Hunted tidc-6

by Kevin Hearne

  But I had never tried to run across Europe before. I’d hiked it once and stayed in youth hostels and put little patches on my backpack because I thought it was a funny disguise, but I took my time doing that, and climbing up mountains was an experience to be savored. I rather thought dealing with mountains now would do nothing but slow us down, and, besides, I didn’t want to telegraph our intended destination. To get to the Strait of Dover directly, we could simply run north of west and hit it. But that route would present us not only with several mountain ranges but plenty of well-paved cities like Budapest and Vienna. We needed misdirection and the ability to keep in touch with the earth at all times. That’s why I took a sharp turn north at the Hungarian border: Once we crossed the Carpathians, we could stick to flattish land or, at the worst, low rolling hills all the way to France. While we moved northwest through Poland and Germany, we’d keep them thinking we were headed for Sweden via Denmark. To get the best possible route, however, avoiding the majority of villages while also minimizing our exposure to survivalists in the woods awaiting the apocalypse, I would need to consult elementals along the way. Using my Latin headspace, I reached out to the Carpathian elemental, who was dominant across several human political borders that were meaningless to Gaia.

  //Druids run / Need guidance / Avoid people and cities if possible//

  After some back-and-forth with Carpathia, we settled on a route that would take us north through rural areas of Hungary and Slovakia until we reached the proper Carpathian Mountains.

  With a plan in place and an hour of trail behind us, I had time to feel, and much of that feeling leaked out of my eyes as I ran. I had spent nearly my entire life worshipping the Morrigan, and, in recent years, more than that. She was the darkness for me, an unexpectedly beautiful harbinger of doom and pain who forced me to struggle, who pushed me to improve myself. She was a necessary balance to Brighid, not something merely to be feared but to be treasured. As Brighid brought light and craft and poetry to our lives, the Morrigan brought an edge, a tangible sharpness to my existence by sharing hers with me.

  With the clarity of hindsight, I saw the signs that the Morrigan had favored me far more than she had the average mortal. Six years ago, especially, when she took me away from Granuaile to repair the tattoos on the back of my hand, she’d been uncharacteristically candid with me, but I had dismissed it because we were in a room enchanted with bindings that encouraged harmony. Now I saw that our interlude there had been haunting her ever since. As soon as she left that room, she reverted to her cruel self, when she had not necessarily wished to do so. And that was what made her snap—not her love for some dude but her lack of freedom to love or not as she desired.

  I’d tried to be her friend, which probably made it all worse. We’d gone to a few baseball games together simply to hang out, and she couldn’t keep herself from remarking on the fear of failure the players felt, or their guilt or despair at poor performance, and only noticed their triumphs when I observed them aloud. Each time I did, she cringed, taking it as a rebuke. She seemed to think she should have seen it first, or at least at the same time, but she had a filter blocking all such things from her sight. Each time we’d gone out to the ballpark, she began the night flushed with optimism, convinced that this time she would be able to enjoy the competition and my company on a purely superficial level and ignore all the feelings she was attuned to feel as a goddess associated with death and war and lust. Usually that optimism had fled by the third inning and she sat in silence, distrusting herself to say anything lest it be perceived as accentuating the negative. My attempts to cheer her up with happy observations only emphasized that she lacked the social facility to engage on that level.

  We caught a game in St. Louis once, and after a quick visit to the team shop I was struck by how different she looked in a Cardinals jersey and cap. She looked damn cute—not hot or sultry or sexy but the sort of innocent, wholesome beauty that lifts your spirit and makes you grateful to be alive to see it. But when I told the Morrigan she looked cute, she didn’t understand the nuance, nor did she appreciate it when I tried to explain it to her. She thought I was asking for sex, discovered that I wasn’t, and then we both felt frustrated and embarrassed. Despite these failures, I thought that we were making progress, becoming friends after two millennia of being uneasy allies against Aenghus Óg. I suppose the Morrigan didn’t feel the progress was sufficient or of the right kind.

  Perhaps just as frustrating for her was the inability to enlist the aid of an iron elemental in binding a cold iron amulet to her aura. No matter how she tried, she could not free herself from the conditions of her godhood and project friendliness.

  I supposed she was free now—most importantly, free of those constraints and, to a lesser extent, of an idiot Druid who never recognized her true feelings. If I had looked at her in the magical spectrum, I might have seen those emotional bonds, much as Granuaile had seen them between us soon after she’d gained her magical sight. But I never dared to look at the Morrigan that way. She would know and consider it an invasion of privacy, and she dealt with such invasions harshly.

  I supposed I was free now, too, but, unlike the Morrigan, I didn’t want to be. Ridiculous as it seemed, I wanted to see her eyes flash red at me again and tell me I was doomed. I wanted to see another baseball game with her and train her in the hallowed yet disgusting art of chewing sunflower seeds.

  And, admittedly, I wanted to feel protected again. She’d been the only one looking out for me. Without the Morrigan’s aegis, I was once again vulnerable to violent death. That had been the case for the vast majority of my long life, of course, but I knew I would miss the last twelve years of relative security. The frequency of attempts on my life had increased dramatically since I’d decided to stop running from Aenghus Óg, and having a goddess in my corner had been a comfort. Her aid had been sporadic and never free of pain, but without it I would certainly already be dead. With her gone now and two immortals on my trail, perhaps the sand in my hourglass was finally running out.

  We quickly discovered that all three of us running in concealment was impractical. We lost one another and spread out unintentionally or even bumped into each other. I remained visible, since a stag running through fields was not all that remarkable and decidedly no cause for alarm. Someone might try to round up Granuaile as a horse, however, and Oberon might be reported as a stray. It was easiest for Granuaile to remain completely invisible and Oberon camouflaged, and in such a fashion they followed my lead.

  Unaided, we were pretty fast critters; each of us could reach thirty miles an hour and maintain that for perhaps a mile or three before we had to rest. But with Gaia’s help, we could push that to forty to forty-five miles an hour and keep it up indefinitely, replenishing spent muscles and preventing oxygen debt.

  The eastern half of Slovakia is largely rural and we had an easy time of it, especially after everyone had gone home for the evening. We slowed down to cross the occasional road or vault a low fence but otherwise stayed in a zone and ran without speaking, hopefully developing a gap that the huntresses would never be able to close. Our first trouble waited for us to the north of a lake called Vel’ká Domaša.

  Domaša was oriented north to south, formed by a dam on the Ondava River. It was about eight miles long, and its surface, silvered with reflected moonlight, had slid by on our left as we ran through the forested hills on its eastern side. It was one of those mature forests that give humans a sense of security, because the undergrowth had been either choked out or taught to mind its manners and couldn’t hide large, man-eating predators. People hiked through it and preyed on wild mushrooms instead.

  We slipped down from the hills after we’d cleared a wee town on its northeastern shore, a village of maybe five hundred people that I later learned was called Turany nad Ondavou. At that point, Oberon’s nose picked up something and so did mine.

 


  I replied.

 

 

 

 

  There was a road ahead of us that led to a border crossing—and thus a pass through the Carpathians. The plan was to follow roughly along its eastern side. I saw nothing on the road heading north, but, scanning to the south, back toward the town, I saw four figures—two on either side of the road. They were all looking south and clearly waiting for something. They wore jeans and hoodies with the hoods pulled up, hands jammed into their pockets.

  Triggering magical sight, I saw that one had the telltale gray aura of a vampire. The other three were far more dangerous, in my view. I said.

 

  I gave a sort of mental snort. The dark elves wouldn’t remain solid long enough to burn.

 

 

 

 

  There was a pause before the answer came.

  She was right about that. The huntresses would be coming along and we couldn’t delay. It occurred to me that perhaps the elves’ sole function was to delay us.

  The last time we’d encountered dark elves was in Thessalonika, and we barely escaped. There were fewer of them here, however, and Granuaile was now a full Druid with powers they probably did not expect.

  Did the vampire know what we could do to him? He might be a young one and somewhat out of the loop regarding Druids. But I saw his utility to the group: He was a sensor array. We would not be able to sneak up on them unawares. He’d smell us or hear us far in advance.

 

  Granuaile shifted but remained invisible and evidently had a complaint when she asked Oberon for her throwing knives, for I heard my hound say,

 

 

 

  I shifted to human and focused on the vampire, speaking the words that would separate him into nothing more than carbon, water, and trace elements. With him gone, the dark elves would have to rely on their more limited senses. I heard Granuaile’s footsteps fade as she ran down the slope toward the road. She would flank them to the north while I would be charging in from the northeast.

  Alerted by something he either smelled or heard, the vampire turned and pointed in my direction, but he crumpled inside his clothing once I energized the binding, and his jeans dropped to the ground with a sort of red sludge spilling out the legs. I dropped my camouflage, drew Fragarach, and charged, naked and howling, just like we Celts used to do in the good old days.

  For their part, the dark elves dropped all pretense of being human. Upon the vampire’s demise, they pulled out page one of their playbook from Sigr af Reykr, the martial art that means Victory from Smoke, and turned incorporeal to avoid getting stabbed or shot or otherwise ambushed. It would have been a fabulous tactic against someone who couldn’t view them in the magical spectrum; they would have melted into the night and been untraceable. But I could see them plainly as clouds of white energy, and, furthermore, I knew they could maintain their smoke forms for only five seconds. They could spend as little as one second in corporeal form before turning to smoke again, but for that one second they would be vulnerable, and if I was right, once they were wounded, they couldn’t go smoky again until they healed.

  Each would have a black knife bonded to him that could dissolve and re-form like his body, but as such it was magical and couldn’t penetrate my aura. Granuaile and Oberon could be hurt by those knives, however, so I wanted the dark elves to try to stab me all they wanted while Granuaile bushwhacked them.

  As I pelted down the hill and crossed the field to their position by the road, I noticed that they weren’t heading for trees on the far side of the road or forming up to face me. They were remaining in their positions, solidifying briefly and then going smoky again but waiting for me to close the gap.

  That was odd. Alarm bells went off in my head and I stopped yelling as I tried to figure out what was up. There were no telltales of a magical booby trap, but perhaps they decided to go with something more mundane. They could have planted mines around their position and I would blow myself up.

  Oberon, tell Granuaile to approach on the road. There might be mines.

  I contacted Carpathia. //Query: Shallow buried metal ahead of my current path?//

  //Yes//

  I stopped running. //Show me//

  The images filtered into my head. A semicircle of M16A2 bounding anti-personnel mines surrounded the dark elves on either side of the road but easily two hundred feet from their position. It was an American design; they were scattered throughout the Middle East and Asia. Step on one, remove your foot, and the mine would pop out of the ground about three feet into the air before detonating and spraying shrapnel for a hundred feet in every direction. To avoid detection, they would have been wiser to plant the modern blast mines that used a minimum of metal, but they probably were counting on me being stupid. I was still a safe distance away and could detonate them remotely. I’m not brilliant at shifting earth, but I can move a bit of topsoil when I need to.

  Oberon, tell Granuaile to stop and hit the deck for a few seconds.

  Targeting a circle of sod near me, I bound it to the top of the first mine. The turf flew through the air and triggered the bounder when it landed and rolled off. The explosion boomed in the night, and shredded bits of iron sprayed out and fell harmlessly between us. I repeated the exercise until all the mines had been detonated.

  Silly dark elves. Earth is for Druids.

  Still they refused to move. When they solidified, they were looking in my direction, but they kept their positions by the road. That meant they had some other kind of protection and wanted me to charge in. I wouldn’t do that, because doing what the enemy wants is tantamount to taking a bath with a kitchen appliance. They might have another ring of those plastic mines after all. Carpathia would have a tough time sensing them, except perhaps as displaced soil.

  Warn Granuaile to look for more booby traps. They’re too comfortable there. Take them out from the maximum distance possible.

  Oberon said.

  I beckoned the elves to come forward, but once they saw this—which proved they had excellent night vision—they remained solid and copied the motion, white smiles splitting their faces. I smiled back and watched one on the far side of the road take a throwing knife in the side of his neck. So nice of him to remain still and present a target like that for Granuaile. His partner immediately went smoky, but the remaining dark elf on my side didn’t see it happen, because he was facing me. I kept smiling at him and gesturing, and in another couple of seconds he went down too. The last dark elf had to turn solid after his five seconds were up, but he tr
ied to be clever about it and solidified in a crouch, presenting a smaller target. Granuaile anticipated it and nailed him anyway. It wasn’t a fatal shot, catching him in the shoulder, but my theory proved true: They couldn’t dissolve their substance once their skin was broken. He clutched the knife and cursed in Old Norse, remaining crouched on the ground.

  Tell Granuaile to head back to you and leave the knives. We’ll get her some more. He’s neutralized now, and I don’t want to risk walking into a trap we can’t see.

  After a pause, Oberon replied,

  I grinned and sprinted back up the hill, leaving the lone dark elf behind to watch the bodies of his comrades melt to black tar. A regular infusion of Immortali-Tea might be keeping my body from aging, but Granuaile made me feel young again.

  Chapter 3

  The only way dark elves and a vampire could have been waiting at that particular spot long enough to plant land mines was if somebody had known we’d be running through there. That suggested a couple of things: Either the Olympians tipped them off—which I thought unlikely because they wouldn’t achieve their measure of glory if they let someone else kill me—or someone was following the Morrigan’s movements and made an educated guess about our route. That someone was most likely Fae. Few others would have a chance to move around the Irish planes without being seen.

  Guessing our route wouldn’t have been that difficult if one assumed we were headed north; there were few passes through the Carpathians, and following a river was one of the easiest ways to shake a tail—you cross it, you cross it again, you pretend to cross but really you just run in the shallow water until you reemerge a bit upstream on the same side. Sitting on a river that led more or less straight to the pass was a fair gamble.

  I said to Granuaile, “We may have a faery tail.”