Hammered with Bonus Content
Page 29
“Sensei? Atticus? What’s the matter?” Granuaile flicked her eyes from the road to my face, creases of worry between her brows.
“Drive on,” I told her. “Oberon’s right. We have to get out of here.”
Acknowledgments
My editor at Del Rey, Tricia Pasternak, is eternally encouraging and may be a Zen master of Soothing Anxious Authors. She exudes calm even through her emails. Here is one of her koans to boggle your mind: What is the sound of one subplot resolving?
Mike Braff, assistant editor, introduced me to Viking Death Metal, specifically a band called Amon Amarth and one of their songs called “Twilight of the Thunder God.” I had that playing on loop while I wrote the last battle scene, and now I’m fighting the urge to buy a double-bladed axe and a drinking horn.
My copy editor, Kathy Lord, and my managing editor, Nancy Delia, both deserve a bottle of something Irish because I’ve probably driven them to drink anyway—it might as well be the good stuff. They’ve been a spectacular help, and I’m grateful for their assistance.
My agent, Evan Goldfried at JGLM, happened to know a really cool rabbi, Jenny Amswych, who was kind enough to help me out with the Hebrew. I chose the kh spelling instead of the ch for the guttural sound, and I hope that doesn’t ruffle any feathers. If there are any errors, please lay the blame at my door and not the good rabbi’s.
Eli Freysson in Iceland assisted with some of the Icelandic names, but please don’t tease him if I messed up, because I tend to Anglicize things a bit.
I’m grateful as always to my early readers, Alan O’Bryan and Tawnya Graham-Schoolitz. Nick Steinkemper also did me yeoman service on short notice.
Kimberly, Maddie, and Gail Hearne are the most supportive family members a writer could wish for, and I count myself blessed to be a part of their lives.
As with my other books, most of the physical locations (on this plane) are real, albeit used in a fictional way. If anyone does that $75 shot of whiskey at Rúla Búla, drop me a line and let me know if it was worth it. I’ll tell you right now that the Smithwick’s with the fish and chips is always worth it.
Likewise, the teak motorcycle sculpture at the Huddle in Globe is worth a look. It gets even better after you’ve had a couple Big Boys. I’m indebted to the owner, Tracy Quick, for a tour of downtown that included a rare glimpse of the old secret tunnels beneath the streets.
You can find me at www.kevinhearne.com. I’m also on Twitter (@kevinhearne), and I hope to see you at a spiffy shindig of some kind. Maybe we’ll meet at a sci-fi/fantasy or comics convention, catch a glimpse of Neil Gaiman, and squee in ultrasonic stereo.
Read on for a peek at the first two books
in The Iron Druid Chronicles
Hounded
and
Hexed
by
Kevin Hearne
Published by Del Rey
HOUNDED
I had Oberon stationed as sentinel on the edge of the lawn, close to the street. As the widow regaled me with tales of her Golden Age debauchery, I was depending on him to tell me of approaching danger.
Is he a stranger? I had put Fragarach aside while I talked with the widow, but now I stood and slung the scabbard back over my head, causing the widow to frown.
Uh-oh. That’s not good. Stay still and try not to make any noise.
“Excuse me, Mrs. MacDonagh,” I said, “someone’s coming and he might not be friendly.”
“What? Who is it? Atticus?”
I couldn’t answer yet, so I didn’t. I kicked off my sandals and drew power from the widow’s lawn even as I walked toward the street and peered northward. One of the charms on my necklace has the shape of a bear on it, and its function is to store a bit of magical power for me that I can tap when I’m walking on concrete or asphalt. I topped off the magical tank as a possible antagonist approached.
A tall, armored figure clanked noisily on the asphalt a couple of houses away, and it raised a hand to hail me when I came into view. I activated a different charm that I call “faerie specs,” a sort of filter for my eyes that lets me see through Fae glamours and detect all sorts of magic juju. It showed me the normal spectrum, but then there was also a green overlay that revealed what was going on magically, and right now the two layers showed me the same thing. So whoever he was, I was looking at his true form. If he had something similar to my faerie specs, he might be able to see through Oberon’s camouflage, but then again, he might not.
He was wearing rather gaudy bronze armor that no one would have worn in the old days. The cuirass, faced in hardened leather dyed with woad, covered too much and restricted movement. He had leaf-shaped tassets hanging down over a bronze mail skirt. He also had five-piece pauldrons and matching vambraces and greaves. It would have been hot enough to wear such armor in Ireland, but here the temperature was still in the low nineties, and he must have been broiling in it. His helmet was beyond ridiculous: It was one of those medieval barbutes that didn’t become popular until a thousand years after his halcyon days of slaughter, and he must have been wearing it as a joke, though I did not find it especially funny. A sword hung in a scabbard at his side, but thankfully he did not carry a shield.
“I greet you, Siodhachan Ó Suileabháin,” he said. “Well met.” He flashed a smug grin at me through his helmet, and I wanted to slay him on the spot. I kept my faerie specs on, because I simply didn’t trust him. Without some way to pierce his glamour, he could make my eyes think he was standing three feet away with his hands on his head while he was really plunging a dagger into my belly.
“Call me Atticus. I greet you, Bres.”
“Not well met?” He tilted his head a bit to the right, as much as the barbute would let him.
“Let’s see how the meeting goes. It’s been a long time since we have seen each other, and I wouldn’t have minded if it were longer. And by the way, the Renaissance Festival doesn’t arrive here until next February.”
“That’s not very hospitable,” Bres said, frowning. Oberon was right: He smelled of salt and fish. As a god of agriculture, he should smell of earth and flowers, but instead he retained the stink of the dockside, owing perhaps to his Fomorian ancestors, who lived by the sea. “I could take offense if I wished.”
“So take it already and be done. I can’t imagine why else you would be here now.”
“I am here at the request of an old friend,” he said.
“Did he request that you dress like that? Because if he did, he’s not your friend.”
“Atticus, who is that?” the widow MacDonagh called from her porch. I didn’t take my eyes off Bres as I called back to her.
“Someone I know. He won’t be staying long.” Time to set up my flanking maneuver. Speaking mind to mind, I said to Oberon, Remain still. But when I say, get behind him, grab a leg, and just yank him off his feet. Once he’s down, jump clear.
Bres continued as if the widow had never spoken. “Aenghus Óg wants the sword. Give it to me and you’ll be left alone. It’s that simple.”
“Why isn’t he here himself?”
“He’s nearby,” Bres said. That was calculated to ratchet my paranoia up a few levels. It worked, but I was determined it would not work in his favor.
“What’s your stake in this, Bres? And what’s with the armor?”
“That does not concern you, Druid. Your only concern is whether you will agree to give us the sword and live, or refuse and die.” The last fingers of the sun were waving good-bye over the horizon, and twilight was upon us. Faerie time.
“Tell me why he wants it,” I said. “It’s not like Ireland has a High King who needs the Tuatha Dé Danann to help him out uniting all the various tribes.”
“It is not for you to question.”
“Sure it is,” I said, “but I guess it’s not for you to answer. Fragarach is right here.” I gestured to the hilt peeking over my shoulder. “So if I give it to you now, you walk away, and I never hear from you or Aenghus again?”
Bres peered intently at the hilt for a few moments, then chuckled. “That is not Fragarach. I have seen it, Druid, and I have felt its magic. You have nothing in that scabbard but an ordinary sword.”
Wow. Radomila’s magical cloak just rocked.
And then the green overlay in my vision started to differ from the normal spectrum. Bres was pulling his sword out of his scabbard in a leisurely fashion and watching my face to see if I reacted, so I tried to stay relaxed and let him think I was clueless. Either he knew that I really had Fragarach on my back and he wanted to double-cross me, or he simply wanted to kill me to burnish his reputation. He’d make a fine tale of the battle, no doubt, in spite of the fact that he was planning the equivalent of a stab in the back.
“I assure you it’s the real thing,” I said to him, and to Oberon I said, Change in plan. Just lie down behind him when I say. I’ll push him over your back so he falls down.
Bres’s glamour form shrugged and said, “You can give your cheap sword to me if you’d like. It will only delay things, and I’ll have to come back again with another offer. But I can guarantee that offer won’t be as generous as the one I’m giving you now.”
And that was when the true Bres on the green overlay grinned wickedly and raised his sword over his head in a two-handed grasp, ready to split me in two.
Now, Oberon, I said, keeping my face pensive as if I were thinking over Bres’s words. I started talking out loud to hopefully mask any sounds Oberon made as he moved.
“Bres, I think you’re missing something important,” I said, even as he brought his sword down with all his strength and I stepped out of the way to the right at the last instant. His glamour persona was still standing there, smirking, but I didn’t pay attention to that one anymore. The green one—the real Bres—had just tried to slay me. While he was hunched over awkwardly on his follow-through, I kicked at the nerve cluster in his wrist to make him drop the sword, then put another one in his face to make him stand back up. It didn’t get through his helmet, but any blow to the head is going to make you pull away. Then I pivoted on my left foot and spun clockwise, delivering a roundhouse into his solar plexus before he could set himself. He staggered backward and fell over Oberon in a tremendous clatter of bronze and hardened leather, still not hurt but pretty humiliated by this point. He gave up on the glamour, and the smirking Bres merged with the one on the ground, so that my faerie specs and my normal vision showed the same thing again.
I could have left it there. He was disarmed and no danger to me now, and if any of the Fae had been around to see him fall flat on his ass, he would be shamed in a legendary fashion. Except that he had tried to kill me with a glamour. He would never fight me fairly, because he could not win that way—he’d never been much of a terror on the battlefield. If I let him live, then he would send a series of assassins my way, just as Aenghus Óg had been doing for centuries. I didn’t need twice the headache I already had.
Plus, in the parlance of our times, he was a douche bag.
So I didn’t leave it there. While he was still on the ground, I whipped Fragarach out of its scabbard and plunged it straight through the center of his bronze cuirass, which offered no resistance to the magical blade. Bres’s eyes bulged and he stared at me in disbelief: After surviving the epic battles of ancient Ireland (in respectable armor), during which he could have died heroically, he was going to meet his end in a fight that lasted less than ten seconds because of his own over-confidence.
HEXED
“So how many fallen angels you killed afore this, Mr. Druid?”
“This’ll be my first, I reckon.”
“Shee-it.” Coyote shook his head with a rueful grin. “We’re gonna die.”
I looked sharply at him. “Are you approachin’ this like a suicide trip? You figgerin’ it’s okay to die and leave me there without no one to watch my back, ’cause you can just come back from the dead anyway? I’ll tell ya right now, Coyote, I’m plannin’ on livin’ a long time after this. If you ain’t plannin’ on survivin’, tell me straight and I’ll go get someone else to help me.”
“Aw, cool your britches, Mr. Druid. I ain’t gonna walk on up to ’im and ask ’im to eat me.” Coyote threw up his hands. “All I’m sayin’ is this ain’t gonna be no picnic. A fallen angel’s gonna be a far sight smarter than a reg’lar demon, and more’n a little stronger too.”
“All right, then. You got any idea where the demon is?”
“Last I saw, he was perched on one o’ their buildings overlookin’ a courtyard area. It’s got some grass and trees in it, so you can draw power there.”
“We’re gonna have to go through the school building to get there, though?”
“That’s what I ’spect.”
“We’ll have to go camouflaged. School officials tend to get worried about people bringin’ weapons onto their campuses.”
Skyline High School is a monolithic building of stucco-sprayed cement block trimmed in hunter green. I parked in the no-parking drop-off zone, because I just didn’t care about parking etiquette. I cast camouflage on both myself and Coyote, then got out and opened the cargo area, where I camouflaged both our bows, the quiver of arrows, and Fragarach too. It didn’t make us completely invisible, especially in the rain, but it sure helped. Once inside, we’d blend into the bland institutional décor without trouble. Coyote pitched in by giving us something he called “Clever Stalking,” which really meant we wouldn’t make any noise when we moved. (I’m not sure why he didn’t call it Silent Stalking; I suppose Coyote thought it was clever of him to think stalking should be a silent exercise.)
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 whispe
red 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.