Hounded

Rey, is sans pareil in my esteem, and her enthusiasm for Atticus and Oberon is the reason you hold this book in your hand today. Her assistant editor, Mike Braff, tolerated my puerile shenanigans with great good humor and proved to be a font of wisdom regarding all things Nordic.
    While the characters and events in Hounded are entirely fictional, one could, if one were so inclined, visit parts of the setting in Arizona. Third Eye Books and Herbs rests where the real-life comic shop of my cousin, Drew Sullivan, lies on Ash Avenue in Tempe; Tony Cabin is still out there in the Superstition Mountains, and the land around it is thankfully not dead; Rúla Búla on Mill Avenue is indeed one of the finest Irish pubs anywhere, and I have yet to find a plate of fish and chips that comes close to theirs.
    Linguistics aficionados may notice that while the Sisters of the Three Auroras are Polish, they use a decidedly Russian name—the Zoryas—for the star goddesses from which they derive their powers. The Zoryas are known throughout the Slavic world by one name or another (such as Zvezda, Zwezda, Zorza, etc.), but since most of the coven was born in the nineteenth century, when the eastern portion of Poland was occupied by Russia, it made sense (to me) to have them use the Russian name. No one is required to agree that this makes sense; I explain this merely to give the impression that my backstory is remarkably thorough and well-researched.

Clan Rathskeller

    By Kevin Hearne
    This story takes place ten months before the events of Hounded, the first book in The Iron Druid Chronicles . Decembers in Arizona are decidedly cool, but not what I would call cold. People shop at outdoor malls like Tempe Marketplace wearing nothing but a light sweater, and they utterly fail to slip on black ice or lose toes to frostbite, because those dangers don’t exist in the desert. For similar reasons, they fail to get inhaled by ravenous yeti or snacked on by esurient cephalopods. One would think they’d also be safe from the attentions of sociopathic kobolds, but I discovered, to my chagrin on a Monday night, that this was not the case.
    Tempe Marketplace is a sprawling shopping mecca anchored by a large cinema and some glowing big-box stores. Near the cinema, smaller retailers and a host of restaurants huddle around like Dickensian orphans, hoping for a scrap of post-movie commerce to feed their hungry bottom lines. ( » Please sir, spend some more. « ) A cobbled walkway sprinkled with upscale patio furniture and water features permits shoppers to feel casual and la-di-dah at the same time. Best of all, there isn’t any canned music blaring through eight-bit speakers, a rare and special blessing while shopping in America. The music is live Thursday through Saturday nights because the mall sponsors free concerts on its outdoor stage, always featuring family-friendly bands who play as if they’re contractually bound to avoid minor chords. The stage gets used for other events the rest of the week, like visits from Santa Claus and his elves.
    The dads were home watching Monday Night Football and the moms had brought out their kids to see Saint Nick and maybe shop a bit for their husbands. ASU students and young hipsters were crowding into San Felipe’s Cantina for happy hour, as well as a few older members of the twenty-something-and-single demographic. I could see them all because San Felipe’s was missing most of its walls, opting instead for a low metal fence behind which customers could legally pound a brewski and enjoy the show, if there was one, as the cantina sat directly opposite the stage. It was between the stage and San Felipe’s that I first became aware that something was profoundly wrong. That was because Oberon, my dog, smelled something that wasn’t human.
    Oberon is an Irish wolfhound, and though he’s a sight hound, his nose is still much better than my human one. And since I’d bound my consciousness to his and he’d gradually picked up my language through the link, he’s not limited to barks and wagging his tail when he wants to tell me something. He says it in his mind, and I hear it in mine.
    › Atticus, there’s something here that isn’t human, ‹ he said.
    That would be you, Oberon. Or me, if you want to get fussy with the definition .
    › No, I mean it’s something I’ve never smelled before. But it’s not a plant, and nothing like any animal I remember. Kind of earthy. ‹
    That gave me an acute case