Hunted (The Iron Druid Chronicles, Book Six)

plates and stole the bacon sides from the pancakes while the waiters were out of the kitchen, and the cook never noticed. The pancakes she left behind utterly failed to raise the alarm.
    I felt sorry about the inevitable argument that would erupt when our theft was discovered—especially sorry to give the waitress an excuse to yell at the cook—but we were hungry and in a hurry and nobody’s lives were at stake but ours.
    Try to chew it slowly and enjoy it
, I said, putting the plate down for Oberon.
     he said as he laid into it. He gave a soft whine of appreciation.
    Glad you like it, buddy. There’s no shortage of bacon here. In fact, you can have mine
.
    with a side of bacon?
I love you, Atticus. If I ever have puppies, I’m going to tell them stories about this food. It’s legendary.>
    A heated exchange of Polish boiled through the screen door, and my pork chops tasted of guilt sauce. We had to chow down anyway. Any meal at this point could be our last. The waitress and the cook eventually broke it off and she exited the kitchen, no doubt to inform her customers that their breakfasts would take a bit longer.
    We were just about finished when two large ravens descended with thunderous backwings that sounded like chopper blades. Each of them had a familiar white gleam in one eye. They landed on the woodpile and squawked at me.
    “Hugin and Munin,” I said. “To what do I owe the pleasure?” One raven—I couldn’t tell them apart—squawked and shoved his beak in my direction, then squawked again while pointing with his beak to the other raven.
    “You want me to talk to that one? Hi there. Oh! I see.” It wanted me to mentally bond with the other raven. Activating my charm for magical sight, I had to blink a little bit at the intensity of white magic emanating from the two birds. But once I could focus, I found the consciousness of the indicated raven and reached out to it. Images slammed into my head, aerial views of Artemis and Diana racing across the Polish border nearDukla, each of them in a fancy new chariot pulled by four golden-horned stags. They were running side by side, following our trail across a familiar alfalfa field, when the earth gave out from under them and they fell into our pit trap. They tried to leap out of the chariots and make it back to solid ground but weren’t in time; they’d been moving quickly, and the stags pulled those floating chariots down. A grind house of gore and screaming ensued. Though I felt sorry for the stags, I didn’t feel the least bit distressed at seeing the goddesses impaled on the wooden pikes we’d left at the bottom. They’d have to heal up from that, somehow get out of the pit, and get yet another brace of chariots and new teams to pull them. They’d be going a bit slower, but they would never give up now that I had personally wounded them. I needed a long-term solution more than ever, and I didn’t have one.
    The scene shifted; Artemis and Diana in the gray sky of an early dawn—it must have been the same one we experienced a few hours ago—looking none the worse for suffering what would be mortal wounds to anyone else and gathering themselves to begin again outside the pit. They had new chariots, new stags, and now a pack of seven hounds each. I remembered the hounds from mythology; they had been gifts from Pan and Faunus. Each goddess blew into a horn, and the hounds leapt ahead on our trail. They waited for a few seconds and then followed behind in their chariots. If we tried another pit trap, the hounds would fall in first and the huntresses would be able to see that in time to avoid it.
    But it had worked. It had taken us about eight hours to get from the pit trap to here, and it was about three hours after dawn now, so if the huntresses began at dawn, that meant they were about five or maybe six hours behind us now.
    The link broke and the raven I’d bonded with—clearly Munin, since I’d seen a memory—pointed