The three of us climbed out of the Mustang, and Leif left the keys in the ignition. I enhanced my vision for night and slipped off my sandals, carrying them in my left hand. The entrance to the wilderness was fenced off, but we vaulted it and began to jog toward the creek. The tabletop mesas on either side of the canyon held little in the way of wildlife; it was the bottom of the canyon that was rich in that regard.
“How far on foot?” Gunnar asked.
“About a mile in, we should be okay to shift,” I said. “Keep a sharp ear out for pursuit, will you?” My senses couldn’t begin to approach theirs while in human form. “I still don’t think Bacchus gave up on us.”
We loped easily through the night and I spoke to Sonora as I ran, informing him—or her, as Granuaile insisted—that I hoped to return soon.
Gunnar looked over his shoulder with about a half mile to go, and Leif did the same a second later. “He’s coming,” Gunnar said.
“No more jogging!” I said. “Leif, you’re the fastest on two legs. Can you carry us?”
“I don’t know where we’re going,” he protested.
“Straight down the canyon. I’ll tell you when to stop, then you guys just throw rocks at him or something, keep him off us until I can shift us away.”
Gunnar didn’t like the idea of being carried, but he saw the necessity. We weren’t going to stay ahead of flying leopards for very long. Leif picked us up easily in a fireman’s carry over either shoulder, and then he lit out with his best speed. It reminded me of the violent ride on top of Ratatosk. Still, the vampire’s best speed was short of a leopard’s. We heard a roar behind us and then a victorious “Ha!” from Bacchus. Immediately afterward, Leif dropped out from under us and I went flying through the air, along with Gunnar, to land painfully against the trunk of a cottonwood. I scrambled to my feet and saw that Leif’s legs were tangled in ivy—or perhaps grapevines. Bacchus was catching up and swooping down at us, his face a mask of the sort of frenzy he inspired.
Well, sanity was better than madness. I sent a message to Sonora through the earth: //Druid needs favor / Prevent rapid plant growth / My location / Now / Gratitude//
Gunnar was shucking off his shoes and jeans and going wolf. He didn’t bother with the rugby shirt, deciding for philanthropic reasons it was best for everyone if it got destroyed in the transformation.
“Just hamstring the kitties,” I told him while I was waiting for Sonora’s answer. “Don’t mess with the god.” Gunnar managed a nod before his face elongated into a snout and his human expression was gone.
//Favor granted// Sonora replied, and I sent him my thanks. Bacchus touched down and unleashed his leopards with the Latin equivalent of “Sic ’em!” before leaping out of his chariot to follow behind. The leopards sprang at Leif, who was now disentangled from the vines that had tripped him, but he dodged out of the way with vampiric speed and let them continue on. He stepped forward to confront the god of wine—who was notably bereft of his thyrsus and showing no sign that he’d had a pinecone stuck between his eyes an hour ago—while Gunnar advanced to meet the two leopards.
“Just chuck him back upstream, Leif; don’t test your strength against his!” I shouted as Gunnar and the leopards collided in a mess of fur, claws, and teeth. Bacchus wasn’t completely incompetent as a fighter, as evidenced by his stance as Leif approached, but neither was he used to confronting vampires with a thousand years of martial arts experience. Leif jabbed a couple of lightning raps to his jaw to set him back on his heels, then he spun and dropped the wine god on his ass with a kick to the side of the knees. While Bacchus was still down, Leif quickly grabbed him by the feet and yanked to deny him leverage for a kick, then spun him around in a discus toss, finally throwing him several hundred yards away up the canyon. He landed heavily in the rocky creek bed and probably broke something. Shame about that.
In the meantime, Gunnar had lamed the two leopards, but not without taking on significant damage himself. The good news was that he would heal and the leopards wouldn’t be pulling Bacchus along to harry us anytime soon.
“Nice throw,” I said. “Come on, let’s go. It’s just a little bit farther.”
I gathered Gunnar’s jeans and shoes and carried them with my sandals as Leif scooped me up again to continue down the canyon. Gunnar kept pace alongside now that he was in wolf form.
“Keep to the creek bed if you can,” I requested. Leif obligingly swerved to take the requested course, which would allow me to keep a sort of jittery surveillance on Bacchus. The Olympian staggered to his feet in a fury and located us easily. He had one hand pressed to a spot on his lower back, but as I watched, he brought both hands around in front of him at waist height and slowly raised them, a clear gesture commanding something to rise from the ground—vines of some sort, no doubt. Thanks to Sonora’s help, nothing happened. Leif ran unencumbered, and I chuckled.
Speaking in a conversational tone, I said in Latin, “Lord Bacchus, can you hear me? Nod if you can hear me.”
Bacchus dropped his hands and nodded.
“You have never killed a Druid all by yourself, and you never will. Only with hordes of Bacchants and Roman legionnaires and the aid of Minerva have you ever managed to slay a single one of us. Your lackeys may get me eventually, and I know that I will never be able to slay you, but admit to yourself now that you, alone, will never prove my equal. The earth obeys me, son, not some petty god of grape and goblet.” I switched to English for a postscript. “So suck on that, bitch.”
Bacchus didn’t bother to compose an intelligible reply. He merely roared his defiance and came after us. But he wasn’t especially fast on his feet; he was no quicker than any mortal man, and he had hundreds of yards to make up.
“Find me a nice tree, Leif, anywhere near here,” I said. Leif immediately steered us out of the creek bed and deposited me at the base of an impressive sycamore. Unlike the Fae, who specifically needed oak, ash, and thorn to shift planes, I could use any stand of timber that was sufficiently robust to connect to Tír na nÓg. It didn’t matter if I used a sycamore or a sequoia; all I needed was a healthy forest.
Gunnar sat on his haunches next to us, panting and bleeding. “All right, both of you touch me and the sycamore at the same time.” I looked at Gunnar to make sure he understood. He responded by rising on his hind legs and placing one huge paw on my chest, the other against the trunk of the tree. I needed skin contact, so I poked a finger of my left hand—the one holding the shoes and jeans—into his fur. Leif condescendingly put a hand on my head and the other on the tree.
I took one last look upstream to check on the wine god’s position. He was sprinting somewhat spastically down the creek and not paying enough attention to his footwork. He slipped on a moss-covered rock and looked very mortal as he executed a spectacularly graceless face plant. I laughed, because I knew he could hear me and I wanted him to know I’d seen his humiliation. We still had plenty of time to shift.
Sensing that I was about to escape, Bacchus looked up from where he lay in the streambed. “Your insults will be paid in good time,” he said in a voice of barely restrained fury. “I swear to Jupiter I will tear you apart myself, Druid. Your death is long overdue.”
“Perhaps I deserve to die,” I admitted. “But you don’t deserve to live. Your very existence is nothing but a feeble echo of Dionysos. You are a weak copy of a better god.”
I gave him no chance to respond, proceeding on the maxim that it’s always best to have the last word. I closed my eyes, sought the tether to Tír na nÓg, and pulled us through to the land of the Fae.
Chapter 14
Werewolves are generally immune to any magic that’s not Pack, but Gunnar came through all right. I neglected to tell him I’d been worried about it at all. The binding wasn’t centered on him, anyway; it was centered on myself and what I wanted to bring along. He yakked up his dinner—which Leif and I pointedly did not notice—and he was fine.
When he was finished, I recommended he revert to
human form before we shifted back to earth. I tossed his jeans and shoes to him and turned my back during the change so I wouldn’t lose my lunch.
It was night in this part of Tír na nÓg, just as it was in Arizona. We couldn’t switch right away to Nadym, because it was already after dawn there and Leif would sizzle away to greasy ash. Nor could we stay in Tír na nÓg; faeries wouldn’t take well to Leif’s presence, and even now they would be drawn to our location, sensing something wrong. We would shift instead to a forest about twenty-five miles north of Prague at Leif’s request. He’d have a couple of hours before sunrise.
Gunnar got himself dressed and announced his readiness to go. Even with bloody scratches across his bare chest, he looked better than he did in that rugby shirt. He was healing quickly, but I could tell he’d lost something between the rapid changes, the fight, and the plane shift. He had one more to endure.
As before, Leif and Gunnar put one hand on me and another on the tree, then we shifted to a wooded hillside some distance from the wee hamlet of Osinalice in the Czech Republic. Gunnar was promptly sick again.
“I’ll meet you at this tree tomorrow night,” Leif said, wrinkling his nose. “It should be a simple matter for me to find it again.”
“Where are you going?”
“I’m in Zdenik’s territory,” he explained. “I must pay my respects. Tomorrow night we will go the rest of the way. Please rest.” He melted into the night until all we could see was his corn-silk hair, and then even that was gone.
“The shift was no better in human form,” Gunnar muttered.
“Sorry,” I said. “You’re the first werewolf planewalker, so far as I know. There was no baseline data in the lore to predict how you’d handle it.”
“What lore?”
“Druid lore.”
“And now, I suppose, my sickness will be set down in your Druid lore?” He looked less than pleased at this prospect.
“You won’t be named,” I quickly assured him. “It’ll be a footnote about werewolves in general. It will be an extreme caution, in fact, because if you get sick as an alpha, what might happen to a weaker wolf?”
Gunnar considered this, then nodded gruffly. Once again, his cuts were already looking better. Soon, I knew, there would be no evidence he’d ever been harmed at all. But there was a price to pay for that.
“I’m starving,” Gunnar said.
“You want to eat as a human or a wolf?” I asked. “We could hunt here, or go into town, get a mess of eggs or something.”
“You speak the language here?”
“No,” I admitted. “I don’t know many of the Slavic languages. But they probably speak Russian or English. And we could always point at the menu.”
“You have Czech money?”
“Nope. Just a few bucks in my wallet. It would be dine and ditch or work it off.”
Gunnar curled his lip in distaste. “Let’s hunt here, then.”
I unslung Fragarach from my back and leaned it against the tree—a blue spruce, it was. I continued to strip and neatly folded my clothes as I went. Gunnar sighed and began to take off the jeans and shoes he’d just put on. I dropped to all fours and bound myself to the shape of an Irish wolfhound, then waited for Gunnar to complete his longer, more painful transformation. I took a good sniff around to lock the scent of the area in my mind, then I let Gunnar take the lead and trailed behind him.
Hunting was uncomfortable for us both, since he couldn’t communicate with me via pack link and I couldn’t form a bond with him like the one I had with Oberon, but we managed to find a small doe and bring her down before dawn. I left Gunnar to it and returned to the tree where I’d left my clothes and Fragarach. No raw venison for me.
I switched to my owl form briefly and did an aerial scout above the trees to figure out where the nearest diner was. I spied a likely spot five miles away in Osinalice.
A half hour’s steady run with my sandals off brought me into town. It was a charming collection of timbered cottages, a few cocks crowing at the dawn, and a single road winding through its length, nestled in a narrow valley. There wasn’t really a diner in a small place like this, just a bed-and-breakfast catering to ecotourists and writers eager to escape the oppression of modern cities. The innkeeper, who was also the cook, was a short, jovial, spherical man who spoke Russian and loved his business. He had food stains on his apron and a ready smile under a salt-and-pepper mustache. He cooked me a big breakfast in exchange for some work around the inn—degreasing the fryers in the kitchen and cleaning behind the oven, chopping some wood out back for the fireplace in their common room. His daughter was the hostess, and she flirted with me as I ate. She equated me with the road out of town, and any road out of that tiny, beautiful place was a good road to her. I reflected on the paradox of nature: Some people wanted to escape it and others couldn’t wait to get back to it, never realizing that it said more about their nature than about nature itself.
The lodgers, who were eating breakfast communally in the dining room, tried not to stare at me and did a miserable job of it. Maybe they smelled the werewolf on my clothes, or the vampire—not consciously, mind, because their noses weren’t that good. They might have smelled something a bit off about me, giving them a vague sense that I traveled with monsters as a matter of course. They made no attempt to speak to me.
I thanked the owner and his daughter and felt everyone’s eyes on my back as the little bell on the door announced my exit from the inn. I crossed the single road in town and slipped into the forest. They’d make up stories about me in their minds, and that was fine. If my ephemeral presence in their lives made it a smidge more interesting for them, so be it.
I took my time returning to the tree marked with Gunnar’s vomit. There was no hurry; until Leif returned, we could not proceed. I walked with my hands in my pockets, enjoying the feel of these woods. I hadn’t heard from the elemental of this region in a long time, and I sent it a greeting and wished it well.
Near the rendezvous point, but far enough away that I wouldn’t have to smell the acid remains of Gunnar’s stomach, I assembled a rough lean-to—it’s much easier to do when one can bind the branches together magically. I planned to indulge in a good day’s sleep, since it was now my bedtime in Arizona, and the lean-to would provide shelter from aerial surveillance more than from the elements. Lacking a teddy bear or a pillow or even Oberon, I took small comfort snuggling up with Fragarach.
The forest floor was cold; snow would be coming soon …
Gunnar was sprawled nearby on his back when I awoke, his paws splayed comically in the air and his tongue lolling out to one side. He was snoring a bit. I wished I had a camera. One with a big flash, because it was past sundown. Something had woken me up—but, oddly, not the werewolf.
Turning on my faerie specs, I scanned the night without moving my body or creating any noise. I saw nothing and heard nothing. Maybe the pressure on my bladder had roused me, and nothing more. Still, I was convinced something was outside the lean-to, watching—perhaps waiting for me to stick my head out.
I wasn’t going to give it the satisfaction. I’d prefer to wake up the werewolf instead and then exit while it was distracted with the problems that startled werewolves tend to present. Shifting the ground underneath him ought to wake him quickly. I placed my palm flat against the earth and was about to issue a command through it to disturb Gunnar’s sleep when a voice spoke and did the job for me.
“Calm yourself, Atticus. And you too, Gunnar. It is I.” Leif stepped into view from behind a tree as Gunnar and I rose to meet him, a bit miffed by his entrance. This seemed to please him, judging by the smirk on his face. “Did you have a nice day?”
“Slept through most of it,” Gunnar growled.
“That’s what I always do,” Leif said. “Sleep like the dead.”
“How was Zdenik?” I asked.
“Impeccably tailored. Surprised to see me. Annoyed that I defended my territory so publicly. Gratified that I paid him pro
per respect. Shall we go on to Nadym?”
I released the bindings keeping my lean-to together and wandered off to relieve myself, then returned and pronounced myself ready.
“Can you shift us quickly out of Tír na nÓg?” Gunnar asked. “Perhaps I can vomit only once and pay for both trips at the same time.”
“I’ll do my best,” I told him.
We shifted, and I spent as little time as I could in Tír na nÓg before hauling us east to the forest south of Nadym. Gunnar was violently ill immediately upon arrival. Leif and I stepped off to give him some privacy and save our noses.
Once Gunnar announced himself ready to proceed, we ran north underneath a clear starlit sky, arriving at the rendezvous point near midnight. Leif graciously offered to carry my sword and our clothes so that Gunnar and I could run in our shifted forms. We kept an eye on the sky above, watching for telltale signs of storm clouds gathering, but apparently the Norse were searching for me elsewhere. It made sense: They were expecting me to hide as far away as possible from Asgard, not to attempt a return trip. As the lake came into view, we spied a campfire licking at the night, setting the branches of a familiar tree on the shore into sharp relief. There should have been three people waiting for us, but I spied only two. Perhaps Leif had not managed to get hold of them all and tell them where to meet. Two elderly-looking men sat on either side of the fire, apparently unafraid of what might be lurking in the darkness outside its glow.
“I see we are the last to arrive,” Leif said. Either he was expecting only two or he saw the third man somewhere. “Come. Shift to your human forms and I will introduce you.” Gunnar and I shifted and dressed, and together we approached the fire. Leif hailed the two old men, and they turned toward the sound of his voice. Betraying no sign of arthritis or poor eyesight, they rose fluidly from the rocks they’d been sitting on.