by M. D. Massey
Unfortunately, these fools weren’t as easy to spook as I’d anticipated. Apparently they were used to seeing magic, and the fact that my spells were missing must’ve made them think I wasn’t very good at it. Some of them started jeering and laughing, beating their spears on their shields as they urged their horses to clear the muck.
From my vantage point on the hill, I could see that this was not going to end well for me if I didn’t do something—and fast. I was exposed as all hell where I stood, and all it would take was a single well-aimed spear to end me. No way was I going to make this godforsaken dimension my final fucking resting place, because I had a suspicion if I did, I’d just come back all over again and be stuck here.
Fuck. That. Time to get sneaky.
Before the first riders could get free from the mud, I cooled the air around them while sending the heat I drew from the air into the ground. Soon, a dense mist began to rise from the mud and grass below. When it was thick and high enough to cover the horses’ heads, I sprinted down the hill and hid in it. Then I placed a chameleon spell on myself, and started casting Cathbad’s Minor Sling.
When Finnegas had cast the same damned spell, it was a fucking symphony of druid magic. When I first cast it? Not so much. Unlike Finnegas, the most I could manage was to get a few small stones flying in wobbly circles around me. Eventually, I’d discovered that if I levitated just one stone I could control it fairly well—and do a bit of damage.
As I finished the spell, I realized Finnegas had drawn too much power and the strain had been more than he could bear. Meaning, it was my damned fault that he’d stroked out. If only I’d started learning magic years ago, when he first wanted to teach me…
Stop.
Now was not the time for a guilt-ridden pity party. I’d be hellaciously busy feeling like shit about that later, but right now I needed to deal with these clowns so I could find a way out of Underhill and save his life. Or at the very least, find someone who was sympathetic to our plight and ask them for help. I wasn’t picky on how I saved the old man, after all—so long as it didn’t involve freeing a 2,500-year-old master vampire.
C’mon, Colin—stop being a pussy and get to work.
I stalked through the fog, following the sounds of riders yelling and calling to each other and the snorting and whinnying of their mounts. Whenever I came upon a shadow in the mists, I slung my stone at it. Some I knocked unconscious, while others likely received broken limbs. A few times, I barely managed to avoid being skewered by a stray spear or arrow, but luckily I escaped injury.
As I took the riders out one by one, I counted my “kills.” I’d gotten to eleven, but for some reason I couldn’t find that last rider. The rest of them were lying in the mud, bleeding and cursing in Gaelic, so I figured maybe that last warrior had decided that discretion was the better part of valor. Secure in the knowledge that I’d achieved victory against overwhelming odds, I stole a horse from a downed rider and started walking it back to where I’d left Finnegas, Clara, and the coffin.
The horse made an awful lot of noise and it was fighting against being led away from its owner. Knowing I was going to be discovered if the horse kept carrying on, I slowed my breath to enter a druidic meditative state. The way I figured it, if I could link minds with the horse, I could calm it down and get it to carry Finnegas and me out of here.
I’d just started mind-melding with it when I heard a soft footfall behind me. Opening my eyes, I spun around in a crouch, just in time to see the bronze-shod butt of a spear as it connected with my left temple.
15
I awoke to the smell of horse shit, peat smoke, and cooked meat. The horse shit smelled like it was right next to my face, which was half-buried in mud. My eyes were almost completely glued shut—the left with dried blood and the other with dried, caked-on dirt and grass. My head felt like a watermelon wrapped in rubber bands until it was ready to burst. That and the accompanying nausea told me I’d suffered a mild concussion.
After spending several minutes unsticking my eyelids, I began to assess the extent of my current fucked-ness. No surprise, I was pretty fucked. I’d been bound tightly hand and foot with leather straps and gagged with a horse’s bit. Based on the taste, it hadn’t been cleaned before it’d been inserted between my teeth. They’d even used thinner straps to bind my fingers which, along with the gag, would prevent me from casting spells.
Man, if this day gets any better I’m buying a lottery ticket.
Although they’d bound my hands and feet together behind me and strung a noose from my ankles to my neck, I was able to raise my head to take in my surroundings. The warriors were encamped nearby, sitting around a fire laughing and bullshitting while they shared a meal of rabbits cooked on a spit. Some of them had knots and cuts on their heads, while others had their legs in splints or arms in slings. That said, in this place their wounds would likely be healed by tomorrow morning.
What a shame.
My obfuscation spell had likely dissipated the moment I’d lost consciousness, so it was no surprise that the riders had found my companions. Thankfully, Finnegas had not been harmed. Instead, they’d wrapped him in blankets and propped him up on some saddlebags next to the fire. Someone had also marked a few healing runes in a primitive ogham script on his forehead and, from what I could tell, his color had improved slightly.
Well, that’s something.
As for Saint Germain’s coffin, it sat under guard a stone’s throw from their main camp. Clara had been tied to a tree next to it, bound and gagged as I was, although she was still catatonic. I noticed a few sharpened stakes on the ground next to her, likely cut from a yew tree. Nearby, one of the guards was honing his sword on a long, flat stone.
It was the classic method of dealing with the neamh-mairbh—first a yew stake through the heart, then beheading, and finally buried upside-down and covered with heavy stones. That was how we’d dealt with the Avartagh, after all. Witnessing their preparations also confirmed the hunch I’d had earlier, that these jokers were a fiann made up of Celtic warriors who’d died and gone to Tír Tairngire or Mag Mell. If so, these men and women were the original druid-trained monster hunters.
Too bad I didn’t speak ancient Gaelic. If I did, I might’ve been able to talk my way out of locking horns with them and we wouldn’t be in our current mess. But I’d never been much of a language scholar, yet another indication of my failings as Finnegas’ pupil.
Now, the old man might die. It was something I didn’t want to think about, but there it was staring me right in the face. His health had been failing for some time. Considering how long he’d lived, I thought he’d have a slow, steady decline over several decades. In other words, plenty of time for me to learn everything he had to teach me—and to prepare myself for losing the man who’d been like a father to me.
My own dad had been killed when I was very young. He’d been a soldier, and also trained by Finnegas to hunt unseelie fae and other creatures. Mom told me he died in one of the endless wars we’d been fighting in the Middle East, but that was only partially true. A year prior I’d learned that the Fear Doirich had tried to take over his body, but Dad had killed himself before the ritual could be completed.
The Dark Druid—may his decapitated head rot in whichever hell Camazotz hid him.
He’d taken two of the most important people in my life from me, and in a way he’d be taking another away if Finnegas died. After all, it was the Dark Druid who had wanted to body-snatch me, and who had such a grudge against me after we’d offed his son, the Avartagh.
Hell, it wasn’t my fault that the fucking vampire dwarf came after me. He said he wanted to kill me, by way of getting revenge for what Fionn MacCumhaill had done to him. I often wondered if he hadn’t been trying to capture me to impress his dear old dad. Regardless of his motives, in the end the temperamental little shit got what he deserved—a deep, dark, concrete-filled grave.
If I had to be pissed at anyone, it would be fucking Fionn MacCumhaill. By a
ll accounts he’d been a major prick when he walked the Earth, pissing people off and holding grudges left and right. Half the deities, demigods, and aes sídhe who wanted me dead were his former enemies.
Fionn had killed the Avartagh, stole the Dark Druid’s intended, and chased Diarmuid halfway around the known world and later refused to heal him of a mortal wound. That in turn made him the enemy of Aenghus, who hated his guts for letting his adopted kid die. And of course, since Fuamnach was the Dark Druid’s current squeeze—having fallen out with Midir ages ago over Etain—she jumped into the mix as well.
If by chance I ran into my ancient ancestor here, I’d damned sure give him a piece of my mind. But I had greater problems to deal with at the moment. Saving Finnegas was one, and another was that it looked as though the fiann were gathering to kill Clara. Even worse, some dumb motherfucker was about to take a hammer and chisel to Saint Germain’s coffin.
The coffin didn’t concern me, but Clara was another matter. Despite what a shit she’d turned out to be in the Hellpocalypse, I still felt obligated to look after her, especially after Saint Germain’s request. It wasn’t her fault that she’d been turned, and despite being young and inexperienced at controlling her thirst, I had yet to see her attempt to hurt any humans. If there had ever been a vampire who might be redeemed, it was that little smart-assed bloodsucker.
Since I was out of contact with the Druid Oak, my druidic abilities to alter natural substances were diminished to my pre-Master of the Grove levels. The straps were leather, so I couldn’t do much with them anyway. Druids typically avoided using alteration magic on dead animal matter, because it was too much like necromancy. There was, however, a chance I could do something about the horse bit in my mouth.
When it hadn’t been magically hardened, bronze was a relatively soft metal and, as far as I could tell, this bit was one-hundred percent magic-free. I closed my eyes, slowing my breathing so I could focus on the magic flowing within me and the structure of the metal. It took some doing, but eventually I channeled enough of my own internal magic through the bit to cause it to part in the middle.
After spitting out several small pieces of bronze—and what I thought might have been a fleck of horse cud—I yelled out to my captors. “Hey! If any of you morons speak modern English, I’m warning you not to mess with that coffin.”
The sound of my voice startled the group of warriors who’d gathered around the tree and coffin. One of them yelled at another in Gaelic, pointing at me and gesturing at his mouth. Obviously, he thought his underling hadn’t gagged me properly. How you could screw up putting a horse bit in someone’s mouth was beyond me, but he was chewing that guy’s ass proper.
“Yo, celtic warrior dude! It’s not his fault. I’m a druid—well, a journeyman druid, anyway—trained by that old man over there. I de-gagged myself, all on my lonesome.”
The leader stopped screaming at his subordinate, instead turning his angry glare on me. He drew a leaf-shaped short sword and strutted my way like the cock of the walk, which I guess he was among this crowd of yahoos. As he approached, I noticed that he was the only one in the group who wasn’t banged up. Meaning, he was the guy who’d snuck up and laid me out.
He used the sword to poke around at the ruined bronze bit that lay in pieces on the ground, with the remainder hanging from leather straps around my neck. The warrior grunted, then he forced my head up by placing the tip of his sword under my chin.
“You say you are a druid, leathchúpla an oilc. I think not,” he said in English that had just a touch of an Irish accent. “The only druids left alive by the gods are Finn Eces and the Fear Doirich. Are you telling me that old dying man is one of the two greatest druids who ever lived?”
“Ah, so you speak modern English. Wish I had known that earlier. If so, I might have tried to reason with you guys. Of course, if your troops hadn’t gotten jumpy I might not have resorted to using magic.”
He poked me harder with his sword, piercing the skin under my chin. His barbuta-styled helm covered most of his face, revealing only the grim set of his mouth and the hard glare he gave with his cold blue eyes. “Answer the question!”
“Yes, that feeble old man you see over there is none other than Finn Eces, the Seer—and I’m his last apprentice.”
“You lie.” He spat on the ground next to me. “And when my father arrives, he’ll punish your profane use of fae magic himself.”
The warrior sheathed his sword as he turned to walk away.
“Hey, wait,” I cried after him. “You called me leathchúpla an oilc—what does that mean?”
The man paused long enough to glance at me over his shoulder. “I believe you would say, ‘evil twin.’”
“Twin? Of who? Who do I look like?”
I heard horses in the distance. The warrior shielded his eyes as he stared at the approaching riders. He grunted and nodded once.
“As if you do not know, fetch. Your double rides toward us now, along with my sister. She will reveal your true nature to all, and then our rígfénnid will deal with you as he sees fit.”
He chuckled mirthlessly to himself as he headed back toward his soldiers. Even though he was being a real dick, I nearly called after him to warn him about futzing with the sarcophagus. But all of a sudden I realized that I really didn’t like this guy, or his troops. And with that epiphany, I decided to let them find out the hard way that they shouldn’t fuck with druid magic.
The other two riders pulled into camp, just as one of their warriors tried to chisel the lock on the coffin. A small thunderclap echoed across the glade where they’d made camp, and the fool was thrown thirty feet across the clearing. He was dazed, but he appeared to be none the worse for the wear, as that was only the first and least harmful defense. If they kept jacking with it, well—the next person who attempted to break it open wouldn’t be so lucky.
As for the two newcomers, the male sat tall and lean in his saddle, eyeing the hapless flunky who just got blasted by my magic. He also wore armor in the Celtic style, but his get-up was a lot nicer than the rest of them, mostly consisting of shiny bronze plate. He had a pretty, flowing green cape clasped to his shoulders, a short sword at his hip, and a wicked-looking barbed spear in his hand. Like the other leader, his head and face were almost completely obscured by his helm—but if this guy wasn’t Irish, I was a horse’s ass.
His companion lacked his stature, but not his regal bearing. She looked to be about twenty-five, roughly my age, but she carried herself like an older woman. She was stunningly beautiful, yet she dressed like a warrior in close-fitting leather pants, a green tunic, and fine bronze chainmail cinched around her thin waist with a wide leather belt. Like the rest, she had a short sword sheathed at her hip and a dagger on the other side to match. With her long flaxen hair, fine, pleasing features, and piercing gray eyes, she reminded me of someone—but for the life of me, I just couldn’t place it.
Her gaze swept around the camp, first to the stunned soldier, then to the coffin and Clara, then over to me. Her eyes widened slightly, and she leaned over in the saddle to mutter something to the tall guy. For grins, I looked at her in the magical spectrum. Surprise, surprise—she practically bled Tuatha magic.
“Hey lady, I don’t care if your goons keep me tied up, but that old man over there is Finn Eces the Seer and he needs your help.”
At once, she and the tall guy both swung their heads around to look at Finnegas where he lay wrapped in blankets by the fire. She leapt from the saddle, sprinting over to attend the old man. To my relief, it wasn’t long before she was working healing magic on him, and thankfully it looked like she knew what she was doing.
The tall guy—the one I assumed was the real leader of this group—swung out of his saddle and walked over to Finnegas at a more leisurely pace. He knelt next to the old man and gently laid a hand on his shoulder, then stood and started barking at everyone. As soon as he opened his mouth, those clowns were jumping through their own assholes trying to follow the ta
ll dude’s orders.
He and the other leader, the one who’d knocked me out, strode toward me. The tall guy took one look at me and shook his head, then he snapped at his lieutenant.
“Release him, now,” he said in richly-accented English.
“But father, he’s obviously a fetch, sent by the Fomorian king to supplant you and undermine our house.”
His father hissed. “Fool! Can’t ya’ recognize yer own blood when ya’ see it?”
The tall guy pulled off his helm, and I swear it was like looking in a mirror. He shook his shoulder-length strawberry blond hair out, then he knelt and used a short, bronze knife to cut me loose himself. I stared at him in shock and disbelief the whole time, because he could’ve been my slightly older twin. Once free, I rubbed my wrists and shook out my legs, trying to get some circulation back in them.
“Oisín, I presume?” I asked, stating the obvious.
“One and the same,” he replied. “And ya’ must be the Seer’s apprentice, Coileáin MacCumhaill, last o’ the line o’ Fionn. I’ve heard much about ya’, tho’ ’tis hard to know what stories are real and which are lies told by the Tuath Dé.”
He extended his hand to me and I took it, allowing him to help me to my feet. Oisín lifted me effortlessly, which was unsurprising considering that by blood he was part god on his mother’s side. He had that deific look about him too, the kind Lugh and Aenghus had, with natural good looks and self-assuredness to the point of arrogance. I mean, sure, the guy looked like me—or rather, I looked like him—but he had swagger that I could never pull off in a million years.
“I’d introduce ya’ ta’ me son, Oscar,” he said, casting his boy a stern sideways glance, “but it seems ye’ve already met.”
