Hammered

From Winkelman we headed south on State Route 77 and picked up a police officer anxious to pull over a speeding muscle car. Leif eased up on the accelerator and let Gunnar hold the wheel steady. He rolled down his window and leaned out, facing the rear. His gaze captured the officer’s eyes and charmed him. Shortly thereafter, the sirens ceased their wailing and the police officer pulled himself over.

Leif pulled his head back into the car and spent a few vain moments straightening his windblown hair in the mirror, while Gunnar continued to steer from the passenger seat. I sniggered.

“You have something to say to me, Mr. O’Sullivan?” Leif asked archly.

“Please do not trouble yourself about your appearance, Mr. Helgarson,” I replied. “I assure you that you look very pretty.”

Gunnar chuckled and Leif raised his chin haughtily. “I shall ignore the jealous gibes of ugly men,” he announced.

“He’s talking about you, Atticus,” Gunnar said.

“Your mom talked about me,” I said, and the werewolf abruptly lost his sense of humor and growled. I smiled and kept silent after that, as did Leif. You can push a werewolf only so far.

We turned left on Aravaipa Road and continued for twelve miles, the last eight of which were covered in gravel. The Aravaipa Canyon Wilderness is not technically a forest, nor does it contain much in the way of oak, ash, or thorn, but its healthy riparian habitat is strong enough to support a tether to Tír na nÓg. More than two hundred species of birds, nine species of bats, and fish species native to Arizona live there, along with black bears, bobcats, desert bighorn sheep, and coatis. The trees are largely broadleaf species, a pleasing mixture of alder, willow, walnut, cottonwood, and sycamore, all lining the perennial flow of Aravaipa Creek. There are true forests with stronger ties to Tír na nÓg slightly closer to Tempe as the crow flies, but in terms of getting the hell out of town quickly, this was my best option.

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:

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.

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.