Trapped (The Iron Druid Chronicles, Book Five) (24 page)

“Can I shape-shift now?”

“Wait a moment. Bind with Oberon first.”

“Oh! Yeah. Duh! I’m sorry, Oberon, I’m just so excited.”

“He understands,” I told her. “Okay. So look at the connection between Oberon and me in the magical spectrum. You need to bind yourself to him in the same way so that you can hear his thoughts and vice versa.”

“Will you be able to hear my thoughts too?”

“No. The only person I know capable of human telepathy is the Morrigan, and she doesn’t accomplish it through traditional bindings.”

“What if we’re both in animal form?” Granuaile asked.
“Do we use Oberon as a go-between to speak to each other?”

“I suppose we could.”

“But we should probably try to keep that to a minimum,” I added.

Granuaile nodded. “Poor dog would probably go nuts.”

Hey!

Do not take advantage of her generous nature!

Granuaile gave a tiny gasp and her eyes widened. “I heard that! Or the end of it. Why would you want him to stop being a hound?”

“Hi, Oberon! It’s so nice to finally hear your voice! Is ‘Clever Girl’ your name for me?”

“He’s been calling you that ever since that business with the skinwalkers. Watch out. He’s buttering you up for something.”

“Is that so?” Her eyebrows asked a question of my hound.

“And tonight you’re hungry for really tiny antelopes.”

“Okay. I’ve never hunted before, so you’ll need to give me some tips and forgive me if I screw up, all right?”

“Good. Because my predator form is a giant black cat.”

cat
person?> Oberon whipped his head around to me.

“It wasn’t my choice, Oberon!” Granuaile said. “Gaia chose my predator form. If it had been my choice, I would have been a wolfhound like you and Atticus.”

That’s true, buddy
, I said privately.
She didn’t have any say in her animal forms. Besides, what does it matter? She’s Granuaile no matter what shape she’s in
.

Oberon admitted.

“What is?” Granuaile asked.

“Oh. That’s true. Atticus, maybe we should speak aloud to Oberon whenever we can so we don’t have to always ask him for clarification when he answers?”

“Yep. Good idea. I’m used to keeping a lid on it, so it will take me some time to break the habit.”

Granuaile and I disrobed and placed our clothes near the tethered tree. We asked the earth to part and conceal our weapons for us.

“One more thing before you shift,” I said. “I have to fix your necklace.”

“Oh.” Granuaile raised her hand to the cold iron amulet dangling at her throat. “Good call. I would have garroted myself.”

“Would you mind terribly if I did this for you? Fix it so that it changes sizes with your shape? I could teach you how, but it would take a while.”

“No, go ahead,” she said.

“You’ll have to shift to every form to do it properly, and I know you’ve been dying to anyway.” I moved around her and unfastened her necklace, noting as I did so how much slack and extra chain there was.
Then I stepped away with it in my hand. “So let’s take it from the top. Horse first. Go.”

Granuaile spoke the words that would bind her spirit to the form of the horse indelibly tattooed on her arm. She shifted to a beautiful copper-colored chestnut, sometimes called sorrel, with her mane slightly lighter than her coat. Her nostrils flared and she sneezed. I told her what she looked like as I adjusted the necklace around her neck and memorized the size and position. She whinnied and stamped on the ground with her hooves, one leg at a time, no doubt marveling that she had four of them. I crafted the first part of the binding that would allow the necklace to shrink back to human size when she shifted.

“Okay, shift back to human. I know you want to run, but this isn’t the best place to do it. There are leopards in the trees here and other hungry things.”

Granuaile snorted and shifted back to human form. “Atticus, that was amazing! Four legs! Hooves! Incredible!”

“I know. Check your necklace.”

She looked down and saw that the necklace was fastened around her neck exactly as it had been before.

“You rock.”

I unfastened the necklace again. “Okay, kitty form.”

Granuaile shifted and became a sleek black jaguar. I could tell by the shorter, thicker tail and the wider head. She sneezed a couple of times here too.

“Congratulations. You’re a jaguar.”

Granuaile’s joy at this news elicited an extremely loud roar, startling Oberon and me and the surrounding woods into silence.

pooped,> Oberon said,

Granuaile lowered her ears and managed to convey a sense of regret. I took measurements for her necklace and had her shift back to human.

“Sorry, Oberon,” she said as soon as she got her voice back. “It’s Helen Reddy’s fault. It was the whole ‘I am woman, hear me roar’ thing.”

“All right,” I said, retrieving the necklace. “Let’s see what kind of bird you are. Fly a bit if you want, but don’t keep us waiting long.”

Granuaile shifted and I whooped. “You’re a peregrine falcon! Fastest bird alive! Fly! Be free!”

With a screech of victory, Granuaile took wing; for a moment it was a majestic scene out of
Animal Planet
, and then it wasn’t, as she promptly crashed after an awkward banking maneuver. She tried again, crashed again, and then, on her third attempt, climbed toward the moon so she could dive back down at two hundred miles an hour. When she landed in a sort of sprawling skid and shifted back to human form, she groaned and clutched her stomach.

“Oww. Atticus, I don’t feel so good inside.”

“It’s because you’ve been shifting back and forth so quickly. When you thumb your nose at the laws of physics like you’ve been doing, the universe tends to get you back through biology.”

“I’m not permanently damaging my spleen or anything, am I?”

“Nope. It’ll fade. It’s just a pain you can’t heal or suppress. How was your flight?”

“
So
awesome. The third one, anyway. I can tell I’m going to enjoy that form a lot.”

“I’m sure you will. Last one: sea lion.”

She shifted and clapped her flippers together. Oberon chuffed at her, and I chuckled as I adjusted her necklace.

“Okay, now hold still in this form awhile. I’m going to make all the forms and sizes recursive so that you can shift directly from horse to falcon or jaguar to sea lion, and the necklace will change properly along with it.” A few minutes and it was done. “Okay, shift to jaguar from this form and we’ll hunt.”

Oberon said.

Granuaile shifted to her jaguar form and I shifted to a wolfhound. We both sneezed. My coat was reddish with a white stripe down my right front leg where my tattoos were; I looked like a slightly different dog, since I was in truth one of the old warhounds of the Irish that eventually were bred to become the deerhounds and wolfhounds of today. It made no difference to Oberon, though; to him I was a wolfhound, part of his pack.

Oberon said to Granuaile. She did and promptly began to sneeze uncontrollably, more violently than she had upon her initial shift. She even tried to cover her mouth with her paw, which was pretty funny.

Granuaile managed to find some space between sneezes to growl at him.

We failed miserably to find any dik-diks, but Oberon wasn’t the least bit disappointed. He was highly amused by the entire trip, because Granuaile kept sneezing and didn’t get used to her new sense of smell. She’d always been a bit sensitive to odors; her first exposure to demons had caused her to retch miserably for ten minutes. Once we passed near an impressive pile of rhino feces, she gagged and tried to run away from it, but her gagging
turned the normally smooth mechanics of a jaguar into a jerky, trembling dance. Oberon chuffed so hard he fell over and pawed helplessly at the sky.

Granuaile was still gagging and trying to pull herself away from the smell on the ground, her belly on the grass of the savanna. Then she remembered she had other options and shifted to falcon form. She screeched and took wing, elevating herself above the rank odor of the grassland.

Oberon said.

All right, we’d better go. We can’t keep laughing at her expense
.

We’ll go to Tír na nÓg and visit Goibhniu. I’ll bet he has a snack for you
.

We began trotting back to the tethered tree as Granuaile circled high above.

No, he doesn’t have anything like that. He’s one of the Three Craftsmen though
.

Not much of one. They’re all sons of Brighid, with skills in various arts
.

No, they tend to be jolly lads. Goibhniu is into smithing and brewing. Luchta is a master woodworker. And Creidhne is a master with gold, bronze, or brass
.

You must be thinking of stories from other cultures. Irish women tend to kick ass and do whatever they want. For exhibits A, B, and C, I give you the Morrigan, Brighid, and Flidais
.

I don’t think there is one
.

We had our priorities straight
.

He always has something lying about—pretzels or something to anchor the porter. Allows you to drink more, see. Priorities
.

We padded in silence for a while after that, which gave me time to consider the implications of vampires converging on us in the Pyrenees.

Since I hadn’t been actively hunted by vampires, ever, this had to be a result of an order issued by Theophilus. That meant I’d need to eliminate him if I wanted it to stop—that was much more logical than attempting to eliminate all vampires. But even then, his successor might issue the same order. Vampires weren’t renowned to be live-and-let-live types. To earn myself a modicum of safety, I’d have to make sure Leif Helgarson was the most powerful vampire in the world.

And as soon as I thought of it, I knew that was his plan.

By pretending to act in my interest, he was serving
his. Just as he did back in Arizona, he was manipulating events so that I’d eliminate his rivals and elevate him to the position he desired. And he knew that if he got to that position, he could safely ignore me, unlike every other vampire in the world. The aid he gave us in Thessalonika—tearing apart those last three dark elves—wasn’t an act of generosity or concern but pure selfishness. I was his ticket to the top, so he couldn’t let me die.

I could hate him all I wanted for it; he still saw that I needed him and was going to take full advantage of it. And he knew that I wouldn’t do anything to him as long as there was a chance he could help me eliminate Theophilus.

Granuaile was fairly incensed when she landed and shifted back to human. I shifted as well and called up our weapons from their hiding places in the earth.

“That wasn’t very nice, Oberon,” she said, yanking on her clothes with irritation.

“You hoped it would be.”

“What!”

Auggh! That didn’t help, buddy
.

That’s better
.

“Well, I clearly need to adjust if I’m going to be worth a damn in that shape. I’m sure I disgraced every jaguar on the planet today and deserved to be laughed at. But Gaia chose that form for me, so I need to deal with it if I’m going to serve the earth well. Promise you’ll let me try again later?”

Granuaile petted him and looked over at me. “Where to now?”

“Well, if I’m right, there’s a sort of graduation present waiting for you in Tír na nÓg.”

“An envelope filled with cash and a card signed by all the Tuatha Dé Danann?”