Hunted tidc-6

by Kevin Hearne

  Wait. What does he smell like?

  Oberon held his head low, his ears and tail drooping as he paced worriedly around a still form. The wailing voice that said no no no got louder.

 

  Oh, gods, I hope you’re wrong too.

  The enormity of what had happened began to catch up with me. Leif’s warning of an ambush had been legit—it just hadn’t manifested itself as vampires, the way Atticus had thought. I reached Oberon in the next few seconds and my throat tightened at what I saw. Atticus was sprawled on his right side, blood pooled underneath his head. His eyes were open and unblinking. The entry wound near his left temple was a small black hole, not red or a bruised purple. A small black hole.

  I knelt next to him and put a finger underneath his nose to see if he was breathing. He didn’t appear to be, and I felt no puff of air on my finger. I searched for a pulse on his neck but found nothing. I tried his wrist. I put my ear down to his chest and hoped I could hear something over the voice saying no no no. All was still. And though these indications were all of a kind and pointed to a terrible conclusion, the worst for me was that Oberon was plainly visible, and so was Atticus. They had both been running in camouflage and Atticus had been the one to cast it.

  Oberon asked.

  A small black hole. No vital signs. That should have done it, but it was having to answer Oberon, saying it aloud, that broke me.

  “Yes,” I cried, my voice quavering. “He’s gone. I can’t do anything.” And then we both howled. We howled the way people do when they don’t care about speaking anymore because the words don’t exist that can properly convey their emotions. Only ragged, broken, discordant noises could come close. And there are always tears and snot and gasping too, gasping because there isn’t enough wind to cry all that they feel in a single breath.

  For what else was there to do? CPR wouldn’t help with a head wound. I couldn’t make his heart beat if his brain wasn’t fucking there. Druidry only gave me the power to heal, not resurrect.

  He’d died before he finished falling. The little black hole in the side of his head swelled until it filled my vision—a distortion brought on by my tears. Knowing I’d already avenged him gave me no satisfaction.

  I had him for only a few weeks. I’d thought we would be happy together forever. And I think I might have said that out loud, to his body, in a sort of high-pitched, incoherent keening that approximated speech but wasn’t intelligible. Twelve years of longing and being with him every day—closer to thirteen if you counted the year of flirting at Rúla Búla before I began my training—thirteen years of repression and stupid surrogate boyfriends so that I would be a stronger Druid, but only a few weeks of openly loving each other, ended by a small black hole in the side of his head. No chance to tell him goodbye or let him know one more time how grateful I was to be bound to the earth. No chance to let him tease me and then tease him back harder. No chance to cuss at him in Old Irish because he said it made him feel young again, or put on strawberry lip gloss and watch him go dizzy. He’d always had a thing about that for some reason.

  I don’t precisely know how long we cried over Atticus, but the moon was high in the sky, probably close to midnight, and my throat was raw before I remembered that Artemis and Diana were still after us. We’d probably cried away much of our lead.

  Oberon, I said, we have to go.

 

  We have to. The huntresses are coming.

 

  Atticus would care. You know that. He would want us to run and thwart them. We will bury him and say our farewells, and then we will honor him by sticking it to the Olympians.

 

  By making it to England. Surviving will piss them off and make Atticus proud.

 

  I know, Oberon, but staying here and letting the Olympians kill us won’t make him happy. Us either, for that matter.

  Oberon ignored my wisdom and asked,

  I didn’t know where he was. Normally the Morrigan would escort spirits to their final resting place, but she was dead now. Perhaps Manannan Mac Lir would know. Maybe Atticus and the Morrigan were together somewhere.

  I’m not sure where he is, Oberon, but I’m sure we can’t see him. The dead and the living can inhabit the same planes in the Summer Lands, but they do not mix.

 

  No, Oberon. I need you to stay with me. Please? Let’s send him off properly.

 

  We will have whiskey as soon as we find a liquor store.

  Fragarach was lying a short distance away, so I retrieved it and placed it on the ground in front of him. I didn’t roll him over or anything like that. I couldn’t bear to see the other side of his head. The small black hole would haunt me forever as it was; I didn’t want to see anything worse.

  I closed my eyes, pressing tears down my cheeks, and used my Latin headspace to contact the local elemental, Saxony.

  //Druid needs aid / Bury body and sword here / Keep surface undisturbed//

  //Harmony// came the reply. Atticus and Fragarach sank into the earth, and the turf nearby sort of stretched and closed over him, adjusting itself to make it appear as if nothing had ever happened there. No blood. No marker to indicate that the finest Druid to ever walk the earth ended his walk in this nameless field.

  My voice wasn’t up to speaking aloud, so I spoke mentally to Oberon. Here lies Siodhachan Ó Suileabháin, I said, known as Atticus to us. He changed my life forever—for the better—and I can never repay the debt I owe him. All I can do is honor his memory by protecting the earth. I paused, confronted by the impossibility of doing justice to my memories of him, so I simply ended with, I loved him and will think of him every day, no matter how long I live.

  I sobbed once and then did my best to weep silently so that Oberon would know it was his turn. He whined, indecisive, before he gave form to his thoughts.

  Oberon said.

  I petted Oberon and stood shakily. I sniffled and looked up at the moon. Its cold light gave me no comfort. It only reminded me of Artemis and Diana. I cast my eyes back down to the ground and shook my head. There had been no vampires waiting for us. Only a sniper, probably in their employ, determined to wipe out the last of the Druids. And even the vampires were being directed by some shadowy figure in Tír na nÓg.

  I really need to run now. I need to get out of here.

 

  I shifted to a horse and found Scáthmhaide where I’d dropped it. Then I lit out for the Netherlands with Oberon as if we could somehow catch up with what we’d lost, as if the desolation we felt could be left behind and wouldn’t grow inside us with every mile.

  Chapter 11

  A pair of horns blast behind me, I am chilled with a premonition of my own death, and I wish for the thousandth time that Atticus were here. Did he find horns to be harbingers of death and sorrow? I cannot eve
r ask him now.

  Instead of “When the Saints Go Marching In,” I always hear “Taps” at funerals, and somehow the collective sorrow of so many final farewells builds in my mind, a great Jungian unconscious flood of tears and roses thrown on caskets and folded flags given to widows by a pair of crisp white gloves. That horn that plays in the John Williams score after Luke Skywalker finds the smoking ruins of his aunt and uncle—such a mournful sound, full and hollow at the same time, a surfeit of emptiness. And the call to charge never rouses me but rather signals that someone is going to die a violent death soon—or, if it starts a race or contest, it means there can be only one victor.

  The horns that blasted behind me were dim, nasal, and stuffy sounds that nevertheless meant the goddesses were gaining on us, and they weighted down my legs, which were already straining, not from fatigue but from dolor. These were the sounds of horns and hunting that, according to myth, brought Actaeon to Diana as she was bathing. He’d been lost in the woods and thought that by following the sounds of horns he’d be saved. But Diana had turned him into a stag and set her hounds on him instead. Those horns had called him to his death.

  Is she still sounding the same horn all these centuries later?

  And is there anything more horrifying to the hunted than the sound of horns? Even the baying of the hounds is not so terrible; they are animals and following their instinct and training. But the murderous intellect behind the horn, the creature coldly orchestrating my doom—that’s what makes me feel like prey and sets icy wings of fear fluttering inside my throat.

  I probably would have given up already if it weren’t for Oberon. And he is probably thinking the same thing regarding me. In truth, we are running only because Atticus would have wanted us to. I think we are only marginally more scared than we are depressed, and we aren’t running as fast as we had been before. The urgency is gone. I don’t see how I can survive this if Atticus and the Morrigan couldn’t. The powers of a Druid are awesome, but the powers arrayed against me are too numerous and in a different league. I’m not going to quit, but I feel like I’m on a soccer team losing 3–0 with ten minutes left on the clock. While winning in that scenario is still theoretically possible, I don’t see a way to make it happen all by myself and I half-wish that the end would hurry up and get here, banishing the dread of its approach.

  We crossed the border into the Netherlands, and the elemental directed me to turn sharply to the southwest to avoid the bulk of cities by the sea. We’d have had to turn south at some point anyway to reach the French coast.

  It’s odd, sometimes, how a border can seemingly change the character of the land. The German landscape had been sharp, clean, and precise, whereas the Dutch, even at night, had a bit of a gauzy filter over it, as if the ghost of Rembrandt had pulled his brush across it to soften the edges just a little bit. The colors I saw in my night vision, too, appeared subtly textured and mixed by the master, not so stark as they had been in Germany. Or perhaps it was no different at all, and only my melancholia made it so.

  Noting the change of direction, Oberon said in a subdued tone,

 

  He let some time pass, and all we heard was the pounding of my hooves and the pads of his paws on the earth. They beat out a rhythm of cycling thought, the percussive notes repeating Atticus over and over if you were inclined to hear it that way, and we were. Then he said,

 

 

  The horns sounded again. Perhaps my imagination magnified the sound a bit.

 

 

 

 

  I felt as if my eyes should be flooding with tears, but horses don’t cry the same way humans do. Oberon continued, not waiting for me to finish.

 

 

 

 

 

  I told him.

 

  Oberon abruptly quit running, and I had to stop too. We were in the middle of a large barley field.

  He turned to face the northeast and growled.

  My instinct for self-preservation spoke up. It told me I could survive this. I could drop Scáthmhaide, abandon Oberon, and turn into a peregrine falcon. I could fly straight across the channel to England, find a tethered tree, and shift away to safety. They couldn’t have pandemonium going on over there too, I thought. Somewhere in the New World, maybe even back in Arizona, I’d bind my amulet to my aura the way Atticus did, and then the playing field would be a bit more even.

  Except I’d never be able to live with the guilt. And I’d never have the stomach to fight again if I didn’t fight now.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  I had thought Oberon’s tail might wag at that, but it didn’t. He simply pricked up his ears.

  elemental does. Let’s keep going while I figure it out.>

  The ears drooped.

  I raised my right front hoof.

 

 

 

  We ran, and I consulted the elemental about a suitable place to defend ourselves. Images of the path ahead flashed through my mind until I saw a likely spot.

  //There / That place / Query: Where is that?// It was a small precipice—only fifteen or so feet high—but if we could get our backs to it, we would have a relatively unobscured line of sight and no one would be able to sneak up on us. There were trees on top of it, but at the base a small clear space before the trees broke up the view—and the approach was on a gentle slope as well, so we’d have the high ground.

  //Remain on current path// the elemental said. //Will guide//

  //Query: Distance to destination?//

  Elementals are not excellent at using human units of measurement, but I figured it was about eighty miles to the southwest, skirting cities and keeping to rural areas as much as possible. If we sped up, we could make it in a couple of hours.

  I told Oberon.

 

 

  Chapter 12

  Our minds are all that defend us from the horror of the void. The majority of the time we simply think about something—anything—else, and that itself is an act of defiance against the vast nothing of the universe. But minds break down and stop thinking sometimes. They feel instead: A looping, gnawing monster eats away confidence and goals and even a sense of duty until we are in a dry bleak place of ennui, unable to focus on the minutiae that used to keep us moving. Tongues taste chalk and ashes, and eyes see only gray washes occasionally penetrated by bright stabs of panic.