Hunted (The Iron Druid Chronicles, Book Six)

I’ll be there soon. I need to snag some flashlights from the border station.” Oberon opened his mouth extra wide to carry both my scabbard and Granuaile’s knives.
     he said.
    “Enough complaining.”
    
    I doubled back in camouflage, not caring if the huntresses saw the footprints. Let them follow me to the guard station at the border and wonder what I did there.
    What I did was throw a couple of rocks at the guardhouse windows. Two guards obligingly came out with flashlights shining into the night, resting their hands onthe butts of their guns and calling out warnings to the dark. I snatched their flashlights away, turned them off, and then cast camouflage on them. From the guards’ point of view, the flashlights had leapt out of their hands and disappeared. They drew their guns but they couldn’t find a target in the dark. I was already running back to the alfalfa field, chased by Polish curses that seemed to Doppler-shift bizarrely into “Never Gonna Give You Up,” and after I thought of it I couldn’t believe I’d just rickrolled myself.
    Once I reached the field, I kept trucking across it with my human feet. There was no need to switch up my form for consistency; all the goddesses needed to do was follow me across. Underneath the opposite cover of trees, we made contact with Carpathia. Granuaile wanted a bit of help and some permission to harvest some living tree branches, while I explained the tunnel we needed and then the pit in the middle of the pasture that needed to be hollowed out while leaving the surface undisturbed. Artemis and Diana needed to see that swath of trampled alfalfa and follow directly in our paths.
    Despite Carpathia’s aid, building the trap took an hour. Moving the earth and hidden rocks in the ground wasn’t that much trouble for the elemental—only the work of a few minutes or so—but it took us multiple trips through the tunnel to populate the pit with sharpened stakes. We could carry only so much, because we had to carry the flashlights too. Our night vision was sufficient for the work outside, but that wouldn’t cut it in the total darkness of underground. Planting the stakes in the bottom of the pit so that they’d remain steady took the majority of the time.
    The pit itself was rather deep at twenty feet, and Oberon was impressed. To him it was an epic feat of engineering.
    
    “Not nearly so deep,” I replied.
    fwoosh
when he hit the bottom?>
    “He’d go something, but probably not
fwoosh
.” I was worried that the goddesses would avoid the stakes somehow. Their teams would fall in first, after all, and they might land on their teams and thereby avoid injury. I wanted it to be difficult to hop out if they somehow managed to avoid the stakes, and even I don’t have a twenty-foot vertical leap. But what if they had some sort of levitation enchantment on their chariots? In the brief glimpse of the chariots that I’d had before the goddesses fired at us, I thought the chariots were floating slightly off the ground. I couldn’t recall if their teams had been floating too. If so, then we’d probably wasted an hour. But if not, then the stags would fall in and drag the chariots down by their harness. Maybe. I hoped that, one way or another, falling into the pit would cause the goddesses at least an hour’s inconvenience, if not more, in addition to slowing down their subsequent rate of pursuit. The Morrigan had bought us a few hours of time when she had unbound their chariots, since they had to wait awhile to get new ones from Hephaestus and Vulcan. We were eating into that time now. With luck, the pit trap would gain us half a day’s lead on them.
    The roof of the pit was nothing but a finely woven carpet of alfalfa roots strengthened with a binding in the middle to prevent sagging. Carpathia closed up the tunnel behind us as we left.
    We hoofed it out of there to the northwest, loping downhill now, planning to skirt the Polish city of Jasło to the southwest. By following that general course—keeping to rural areas as best we could but darting into villages here and