Hunted (The Iron Druid Chronicles, Book Six)

of Random House, Inc., in 2012
    eISBN: 978-0-345-53877-2
    www.delreybooks.com
    Cover design: David G. Stevenson
Cover illustration: © Gene Mollica
    v3.1

Pronunciation Guide
    As always, please remember that while I provide these for reference, I’m completely okay with you pronouncing these names however you wish, because the entire point of reading is to enjoy yourself and not stress out about unusual names from mythology. If, however, you enjoy knowing how to pronounce them, here you go:
    Irish
    Aillil = ALL-yill (In
The Wooing of Étaín
, this name is held by both Étaín’s father and the brother of Eochaid Airem. It’s used here to refer to the brother.)
    Amergin = AV er ghin (legendary Irish bard whose name is spelled and pronounced many different ways. The modern Irish spelling is
Amhairghin
and pronounced something like OUR yin, but the Morrigan would use the Old Irish spelling and pronunciation.)
    Brí Léith = Bree LAY (the
síd
or home of Midhir)
    Eochaid Airem = OH het EH rem (High King of Ireland once upon a time)
    Étaín = eh TEEN (so epically hot they wrote an epic about her)
    Fódhla = FOH-la (one of the poetic names of Ireland and the name of the Irish elemental)
    Fúamnach = FOO am nah (Midhir’s wife)
    Midhir = ME er (member of the Tuatha Dé Danann; half brother to Aenghus Óg and Brighid)
    Orlaith = OR la (Yep, that –ith on the end is just to make it look pretty)
    Polish
    Dukla = DOOK la
    Gościniec pod Furą = gohsht NEE etz pohd FOO roh (basically long
o
wherever you see
oh
)
    Jasło = YAHS woh
    Katowice = Kat oh VEET suh (city in southern Poland)
    Pustków Wilczkowski = POOST kov wiltch KOV ski
    Sokołowska = SO ko WOV ska
    Wojownika = Vai yov NEE ka
    Wrocław = Vroht SWOF
    Żubrówka = Zhu BRUF ka (bison grass vodka, popular in Poland and available here, quite tasty mixed with apple juice or cider)

Translation Note
    There is a passage in the novel where Atticus recites some verses from Dante’s
Purgatorio
in the original Italian, but he neglects to share an English translation. I have duplicated the verses here and followed each with a translation by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
    From Canto V:
            
Là ’ve ’l vocabol suo diventa vano
,
    arriva’ io forato ne la gola
,
    fuggendo a piede e sanguinando il piano
.
    There where the name thereof becometh void
    Did I arrive, pierced through and through the throat,
    Fleeing on foot, and bloodying the plain.
            
Quivi perdei la vista e la parola;
    nel nome di Maria fini’, e quivi
    caddi, e rimase la mia carne sola
.
    There my sight lost I, and my utterance
    Ceased in the name of Mary, and thereat
    I fell, and tenantless my flesh remained.

Chapter 1
    It’s odd how when you feel safe you can’t think of that thing it was you kept meaning to do, but when you’re running for your life you suddenly remember the entire list of things you never got around to doing.
    I always wanted to get blindly drunk with a mustachioed man, take him back to his place, do a few extra shots just this side of severe liver damage, and then shave off half his mustache when he passed out. I would then install surveillance equipment before I left so that I could properly appreciate his reaction (and his hangover) when he woke up. And of course I would surveil him from a black windowless van parked somewhere along his street. There would be a wisecracking computer science graduate from MIT in the van with me who almost but not quite went all the way once with a mousy physics major who dumped him because he didn’t accelerate her particles.
    I can’t remember when I thought that one up and added it to my list. It was probably after I saw
True Lies
. It was never particularly high up on my list, for obvious reasons, but the memory came back to me, fully fantasized in Technicolor, once I was running for my life in Romania. Our minds are mysteries.
    Somewhere behind me, the Morrigan was fighting off two goddesses of the hunt. Artemis and Diana had decidedthat I needed killing, and the Morrigan had pledged to protect me from such violent death. Oberon ran on my left and Granuaile on my right; all around me, the forest quaked silently with the pandemonium of Faunus, disrupting Druidic tethers to Tír na nÓg. I could not shift away to safety. All I could do was run and curse the ancient Greco–Romans.
    Unlike the Irish and the Norse—and many other cultures—the Greco–Romans did not imagine their gods as eternally youthful but