Hunted

Chapter 3

The only way dark elves and a vampire could have been waiting at that particular spot long enough to plant land mines was if somebody had known we’d be running through there. That suggested a couple of things: Either the Olympians tipped them off—which I thought unlikely because they wouldn’t achieve their measure of glory if they let someone else kill me—or someone was following the Morrigan’s movements and made an educated guess about our route. That someone was most likely Fae. Few others would have a chance to move around the Irish planes without being seen.

Guessing our route wouldn’t have been that difficult if one assumed we were headed north; there were few passes through the Carpathians, and following a river was one of the easiest ways to shake a tail—you cross it, you cross it again, you pretend to cross but really you just run in the shallow water until you reemerge a bit upstream on the same side. Sitting on a river that led more or less straight to the pass was a fair gamble.

I said to Granuaile, “We may have a faery tail.”

“No, Oberon, I said we might have a faery tail, as in a faery who is tailing us.”

My hound whined.

“Look up once in a while. It’s clearly not only the goddesses hunting us. We still have vampires and dark elves to worry about, and I think they’re getting help from someone in Tír na nÓg.”

“Does anyone like us?” Granuaile asked, an edge of bitterness to her voice. “Because I’m thinking maybe we should go hang out with them if we survive this.”

“Yeah. We should probably get out of Europe for a while if we can.”

Grauaile exhaled quickly, banishing wishful thinking and returning to practical matters. “But first things first, right? We have to get out of this fix. Would it be ridiculous to booby-trap our trail?”

“No, I don’t think so. In fact, I think it’s strategically necessary.”

“Agreed. Even a failed trap will cause them to slow down and be wary for more. We should make a pit trap with spikes in the bottom. You make the pit and I’ll make the spikes.”

I grinned at her. “A cold suggestion of mayhem? That’s hot.”

Granuaile dropped her staff, stepped forward, and placed her hands flat against my chest. Her face darted toward mine for a quick kiss but then pulled back at the last instant, leaving me with the heat of her breath and the scent of strawberry lip gloss. I don’t think she was wearing any—beauty products tend not to survive the rigors of shape-shifting—but I always smelled it now, regardless; the memory of it was indelibly linked with the sight of her lips. She pushed me away, hard, and shape-shifted to a horse. She picked up her staff in her mouth and galloped north at full speed, leaving me bewildered and more than a little wistful. Oberon’s mental groan came a few seconds later.

I broke into a wide smile before dropping Fragarach’s scabbard on the ground and shape-shifting to a stag. I said to him, picking the sword up in my mouth.

The race, I eventually discerned, was in earnest. I spent half of it like a cockfident waffle dolphin, thinking she would slow down and let me win. But then I tried to close the gap and found that she hadn’t been going full speed after all; she had a sixth and seventh gear.

Oberon asked.

The horse in front of me whinnied in amusement—Granuaile could of course hear Oberon too—but I wasn’t gaining on her, so I didn’t think it was funny. We were running either in or near the trees on the east side of Highway E371 to keep from drawing the attention of drivers crossing the border between Slovakia and Poland. This was Dukla Pass, site of one of the bloodiest battles of the eastern front during World War II. Farmhouses and memorials for the dead sat like squat chess pieces on squares of pasture framed by stands of timber.

Once past the border and safely on the other side of the pass, Granuaile paused to gloat at the edge of an alfalfa field. “Guess you’ll have to rechannel all your sexual energy into making a death trap for immortals,” she said.

A nap sounded like a great idea to me, but we couldn’t afford the time. If we slept now we might never wake up, so we concentrated on our task.

Normally a pit trap would take many hours and a handy tool like a shovel or a backhoe—or at least a spade—with which to move the earth. But it doesn’t take that long and requires no tools at all when the earth is willing to do all the work for you. The trick is to be smart about it when you have two expert huntresses on your tail.

“We can’t have you cutting down branches here and sharpening stakes,” I said. “If they have night vision or they come through here after dawn, there’s too much chance that they’ll see it and be wary. Let’s cross the pasture on the hoof and leave a clear trail. Once we get to the other side, we pull a wascally wabbit and tunnel back, you see?”

“I surely do.” She shifted to a horse, took up her staff, and galloped across.

“Not here, anyway. Across the field of joy. Here. Take Fragarach with you too. Tell Granuaile to get started and I’ll be there soon. I need to snag some flashlights from the border station.” Oberon opened his mouth extra wide to carry both my scabbard and Granuaile’s knives.

he said.

“Enough complaining.”

I doubled back in camouflage, not caring if the huntresses saw the footprints. Let them follow me to the guard station at the border and wonder what I did there.

What I did was throw a couple of rocks at the guardhouse windows. Two guards obligingly came out with flashlights shining into the night, resting their hands on the butts of their guns and calling out warnings to the dark. I snatched their flashlights away, turned them off, and then cast camouflage on them. From the guards’ point of view, the flashlights had leapt out of their hands and disappeared. They drew their guns but they couldn’t find a target in the dark. I was already running back to the alfalfa field, chased by Polish curses that seemed to Doppler-shift bizarrely into “Never Gonna Give You Up,” and after I thought of it I couldn’t believe I’d just rickrolled myself.

Once I reached the field, I kept trucking across it with my human feet. There was no need to switch up my form for consistency; all the goddesses needed to do was follow me across. Underneath the opposite cover of trees, we made contact with Carpathia. Granuaile wanted a bit of help and some permission to harvest some living tree branches, while I explained the tunnel we needed and then the pit in the middle of the pasture that needed to be hollowed out while leaving the surface undisturbed. Artemis and Diana needed to see that swath of trampled alfalfa and follow directly in our paths.

Despite Carpathia’s aid, building the trap took an hour. Moving the earth and hidden rocks in the ground wasn’t that much trouble for the elemental—only the work of a few minutes or so—but it took us multiple trips through the tunnel to populate the pit with sharpened stakes. We could carry only so much, because we had to carry the flashlights too. Our night vision was sufficient for the work outside, but that wouldn’t cut it in the total darkness of underground. Planting the stakes in the bottom of the pit so that they’d remain steady took the majority of the time.

The pit itself was rather deep at twenty feet, and Oberon was impressed. To him it was an epic feat of engineering.

“Not nearly so deep,” I replied.

fwoosh when he hit the bottom?>

“He’d go something, but probably not fwoosh.” I was worried that the goddesses would avoid the stakes somehow. Their teams would fall in first, after all, and they might land on their teams and thereby avoid injury. I wanted it to be difficult to hop out if they somehow managed to avoid the stakes, and even I don’t have a twenty-foot vertical leap. But what if they had some sort of levitation enchantment on their chariots? In the brief glimpse of the chariots that I’d had before the goddesses fired at us, I thought the chariots were floating slightly off the ground. I couldn’t recall if their teams had been floating too. If so, then we’d probably wasted an hour. But if not, then the stags would fall in and drag the chariots down by their harness. Maybe. I hoped that, one way or another, falling into the pit would cause the goddesses at least an hour’s inconvenience, if not more, in addition to slowing down their subsequent rate of pursuit. The Morrigan had bought us a few hours of time when she had unbound their chariots, since they had to wait awhile to get new ones from Hephaestus and Vulcan. We were eating into that time now. With luck, the pit trap would gain us half a day’s lead on them.

The roof of the pit was nothing but a finely woven carpet of alfalfa roots strengthened with a binding in the middle to prevent sagging. Carpathia closed up the tunnel behind us as we left.

We hoofed it out of there to the northwest, loping downhill now, planning to skirt the Polish city of Jasło to the southwest. By following that general course—keeping to rural areas as best we could but darting into villages here and there to get what we needed—we would avoid all the mountainous terrain of Poland and Germany. Once into the Netherlands, we could swing south and west through Belgium until we hit Calais, France.

Journeys sound so easy when you string together destinations in a sentence. But one does not simply run into Britain.