Bücher online kostenlos Kostenlos Online Lesen
Hunted (The Iron Druid Chronicles, Book Six)

Hunted (The Iron Druid Chronicles, Book Six)

Titel: Hunted (The Iron Druid Chronicles, Book Six) Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: Kevin Hearne
Vom Netzwerk:
thing
, I explained to Oberon.
You’ve been with me many years now and probably don’t remember how tough it was at first
.
    
    When Granuaile thinks she’s ready. It will probably be a while, buddy
. Bonding them too soon might overwhelm Orlaith, and I needed to remember to remind Granuaile of that.
You can just enjoy her as she is in the meantime, right?
    
    The days passed quickly with training and play until it was time to travel back to Tír na nÓg. I’d asked Hal Hauk to start liquidating some of my assets and converting them to gold, and one of his pack members, Greta, was tasked with delivering it to the cabin. It was her second trip there—a rather long one from Tempe—and she made it clear that she hated the drive. She turned her car around on the road and honked, never gettingout. Once I walked around to the driver’s side, she rolled down the window and dropped a heavy sack on the ground in front of me.
    “A giant bag of gold I can understand, but making me drive up here to deliver those Girl Scout Cookies and whiskey? That makes you a whole new species of asshole,” she said, then stepped on the accelerator and peeled down the hill, leaving me in a cloud of dust. I coughed a bit but grinned. I knew what to get her for the holidays. I hefted the sack and, after bidding farewell to Granuaile and the hounds, took it with me to pay Goibhniu and thereby finance the stealth war against vampires.
    When I got there and paddled the canoe out to Zealot Island, Goibhniu had already extracted its inhabitant from the slow time and placed him on a makeshift bed on the barge. In keeping with his promise to the Morrigan, he’d called in Fand, who was leaning over the man, lending her healing powers and the miraculous bacon of Manannan Mac Lir’s hogs to his recuperation—for, as expected, he had broken quite a few bones in the shock of removal. She smiled as I approached and said, “Ah, here he is! Your savior. I’ll let you two talk.” She winked at me and whispered, “He’s doing very well considering his age, even with our help.” Her surprise and curiosity about his identity were unspoken but clear.
    It wasn’t a mystery to me why he healed so fast, but I felt it best to keep his identity a secret for a while longer. Ignoring her nonverbal query, I simply said, “Thank you.” She complimented my new haircut with a faint trace of sarcasm and took the hint, leaving us alone.
    A weathered visage underneath a pair of bushy white eyebrows scowled at me in querulous confusion, one gloved hand holding up to his mouth a strip of bacon, which he gnawed on with gusto. He was having trouble placing me—my haircut was quite severe. I’d had toshave my head because most of the hair on the left side had been torn out by the tooth faeries, and now there was only a couple weeks’ stubble showing. His curt voice was laced with irritation as he spat in Old Irish, “Say something, y’poxy pile of shite.” A small chunk of bacon launched itself from his teeth by way of punctuation.
    Normally, such a greeting would elicit from me an assertion that I had enjoyed the company of his mother the previous evening, but, considering who it was, I toned it down a bit. “The good news is that you’re still alive after all these years. The bad news is that you’re still alive after all these years.”
    The eyebrows writhed in sinuous fashion atop his brow, wrestling for dominance on his face, until recognition hit him and they drew together in their customary configuration, a severe roof over an angry grimace. “You? Bloody Siodhachan!” Little bacon-flavored flecks of spittle flew from his lips. Deciding this wasn’t enough, he hawked up something gross and spat on the deck before continuing, “Gods damn it, how long was I on that thrice-cursed island? Nobody will tell me. You’ve gone and cocked everything up again, haven’t ye?”
    My old archdruid literally hadn’t aged a day since the Morrigan put him on the island, and he was still as charming as ever.

For the Confederacy of Nerds:
AK, Barushka, Alan, Tooth,
and Pilot John

Acknowledgments
    In case you might be interested, I’ve included a couple of goodies on my website ( www.kevinhearne.com ) that couldn’t appear in the book. The first is a Google map of the run across Europe. The second is a much longer retelling of
The Wooing of Étaín
by

Weitere Kostenlose Bücher