She let the silence linger for the space of ten heartbeats, then regarded the Olympians again. “There is your answer.”
“We hear you and will deliver your message even so to Olympus.”
“Before you go, a question,” Brighid said. “In case I am able to contact the Druid, is there any guarantee of his safe conduct if he returns the dryads?”
The Olympians exchanged a glance, and Hermes gave Mercury the barest of nods.
“He will be safe from all save Bacchus if he returns the dryads within the night,” Mercury said.
Hermes finally chose to speak after all. His voice was a melodic aria struggling to break free of base speech, as if someone had shoved a wee creative genius into a gray suit and a grayer cubicle and told him to just fucking stay there forever. It was odd how the impeccably groomed Mercury could say “hello” and inspire visions of a quick strike to the sack, yet when Hermes spoke—the much rougher-looking of the pair—it was beautiful and sad and I wanted to buy him a beer so I could help him weep into it. “All the members of my pantheon are willing to forgive the trespass if the dryads are returned immediately,” he said.
Well, that was it for me. I wanted to return the dryads immediately. So did Granuaile.
“Atticus, let’s go,” she whispered.
“Yeah, let’s.”
We turned our backs on the Court as Brighid exchanged farewells with the Olympian messengers. We had a mission.
“The faster we do this, the better off we’ll be,” I said to Granuaile once we were out of earshot. “While all the Olympians wait around for Hermes and Mercury to talk things over and send messages back and forth, we’ll get this done.”
“I’m all for it,” Granuaile said, “but I’d like a fresh set of clothes first.”
“Oh. Right.”
We returned first to the workshop to pick up Oberon, then we shifted to a safe house of sorts in the Uncompahgre Wilderness in southwestern Colorado. It was a cabin located near the old Camp Bird Mine, some ten miles west of Ouray, and I had bought it under an alias six years ago to conduct some business with Odin. Surrounded by a forest tethered to Tír na nÓg, it was an ideal rendezvous point and a place to store changes of clothes for times like these. It was also out of Coyote’s territory and a safe place for Oberon to spend some time by himself if necessary, since it was equipped with a large doggie door and plenty of food and water—not to mention squirrels and deer galore.
Granuaile and I changed clothes quickly and told Oberon he’d be on his own for a while.
“Hopefully only a few hours. Less than three months. You are terrible with time anyway. Now, listen, you are absolutely forbidden to go into any mine shafts around here. They’re off limits, you understand? If a squirrel runs inside, you count him dead; you don’t go after him. And you don’t get to pretend that they are Batcaves either. You can’t save Gotham from here.”
“Have fun hunting, buddy.” I petted him and he wagged his tail. Granuaile finished strapping on a replacement set of throwing knives and kissed his head.
“I hope we’ll get to go hunting with you soon,” she said.
“That’s very considerate of you,” she said, smiling.
Chapter 24
We shifted to the first dryad’s tree in Olympus and cautiously scanned the area. Seeing no one, I opened a portal to the island of slow time, with the admonition to Granuaile that she should watch. “I’m going to have you do the later ones.”
“Okay. Why don’t we just open portals wherever we want?”
“You can’t open them at all if you’re not in an area that’s been bound to Tír na nÓg. But we avoid them because it takes longer to open one and uses far more energy. We shift via trees because it requires the least amount of the earth’s power. That’s why Aenghus Óg’s huge portal to hell drained the earth and killed it.”
Parts of the dead land around Tony Cabin were functioning on a basic level again, but large patches were still dead, and it had taken us years of toil to bring it back even to weak levels of life.
The first dryad we’d separated from her tree stared uncertainly back at us, suspended in midair a few feet above the ground of the Time Island. Her arms were splayed out toward us in a final, desperate bid to grab hold of this plane. I held on to Granuaile’s left hand and told her to reach through and pull the dryad back with her other.
“I don’t need some kind of long pole or something?”
“No, as long as half of you stays here, you won’t get pulled into that timestream.”
“What about pulling her out, though? Won’t that cause whiplash or something?”
“No, in that timestream she’s only begun to fall. Gravity just figured out she’s in the air above the island, but she hasn’t even had a full second to fall five yards or so. Look at her. She’s hardly moved, and it’s been almost two months for us. So yanking her back right now would be no worse than one of those tango moves where you extend your arm and then pull your partner back to you. Grab her gently. Remember, to her we’re a blur in the sky.”
“All right.” Granuaile reached through the portal and took her time wrapping her fingers around the dryad’s wrist. “Ready?”
“Yep. Do it.”
Granuaile pulled, the dryad found her feet on solid ground again, then reeled as soon as Granuaile let her go. The dryad blinked and sat down heavily underneath the canopy of her tree.
“What happened? My head spins.”
“Sorry about that,” I said in Latin.
She peered at me and her eyes widened. “Your face. Wasn’t half of it scarred and melted a moment ago?” She noticed that Granuaile looked different too. “And now you have strange markings on your arm. What magic is this?”
“It is the magic of the earth and of the Fae,” I replied. “I apologize for the inconvenience and whatever pain you might have felt. I was forced to use you to get the attention of Faunus. He wasn’t allowing me to bind my apprentice to the earth, you see. But all is well now, or will be shortly. I’m going to mend the broken bonds with your tree.”
“How?”
“The same way I unbound them, except backward. Are you capable of seeing your bond with the tree?”
“No. I just feel it.”
“Please tell me if you feel better, then. This shouldn’t take long.”
Granuaile offered to help the dryad to her feet, but she shied away. “No, thank you,” the dryad said. “I’ll manage by myself.”
“Okay,” Granuaile said, backing away with a friendly grin on her face. She continued chatting and apologizing while I turned my attention to the magical spectrum and sought to restore order to the small bit of chaos I’d brought to the tree’s binding with the dryad. It took a little longer than unbinding, for creation is always more difficult than destruction, but it wasn’t like visiting a modern doctor’s office either, where patients must learn the true meaning of patience before they can get treated. The dryad admitted she felt whole again once I was finished.
“Excellent. Again, I’m sorry for the necessity, but I’m very relieved we could restore you completely. We have to perform this same operation on five more of your sisters and need the time and space to do it in. If you would refrain from calling to Faunus or any other god for two hours, that would give us sufficient time to rebind all dryads to their trees without interference, and then, when everyone’s safe, you can call to Faunus and receive an enthusiastic welcome back, which will no doubt include several erotic terms for which the Latin language is still renowned today.”
The dryad’s jaw dropped. Granuaile flashed her a Spock salute and wished her long life and prosperity.
“Who are you?” the dryad asked. “I’m so co
nfused.”
“I’ve had many names throughout the centuries,” I began, but Granuaile was reminded of one in particular and jumped in.
“In Toronto they called him Nigel,” she said.
“Ugh. You never want to be Nigel in Toronto,” I told her. “Trust me.”
“I don’t know where Toronto is,” the dryad said, looking lost.
“It’s a place across the ocean with a great film festival and a bad hockey team,” I explained, but she still looked bewildered. “Their ticket prices are sky-high, but they haven’t hefted the Stanley Cup since 1967. I know there’s always next year, but, damn, you know?” None of this helped. The dryad looked ready to go fetal, so I thought it best to leave her alone and move on to the next one. I gestured to Granuaile, and we shifted to the next dryad’s tree and repeated the procedure. We tried to keep the chitchat to a minimum but were unfailingly polite and very apologetic. I let Granuaile do the last two, portal and all. She left the portals open while she was binding the dryads back to their trees, but I’d speak to her about it later.
The last dryad was a bit more miffed at us than the others, who had been more bemused than anything else. She wasn’t afraid of us, and neither was she above threatening us a little bit. After I finished mending her bond to her oak, she said, “You’ll suffer as no mortal has suffered in an age.”
“But I fixed everything,” I protested.
“It was arrogance from beginning to end,” she replied, slipping into her tree. Her voice changed once she was inside. “Suffer,” she said, or rather the leaves seemed to say it, no more than a husky whisper and rustle on a windless day.
I looked at Granuaile and she shrugged. “It’s done,” she said in English.
“I don’t know. That was weird. You’d think that she’d be nicer to us, since I’ve already demonstrated that I can destroy her bond to the oak.”
“It’s because she has friends here,” a voice said from behind.
Granuaile and I turned around and saw no one at first. But then a large group of women draped in white shimmered into view, with a single smirking figure in the center of them.
“I swore I’d tear you apart with my own hands, Druid,” Bacchus said. “I may be mad, but I tend to remember things like that.”
Chapter 25
Usually I treasure new experiences. I still remember my very first Sno-Cone, for example: It was Highly Artificial Raspberry and turned my tongue blue. My first time in Madagascar was awesome because lemurs are kind of funny; they throw fruit at the back of your head when you’re not looking and then point at one another when you turn around. But there are times when you don’t appreciate novelty, such as when you’re trying to run for your life, and this was one of those times: I couldn’t shift away from Bacchus, because the damn tree slapped my hand away every time I tried to touch it, thanks to the dryad inside. New experience, but not cool.
“Should we go invisible?” Granuaile asked.
“No, they’d smell the magic and chase us.”
“The man is mine,” Bacchus said to his horde of maenads, “but you can entertain yourselves with the woman.” And then he charged me with all the confidence of the truly immortal.
“Don’t grapple,” I advised Granuaile quickly. “Keep them at a distance. They’re stronger than you are but not as quick.”
It might have been better to advise her to run, but she was already moving toward them. There were close to a hundred of them and only one of her, but since the Bacchants were half stupid with liquor and secure in their numbers, they had difficulty processing the fact that Granuaile was attacking them. Nor would they be immune to wood. I caught a flash of her lunging forward and flipping Scáthmhaide down hard on a skull just to set the proper tone. The Bacchant crumpled and Granuaile sprang away, content now to lead the drunken savages on a merry chase. I loved how she always struck first when threatened; she appreciated the value of surprise and wielded it with often deadly results.
I didn’t get to watch her much after that; Bacchus was in my face. Like his followers, he was immune to iron, so Fragarach was useless and I left it in its sheath. We had never tangled personally, and I’d rather hoped we never would. But I’d seen him fight before against Leif, and he wasn’t terribly skilled, just terribly strong. I leapt about eight feet straight up, and he bull-rushed headfirst into the dryad’s tree, which cracked and groaned.
“Ow, watch it!” the dryad said.
I’d tucked my legs underneath me for the leap but kicked out with my right as I fell, to take advantage of Bacchus’s rebound. He took it on the chin and flopped backward after staggering a couple of paces. His skin was changing before my eyes: The baby-faced libertine was being replaced by the wine-mad monster. Where a soft blue tracery of veins might show beneath a pink blush of skin in his contentment, now they throbbed green and stood out like vines, and the whites of his eyes flooded with a deep burgundy. If he got hold of me, I’d be in trouble. Goading him would work in my favor though, since he would lose even more discipline the crazier he got. And since I knew exactly what kind of guy he was, I employed the advice I’d given to Granuaile and said, “Come on, bitch. Charge me again and see what happens.”
He lost his mind completely after that. He purpled and drooled as he roared and gave not a single shit about it. He rose and quivered and just yelled inchoately in a roid rage, until his lungs gave out. I bore this display with patience and used the time to figure out how to beat him. Unlike the Norse or the Tuatha Dé Danann—or me—the bloody Olympians couldn’t be killed. They could be harmed, but they could heal from anything; even if they were disintegrated or blown to tiny bits, they simply regenerated on Olympus and put on a fresh toga. There had to be a solution to him, or else the Morrigan would be here fighting him for me, fulfilling her oath.
The best solution would be to run and use some other tree to shift away. In fact, I hoped Granuaile would do exactly that. But the cries of pain I heard in the forest weren’t hers; in battle, as in charity, it is better to give than to receive.
Bacchus finished emoting and charged me again. I crouched, ready to jump, and then it was a simple matter to fake the leap and watch Bacchus launch himself over my head. His face met the tree for the second time, and while he was in the air above me, I punched him in the groin as hard as I could. In my mind’s eye, he was supposed to curl up and cradle his crushed grapes, but that’s not what happened. It toppled him so that he fell headfirst down my back, and he grabbed clumsily at my legs as he hit the ground. It wasn’t a move or a punch or anything more than a desperate flail on his part, but it knocked me off my feet and sent me sprawling.
Before I could scramble away, he managed to clap a hand around my ankle and haul me toward him. I twisted around and aimed a kick at his head. It rocked his neck back and he lost teeth, but he shook it off and grinned bloodily.
“No, you’re not getting away now that I have you.”
He aimed a vengeful punch at my groin, but I turned in time to take it on the thigh instead. That would be a nice bruise. I kicked him in the face again, and the fucker laughed. Apparently he could turn off pain much like I could, but, unlike me, he found physical punishment amusing. I tried to make him laugh harder by kicking him some more.
Bacchus tired of it after all and slapped my leg down on the next kick, then leapfrogged on top of my knees, pinning them. I bucked, crunched up, and landed a solid blow on his temple, but this failed to dislodge him. He grabbed my shoulders and slammed me back to the ground. Against a normal opponent, that would have been a stupid move because I could still deliver rib-cracking blows to his body, but Bacchus simply didn’t care. He wanted to taunt me and he was saying something in Latin, but I ignored this and crafted a binding in Old Irish between his toga and the dryad’s tree. The binding worked, but this also failed to dislodge Bacchus. He lunged forward, bore down, and let the toga tear away from him rather than let me go. His strength was such that I began to doubt I could match him. I reached for pow
er, felt that it was abnormally low, and remembered that Granuaile had left the portal open. I was going to need her help to get out of this—though she might very well be thinking she’d need my help to escape the Bacchants at this point.
I shouted for help in Russian and added that she should break the wine god’s elbow. I kept shouting it in a loop.
“What is it you say?” Bacchus said. “Some pithy insult?”
His fingers dug into my shoulders painfully, until his thumbs ground into bone. My blows were having no effect. He merely pushed down on my right shoulder and began to pull on my left one, and soon enough he had torn my arm loose from its socket. He kept pulling; he really did mean to tear me apart, limb from limb.
He never saw what hit him, and neither did I. But I saw—and he definitely felt—his left arm bending the wrong way, heard the crack and tearing of tissue, marveled at the white bone splinters shredding the inside of his arm. He collapsed on top of me in shock, and I was finally able to dislodge him; a few Bacchants trailed by, seeking an invisible Granuaile.
I got to my feet and put a bit of distance between Bacchus and me. We both had useless left arms, but only one of us now had a clear plan of how to proceed. Bacchus was howling over his shredded arm and spurting what passed for blood among the Olympians—ichor, I think they called it. He’d heal up far faster than I would with a similar injury, but he was seriously jacked up for the present and kneeling only ten feet or so in front of the still-open portal. He’d probably never even seen it, since he’d originally approached me perpendicular to it. I walked toward him coolly, right side first, and he staggered to his feet once he saw this. He backed up as he did so, putting himself closer to the portal. Bacchants streamed between us, still pursuing Granuaile, mindlessly obeying the last order they were given when they could have easily taken me out. Bacchus roared and waved me forward with his right hand, daring me to charge. I chose my spot carefully, waiting for two Bacchants to pass between us before I shot toward him with juiced speed and planted a swift kick to his chest. He tried to grab my foot with his right hand, but he wasn’t quick enough. He staggered back and through the portal, realizing too late that there was no ground underneath him anymore.