Trapped (The Iron Druid Chronicles, Book Five) (21 page)

“I am sorry,” he said. “I did not think they would manage to do you any harm.”

“Eleven or twelve smoky bastards against two and you thought we’d walk out without a scratch?”

Leif shrugged a shoulder. “I have seen you lay waste to fields of opponents.”

“
Field
is the key word there. There was no field in that store and therefore no magic.”

“It is magic I have come to warn you about. You are heading for the greenbelt, yes?”

“Of course.”

“Theophilus has seeded it with vampires who are searching for a human with unusual blood.”

“Beware the puppet master, eh?”

“Yes, but Theophilus is not the puppet master. He is more of a skilled apprentice, if you wish to extend a metaphor.”

“Then who’s pulling his strings?”

“Someone from your world.”

“Ireland?”

“No. The other one. Tír na nÓg.”

“The Fae are behind all this? Someone there is giving orders both to dark elves and vampires?”

“As far as I can tell, yes.”

It was no more than I had already suspected, but to have it confirmed was a bit of a shock. But maybe it wasn’t confirmed after all. I couldn’t trust anything he said.

“I know what you’re up to,” I growled.

Leif’s lips turned up at the corners. “I would be intensely disappointed if you did not.”

“You’re playing both sides and setting your own odds in Vegas, you conniving bastard. You probably have some Machiavellian shit going down on other planets. Are you expecting me to make a deal with you? An alliance?”

The vampire shrugged again, hands in pockets. “None is needed. For now our interests are the same. That will serve as well as anything else.”

“I will never forgive you for using me. For hurting Oberon.”

Leif smirked at me. “How fortunate, then, that I do not seek your forgiveness. I will go ahead and dispatch the two at the edge of the greenbelt. After that, you will be on your own. What is it that the young Americans say now? ‘Peace out, brah’?”

“No,” I said, “not unless they want to get their balls booted into their stomachs,” but Leif had already raced ahead, his amused chuckle hanging in the air and fading with distance.

The night settled about us, and for thirty seconds there was no sound except our footfalls, the muffled noise of family arguments, and the wail of emergency vehicles converging on the sporting-goods store.

Granuaile finally asked a question into what passes for silence in the city: “Do vampires have balls?”

“I don’t know.”

Once we reached the greenbelt, the elemental of Thessalonika, Macedonia, restored my magic and allowed Granuaile to tap her own. She cast night vision and sped herself up immediately, even though we were crouched underneath a tree. Under the tree behind us, nearest the street, rested the gray corpse of a vampire, courtesy of Leif, head torn from its neck and held between its hands on top of its stomach. Leif had mentioned two, but we didn’t see another.

For my part, I filled my bear charm and gave succor to my screaming skin. Now that I had a clear head and plenty of help from Macedonia, I could assess the burn damage and apply my skills to healing it in earnest.

Left alone, I’d wind up looking like Two-Face, because I had deep burns down the majority of my left side and in a few months those would turn into red hypertrophic scars, all the suppleness gone and my ability to scare children increased geometrically. But skin, fortunately, is not that difficult to regenerate. The secret is all in the dermis; maintain a healthy dermis, and cosmetically your epidermis will look just fine. Regenerating the dermis would take more time than the epidermis, of course, but it wasn’t going to be like growing bone or muscle tissue either. And if I could get hold of the right herbs, I could even make my special brew for
skin health, Elastici-Tea. I’d be a bit scary-looking for a while but hopefully normal-ish in a few weeks; the underlying healing would be finished in three or four days, but the cosmetic side of things would take longer to sort itself out as the dead cells sloughed away and got replaced by fresh ones. I was well aware that I was damn lucky to be here, considering the past hour. The first battle between dark elves and Druids had yielded surprises to both parties, and foremost among them had to be that I had managed to escape. I doubted that I would have if it weren’t for Granuaile.

“You were brilliant back there, by the way,” I said. “Thank you.”

She swallowed audibly before answering. “Welcome.” Her voice was quiet.

“How many did you get?”

“Eight. Not that I’m, you know, keeping score or anything.”

“I got three. Were there only eleven, or were there twelve?”

She winced. “I thought there were twelve.”

“Me too. So that means either the last one got blown up in the firebombing of the store, or it didn’t …”

“And that means it’s either following us or reporting back to its superiors on our skills and tactics.”

“It’s not following us,” I said. “Leif wouldn’t have spoken so frankly to us if there were anyone around from the other side to hear it.”

“So next time we meet them, they’re going to use conventional weapons on us,” Granuaile said.

“Yep. And they won’t let you flank them again.”

She nodded, accepting this, then swallowed again. I realized she was trying to keep from crying. “I didn’t get there in time. Are you going to be okay?” she asked.

“Oh, yeah.” I tried to smile and realized that, the way my face looked now, it probably wasn’t the most reassuring
expression I could have made. “I know it looks bad, but I’ll be okay given time.”

“All right.”

“Theophilus and Leif expect us to keep to these woods—maybe the dark elves do too—but I don’t see the upside. You can’t cast camouflage or unbind vampires yet. I could cast camouflage on you, but if we get attacked by more than one vampire at a time, it’s going to be extremely risky. We don’t need to fight this battle. The situation’s changed. We don’t have to go back to Olympus armed to the teeth to make inquiries. We can go back now, as we are, because I know what’s happening.”

“So just call a cab and go grab Oberon?” she asked.

“Yeah, go ahead. I’ll unbind the remains of this vampire first and Theophilus can suck on that.”

Granuaile grinned and rose. She jogged the short distance back to the street, put her fingers between her teeth, and whistled.

“We are about to start some shit we may not be able to finish,” I warned Granuaile. “Though we can argue that this is all Bacchus’s fault, in order to get around him we’re going to have to risk bringing the Greek pantheon into this too. They’re probably not going to care who started it.”

Oberon said, He’d taken my injuries in stride once I’d reassured him that I would be good as new eventually.

“I’m not sure what you mean, sensei.” We were speaking in the back of a limousine on our way to Olympus. We needed the privacy and the nice bucket full of ice in which to soak my burned left arm. The driver was accommodating and willing to pull over every so often so I could “get some fresh air,” but it was really so I could replenish my bear charm and continue healing as we drove. I also didn’t mind the luxury after the exertions of Thessalonika.

“We don’t have to snag a Bacchant and interrogate her anymore. I know precisely what’s going on—what’s
been
going on. You heard Bacchus talking outside the cave, right? He said Faunus couldn’t keep us trapped there forever.”

“Right. Except we weren’t trapped. We got away.”

“The trap is Olympus itself. It’s the only place we can
bind you right now, and twice we’ve had to interrupt the ritual because of it. We’ve been operating on Lord Grundlebeard’s theory that the entire Eurasian plate was disrupted because Perun’s plane got burned up by Loki. I never really bought it—the trembling in North America faded right away and we were able to shift just fine, so why would the trembling last so much longer in Europe?—but I didn’t have a better theory to offer. Now I do. It’s been a month and a half. If the burning of Perun’s plane was the source of the disturbance, wouldn’t there have been some fluctuations throughout Europe? Wouldn’t the severity of the disturbance vary, being stronger in Russia and less so in Spain and Italy and so on, and shouldn’t it have tapered off a bit by now? But it’s still going strong. Something is producing the disruption consistently, and it’s purposely leaving Olympus alone.”

“I thought you agreed the Olympians were protecting their turf.”

“They are. But they’re also responsible for jacking up everything else, and it’s all to catch us in their net. It’s Faunus, Granuaile. Faunus and that worthless sot, Bacchus.”

“How are they responsible?”

“Pandemonium, you see.”

“No, I don’t see.”

“I didn’t see either, because I was thinking of the Roman god’s name and not the original Greek. Pandemonium is the disruption of order—it’s chaos, in other words. That’s what’s disrupting all the forests on the Eurasian plate so that we can’t shift anywhere else. This is a power that both Pan and Faunus possess—it’s explicitly stated in the mythology, and of course it’s inherent in the etymology of the word. And none of the Tuatha Dé Danann or the Fae recognize it for what it is. It probably hasn’t been used since truly ancient times,
and even then it was never on this scale. This might be the first time it’s been used outside Greece, so that’s why the Fae are fumbling for explanations.”

Granuaile got a crinkle between her eyes. “Why would the Olympians have a power that specifically prevents Druids from shifting?”

“That wasn’t its original purpose—it’s just the purpose they’re using it for now, because it’s a side effect that gives them an advantage. Originally Pan was a way for people to get in touch with all that’s primal in nature and within themselves. He was a great big yang to all the yin of the other gods and the order of Olympus and civilization. Pan wanted to party and fuck and make a lot of noise—and once the monotheists came along and got a load of him—”

load
.>

“—he became the very devil himself. He messes with the order of everything. I bet if we took time to pick up a newspaper and look at what’s going on in Europe right now, we’d see more than the usual ruckus. And that’s because Pan’s Roman doppelgänger, Faunus, is screwing up the entire continent. Our tethers to Tír na nÓg are Druidic order laid on top of nature, and he’s disrupting them.”

“So how do we get to him?”

“If Faunus is out in the world messing with all the forests except around Olympus, we need him to return to Olympus and stay there so we can have all the rest of the forests to work with in the meantime. The way I see it, only one thing will make him come running back.”

“What’s that?”

“We take away his sex toys.”

Literally and figuratively, the goat-footed god has always been a horny lad. The ancient Greeks provided him with plenty of nymphs and dryads to play with in the forest so he wouldn’t be tempted to wander into the cities and fuck around. Fucking around was all well and good to the Greeks, of course, but, you know: “Moderation in all things.” The Greeks were trying to lay the foundations for Western civilization as well as one another, so Pan and his worshippers were required to do their unchained frolicking in the woods.

Pan liked a good chase most days. It replaced foreplay. Nymphs were great for providing a chase. But sometimes he felt a bit lazy, so he hunted up dryads on those days, because dryads couldn’t run very far from their trees. Dryads who spent more than a couple of days separated from their trees tended to wither and die—and the same was true for the trees. The connection between them was not only symbiotic, it was vital.

I fully planned to take advantage of that to buy Granuaile and me the time we needed. What was true for Pan was also true for his Roman clone, Faunus.

“You know what’s cool about a dryad’s tree?” I said. We had paid off the limo driver to the south of Olympus and walked into the foothills with nothing but a couple bottles of water and our weapons. I was shirtless
because I couldn’t stand the feel of fabric on my crispy skin.

“Well, it’s an oak tree with an immortal nymph attached. That’s pretty cool.”

“Agreed. But what’s also cool is that a dryad’s tree is exactly the same on three planes. It’s not only here, but it’s on the Roman and Greek planes too, every branch and leaf.”

“Each tree is a trinity, then. I dig it.” Granuaile was nodding and smiling, but this faded as a question occurred to her. “There aren’t three different dryads, are there?”

“No, just one. Pan and Faunus share them, and Artemis and Diana also divide their attentions between them.”

“Oh! Right. Dryads are kind of special to the huntresses. Um.” Her eyebrows drew together and she frowned, clearly disturbed.

“Yes?”

“Are you sure you want to mess with the dryads?”

“Are you sure you want to be a Druid?”

“Well, of course I am, but isn’t there any other way?”

“Sure. We could seek out the Olympians and ask them nicely to stop. But direct confrontation with true immortals will probably not work out in our favor.”

“I concur, sensei, which is why I’m questioning the wisdom of pursuing this.”

“Would you rather we continue as we have been, knowing that the Bacchants will track us down and interrupt the binding who knows how many more times? There are only so many places around Olympus where we can perform the ritual. No, it’s time to act boldly. Better to ask forgiveness than permission and to answer their shenanigans with even better shenanigans. We won’t hurt them.”

“The Olympians are not renowned for their forgiveness,” Granuaile pointed out.

“Well, I’m tired of playing defense. We’ve been lucky so far in that we’ve been able to move faster than them, but strategically we’ve been playing not to lose, if you see what I mean. And the two of us—”

“—Sorry. The three of us against the world’s vampires, the Fae, and the Svartálfar in a confined area are awfully long odds.”