Trapped (The Iron Druid Chronicles, Book Five) (19 page)

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!”

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.

Too bad they didn’t count on my apprentice. While the elves focused on me being all shouty, Granuaile threw three knives,
shik-shik-shik
, and three Svartálfar went down before they even realized the fight was on. I charged to my right, which was also Granuaile’s three o’clock, and swung Fragarach at the clown standing there. As expected, he went incorporeal and his clown costume fell to the floor, along with a mess of white face paint and
the colorful wig. I didn’t stick around to wonder when or where he’d turn solid again but turned clockwise and kept going at full speed.

I felt a draw on my bear charm and shot a glance at Granuaile before I lost sight of her around the partition. I saw that she was taking my advice to heart and moving. She had leapt up on top of the glass display case with her staff in one hand and a knife in the other, and she followed me to the other side of the partition by launching herself backward and flipping over it.

My first thought was, oh, gods, where is she going to land? But then I saw it was a necessary move. She had a whole lot of smoke boiling her way. Empty clown suits competed with flannel for attention on the sales floor.

Granuaile’s leap drew the eyes of the Svartálfar creeping around behind the partition; they’d been planning on going smoky and stabbing us from behind. Since one of them was looking at Granuaile instead of me when I turned the corner, he didn’t see Fragarach coming and was very solid when I stabbed up through the place where his kidney should be. His death scream attracted the attention of the clown closing in on Granuaile, allowing her to land clumsily but safely between the racks of loud camouflage suits.

“Keep going!” I called. “Flank and ambush!”

I wasn’t the only one yelling. The managerial type at the front of the store was no longer trying to control his requests with a tense whisper; he was shouting into the phone for immediate police support, as if gunfire had broken out at Nakatomi Plaza. He needed help
now
, God damn it, now!

I charged the clown who was closest to Granuaile even as smoke began to pour over the partition after her. Granuaile fled to the back of the store, out of my sight—especially since I tripped and did a face-plant in the aisle.

I’d been slide-tackled from behind by the clown I’d first swished my sword through; he’d re-formed and pursued me. Now that I was down, he leapt on top of me and plunged his knife into my back—or so he thought. It felt like a rather painful punch, but his black smoky knife was apparently magical, and my cold iron aura refused it entry. Still, I yelled as if I’d been stabbed, then flipped over, bringing Fragarach around as I did so, left to right. He stabbed me again, this time in the gut, and grinned wickedly as he remained solid, clearly willing to take one for the team to ensure that I died. I took his head off instead.

The clown I’d been charging was now trying to slit my throat. In the thespian spirit, I gurgled dramatically and clutched my neck with my left hand, then took a blind swipe over my right shoulder with Fragarach. It connected, and I was rewarded with a tiny gasp. I kicked off the dark elf corpse astride me before it could turn to tar and rose to confront the clown I’d just stabbed. He clutched his arm and hadn’t yet turned to mist. He was wincing through face paint already designed to make him look woebegone.

“Aw. Sad clown is sad,” I said. Behind him, the boiling clouds of elves were beginning to move off in pursuit of Granuaile. I heard glass shattering in the back of the store and hoped she was all right. I flourished my sword and lunged at the sad clown, expecting him to shift to mist, but he tried to dodge instead and became entangled in a rack of camo suits. I stabbed into his heart easily, somewhat bemused. They must not be able to take their smoke forms when wounded.

This execution earned the especial ire of the Svartálfar who’d been after Granuaile. Three of them solidified out of the coal-black dust and hissed, brandishing their knives. That was fine with me. The more they chased
me, the safer Granuaile would be. She didn’t have the same magical immunities I did.

I backed up warily and stepped into the remains of the first elf I’d slain.

“Euughh,” I said. “Your buddy just turned me into a tar heel.”

One of them cursed at me in Old Norse—he called me the dwarf-dicked spawn of Hel’s half-dead twat, and I privately gave him props, so few people take the trouble to curse creatively anymore—then they came after me. I turned and ran for the front of the store, back the way I’d come. Once around the partition, I was near the knives and the aisles devoted to outdoor food prep—coolers, hibachi grills, meat smokers, and the occasional flannel-clad mannequin flipping a burger. So intent was I in searching for dark elves at eye level that I didn’t see the rope tied between two racks until after it tripped me. I sprawled facedown in front of the charcoal and lighter fluid but held on to Fragarach. The three who’d been pursuing me immediately fell on my back, discovering for themselves that their knives would do nothing more than irritate me.

They were quick, efficient killers, and it wasn’t lost on me that if I hadn’t been immune to their smoky knives, I would already have died several times. Since we were so close to a rather large supply of standard steel knives, I was in favor of a quick exit.

My escape, however, was not high on their agenda. I struggled to break free, but they redoubled their efforts to weigh me down, not trying to stab me now or do anything much except keep me in place. That meant they were planning something else. I managed to turn my head to see two more Svartálfar behaving oddly down the aisle with the hibachis. One—a female, I noticed—had torn the cap off a tin of lighter fluid and was now pouring it all over her naked partner. As
she shook the last few drops onto his shoulders, she gave the drenched dark elf a lighter and told him in Old Norse he was ready.

Ready for what?

The answer was made horribly clear to me in the next few moments. Wearing one of those wicked grins that you never believe can exist outside comics until you see one, the gassed-up dark elf ran straight at me and set himself aflame. The fire didn’t get a chance to fully spread across his body, but that was never part of the plan anyway. The plan was to charge me and turn to mist at the last possible instant, showering me with liquid fire. That’s precisely what he did, and the bastards holding me down didn’t turn into mist until they were sure it had hit me. Oh, and the girl who’d hosed him down in the first place? She followed behind him with a couple more cans of lighter fluid and squirted them at me as if I was her personal barbecue.

Druid’s Log, July 15: Dark elves are not only quick and efficient killers but creative and pyrotechnically inclined ones
.

During my younger days, some people occasionally got ideas about burning me at the stake—there was a time when tattoos meant you had made a “compack widda debbil”—but I never stuck around long enough for them to try it. I had witnessed a few burnings though. It was usually not a witch at all but some poor person who’d committed no other crime than being born gay or with a third nipple or a birthmark of some kind—and the screams were terrible, unlike any other pain I’ve heard. This is truth: “Burning alive” is a wholly inadequate phrase to communicate the agony involved in the process. It’s every nerve in your skin screaming about the apocalypse, and there’s no way you can block that out and find a happy place. This wasn’t hellfire or magical in any way; it was simple
chemistry, and, as such, my cold iron amulet afforded me no protection.