Trapped (The Iron Druid Chronicles, Book Five) (33 page)

“Atticus, that’s not going to work,” Granuaile said.

“Yeah? Well, you try it.”

Granuaile faced Freyja forward so the cats could see her face. “Listen,” she said. “Freyja is hurt.” The cats took sudden interest. Their eyes, indifferent before, were now clearly focused on Granuaile and Freyja. “Your mistress needs help. We need to leave now. Over the wall, back the way we came. Take us to Frigg. Take us to Frigg, and I’ll buy you some tuna.”

At least, I think she said
tuna
. Her words were drowned out by a roar from Hel, who appeared in her half-hot, half-rot form to demand an explanation, her hair touching the ceiling of snotlike mist. Though she was twenty yards away, we could already smell her. “Who killed him?” she wanted to know, the great knife Famine clutched in her skeletal left hand. “Was it Freyja?”

The chariot jerked and we lifted off the ground; Freyja’s cats were suddenly anxious to escape.

“Nope. That was me!” I shouted.

Hel’s eyes focused and then narrowed in recognition. “You! You’re supposed to be dead!”

“You should have learned from the mistakes of the Æsir,” I said. “Never fuck with a Druid!”

I shouldn’t have said that.

As we rose into the clouds of mist, all sounds of battle and rage below muffled by its close stickiness, Hel’s giant right hand followed us in and closed on the open back of the chariot, halting our progress in midair. Granuaile and I yelped, and the cats protested with a noise primarily composed of vowels.

Freyja’s kitties were powerful, and thanks to them Hel couldn’t drag us back down, but neither could we escape. Hel’s right hand was on the “hot” side, and thus it looked lovely and cultured and gave no hint that it belonged to something hideous. Granuaile slapped at her thighs, searching for a knife, but she had thrown them all at Fenris and slammed her bowie knife into his leg. I handed her mine.

She snatched it, cocked it over her shoulder, and threw it directly into the back of that giant lovely hand—not hard enough to pin it to the chariot floor, but hard enough to stick in there. A bellow from below and we shot skyward as the hand disappeared. I think the cats were in a hurry, because we didn’t seem to spend so long in the snot this time. More likely Freyja had taken us through it a bit slower than necessary.

“You poisoned that blade, right?” Granuaile asked.

“Yep. We can always hope. I doubt it will take her out, though.”

I held much more hope that the Black Axes would make it out okay; I’d had no time to assess the state of their forces. I rather feared that the dwarfs in Nidavellir would have to bear a counterattack now. It would be better if Hel were somewhat cowed by this affair and rediscovered caution.

“Hey, Granuaile,” I said once we got clear of the mist and were sailing back to the wall. “Will you ask the cats to keep the portal to Midgard open for the dwarfs?”

“Sure. I don’t know if that’s something they can do, but I’ll try.”

“Thanks. I’d hate to think we were stranding all the dwarfs in Niflheim.”

Red hair streaming behind her in the cold wind, Granuaile asked our transportation to keep the door open for the dwarfs. I distinctly heard a
meow
in reply.

“Oberon was right about you,” I said. “You really are a cat person.”

Sound and light returned to normal once we crossed over the wall. Colors came back, and the thundering of artillery coming from the other side of the wall echoed in our ears. Once we got an angle, I could see that it was significantly damaged and Hel had made absolutely no return fire. She’d never upgraded her own defenses, assuming that she would be the one to make an attack. Perhaps that would keep her busy also.

Someone must have been watching for us, or else the dwarfs used radio or something, for the attack broke off and the ships began to rise to follow our chariot. Looking behind us, I saw more dwarf ships sailing silently over the wall, following us back. I had no way of knowing how many returned, but I knew that honor was important to them and that the dwarfs would feel better for dealing Hel this defeat.

We swerved up the root at a ninety-degree angle but thankfully did not fall out the back of the chariot. There was, instead, just a slight sense of vertigo as we completely ignored gravity.

“I could get used to cat chariots like this,” I said.

We splashed up through the pond and the night sky was full of different stars—earth’s stars—then we banked around until we found a rainbow in the dark. It was on this occasion that I discovered that Granuaile had never
heard of Ronnie James Dio. My shock at this news was such that I almost completely missed the fact that we were traveling on Bifrost, the rainbow bridge to Asgard. Only when we reached Asgard and got a serious frowning from an unknown keeper of the bridge—Heimdall being dead—did I notice that we weren’t on earth anymore. The cats meowed at the frowning man and the rainbow pointed elsewhere; Freyja’s cats promptly followed it back down to Midgard, where it led to the foreman’s manse in the mountains near Ouray.

Granuaile couldn’t believe it. “You mean Frigg never left here?”

“Well, Fjalar went to such trouble to decorate it warmly.”

Outside on the porch, we delivered Freyja into Frigg’s care and reported with great satisfaction that Fenris was dead, Hel’s walls were heavily damaged, and that at least half of the Black Axes, at minimum, would be returning to Nidavellir. Frigg turned her head to a patch of shadow under the roof of the front porch: “Tell him.” Two ravens took flight into the darkness.

Before Fjalar could ask us a question or issue a challenge, Frigg asked him to fix some broth for Freyja. He gave us a dire eye but obeyed without a word.

“Thank you, Druids,” Frigg said. “You have dealt a serious blow to Hel’s plans. We will keep you informed of any developments.”

She bent her head to Freyja then, in clear dismissal, and we made our farewells.

We walked in silence back to our cabin, where Oberon waited, full of something he’d killed and therefore drowsy and uninterested in what we’d been doing.

he said with a yawn and a halfhearted wag of his tail. barely over. Come, humans, fulfill your evolutionary purpose and build your hound a fire.>

We laughed at him, and Granuaile rubbed his belly while I built a small fire for him in the hearth. Once he was satisfied, I made hot chocolate with marshmallows while Granuaile changed out of her blood-soaked shirt. We clinked our cups together in the kitchen and kissed.

“So what now?” Granuaile asked.

“Well, we could go figure out who’s trying to get us killed in Tír na nÓg,” I said, “or start binding your iron amulet to your aura, or find out whether all the evil clowns in the world have been dark elves all along.”

Granuaile poked me in the chest. “I have a better idea. How about introducing me to all the elementals one by one? I’ve only met a few so far.”

“A sort of Druid World Tour? We could make T-shirts with a list of all the elementals on the back.”

“Yeah. But first let’s go somewhere with a name I can’t pronounce that has a really nice hotel with a giant bed in it.”

“Gods below, you are brilliant.”

Oberon roused himself to full wakefulness in the living room.

The giant bed we found in Tlalpujahua, Mexico, had been sufficient for our purposes, and it was not long after that we picked up Oberon from his guest stay at a poodle ranch in Vermont and embarked on the Druid World Tour. I was showing Granuaile some of the Old World doorways to Tír na nÓg that humans could walk. Occasionally, humans discovered them by accident and found themselves in Tír na nÓg, and if they were extraordinarily lucky they managed to find their way back.

The old doors were good to know, I argued, because even though they were sparsely distributed, they functioned even when the trees did not. They were constructed in caves, which were not subject to the same whims and forces that trees were.

Part of the exercise was just damn cool, because caves are like that, and I emphasized this to Granuaile. But, in truth, I had another agenda: I wanted Granuaile to be impossible to catch. Strategically speaking, falling in love with her was a mistake, the sort of thing that Machiavellian types would exploit, for my enemies—vampires, dark elves, you name it—would always view Granuaile as a lever to use against me. She was quite the badass in her own right now, capable of feats I couldn’t match, but during our connubial sequestration
in Mexico it occurred to me that we would have precious little chance to lay low going forward. She’d never get an opportunity to truly enjoy her powers and nurture a sense of harmony in the world as it stood. I kept thinking back to that conversation with Jesus where he said if I’d remained meek, I would have inherited the earth. But there was no going back to that idyllic time when only
one
god wanted to kill me. Now I just wanted the earth to stick around so someone meek could inherit it. And I hoped that we two Druids would manage to stick around as well. I wasn’t nearly through staring at her yet.

We emerged from a cavern in the Apuseni Mountains in Romania; the range—in the western part of the Carpathians, in the old province of Transylvania—was famous for its hundreds of caves. The vista we beheld at the cave’s mouth smacked of the bucolic rather than the vampiric. Sheep and cattle competed contentedly for their share of abundant grassland directly below, a friendly forest waved at us a short distance beyond, and zero stone edifices loomed over the landscape with palpable auras of ickiness.

Oberon asked.

“Yes, I did. It is.”

“Vampires are a bit more discreet than that these days, Oberon.”

“Feel what?”

No sooner had I asked him than I felt it: a trembling in the earth—a building one. I shot a hello and query to the Apuseni elemental. //Greetings / Harmony / Query: Plate event?//

//Greetings / Druids welcome / Advice: Run / Not plate event / God event through me//

“We need to get out of here,” I said, as the ground bucked beneath us. We heard loud cracking reports of stone shattering to our rear: The cavern from which we had just emerged was crumbling and filling in with stone that had been stable for centuries. We scrambled down the hill, across boulders and shale, into the forest below. A minor landslide followed us.

“Someone’s after us,” I explained to Granuaile, who probably hadn’t heard my quick conversation with Apuseni. “Some god is causing this through the elemental. Let’s shift to Colorado.”

“Got it,” she said.

Once down to the friendly forest we’d spied from above, we put our hands to a tethered tree, but it wouldn’t respond; the paths to Tír na nÓg were cut off somehow.

“Pandemonium,” a voice croaked from the branches above. We sought the source and found it: A crow with red eyes stared back at us. It was the Morrigan.

“You won’t find anyplace on the continent that will let you shift away,” she said, and I shuddered involuntarily. It was always disconcerting to hear the crow speak English. “They’ve trapped you here. That earthquake was Neptune’s work, and Faunus will deny you every tether to the Summer Lands. You’ll find the old ways collapsed or guarded. You’re going to need to run for the British Isles, Siodhachan—and I mean literally run all the way there. It’s the only path I’ve seen where you live through this.”

“Live through what?”

“You’ll see. The ankle-winged boys are coming to tell you now.” The crow tossed its beak at something behind us. We turned and looked up.

Hermes and Mercury descended from the sky, pale savage beauty paired with golden pomposity, and the Roman demanded to know what I had done with Bacchus.

“Ask the Fates,” I said, shrugging.

A bolt of lightning lanced down from the heavens to strike Oberon, who first yelped, then barked at the sky.

Oberon was unharmed because of Perun’s fulgurite on his collar, but one of the Olympian sky gods had clearly intended for him to die. It was a message meant to put me in my place, to reduce me to quivering obeisance.

I looked up and spoke loudly: “That was damn rude, Jupiter. The last god of Olympus who was rude to me was Bacchus.”

“Where is he?” Mercury demanded again.

“Why do you wish to know? Have the Roman wine cellars run dry?”

“You will return him or suffer the consequences.”

I shifted my gaze to Hermes and asked, “What is the Greek interest in this?”

Hermes shrugged and spoke in his taut melodious tones: “Olympian solidarity, officially. But, in truth, Artemis was extremely vexed about the kidnapping of the dryads. As was Diana. All nymphs of the wood are sacred to them. This Bacchus affair is their chance to exact revenge for what they promised to forgive.”

I could almost hear Granuaile saying, “I told you we shouldn’t have touched the dryads.” I carefully kept my
gaze on the Olympians so I wouldn’t have to see it in her face.

“Well, Bacchus and Faunus should be blamed for it, not I. They forced me to do it, and, besides, I returned the dryads unharmed as promised.”

Mercury said, “We won’t let you do to the Olympians what you did to the Norse, Druid. Return Bacchus or die.”

“Return him or die? That’s not much of a choice. If I bring Bacchus back, he will kill me.”

The messenger gods didn’t even bother to shrug. They merely raised their eyebrows as if to say, “So?”

“Haven’t you ever heard of
Catch-22
? Throw me a bone here, guys. If I’m going to die either way, what’s the point of giving Bacchus back?”