Hunted (Iron Druid Chronicles)

by Hearne, Kevin

  “We need you to appear big and intimidating.”

  “Ah, you need to scare peoples with face of rage?”

  “That’s it.”

  He smiled at me. “I can do this. Will be fun. Look.” He crossed his arms and the atmosphere darkened around him. His eyebrows drew together and his eyes, normally blue, flickered with the blue and white of lightning as he glowered down at us. He flexed everything and grew bigger.

 

  I didn’t do anything, Oberon. This is performance art.

 

  Perun’s visual promise of doom relaxed, and he grinned. The sky brightened immediately. “Is good, yes?”

  I nodded enthusiastically. “That’s perfect.”

  Perun had moved on to greeting Herne, and I was reminded again that he was one of the nicer gods I’d ever met—at least, when he wasn’t stirred to anger. He was going to provide me a bit of an edge in the coming psychological warfare. When they arrived, Zeus and Jupiter wouldn’t be able to intimidate us with muscles and thunder when we had plenty of that on our side. And I thought it would be important for the Greco–Romans to see that we had a thunder god throwing in his lot with us. They’d accord Perun some respect and perhaps pause long enough to give me a serious hearing. Without him, I’d expect the Olympians to pummel us into submission without bothering to talk.

  The current popular image of Zeus as a cheerful, avuncular type perplexes me. I know it comes from a silly kids’ movie, but I’m not sure they could have gotten it more wrong. Zeus was never avuncular. He killed his father, raped his sister, and then married her, calculating that sanctified incest was marginally better than the unsanctified kind. After that he conducted a series of what are generously called “affairs” with mortal women, though sometimes tales will admit he “ravished” them, which is to say he raped them. He turned into a swan once for a girl with an avian fetish, and another time he manifested as a golden shower over a woman imprisoned in a hole in the ground. His actions clearly paint him as skeevy to the max and the most despicable of examples. He’s not the kind of god that belongs in kids’ films. He’s the kind that releases the kraken.

  Thunderclouds condensed and roiled above us, signaling that the gods of the sky had heard my words fall from the lips of Hermes. The messenger god rocketed out of the southern sky and hovered six feet above us, safely out of our reach.

  “Zeus and Jupiter approach,” he said, then darted sideways like a hummingbird.

  The Olympians knew how to make an entrance. A deafening thunderclap boomed in our ears, causing Oberon to yipe, and two lightning bolts struck the ground not ten yards away. Zeus and Jupiter stood in their place. Lightning continued to rain down around us and clouds boiled directly above, which was odd since we could see blue sky not all that far away.

  By now I’d grown used to the differences between the Greeks and Romans and could immediately tell the two apart. Zeus, the uncredited god of sexual deviancy, had wrapped a thin sheet of polyester material around his waist, like a towel, but was otherwise naked—and was visibly aroused by the opportunity to confront us. His beard, oiled and entirely white, was tied underneath the chin and fell to his sternum. His hair still had a dash of pepper in it here and there, and this fell in oiled waves down his back. Jupiter was dressed (or undressed) in much the same way, but his white beard was cropped close and oil-free. His hair seemed unnaturally black by comparison, with some graying only at the temples. Perhaps he’d been using Just For Gods hair cream.

  Their eyes glowed with menace, and both sets locked on me.

  “Enough of this, Druid,” Jupiter growled. “Release Bacchus and the others now.”

  The Olympians, I had noticed, were not the sort for small talk or pleasantries. They just showed up and demanded that you jump to serve them.

  “Thanks for coming to talk, Zeus and Jupiter. Look, I’m not the bad guy here.”

  “You have imprisoned members of our pantheon, have you not?”

  “Yes, but that’s only because they were behaving like ass napkins. There’s something beyond our petty squabbling that requires your attention. It’s Loki and Hel and the end of the world as we know it. Despite what Michael Stipe might think, you will not feel fine when it gets here. You should poke your head outside Olympus once in a while. See, if Loki finds me and manages to kill me, Ragnarok will begin. And most of the Norse gods who were supposed to act as a check on that have checked out prematurely. The threat of Loki is real. He’s destroyed the planes of two thunder gods already by himself—Perun’s of Russia and Ukko’s of Finland.”

  The Olympians flicked their eyes to Perun, who gave them the barest nod of confirmation. The exchange surprised me, because I thought the Olympians would have known about Perun’s plane already, but apparently they hadn’t been paying attention to recent events.

  “If Loki is able to unite his power with that of Hel and Muspellheim and pull off Ragnarok,” I continued, “Olympus goes down in flames with the earth. So the world could use my help and yours. What do you say we put aside our differences for a bit and fight a common enemy? Odin’s with us, I can assure you of that.” Name-dropping couldn’t hurt at this point.

  Jupiter’s expression of impending wrath modulated into a frown of concern. Zeus’s leer underwent a similar transformation. At least they were listening, I thought. But there was no give in Jupiter’s tone as he uttered his reply.

  “We cannot put aside differences until our pantheons are whole again,” he said.

  “Okay, I’m sure we can work something out. Let’s talk so everybody wins. But, first, could you maybe dispel those storm clouds?” I jerked a thumb at the sky. “That’s weird and it’s going to draw attention.”

  “Attention from whom?” Zeus snorted, and glanced toward Windsor Castle and the distant helicopters buzzing like flies around carrion. “I care not what the mortals think.”

  Oberon said,

  My hound’s gaze was fixed on the northern sky. Following it, I saw a familiar orange meteorite with a heart of white phosphorus headed our way. “Aw, damn it!”

  Chapter 26

  Get right behind me and stay low! I ordered Oberon, and then I shouted, “Don’t kill him or Ragnarok begins!” a few scant seconds before Loki landed in our midst and sprayed his surroundings with fire, just to make sure we noticed him. My cold iron amulet protected me and my body shielded Oberon. Perun didn’t think fast enough to protect Flidais and she hadn’t expected such an attack, so she got tagged badly and screamed as flames engulfed her. Perun and the Olympians weren’t harmed by the fire but didn’t like the intention behind it; Hermes avoided the fire altogether by flying above it. Zeus and Jupiter called down lightning bolts on Loki from their portable storm clouds overhead but didn’t know from experience that he was as immune to them as they were to his fire. Perun did know, however, and he’d obviously been thinking about how to handle Loki Flamehair if a rematch became necessary. He summoned wind and snuffed out Loki’s flames as if they were candles.

  The mad fucker just laughed that insane laugh and pulled his sword out of his ass. Zeus, now afflicted with acute priapism, gasped and asked him to do that again. Jupiter slapped him to the ground and barked at him to get his priorities straight. Obviously there was some tension between them.

  Perun had the right of it. Neutralization was more important than defeating Loki right now. But Perun had already crouched down to aid Flidais rather than press his advantage. Before I could step into the fray, Herne called up his lads; Loki’s initial fire burst had set the edges of the clearing aflame, and since it was all part of Windsor Forest, that shot Loki right to the top of Herne’s list of people to kill.

  “For the King’s Forest!” he yelled. He and his hunters charged, confident, hounds at their heels, and Loki grinned and waved them on.

  “Yah! Yah! Yah!” he said, a wide smile of malevolence splitting his f
ace. That didn’t seem right; the charge of an armed ghost cavalry should have scared the scars off his face. Behind him, a giant hound, six feet tall at the shoulders, winked onto the clearing and woofed, then vanished as suddenly as he’d appeared.

  “Herne, wait!” I called. But it was too late. The first huntsman, eager to strike a blow for England, did nothing to avoid the sweep of Loki’s sword, thinking it would pass through him as all other weapons did. But Loki—father of Hel, Queen of the Dead—didn’t swing an ordinary hunk of steel. When the sword met the huntsman’s form and continued on, a ripping noise like someone’s jeans tearing announced that something untoward was happening. The nameless huntsman and his horse split apart and exploded into puffs of floating blue ectoplasm, then faded entirely from view. Loki didn’t just wound the ghost; he annihilated him completely. Herne and the other hunter almost followed in short order, having charged in too far to escape Loki’s reach in time, but they managed to muster a defense and were merely knocked off their horses. The spectral hounds, unable to process that the rules had abruptly changed, kept right on going. They nipped at Loki from all sides, and his sword could dispatch only one at a time. “Fff-fff-ffucking dogs!” he spat, kicking ineffectually at them.

  Oberon said.

  A few more frantic stabs of Loki’s sword ended the poor pooches, but they had drawn blood and he limped slightly. It did much to subdue his confidence, and by that time Herne and the remaining huntsman had regained their feet and approached him warily. Loki took them in and looked annoyed. As successful as he’d been thus far, he had not come here to fight ghosts. Hel must have placed an enchantment on that sword to make it effective against the undead. I wondered if it had a name.

  Loki backed up, keeping space between himself and Herne, and rested his twitching gaze on me. He raised a bony finger and waggled it in accusation.

  “Y-y-you nah, nah-t dwarf con, con, ssstruct,” he said, repeating the accusation he’d made back in Poland. True. I’d told him that months ago simply to distract him, and it had worked far better than I ever imagined it would. He could have figured out the truth easily if he had bothered to listen to the dwarfs or asked his daughter, who wanted nothing so much as to please him, but apparently he was determined to do things his way and in his own time. The jerking finger panned to my right. “Zeussss. Ju-Jupiter. No fff-friends tih, tih, to dwarffffs.” I supposed that was his way of building a case against me. “Who you are?” Loki said, and I couldn’t tell if it was a question or a statement. “Fffffind out. I wuh, wuh, will!”

  Oberon said.

  Herne and the remaining huntsman had had their fill of caution. Windsor was on fire and they needed justice. They pressed their attack, weapons held high, and Loki’s giant sword crashed down onto Herne’s and slid down its length. The antlered ghost was brought to his knees by the force of the blow, but Loki did no lasting damage. On the upswing, though, he tagged the other huntsman, and the ghost paffed out of existence, decompressed as the blade’s magic sundered the ethereal binding of his form.

  Herne saw this and the great sword raised high, ready to fall on him anew. I ran to his aid, since the Olympians would clearly do nothing but watch. I didn’t want to kill Loki yet, but I wasn’t averse to hurting him, and Herne didn’t deserve to be sent to eternity by an avatar of madness. The sword fell and Herne leapt out of the path of the downstroke, attempting to tumble so that he could rise and take a swing at Loki’s ankle. It was an excellent strategy and might have worked, except that blue smoke rose out of the ground all around the giant and took shape as draugar, the undead minions of Hel. And the Queen of the Dead herself rose with them, behind her father, as tall as he and stinking of rot and pestilence. Her right side was a vision of loveliness and her left a wasted husk of a corpse. Without ever glancing our way, she placed her right hand on Loki’s shoulder and grated in Old Norse, “Come, Father, we have much to discuss.” Then she and Loki melted back into the earth and left us with a dozen blue draugar to fight. Herne cursed and I cursed with him. I didn’t want the two of them to confab, ever, and now it appeared as if they would and Loki would learn who I truly was. And it was all because Ukko had freed both Loki and Garm at someone’s urging. Garm had clearly healed, tracked Loki here, and told Hel where to find him on Midgard.

  “Blood and shite and fifty-seven severed cocks!” Herne roared, swinging his sword through the neck of the nearest draugr. “I’ll be spanked by all the men of Scotland before me mates are wiped out and no one pays for it!” He kept going like that, slinging curses and lopping off heads, and I joined in lest he be overwhelmed. The draugar had not been armed and had little defense against our weapons, but anyone could use help against odds like that. Oberon pitched in by knocking a couple of them down, giving us the time to finish them off.

  Once the draugar were decomposing into ash at our feet, I turned in disbelief to the Olympians, who hadn’t stirred an inch to lend us aid. Zeus closed his eyes in perverse pleasure for a moment before flashing me a crooked grin. “Who was that tall woman who appeared just now? She wasn’t half bad.”

  “Bloody git,” Herne whispered.

  Chapter 27

  “That was Hel,” I explained. “Loki’s daughter. And now that they’re together, Ragnarok could start at any time.”

  “And what, exactly, would that entail?” Jupiter asked, clearly trying to decide if he should care or not. “You said something about Hel and Muspellheim, but I am unfamiliar with their legends. Why would the nightmares of the ancient Norse trouble the modern world?”

  “Okay, fair enough. I’ll lay it out for you.”

  “We should move before we talk,” Perun interjected from where he knelt next to Flidais. “Innocent peoples come.” He pointed east; there were now four aircraft heading our way, silhouetted in the early-morning sun.

  “True,” I said. “Let’s move deeper into the forest. Would that be agreeable to you?” I raised an eyebrow at the Olympians.

  Zeus and Jupiter exchanged glances and gave each other a tight nod.

  “All right, give me a moment.”

  If the fire on the edge of the forest took firm hold and began to spread, we’d have firefighters here in addition to investigators. Aside from that, of course, I couldn’t bear to let it continue; these were trees for which the Wild Hunt of Herne had perished, and I knew that somewhere, later, I would find the time to be very upset at their passing. With help from Albion, who was much better at moving earth than I was, I bound turf and dirt from the forest floor to the trunks of the affected trees, smothering the flames before allowing the earth to settle back down. While I did this, Zeus and Jupiter finally deigned to be helpful and transformed their thunderclouds into a thick fog that hid us neatly. Mist swirled and shrouded us as the thump of rotors whipped the air above. They’d have to put someone on the ground to find us now, and I figured we still had some time before that happened, if it happened at all.

  I led the Olympians to the place where the huntresses were buried and silently asked Albion to move Mercury underneath the ground to somewhere near them. Perun and Flidais followed, though Flidais moved gingerly and only with Perun’s help. She would heal fully from the burns eventually, but I knew from experience that it would take an uncomfortable while.

  “Right,” I bellowed over the noise of the choppers, which I hoped would move away soon. “You wanted to hear why you should care about the Norse. Let’s start with Hel, whom Zeus found so alluring. Hel commands legions of those semi-corporeal zombies called draugar, who don’t go down easy unless you behead them, and I have sources who tell me that they now have access to modern automatic weapons. She can also command the dead, so every person her army kills is a potential recruit for said army. Her forces will quickly build into something that can’t be stopped before you add on anything else, but there’s more. The sons of Muspellheim are fire giants—sort of like Loki but without an off switch. They just love
their fire and magma and want to share it with everyone. And the frost giants are going to join in too, so you’re going to have elemental upheaval on top of the zombie apocalypse. And then there’s Jörmungandr, the world serpent, who will presumably pop up somewhere and start shit in the ocean. And we may or may not have to deal with dark elves. Humans won’t stand a chance against them. Well, maybe Chuck Norris would. But you know what humans are like. They’ll panic and start shooting one another, because they’re going to think their enemies are responsible for it all. Or else they’ll go into Doomsday mode, assume that the only rule is anarchy, and do something unthinkable to people. Some trigger-happy idiot might even launch a nuclear missile, and then it’s over. It’s going to be one hell of a bloodbath, guys. When all the humans die—or so many of them it won’t make any difference—what’s going to happen to you and all the rest of the gods who depend on their belief?”

  “Bah!” Zeus exploded. “We go to kill Hel and Loki now and this never happens.”

  “Who’s ‘we,’ Zeus? Do your powers work on any other plane but Olympus and earth? I know Hermes and Mercury can travel to other planes and return, but are you certain that they remain immortal while they’re cut off from this plane and the source of their worship?”

  Zeus flicked his eyes to Hermes, and the god of thieves gave a tiny shrug. I pressed my advantage. “Have you ever called forth lightning on a plane other than this one or Olympus? And even if you have, did you not notice the part where Loki thought your thunderbolts were kind of cute?”

  Zeus glared at me and said nothing. Jupiter jumped in. “Fine. You kill them both.”

  “He’s not so easily killed, as you just witnessed, and neither is Hel. I certainly don’t want to confront them on their turf, where I’ll be weakened and they’ll be strongest. Come on. You guys are smart. What we need to do is help out Odin and the rest of the good guys and make sure the right side wins when they make their move. Look, I’ve already managed to take out Fenris—he was supposed to kill Odin and wreak bonus havoc. What if Poseidon and Neptune went looking for Jörmungandr and we took him out as well? That would make Loki and Hel all kinds of worried. They’d crawl back to their dark holes and shake their fists and say, ‘Curse you, unexpectedly effective alliance of powerful beings!’ And then we’d all have ice cream or something. What do you say we cooperate on this so that we can all have a future?”