Hunted (The Iron Druid Chronicles, Book Six) (19 page)

Avoiding the shipping was a challenge in itself; the Strait of Dover was one of the busiest waterways in the world, and we had to add on a bit of distance by swimming outside those lanes.

We saw nothing for the first few miles except the next choppy wave that wanted to slap us in the whiskers. The white cliffs of Dover eventually appeared in our night vision; they had some white magic about them in the magical spectrum. Someone had cast wards over them,
though I could not tell what kind at that distance. When we swam past the halfway point without incident, I allowed myself to feel the faint stirrings of hope. And, directly afterward, I felt faint stirrings in the sea.

Something was moving beneath us. The strait was twenty to thirty fathoms deep, and something down there was displacing a substantial amount of water. Something of leviathan proportions. Rising.

My imagination filled with a tentacled horror reaching up from the dark to pull us down for dinner. Krakens, to me, are so much more terrifying than sharks, though I do not know why it should be so. More people are bitten by sharks than eaten by krakens every year, but seeing a shark would have been reassuring right then. A shark, somehow, was merely a predator doing its predator thing, where a kraken was an unholy monster that sent sailors (and Druids) shrieking from their bunks.

I’m aware that my fear and loathing of krakens is unjustified—after all, they bear me no more ill will than I bear to lunch meat. But fear and rationality are hardly good drinking buddies—I’m fairly certain one of them doesn’t even drink. When I’m on dry land, I can set aside my dread and even feel sorry for krakens because nobody loves them. It is a desolate feeling to crawl about the crust of the world unloved, and though most of us have never spent a single moment bereft of love, we can sense the emptiness of it and fear it, can sympathize with J. Alfred Prufrock and all such people unmoored from the shores of humanity. But my empathy for krakens dissolves in the water when we may be swimming in the same body of it.

Night vision, I discovered, does little good in the water past a couple dozen feet. If something decided to swim up from beneath us very fast, I would have almost no time to swim out of the way, assuming I could. And Oberon was about as agile in the water as a lily pad.

Magic sight was slightly better—the auras of living things have their own light and don’t give a damn how far away they are from the sun or moon. But the sea is full of living things, and as I peered into the deep I had quite a bit of filtering to do before I could see anything more than visual noise and get a sense of distance. If I was having trouble, I imagined Granuaile was bewildered. She could interpret what she saw very well but still had difficulty penetrating the nonessential bindings.

When I finally identified the threat, it was so close that I nearly shat kine. It wasn’t a kraken at all; it was a chorus of seven great serpents, spawn of Jörmungandr, swollen to monstrous size and rising below us to the left. Väinämöinen had told me of his encounter with one of them long ago; otherwise, I would not have recognized them. Sentient but shy creatures that preferred to dine on blue whales, they never would have pursued us without goading. They preferred the deep ocean and rose to the surface only in their youth to satisfy their curiosity. Poseidon and Neptune were whipping them doubly against their natures—to eat food they’d never seek out on their own, and in a portion of the sea they habitually avoided.

Frantically seizing on the threads of their consciousness one by one, I shouted the concept of
Poison!
to them as best as I could. One turned away. Then another. One that I hadn’t shouted at turned away, so Granuaile must have been doing something similar. Four were still rising fast and opening jaws that would gulp us down like goldfish. I got one more, and two others peeled off to erupt from the surface nearby. But for the final one—a gigantic yawning darkness rimmed in teeth—there was simply no time. I had a Hamlet moment as death approached: The famous Dane had marveled in the graveyard at how
Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay, might stop a hole to keep the wind away
, and I
wondered at how I could live so long and survive so many wars to wind up as snake shit.

Something massive rammed into the serpent’s neck right below the head—it came in from the north and I never saw it coming, because I had been looking down. The collision caused the serpent to change course just enough to miss our tails. It still exploded through the surface along with the six other serpents, and the resulting turbulence tumbled us ass over teakettle deeper into the water. This wasn’t a problem for Granuaile or me, but it was a significant issue for Oberon, who’d had no warning at all of the attack.

I couldn’t answer him specifically, because I honestly didn’t know. The churning of the sea continued to pull me in directions I didn’t want to go, and I was helpless to fight against it. I couldn’t even see him. I caught a flash of Granuaile’s sleek shape twisting away from me—either above or below, I couldn’t tell which—and saw the shining trunks of serpents surrounding me like scaly towers. Everything else was dark and I couldn’t tell which way was up. The huge creature that had butted into the last serpent flickered in my vision—a shark, perhaps, but strangely limned in white magic. And then the serpents crashed back into the sea again and made it all worse. That told me where the surface was, at least.

Oberon’s clear panic was infectious, and I struggled to right myself. I didn’t know where he was and couldn’t think of how to help him even if I did.

I told him. It was his best hope, slim as it was. The serpents would be coming around for another pass; Poseidon and Neptune wouldn’t let them give up.

I didn’t know what I was supposed to wait for. I began
to shout “Flee!” at the serpents, to try to clear them out, but all that accomplished was another short-term reprieve from becoming an hors d’oeuvre. The Olympians were urging the serpents to eat us as quickly as I could urge them to forget about it, and so for every time I convinced one to swim in a different direction, it would swing back around a few moments later as I switched my attention to another set of jaws. It wasn’t sustainable; my magic was draining rapidly out of my bear charm. Soon I would have no way to communicate to the creatures, and that would be the end.

I missed one diving from above, but Granuaile must have spotted it, for a serpent plunged right past me, its scales scraping my fur and its tidal gravity pulling me deeper with it, tumbling me in swirls of current and confusing my sense of direction once more. My lungs burned, reminding me that breathing air was not optional, but the surface was a mystery to me now.

Oberon’s plaintive tone was heartbreaking.

I managed to fight free of the serpent’s wake and searched for anything in the darkness that would tell me which way was up.

Two glowing white figures drew my attention—the lambent glow of godhood. Poseidon and Neptune, calmly floating in their element and directing the chaos. Their heads told me which way was up, and I began to swim desperately for the surface.

I didn’t know anything was closing on me from behind until it plowed into my rear. It splayed my legs wide across its smooth bulk as it rose rapidly toward the surface. Energy abruptly flooded my tissues and I finally understood. It was Manannan Mac Lir in his aquatic form as a killer whale—a killer whale capable of magnifying his natural strength and speed and drawing Gaia’s strength directly from the water. And as I had done
many times in the past with Granuaile and Oberon, he was now sharing some of that strength with me through skin-to-skin contact that slipped past my aura, while giving me an express ride to the surface.

It was he who had delivered a head butt to the seventh serpent and perhaps had helped distract the others. Odin had totally earned his Samoas and whiskey.

The stars never shone so bright as when we splashed through the surface and the blackness sheeted away from my eyes. I gasped a lungful of sweet, salty air and then had to hold it in as Manannan dove again—so quickly that I slipped off his back as he darted away.

Oberon said, and the victory in his tone reassured me.

Indeed they were. A quick survey of my surroundings revealed that the spawn of Jörmungandr were thrashing about in the sea, tossing the waves as if apoplexed. The Olympians urged them to violence while we Druids urged them to peace, and it was in their nature to side with us. The Morrigan’s words came back to me:
Gaia loves us more than she loves the Olympians
. They might have the power to coerce her creatures and usurp her magic to some extent, but in the end they were bound to their worshippers whereas we were bound to the earth itself.

Now that I was finally able to see them clearly, the children of Jörmungandr proved to be as beautiful as they were terrifying. Blue-green scales, just as Väinämöinen described, shedding sheets of water and glinting in the moonlight, covering everything except for membranous tissue stretched between five bony ridges that fanned out from the top of the head. I didn’t see gigantic fangs;
I thought all the teeth were pretty large, and perhaps the ones on the edges were a bit plus-sized. And it hadn’t been my imagination in the sea that their mouths were giant black holes—they really were. Inside, the cheeks and tongue were not pink or red but a scaly asphalt, as though something else flowed through their veins besides blood. Overlarge eyes like oil puddles helped them see in the gloom of the deep, and their gills flared beneath their jaws, horizontal shadows slashing across the scales.

Manannan’s back and dorsal fin floated on top of the waves about a minute’s fast swim from where he lost me. A sodden wolfhound huddled around the front edge of the fin, his paws hugging either side of it and his head resting against its left side, facing the tail. I scrambled up the side and bounded toward him until I could leap on his back and hold on with my otter paws.

I said.

Oberon’s mental voice spoke in an abominable caricature of pirate speech.

I didn’t reply for fear I would encourage him.

Manannan pulled away from the boiling cauldron o’ serpents, which were thrashing impotently under the conflicting commands of Olympians and Druids. For about fifteen seconds I harbored hope of a clean escape. And then two arrows fell out of the sky and sank into Manannan’s back, right behind the dorsal fin. He shuddered and almost dove by instinct before he remembered he had to keep Oberon topside.

I squinted through the night and, past the writhing trunks of serpents, saw two white-veiled forms skipping across the waves on giant clamshells pulled by dolphins. Those were the chariots of Poseidon and Neptune, but they now carried Artemis and Diana, who had obviously regenerated and caught up to us. But they were
out of their element now. It was an awfully choppy ride through the sea-serpent mosh pit and they couldn’t be as accurate with their arrows as they wished, but they were still bloody dangerous, and I didn’t want to give them any more free shots. Luckily, in their haste to catch up to us in the strait, they had forgotten to take proper precautions with their mode of transport.

Clamshells are all natural. If I could have grinned widely as an otter, I would have. Using energy provided by Manannan Mac Lir, I bound the shells to the bottom of the channel. That dumped the huntresses into the strait and prevented them from firing on us. I released the binding almost immediately, because I didn’t want to hurt the dolphins towing them. But those poor sea serpents were probably working up an appetite with all that thrashing around. I shot an idea to Granuaile and Manannan via Oberon:
Monsters tend to like virgins in the old stories
.

Two things happened at the same time: Poseidon and Neptune realized that their goddesses were in trouble and stopped pushing the serpents to eat us, and we encouraged the serpents to eat the goddesses.

Oh, it was a thing of beauty. All seven of them whipped around and dove after the huntresses in a swirling eddy of scales and flesh and then disappeared beneath the waves. Mm-mmm! Goddess Tartar! Double down!

We had no idea if one snake had eaten both or if they’d gone into different digestive systems. It didn’t really matter. We told all the serpents to flee, and that’s what they did, streaking for the open Atlantic and deeper water. Poseidon and Neptune would rescue Artemis and Diana, of course, and the goddesses would eventually resume their hunt, but there was no way they’d keep us from reaching England now. I stupidly thought we had won.