by Kevin Hearne
We drove Coyote’s truck up to Hart Prairie, a beautiful place on the west side of the San Francisco Peaks largely watched over by the Nature Conservancy. There was a tether to Tír na nÓg there, and it was there that Granuaile experienced her first shift to another plane.
We spent very little time in Tír na nÓg—I shifted us to Scotland right away, before any faeries could spot us and report that the Iron Druid bloke wasn’t dead after all.
Those few days were probably the best time I’ve ever had in Scotland. Oberon was able to run confidently after another three days of healing—he called it “Intensive Sausage Therapy.” And I got back the use of my hand after three days of healing as well; the Highlands elemental was only too happy to help me out with that. The tattoo was indeed ruined on the back of my hand, however, and I wasn’t looking forward to having the Morrigan touch it up.
Once we were fully functional, Oberon and I shifted to the southern hemisphere, where it was summer, while Granuaile stayed behind to tour castles and politely deflect the come-ons of randy Scottish lads. Or maybe she didn’t deflect them; I don’t know, it’s her business anyway, and she deserves whatever happiness she can find.
There was plenty of time for me to think as I stalked Australia with Oberon on a sunny day in Queensland. Though I usually try to live in the present and avoid dwelling on the past, I found time there to gnaw on some regrets. I wished I hadn’t been tricked into killing Zdenik and the two skinwalkers; I mourned the deaths of Darren Yazzie and Frank Chischilly, and it was a shame that Hel had escaped—especially since she took the widow’s body with her. I was worried about what Hel was up to more than anything else at this point, but as there was very little I could do about it until Granuaile was trained, I decided I would not let the daughter of Loki steal away the few moments of sunshine afforded to me now. Ganesha’s mysterious League of Jungle Gods seemed to want me to lay low anyway. The omniscient deities all knew I was still around, of course, but Jesus and that lot weren’t the types to share information with the pantheons who’d like to cast my ashes into the sea. That meant nobody was looking for me, and for the first time in millennia I could ease back on my paranoia and relax.
Oberon and I found a field of red clover and we flopped down onto our backs for an epic wriggling session. Wriggling around in clover is one of the finest perks of walking the world as a hound. It’s not the same when you do it as a human.
Oberon sneezed and then we rested, legs in the air, enjoying the sun on our bellies.
I cannot tell you how wonderful it feels to run when you no longer have to do it.
For Alan O’Bryan,
who bravely stands in front of my word vomit
and tells me to clean it up.
He is an outstanding alpha reader
and the finest of friends.
This is not a trick.
Acknowledgments
Since the first three books came out blam-blam-blam, I never really got a chance to say thanks to the readers. So I want to thank you, first, for your support of the series, and for buying books, period. Authors don’t get to keep writing unless readers buy ’em, and this book wouldn’t have been possible without you buying Hounded way back when and telling your friends to go buy it too. Many of you have said howdy to me on Facebook, Goodreads, Twitter, and on my blog, and I appreciate you taking the trouble! You’re all very kind.
My family is incredibly supportive and pretends not to notice when I walk around talking to my imaginary friends; thank you for the love.
Tricia Pasternak is my editor at Del Rey, and I think she’s five kinds of brilliant. We agree on things like the greatest Metallica song ever recorded and the potential for mayhem inherent in a bag of marshmallows. She is my shepherd through the Valley of the Shadow of Doubt, and I am so grateful for her encouragement, guidance, and the unseen work she does to make each book the best it can be.
Thanks also to the scads o’ fabulous people at Del Rey who contribute to the series’ success: Mike Braff, Nancy Delia, David Moench, Joe Scalora, Scott Shannon, April Flores, and Gina Wachtel, among many others.
Evan Goldfried, my agent at JGLM, deserves bounteous thanks for all his advice and help.
Thanks to Detective Dana Packer in Rhode Island for tips on how to fake a death scene. Anything that sounds stupid or implausible is entirely my fault, and if you try to fake a death in her jurisdiction she will find you.
Sincere gratitude to Tammy Gwara for uncomfortable conversations about poison chemistry. She will probably never come over for dinner at my house now.
Mihir Wanchoo is a font of Indian stories, so thanks to him for the heads-up on the very interesting history of Indra.
To the Confederacy of Nerds—Tooth, Martin, Andrew, Alan, and John—thanks for the laughs and the Insanity Points.
As in my other books, I do try to set these fictional events in the real world as much as possible. However, this particular story inserts two more drugstores into Kayenta than it currently has; the town’s pharmaceutical needs are handled by the Tribal Health Office. While the Double Dog Dare Gourmet Café in Flagstaff is entirely fictional, you can visit the Winter Sun Trading Company, Macy’s European coffeehouse, and Granny’s Closet “for reals.” They’re all spiffy places, and writing about them took me back to my happy college days at NAU.
The Navajo creation story, the Diné Bahane’, is a constantly changing and evolving work meant to be performed orally by a singer and tailored to the audience and purpose for the ceremony. The written versions, therefore, often differ significantly in the details—and my fiction, while based on a couple of well-documented accounts, should definitely not be viewed as an authoritative source on the subject, nor should the ceremonial procedures depicted herein be construed as genuine. In some versions of the story there are five worlds instead of four, but since four are taught at Diné College in the Navajo Nation, I went with that. My source for the two Coyotes, the spirits of First World, and more was the version Hastin Tlo’tsi Hee (Old Man Buffalo Grass) told to Aileen O’Bryan in 1928, originally published as Bulletin 163 of the Bureau of American Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution in 1956, but now available under the title Navaho Indian Myths; I also consulted the work of Paul G. Zolbrod, Diné Bahane’, published in 1987 by the University of New Mexico Press.
I’m indebted to Karen, Mervyn, and Leah Harvey for helping me out with the pronunciation of words in Diné bazaad, the Navajo language
, which you see at the front of the book. Any errors are of course mine and not theirs.
Don’t miss the first three books of
THE IRON DRUID CHRONICLES
by Kevin Hearne
Hounded
Hexed
Hammered
Read on for a preview of the next book in the thrilling
IRON DRUID CHRONICLES,
Trapped
Coming soon from Del Rey Books!
Chapter 1
You know those spastic, full-body twitches you get sometimes when you’re almost asleep and your muscles want to play a practical joke on your brain? You startle wide awake and immediately get pissed at your nervous system, wondering what the hell that was all about. I’ve caught myself talking to it before: “Damn it, Dude,”—yes, I call my nervous system Dude, and the Dude abides—“I was almost asleep, and now you’ve slain all the sheep I was gonna count.”
What I felt as I walked on the Kaibab Plateau was kind of like that, except it was Gaia doing the spastic full-body twitch. It was more of an uncomfortable shudder that I felt through my tattoos, like when you step barefoot into the garage in winter and your nipples pucker up. But as with those nervous muscle spasms, I got irritated about it and wondered what the hell was going on. And while I wasn’t about to go to sleep, I was about to enjoy the culmination of twelve years of training an apprentice—and save for the first few months of it, I’d conducted it all in peace. Granuaile was finally ready to become a full Druid, and we were searching for a place to bind her to the earth when I felt the tremor. I shot a question to the elemental, Kaibab, in the cocktail of feelings and images they use instead of language: //Confusion / Query: What was that?//
//Confusion / Uncertainty / Fear// came the reply. That chilled me. I’ve never heard confusion from an elemental before. The fear, on the other hand, was perfectly normal: Despite their awesome power, elementals are afraid of almost everything, from placer mines to land developers to bark beetles. They can be real scaredy-cats sometimes. But they’re never uncertain about what’s going on with Gaia. Stopping in my tracks and causing Granuaile and Oberon to turn and look at me quizzically, I asked Kaibab what there was to fear.
//Plane across ocean / Early death / Burning / Burning / Burning//
Well, that confused me too. Kaibab wasn’t talking about an airplane. He (or she, if Granuaile was talking) meant an entire plane of existence, a plane that was tied to earth somewhere on the other side of the globe. //Query: Which plane?//
//Name unknown / God from plane seeks you / Urgent / Query: Tell him location?//
//Query: Which god?//
The answer to that would tell me what plane was burning. There was a pause, during which time I stalled with Granuaile and Oberon. “Something’s up with Kaibab. Hold on.” They knew better than to interrupt, and they took this news as an invitation to be on their guard, which was wise. Anything worrisome to the avatar of the environment you currently occupy should rouse you to a caffeinated state of paranoia.
//God’s name: Perun// Kaibab finally said.
Almost unconsciously, I sent //Shock// in reply, because it was truly my reaction. The Slavic plane of existence was burning, perhaps even dead? How? Why? I hoped Perun would have the answers. If he sought me in hopes that I had them, we’d both be disappointed. //Yes / Tell Perun location//
I’d also like to know how Perun even knew to ask for me—did someone tell him I’d faked my death twelve years ago? There was another pause, during which I filled in Granuaile and Oberon.
Yep, that’s the one.
I don’t know why, but perhaps you’ll get a chance to ask him.
//He comes// Kaibab said. //Fast//
“Okay, incoming,” I said out loud.
“Incoming what, Atticus?” Granuaile asked.
“Incoming thunder god. We should move near a tree and get ready to shift away to Tír na nÓg if necessary. And get the fulgurites out.” Fulgurites would protect us from lightning strikes; Perun had given them to us himself when Granuaile was just starting her training, but we hadn’t worn them for years, since all the thunder gods thought I was dead.
“You think Perun is going to take a shot at us?” Granuaile asked. She shrugged off her red backpack and unzipped the pouch containing the fulgurites.
“Well, no, but … maybe. I don’t know what’s going on, really. When in doubt, know your way out, I always say.”
“I thought you always said, ‘When in doubt, blame the dark elves.’ ”
“Well, yeah, that too.”
Oberon said.
We stood in a meadow of bunch grass and clover. The sky washed us in cerulean blue and the sun kissed Granuaile’s red hair with gold, the black dye we’d worn for years washed away, and Oberon looked like he wanted to plop down and bask in the light for a while. Our backpacks were weighted down with camping gear that we’d bought at Peace Surplus in Flagstaff, but after Granuaile retrieved the fulgurites, we jogged over as best we could to the nearest stand of ponderosa pine trees. I confirmed that there was a functioning tether to Tír na nÓg there and then started to look up for signs of Perun’s arrival.
Granuaile noticed and craned her neck upward. “What’s up there, sensei?” she wondered aloud. “I don’t see anything but sky.”
“I’m looking for Perun. I’m assuming he’s going to fly in. There, see?” I pointed to a dark streak trailed by lightning bolts in the northwestern sky. And behind that, at a distance of perhaps five to ten miles—I couldn’t tell from so far away—burned an orange ball of fire.
Granuaile squinted. “What’s that thing that looks like the Phoenix Suns logo? Is that him?”
“No, Perun is in front of it, throwing all the lightning.”
“Oh, so what is it? A meteor or a cherub or something?”
“Or something. It doesn’t look friendly. That’s not a warm, cozy hearth fire that you gather ’round with your friends to read some Longfellow while you toast s’mores. That’s more like napalm with a heart of phosphorus and a side of hell sauce.” The lightning and the fireball were turning in the sky and heading directly our way.
I hear ya, buddy. I’m ready to scoot too. But let’s see if we can talk to Perun first.
The sky darkened and boomed above. Everything shuddered; Perun was traveling at supersonic speeds. He crashed heavily into the meadow about fifty yards away from us, and large chunks of turf exploded around a newly formed crater. I felt the impact in my feet, and a wave of displaced air knocked me backward a bit. Before the turf could fall back to earth, a heavily muscled figure carpeted in hair bounded out of it toward us, panic writ large on his features.
“Atticus! We must flee this plane! Is not safe! Take me—save me!”
Normally, thunder gods are not prone to panic. The ability to blast away problems tends to turn the jagged edges of fear into silly little pillows of insouciance. So when an utter badass like Perun looks like he’s about to soil himself, I hope I can be forgiven if I nearly shat kine—especially when the fireball whoomped into the crater Perun had just vacated and sucked all the oxygen out of my lungs.
Granuaile ducked and shrieked in surprise; Oberon whimpered; Perun was tossed through the air toward us like a stuntman in a Michael Bay film. But upon rolling through the landing gracefully, he leapt back up again, his legs churning toward us.
Behind Perun, the fire didn’t spread but rather began to shrink an
d coalesce and … laugh. A high, thin, maniacal laugh straight out of creepy cartoons. And the fire swirled, torus-like, around a figure twelve feet tall, until it gradually wicked out and left a lean giant with a narrow face standing fifty yards before us, his orange and yellow hair starting from his skull like a sunburst. The grin on his face wasn’t the affable, friendly sort; instead, it was the sociopathic rictus of the irretrievably, bug-fuckeringly insane.
His eyes were the worst. They were melted around the edges as if they’d been burned with acid, and where a normal person would have laugh lines or crow’s feet around them, he had bubbly pink scars and a nightmare of blistered tissue. The whites of his eyes were a red mist of broken blood vessels, but the irises were an ice blue frosted with madness. He blinked them savagely, as if he’d gotten soap into them or something, and soon I recognized it as a nervous tic, since his head jerked to his right at odd intervals and then continued to twitch uncertainly afterward, like a bobblehead doll.
“Go, my friend, go! We must flee!” Perun said, huffing as he reached us and putting one hand on my shoulder and another on the pine. Granuaile followed suit; she knew the drill, and so did Oberon, who reared up on his hind legs and leaned one paw against me and the other on the tree.
“Who in hell is that, Perun?” I said.
The giant laughed again and I shuddered involuntarily. His voice was smooth and fluffy like marshmallow crème, if the crème also had shards of glass in it. But he had a thick Scandinavian accent to go with the nervous tic.
“This puh-puh-place—is Mah, Merrica, yes?”
A twitch, a stutter, and an English-language learner. He’d drive me insane just listening to him. “Yes,” I replied.
“Hah? Who? Thppt! Raah!” He spat a fire loogie and shook his head violently. Perhaps this was more than a twitch. It might be full-blown Tourette’s syndrome. Or it might be something else, as the signs all pointed to a highly unpleasant conclusion.