The Iron Druid Chronicles 6-Book Bundle

  “If ye escape,” the archdruid said, “ye should tup the lass as soon as possible. Ye can’t teach her any more, and yer probably going to die anyway.”

  “I think you’re speaking with the desperate voice of my libido right now,” I said. “So I’ll ignore that. I’m thinking our safest bet is to scamper off and wait this out.”

  “There ye go again,” my archdruid said. “Using your colon instead of yer brain. Ye believe yer thinkin’ because yer workin’ hard, but all yer doin’ is squeezin’ out shit. What good would runnin’ do, me lad? It’d teach yer apprentice that yer not much of a fighter, for one thing, and that all ye have to do to defeat a Druid is to make his life inconvenient. And, apart from that, ye need to help out the Norse, like ye said ye would. Ye can’t go take a few months off to frolic in Mag Mell when ye got Loki runnin’ around ready to set the world aflame.”

  “And what do you suggest I do instead?”

  “Stomp on some nuts, boy! Go on the offensive! Find out what’s really going on!”

  That was advice I couldn’t easily ignore. There was certainly more going on here than anyone in Tír na nÓg was willing to admit. Two Roman gods were colluding against me, and they might or might not be working with dark elves, vampires, and someone powerful amongst the Tuatha Dé Danann. Nobody was going to volunteer answers; we were going to have to apply some pressure of our own.

  Chapter 15

  One of the odd details about sporting goods stores is how incredibly full of steel and straight lines they are. The ambient atmosphere is harsh and fluorescent because, at some point in the planning stages, an executive said, “What, you want windows? Sunlight and moonlight? Fuck that noise.”

  If nature were Little Red Riding Hood and a sporting goods store were the Big Bad Wolf, nature would observe, “My, what orderly rows of synthetic products you have,” and the store would say, “The better to dominate you with, my dear.”

  People go into sporting goods stores ostensibly to prepare themselves to get closer to nature, but, in fact, every time they buy another plastic doodad, they’re doing just the opposite.

  Still, if you’re wanting to go Bronze Age Rambo on some Bacchants and their principal deity, there’s some great stuff for booby traps in sporting goods stores. Rope. Twine. Nets. Sharp, pointy tools of all kinds, perfect for throwing and getting stabbity.

  But to get the best selection, you have to be in a pretty big city, full of people who are desperate to buy things to get them closer to nature. That’s why Granuaile and I were in a store in Thessalonika, a large port city to the north of Olympus, browsing the selection of sharpened instruments designed to kill and gut all the animals people love. My theory was that someone out there had to make knives of bronze or other materials besides steel, and if we picked up enough of them, we’d be able to handle a few Bacchants. We’d emerged from the Olympian wilderness near the tiny village of Petra and hired a car from there to drive us all the way to Thessalonika.

  We arrived near dinnertime and got a hotel room, primarily to clean up. I trimmed my beard, which was getting a bit scraggly after weeks of neglect, and felt better without all the hair on my neck. A bit of channel surfing found a station that played old American movies, and Oberon was happy. We left him stretched out on the king bed, watching When Harry Met Sally.

  You’ll love it, I told him before we closed the door. It will reaffirm your contention that human mating habits are stupid.

 

  Is that a fact?

 

  I think your logic broke down there at the end, buddy, but you keep working on it.

  The apprentice and I shared an awkward supper, the unsaid words from the cave remaining unsaid yet hanging in the air between us like little comic book balloons that someone had erased. I cannot speak for her, but my feeling was that our personal drama would have to wait until we had a safe soap opera setting in which to emote. We’d been interrupted twice in getting her bound to the earth, and it was a good bet we’d be interrupted again while those who wanted us dead had a general fix on our location. We needed a change of venue, and she agreed. The only way to do that was to figure out how the Olympians—or Bacchus anyway—had rigged such a trap for us and then dismantle it. We had to go back once more.

  To that end, Granuaile and I received a few stares once we visited the sporting goods store. I had Fragarach strapped on but camouflaged, she had her “walking stick” with her, and we were buying more tent stakes and exotic bladed weapons than one could reasonably expect to use on a camping trip.

  All the knives were under glass, so we had to have a salesperson help us. Niko—the name on his tag—was a youngish lad in his mid-twenties, handsome enough, and extremely friendly with Granuaile and anxious to help, since I kept quiet. His huge mistake was assuming that Granuaile didn’t know anything about knives. Well, maybe that’s ungenerous of me. Perhaps he was simply trying to appear competent when he spoke to her about balance and throwing weights and the like, but it came across as patronizing, and I was irritated even though he wasn’t talking to me. In truth, Granuaile had surpassed me in throwing a good while back; her aim was naturally better than mine, and she’d been practicing steadily for twelve years.

  Evidence that Granuaile found his tone irritating as well came soon enough. She hefted a knife, did a little flourish with it that looked far more complicated than it really was, spun around to the right, and tossed it into the bull’s-eye of a dartboard behind Niko’s head.

  Niko didn’t try to explain anything after that.

  I turned away, partly to hide my amusement and partly to conduct a routine check of my surroundings. Shoppers in thick-toed boots were milling around. There was a whole lot more flannel on display than you’d see in most places, both on the mannequins and on the shoppers. No one seemed to think this was odd or a bad idea.

  There was a pair of clowns in pasty white makeup and bulbous red noses having an animated discussion over two different coils of rope. Their serious expressions didn’t match the lurid grins painted on their faces or the enormous colored wigs on their heads. I wasn’t sure what they could be discussing. Were some ropes inherently funnier than others?

  Their presence was odd too, but it seemed as if Granuaile and I were getting more stares than the clowns were. I could take the Johnny Bravo route and assume we just looked really good in our jeans, but my suspicious nature still thought there was something strange about this crowd. I interrupted Granuaile’s perusal to tell her in Old Irish to tap the stored magic in my bear charm if she wished. I formed the binding and showed her how to draw upon it.

  “Thanks, sensei.” She smiled and touched my arm briefly. I got one of those little sensations where you feel like you need to shiver but in truth you’re flushing and damn it why had the Diamondbacks’ catchers been so abysmal at the plate last year? Oh, yeah. I had it bad.

  Granuaile returned to browsing Niko’s wares, and I resumed my attitude of watchfulness. A flash of white near the entrance drew my eye. It was a white flag—depending on the situation, a symbol of peace, parley, or surrender. My eyes trailed down from the flag to a pale hand and from thence to a black sports coat and a pale face framed by straight blond hair, so blond that it was nearly white.

  It was Leif Helgarson, hale and whole and healthy as ever a dead guy could be.

  I immediately became a twitching bundle of WTF and drew Fragarach right there in the store, dispelling the camouflage on it so that my erstwhile attorney could see it. Granuaile heard this and whirled, staff in her left and a knife in her right.

  “Atticus, what—oh, shit.”

  Shit, indeed. Niko had keenly o
bserved that our body language had abruptly switched from customers to combatants, and he squalled for help. I felt a tiny draw on the magic in my bear charm as Granuaile spoke the words for magical sight.

  The last time I’d laid eyes on the vampire Leif Helgarson, he was looking smug because he’d just forced me to kill his creator, Zdenik, allowing Leif to retake the territory he’d temporarily lost. He’d very nearly gotten Oberon—not to mention me—killed in the process, and we’d carefully stayed out of each other’s way since then. That was because I’d informed Leif through Hal Hauk, my attorney, that I’d unbind him on sight the next time I saw him.

  So here he was, in my sight. Twelve years later. Waving a white flag in a sporting goods store in Thessalonika. How the fuck did he know I was here, and what did he want? I answered the first question on my own: He’d drunk an awful lot of my blood before we had our falling out. He could probably find me anywhere now. I began to speak the words of unbinding. He saw my lips move and knew what it meant.

  “Atticus, please. I am not here by my own will.” He stopped twenty feet away, in the middle of an aisle, plainly in sight, both arms raised. His right hand still held the flag. He had a cell phone in his left hand.

  A security guard appeared to my left and began shouting at me in Greek to lower my weapon. I didn’t take my eyes off Leif. Leif, however, took his off me and addressed the guard in Greek.

  “Sir? Sir. Look at me, sir.” Eventually the guard looked, and, when he did, Leif charmed him. “You will walk to the farthest corner of the store, face the wall, and piss yourself. You will remain there for one hour before moving.”

  The guard slunk away. Niko was taking small, panicky breaths behind me, but he’d stopped calling for help. Nearby customers were concluding that this tableau really wasn’t their business and remembering that they had moussaka in the oven at home.

  Having secured some time to converse without interruption, Leif said, “I have been forced into the service of the vampire Theophilus.”

  “Since when?” I said.

  “Since you made your presence known in Greece by unbinding a vampire in Litochoro.” He waggled the cell phone. “This is a single-use phone. He wishes to speak with you.”

  He began to squat, slowly, and continued to speak. “Do not believe anything he says about me. I am very unwilling. He will call momentarily. Be on your guard, Atticus. You are marked for assassination, because you are the only thing he fears.”

  Leif scooted the phone across the hard linoleum floor to me. It stopped against the toe of my sandals. I didn’t bend down to pick it up.

  “I will try to warn you as I can with Shakespeare. Perhaps I can make amends for the past. I must go now, because I’m being watched.”

  “Watched? By whom? From where?”

  He didn’t answer. He rose and backed away, his hands up. I watched him go. When he was at the door, the phone at my feet began to ring.

  “Granuaile, get behind the counter. All the knives are yours, understand?”

  Behind me, I heard my apprentice growl, “All your base are belong to us, Niko.” She said this in English, but Niko didn’t have any trouble inferring her general meaning.

  “Yes! Yes! They are yours!” he cried, apparently somewhat fluent in English. Poor guy. He sounded terrified of the girl he’d found so cute a few minutes ago.

  “You might want to take the rest of the night off,” Granuaile added, back to Greek. “It’s a shit job anyway, right?”

  I dropped to pick up the phone and then moved to the right, scanning the area around me. Customers were still leaving. Niko was scrambling after them, trying to beat them out the door. A pudgy managerial type was on the phone near the cash registers, presumably calling police. The clowns had managed to miss all this and were still arguing over rope.

  I pressed the TALK button on the phone. A male tenor voice of surpassing arrogance flowed out of it, as if the speaker were auditioning for the part of the Douchefather. He spoke in Latin.

  “Thank you for taking my call. Am I speaking to the Druid?”

  “What do you want?”

  “I want to be courteous. Since you have managed to live so long, I assume you attach some value to your life and would appreciate an offer to extend it indefinitely.”

  “Let me hear the offer in a moment. Since you are in the courteous mood, introduce yourself.”

  “I am Theophilus. I believe your friend, Mr. Helgarson, spoke of me.”

  “He’s not my friend.”

  “Ah. Perhaps that is why he was so eager to help me locate you.”

  I ignored this; I wasn’t going to play their mind games. They were both my enemies. “Tell me about the Romans,” I said. “The old ones you used to control.”

  “Ah! That is ancient history.”

  “Untold ancient history. Please tell it now. As a courtesy.”

  Theophilus sighed into my ear, and it reminded me of Leif. He used to like to sigh dramatically too. It must be something vampires did to remember what it was like to breathe.

  I was going to take this chance to find out what I could about the Roman campaign to destroy the Druids, since it might be the only one I ever got. Before we’d left for Asgard, Leif had confided to me that Theophilus was the oldest vampire that he knew of. Old as Leif was, he hadn’t been born when the Druids were hunted to near extinction, so he couldn’t answer any of my questions about that time. Theophilus, though, would have been around when Rome spread north and brought the vampires with them.

  “What is there to tell? We vampires wanted to expand our territory, and we did it on the backs of the Caesars.”

  “But why go after the Druids? They weren’t hunting you.”

  “Not hunting, no, but you have that annoying talent of unbinding us regardless of our strength. It’s a bit unfair.”

  “Unfair is burning all the groves and then stabbing a man with two dozen spears.”

  “One dozen probably wouldn’t have done the job. You’re too good at healing.”

  “So you were behind it all?”

  “I cannot take sole credit.”

  “You mean blame?”

  “As you wish. There were many involved. But it was my idea, my pet project, yes: a pogrom against the Druids to ensure that vampires could spread freely around the world. And it worked. Not completely, of course—here we are, talking together—but certainly effective. There are many of us now and only one of you.”

  “One of you per every hundred thousand humans, is that right?”

  A hint of irritation crept into the vampire’s smooth Douchetone. “Did Mr. Helgarson tell you that?”

  Leif had mentioned the Accords of Rome twelve years ago, but I didn’t feel that Theophilus needed to know that.

  “Tell me about your courteous offer,” I replied.

  “The offer is simple: You get to walk out of the store and live. You’ve certainly earned it, and I appreciate reminders that there are limits to my power.”

  “No, you don’t. If you appreciated that, you wouldn’t be threatening me with this courteous offer. What do I have to do to earn it?”

  “You must agree not to hunt vampires and to refrain from training more Druids.”

  “I’ve never hunted vampires.”

  “Explain the puddle you left behind in Litochoro, then.”

  “He attacked me. I don’t think he knew what I was. That was simply self-defense.”

  “Fine. I will accept your word. But you must also stop training Druids.”

  “That’s an unreasonable request. I haven’t asked you to stop making new vampires.”

  “That is because you are in no position to do so.”

  “And if I say no, which you’re assuming I will?”

  “Then the old pogrom renews. A very small one, with you and your apprentice the sole targets.”

  I didn’t think his offer was genuine, so I called his bluff. “Okay, sure, Theophilus. You’re on.”

  “I beg your pardon?”
>
  “I agree. I accept your courteous offer.”

  “You do?”

  Granuaile called to me from behind the knife counter. “Sensei, there’s a damn clown convention going on in here, have you noticed? There’s something strange about their auras, but I don’t know what it means.”

  I blinked and noticed. The two clowns that I thought I’d been seeing over and over were actually more like a dozen. They’d surrounded us. Turning on my magical sight, I saw what was under all the pancake makeup: pointy ears, flattened down and hidden by prosthetic ones. And underneath those rainbow-colored wigs were thick, long queues of black hair. Knives were concealed in the baggy clothing. Over all this was some ice-blue interference—a charm of some kind that had probably befuddled Granuaile’s vision. She was still too unpracticed to see through such tricks. These weren’t clowns at all. They were Svartálfar—real, live dark elves walking around Midgard.

  “You sent in the clowns?” I said into the phone.

  Theophilus chuckled and hung up. So much for his offer. The entire call had been meant to distract me while these clowns surrounded us.

  “The clowns are dark elves, Granuaile. Kill or be killed. Go!”

  Chapter 16

  Despite Manannan’s warning that the dark elves were after me and the confession of the faery assassin that dark elves had hired his band of rogues, I never thought I’d get to see them in the flesh. I guess if you’d like the dark elves to pay you a visit on good ol’ Midgard, spend fifteen centuries blaming them for everything; they’ll hear about it eventually.

  The dark elves had good reason to bring me some karmic payback. I’d brought them grief with the blame game on my first trip to Asgard twelve years ago. I’d slung some lies in an attempt to distract the Norse pantheon from my true goals, and as a result Odin had briefly believed that the Svartálfar were infiltrating Asgard and were partially responsible for the death of the Norns. I learned later that Odin hadn’t been gentle with his rebuke, so the dark elves were justified in seeking to share some of that violence with me.