedgerows and cultured gardens. We went around to the back, where the garbage and the woodshed were, and spied the kitchen door. It was open to let out some of the heat from the grill fire, only a screen door present to keep out insects, and through it we could hear sizzling and the clack of a pair of tongs by a chef waiting to flip a breakfast steak. The breakfast grill looked shoehorned into the layout of the kitchen, a clear afterthought and a recent addition. Since it was the only restaurant in town, demand for breakfast must have eventually convinced the owners to supply it.

  A waiter called out an order, but it was lost on me: I still needed to learn Polish. Granuaile and I shifted to human and leaned our weapons against the back wall, leaving Oberon to guard them. We camouflaged ourselves, and Granuaile drew on my bear charm to keep her spell powered, since she didn’t have her own charm yet.

  Interesting fact: It is really fun to sneak into a restaurant kitchen stark naked. I nearly collided with a stern-looking waitress, who would have no doubt kicked me in the package if she saw me. She had a severe beauty that was probably softened by a smile in the dining area or when surrounded with good company, but out of sight of the customers—customers who may decide not to tip well—her face was taut and unforgiving. There was one other waiter, a younger man who clearly feared the waitress and made way for her, and a chubby, jolly cook in an apron and sweatband working two grills: one was a wood fire for steaks and pork chops, and the other was the flat metal kind for scrambling some eggs and frying bacon. I liked him instantly because of the faint smile on his face as he worked. Maybe he was just thinking about a funny joke or the smile on his lover’s face, but my intuition was that he was a soul at peace with the artistry of his job.

  A few minutes’ observation revealed that he never turned around to face the server area unless he had a plate to deliver or a ticket to look at. He kept his attention on the grills otherwise. The two servers spent more time out in the dining area than they did in the kitchen.

  The cook eventually put up four plates, two with pork chops and eggs and two with pancakes and bacon. Oberon would be grateful for any of that. But a place like this might serve prime rib sandwiches for lunch. If so, they had to put the slow-cooking prime rib in the oven in the morning. That meant it was available for breakfast if you liked it ultra-rare, which Oberon did.

  The oven was behind the serving area but also behind the wood-fire grill’s stone walls, which allowed me to tiptoe back there and open the oven without being seen. The large hunk of meat that greeted me elicited a smile, because I knew how happy Oberon would be. I removed it and rested the prime rib on a prep area next to the oven. I found a couple of carving knives and a plate and sliced off a generous hunk of bloody beef for my friend. Granuaile snagged the pork chop plates and stole the bacon sides from the pancakes while the waiters were out of the kitchen, and the cook never noticed. The pancakes she left behind utterly failed to raise the alarm.

  I felt sorry about the inevitable argument that would erupt when our theft was discovered—especially sorry to give the waitress an excuse to yell at the cook—but we were
hungry and in a hurry and nobody’s lives were at stake but ours.

  Try to chew it slowly and enjoy it, I said, putting the plate down for Oberon.

  he said as he laid into it. He gave a soft whine of appreciation.

  Glad you like it, buddy. There’s no shortage of bacon here. In fact, you can have mine.

 

  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?

  he said, referring to the silver throne from which he could observe events in most of the nine realms.

  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?

  ark brethren on neutral ground, and, for once, they know roughly where to find them—wherever you’re headed.>

  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.”

  Chapter 8

  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.