The Iron Druid Chronicles 6-Book Bundle

by Kevin Hearne

  We glided by the reception desk without disturbing the matronly woman sitting there; she seemed to be emotionally involved with a game of solitaire on her computer. There were two full-time employees working at the attendance window (because taking attendance and getting money from the state is the most important job at public schools), but they were listening to parents lie on the phone about why their children weren’t in school that day, so they weren’t even looking up to see what was dripping all across the industrial carpet in the hallway. The doors to the courtyard gave a high-pitched squeak when we opened them, and the sound of pouring rain caused the attendance clerks to look up, but we slipped out without them spotting us.

  Class was in session and the courtyard was deserted. We were underneath a roofed area that traveled around the perimeter, providing shelter for rare rainy days like this but usually offering shade the rest of the year. Thick ropes of runoff water slapped noisily on the concrete before coursing in swift rivulets toward drainage grates.

  I turned on my faerie specs and had no trouble figuring out where Basasael was lurking. He was directly across from us, perched on the steel roof, in a Doppler-shifted cloud of wrong. The feathered wings he had eons ago were now leathery and batlike. The rest of him was still humanoid in appearance, just blackened and spiky and pulsing with evil, like a subwoofer vibrating a car’s windows and blurring the view.

  What made him particularly repellent at the moment was his open mouth, out of which dangled another teenage victim’s leg—some poor kid who’d been on his way to the nurse’s office, perhaps, or called down to see the counselor. As we watched, the fallen angel’s teeth crunched down and his lower jaw slid sideways in a grotesque chewing motion.

  Coyote saw it at the same time I did. “Too late to help that one, I reckon,” he whispered to my right. I couldn’t see him in the normal spectrum, but with my faerie specs on, he looked like a colorful collection of light streams, shifting chaotically within his form but not unpleasantly—just unpredictably. I handed him six arrows out of the quiver.

  “I’ll put my first arrow through his head; you go for the heart,” I whispered back. “Then just keep shootin’ until he fuckin’ dies.”

  “Wow, you learn all that strategy from the U.S. Army men?”

  I grunted in amusement. “No, I learned it from Attila the Hun, who lived an’ died without ever knowin’ you were here.”

  The two of us drifted apart naturally, hunters of old. We did not need to discuss strategy. When it’s two against one, the two should separate so that if the target counterattacks one, his back is left open to the other. When we’d formed a triangle—Coyote and I at the base and Basasael at the top—we nocked our arrows and nodded at each other. I slid out of my sandals and stepped into the rain so that I could draw power from the earth. First I filled my bear charm back up, in case I needed to cast something on the sidewalk, then I drew enough to pull back the bow, just as Basasael was finishing off his teenage repast. I held up five fingers to Coyote, folded in my thumb, then my index finger to indicate a countdown, then pulled the bowstring to its limit. I took quick aim and let fly in time with the countdown.

  I was already grabbing another arrow as our first volley sank home. My arrow pierced the fallen angel’s left eye, and Coyote’s thudded solidly into the center of its chest. It screeched on several wavelengths and shuddered my bones as it toppled backward onto the roof, surprised and clutching at the shafts.

  Normally, if you shoot something in the head with an arrow, it doesn’t have enough motor skills left to reach up and pluck the arrow out. And shooting a critter in the heart generally robs it of the strength to stand up and roar defiantly at unsafe decibel levels. Basasael wasn’t normal, for he did both of those things.

  A white bubbling wound was left behind in each case, but the fallen angel threw both the arrows down into the courtyard, spread his wings, and crouched in preparation to spring at one of us. He saw us both clearly; my camouflage spell kept us hidden from human eyes but not from his.

  “How many arrows we gotta use to kill this thing?” Coyote yelled.

  “All Mary said was we’d have to pierce it more’n once.”

  “Yeah? Well maybe you shoulda pinned her down to a specific number there afore we left, dumbass!”

  I agreed with Coyote wholeheartedly, as we let fly with another volley. Basasael knocked Coyote’s missile aside with a blurred sweep of his left arm, but mine sank directly into his swollen gut. The force of it toppled him backward again, but this time he knew better than to stay still and let us reload. Ignoring the arrow that was turning his black skin into a white froth before bubbling away to gray, he gathered his legs underneath him and launched himself straight up into the air with a single, powerful stroke of his wings and another mighty bellow of rage I could feel in my teeth. At the apex of his ascent, he folded his wings and dove after his chosen target—me.

  The eternal whine of self-pity—why me?—flashed through my brain as I aimed one last shot at the fallen angel. The answers came flooding in: I looked like nothing more than a puny human weakling; I’d shot him in the head and the gut; I was standing in the open, where he could get to me easily, while Coyote was shooting from underneath the shelter of the roof; and, because of the binding Aenghus Óg had put on him, he couldn’t leave the area until he killed me. I let fly with my shot and it sailed above his right shoulder, much to my chagrin. Dropping my bow because there’d be no time for another shot, I leapt back under the roof and drew Fragarach with my right hand and another blessed arrow from my quiver with my left.

  I positioned myself behind one of the roof’s supporting steel posts so that Basasael would have to pick a side to attack from and reduce his speed accordingly. It turned out the post was not something he considered to be an actual obstacle. He simply bashed it aside with his right arm as his wings spread to brake his flight, and the post obligingly ripped out of its moorings and buckled a portion of the roof as if it were made of Nerf rather than steel.

  “Don’t you feel the least bit ill right now?” I asked. I could see the courtyard through the yawning white hole in his head. It was still boiling and hissing, eating away at his substance—as were the other two wounds—but in terms of real damage it only seemed to have pissed him off.

  His feet touched down on the concrete rather than the earth, so Cold Fire was out of the question; he answered me by belching a gout of bright orange flame at my face. It looked exactly like the ball of hellfire Aenghus Óg had thrown at me. “Hey!” I shouted as the flame passed over me, giving me a brief sensation of heat but otherwise leaving me unharmed, thanks to my amulet’s protection. “You’re the bastard who made a deal with Aenghus Óg! You’re the one who’s been behind it all!”

  I heard the squeal of the office doors opening to my right: Someone was coming out to investigate what all the ruckus was. They wouldn’t be able to see me or the demon, but they’d sure see the mangled post lying in the rain and a dangerously drooping roof. They’d also be in mortal danger. It’s the sort of situation that gets duelists killed: a split second of distraction, flicking the eyes away for a shadow of a moment, and suddenly it’s all over. Basasael was counting on it; perhaps he saw my eyes move, perhaps he didn’t, but he shook off his surprise that I didn’t burn and took advantage anyway. He was still a good four feet away from me, but his right arm shot toward my chest and his fingers extended, then his claws did likewise, telescope fashion, aiming for my heart. He wanted to pull one of those Mola Ram maneuvers, ripping my still-beating heart out of my chest and then laughing at me as I watched him eat it. I dodged to my right as quickly as I could, raising my left arm to let the claws pass under, but I wasn’t quick enough. I felt four rotten black spikes pierce my side, scraping against the outside of my ribs and penetrating clear through to keep me pinned to the wall.

  I grunted in pain and retaliated quickly, because part of him was pinned too: I drove the tip of the blessed arrow down through the back of his corrupt
ed hand and on through the palm. He howled and yanked his hand away, withdrawing the evil claws from my side, and in that moment of reprieve I risked a quick glance to my right.

  A wide-eyed female administrator in conservative dress was talking rapidly into a handheld radio. “There’s some damage to the courtyard roof and some strange animal noises, but I can’t tell what’s making them.”

  “Get back inside, lady!” I yelled. “For your own safety!” That was the best I could do for her just then. Basasael looked as if he was going to move in closer and tear my head off, so I raised Fragarach in a defensive stance and winced at the burning in my side. As the fallen angel bent his knees and hissed at me, arms spread in a wrestler’s stance, preparing to spring, it occurred to me that maybe Coyote should have managed to shoot an arrow or two during the fracas.

  Where was the trickster? Had he taken off and left me to face the fallen angel alone? He’d been known to do that in several stories told about him: Get the white man to agree to a course of action, then take off at the critical moment and make him look like a fool. I didn’t know what more I could do to this creature by myself. Four holy arrows had obviously done some physical damage; he’d loudly announced that he felt pain from them, but he still kept coming. A morbid thought wandered into my consciousness and said hello: If Basasael ate my dumb Druid ass, would the Morrigan be able to bring me back fully functional, resurrected from—what? Angel poop? That raised another question, at once metaphysical and profane: Do angels, fallen or otherwise, have assholes?

  Coyote provided an answer in singular fashion. I heard a sickening, juicy squelching noise, and Basasael forgot all about charging me. He stood straight up on his clawed toes, feet together like a wooden nutcracker doll, his black eyes bulging and his throat ululating in a bean sidhe howl of agony that made me clutch my ears—or, rather, my one good ear and my one mess of pathetic cartilage niblets.

  Coyote shouted “Ha!” once and then began to yip in amusement, scampering across the courtyard in his animal shape, taunting the fallen angel, and Basasael launched himself skyward to give chase.

  While he was thus diverted, I took the opportunity to sheathe Fragarach and grab the school administrator by the collar, dragging her back to the office doors. She yelped in startlement, and I shouted at her as I tossed her inside, “Put the school in lockdown now! Just do it before someone else gets killed!” Every school in America had a lockdown procedure they followed to keep students safe in an emergency.

  “What? Who got killed?”

  “Take attendance and you’ll find out. It’s what you’re best at, because the gods know it’s not teaching them English. Damn kids don’t know the difference between an adjective and an adverb!” I needed to shut up. Stress was making me take my frustrations out on this poor frumpy lady who probably never got laid.

  “Who are …? Why can’t I see you?”

  “Lockdown! Attendance! Stay inside!” I slammed the door shut for extra emphasis and hoped that would galvanize her to the proper course of action. Turning back to the courtyard, I saw that Basasael was trying to fry Coyote from the air with his great balls o’ fire. Coyote was thus far a mite too fast for him, but I wasn’t sure how long that would last or if Coyote would be able to withstand a direct hit of hellfire.

  I scurried over to where I’d dropped my bow in the courtyard. It was still camouflaged, so I couldn’t see it, and it took me a few frantic moments to stumble into it. The act of bending over to pick it up exacerbated the wounds in my side, and, duly reminded of them, I drew power to close them up and begin the tissue-mending process.

  Two arrows left. Coyote had presumably dropped the remainder of his somewhere. I nocked one and tried not to laugh at the image of Basasael flying around with a feathery shaft sticking out between his cheeks. I chose my own target carefully, and the bowstring thwocked as the arrow sailed up and through the fallen angel’s right wing. It tore a magnificent white hole through it and began to widen, which caused Basasael to screech and tumble ignominiously to the earth—precisely where I wanted him.

  “Dóigh!” I shouted, pointing my right index finger at him and drawing strength from the earth as I cast Cold Fire. I immediately felt weaker, as if I were suffering from low blood sugar; my muscles were like leaden weights and sluggish to obey my commands. It wasn’t as bad as the first time I’d cast it, when I completely collapsed from the effort, but it was a fact that I wouldn’t be pulling that bowstring again today. I’d have to lie down and spend some time recuperating.

  The school’s loudspeaker crackled to life, and a stern voice of authority boomed metallically off the courtyard walls. “Teachers, please go into lockdown at this time. Once again, teachers, please go into lockdown immediately.”

  Apparently the repeated unholy shrieks from Basasael and random jets of flame in the courtyard had convinced the administration something was amiss, and this, on top of the commands delivered from a mysterious disembodied voice who seemed dissatisfied with the school’s English instruction, compelled them to act.

  Basasael began to rise slowly from the ground, the arrows clearly (and finally) bothering him now. As yet he betrayed no sign that the Cold Fire was working on him, but I had hope it would take effect in short order.

  Coyote, returned to human form, had dashed back to where his bow and arrows were and called to me, “What’d ya do to him, Mr. Druid?”

  “I’m not sure if I did anything,” I called back. “You might wanna shoot him a couple more times.”

  “Oh yeah, that brilliant strategy ya learned from Attila the Hun. Almost forgot.”

  As Coyote nocked an arrow and began to pull the bowstring, Basasael was ripping the arrows from his hand and his belly and making horrible noises in the process. He was gingerly trying to deal with the final arrow (Mercutio’s phrase about the “blind bow-boy’s butt shaft” took on new meaning in this situation) when Coyote’s shot took him straight in the throat, choking off all further screams. It allowed us to hear the sound of approaching police sirens.

  “Yeah!” Coyote whooped and pumped his fist. “Sit down and have a tall glass of shut-the-hell-up!”

  I was quickly turning loopy because, as the fallen angel was nonverbally communicating his distress with an impressive array of spastic twitches and concomitant white ejecta from his wounds, I was thinking, It’s too bad we’ll never get a chance to talk over a cup of tea. Besides the Morrigan, I rarely had conversations with beings older than I was, and I treasured them whenever they happened along.

  My doubts about whether Cold Fire would work on a fallen angel were soon allayed: The bubbling mess inside Basasael’s wounds began to spread all over his body, so that his legs and arms were roiling like maggots running rampant under a corpse’s skin. The next second, he tried to curl inward on himself in a mockery of the fetal position, and then he exploded in a slimy mass of purulence and gore. His tarlike substance polluted the courtyard, covering grass, trees, steel, and cement alike with the remains of the partially digested teenager splattered liberally amongst the mess. The falling rain was a benediction now, for the earth had been cleansed of an ancient evil, but it would never be able to wash this away before school got out, much less before the cops got here.

  “That’s right, son!” Coyote shouted at the remains. “You don’ come into my house an’ ’spect to live!”

  “By Balor’s evil eye, what are we going to do about all this goo?” I said.

  “What’s this ‘we’ you talkin’ about, Mr. Druid? Ain’t my demon, an’ it ain’t my mess.”

  “Yeah, I know. But I can’t get any ghouls out here now to clean it up. People are gonna have to deal with it and rationalize it away somehow. They can call the Ghostbusters to take a sample o’ the ectoplasmic discharge or whatever. Or they’ll have to bring in Mulder an’ Scully, because there ain’t no CSI on the planet that’ll ever be able to explain this.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talkin’ about, Mr. Druid.”

  I did
n’t care to explain. I just pointed at the carnage and said, “This right here will be the birthplace of a thousand conspiracy theories about aliens an’ most likely a sign of the comin’ apocalypse. You watch, it’ll be in the Weekly World News.”

  Coyote shrugged. “Hey, I don’ care. It’ll be a damn funny story whatever they come up with.”

  “We should get the arrows,” I said. “Better not leave them lyin’ around.”

  “Yeah, good idea,” Coyote replied. I put my sandals back on before venturing out to wade amongst the hellish mess, then joined Coyote in tracking down the arrows. Police officers began to stream into the courtyard, but we kept our mouths shut, knowing that they wouldn’t be able to hear us or see us, except as a flicker of movement they’d dismiss as a trick of the rain.

  Once the quiver was full again, we dodged around a few police officers and administrative types to get back to the office door. I remembered one last detail before we left the scene: I had to get rid of any blood that may have dropped after Basasael stabbed me. I found a few drops near the wall, not as much as I’d feared; it had mostly been soaked up by my shirt. I grabbed a few handfuls of water from the continuing runoff and washed it away, erasing evidence for the coming forensics specialists and leaving nothing behind for witches.

  The bell rang, signaling the end of class and beginning of lunchtime. Since the school was in lockdown, the kids would remain in class and simply go hungry for a while. But they’d be safe now.