by Kevin Hearne
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 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.
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 t
he 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 tried 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.”
“No, Oberon, I said we might have a faery tail, as in a faery who is tailing us.”
My hound whined.
“Look up once in a while. It’s clearly not only the goddesses hunting us. We still have vampires and dark elves to worry about, and I think they’re getting help from someone in Tír na nÓg.”
“Does anyone like us?” Granuaile asked, an edge of bitterness to her voice. “Because I’m thinking maybe we should go hang out with them if we survive this.”
“Yeah. We should probably get out of Europe for a while if we can.”
Grauaile exhaled quickly, banishing wishful thinking and returning to practical matters. “But first things first, right? We have to get out of this fix. Would it be ridiculous to booby-trap our trail?”
“No, I don’t think so. In fact, I think it’s strategically necessary.”
“Agreed. Even a failed trap will cause them to slow down and be wary for more. We should make a pit trap with spikes in the bottom. You make the pit and I’ll make the spikes.”
I grinned at her. “A cold suggestion of mayhem? That’s hot.”
Granuaile dropped her staff, stepped forward, and placed her hands flat against my chest. Her face darted toward mine for a quick kiss but then pulled back at the last instant, leaving me with the heat of her breath and the scent of strawberry lip gloss. I don’t think she was wearing any—beauty products tend not to survive the rigors of shape-shifting—but I always smelled it now, regardless; the memory of it was indelibly linked with the sight of her lips. She pushed me away, hard, and shape-shifted to a horse. She picked up her staff in her mouth and galloped north at full speed, leaving me bewildered and more than a little wistful. Oberon’s mental groan came a few seconds later.
I broke into a wide smile before dropping Fragarach’s scabbard on the ground and shape-shifting to a stag.
The race, I eventually discerned, was in earnest. I spent half of it like a cockfident waffle dolphin, thinking she would slow down and let me win. But then I tried to close the gap and found that she hadn’t been going full speed after all; she had a sixth and seventh gear.
The horse in front of me whinnied in amusement—Granuaile could of course hear Oberon too—but I wasn’t gaining on her, so I didn’t think it was funny. We were running either in or near the trees on the east side of Highway E371 to keep from drawing the attention of drivers crossing the border between Slovakia and Poland. This was Dukla Pass, site of one of the bloodiest battles of the eastern front during World War II. Farmhouses and memorials for the dead sat like squat chess pieces on squares of pasture framed by stands of timber.
Once past the border and safely on the other side of the pass, Granuaile paused to gloat at the edge of an alfalfa field. “Guess you’ll have to rechannel all your sexual energy into making a death trap for immortals,” she said.
A nap sounded like a great idea to me, but we couldn’t afford the time. If we slept now we might never wake up, so we concentrated on our task.
Normally a pit trap would take many hours and a handy tool like a shovel or a backhoe—or at least a spade—with which to move the earth. But it doesn’t take that long and requires no tools at all when the earth is willing to do all the work for you. The trick is to be smart about it when you have two expert huntresses on your tail.
“We can’t have you cutting down branches here and sharpening stakes,” I said. “If they have night vision or they come through here after dawn, there’s too much chance that they’ll see it and be wary. Let’s cross the pasture on the hoof and leave a clear trail. Once we get to the other side, we pull a wascally wabbit and tunnel back, you see?”
“I surely do.” She shifted to a horse, took up her staff, and galloped across.
“Not here, anyway. Across the field of joy. Here. Take Fragarach with you too. Tell Granuaile to get started and I’ll be there soon. I need to snag some flashlights from the border station.” Oberon opened his mouth extra wide to carry both my scabbard and Granuaile’s knives.
“Enough complaining.”
I doubled back in camouflage, not caring if the huntresses saw the footprints. Let them follow me to the guard station at the border and wonder what I did there.
What I did was throw a couple of rocks at the guardhouse windows. Two guards obligingly came out with flashlights shining into the night, resting their hands on the butts of their guns and calling out warnings to the dark. I snatched their flashlights away, turned them off, and then cast camouflage on them. From the guards’ point of view, the flashlights had leapt out of their hands and disappeared. They drew their guns but they couldn’t find a target in the dark. I was already running back to the alfalfa field, chased by Polish curses that seemed to Doppler-shift bizarrely into “Never Gonna Give You Up,” and after I thought of it I couldn’t believe I’d just rick
rolled myself.
Once I reached the field, I kept trucking across it with my human feet. There was no need to switch up my form for consistency; all the goddesses needed to do was follow me across. Underneath the opposite cover of trees, we made contact with Carpathia. Granuaile wanted a bit of help and some permission to harvest some living tree branches, while I explained the tunnel we needed and then the pit in the middle of the pasture that needed to be hollowed out while leaving the surface undisturbed. Artemis and Diana needed to see that swath of trampled alfalfa and follow directly in our paths.
Despite Carpathia’s aid, building the trap took an hour. Moving the earth and hidden rocks in the ground wasn’t that much trouble for the elemental—only the work of a few minutes or so—but it took us multiple trips through the tunnel to populate the pit with sharpened stakes. We could carry only so much, because we had to carry the flashlights too. Our night vision was sufficient for the work outside, but that wouldn’t cut it in the total darkness of underground. Planting the stakes in the bottom of the pit so that they’d remain steady took the majority of the time.
The pit itself was rather deep at twenty feet, and Oberon was impressed. To him it was an epic feat of engineering.
“Not nearly so deep,” I replied.
“He’d go something, but probably not fwoosh.” I was worried that the goddesses would avoid the stakes somehow. Their teams would fall in first, after all, and they might land on their teams and thereby avoid injury. I wanted it to be difficult to hop out if they somehow managed to avoid the stakes, and even I don’t have a twenty-foot vertical leap. But what if they had some sort of levitation enchantment on their chariots? In the brief glimpse of the chariots that I’d had before the goddesses fired at us, I thought the chariots were floating slightly off the ground. I couldn’t recall if their teams had been floating too. If so, then we’d probably wasted an hour. But if not, then the stags would fall in and drag the chariots down by their harness. Maybe. I hoped that, one way or another, falling into the pit would cause the goddesses at least an hour’s inconvenience, if not more, in addition to slowing down their subsequent rate of pursuit. The Morrigan had bought us a few hours of time when she had unbound their chariots, since they had to wait awhile to get new ones from Hephaestus and Vulcan. We were eating into that time now. With luck, the pit trap would gain us half a day’s lead on them.