Hunted (The Iron Druid Chronicles, Book Six)

attention? With caves you can hide the guardians inside.
    We had to turn due south to get to Dubringer Moor, skirting a huge lignite strip mine at Kausche but otherwise enjoying the mixed evergreen and deciduous forests that surrounded wee hamlets until we arrived at the moor. Trees grew out of some juicy ground around the edges of it, but near the center it was a swampy marshland. I stopped at a birch tree that had three knots reminiscent of a triskele on one side. After looking around to make sure we were unobserved, I shifted to human and drew Fragarach from its scabbard.
    “Ready?” I asked.
    Granuaile shape-shifted and held Scáthmhaide at the ready. “Yep. Go.”
    In the magical spectrum the Old Way was plain to see, but Oberon couldn’t see it at all and I didn’t want him to step off. “We’ll go slow. Look and listen for guardians.Don’t forget the treetops. And, Oberon, if you smell anything weird, let us know.”
    
    “And stay close to us. Single file. No chasing squirrels or anything else.”
    
    We advanced ten paces to another birch, directly south of the first one. “Walk around this counterclockwise,” I said, demonstrating, “and then we go west.” They followed me to the tree next door and then we turned south.
    Oberon asked,
    “No, you can’t, buddy, I’m sorry. The path itself is the tether to Tír na nÓg. It can be walked both ways. If a tree dies, then the path gets adjusted a tiny bit, but it essentially remains the same. The alder tree at the end of this must be the twentieth different tree anchoring this Old Way since I learned about it. And the same goes for the birch where we began. But if you step off the path, you have to start over.”
    We crept through the birches, following a sinuous trail and stopping periodically to listen and watch for trouble. Nothing alarmed us, aside from the paranoia that every step brought. We kept expecting faeries or some sort of monster from Greco–Roman myth to jump on us, but we had this portion of the moor to ourselves. When we reached the alder tree, I grew super-cautious, peering up into the canopy.
    “There has to be something here,” I said. “It can’t be that easy.”
    “What’s easy?”
    “This is it right here. We walk around that tree three times and we’re in Tír na nÓg. Boom. Escaped. We shift to the New World and send all these ass bananas a postcard that says, suck it, you’ll never trap us again. But it doesn’t make sense.”
    “Maybe they forgot about this one?” Granuaile ventured.
    “Maybe. Maybe they’re just being clever with their ambushes. Maybe someone’s invisible?”
    “Let’s check the magical spectrum.”
    “Already there, but go ahead, you might see something I didn’t.”
    Granuaile scanned the tree and noted it had a whisper of color about it as a tether, but there wasn’t anything else to be seen. Nothing glowing in the canopy. Nothing glowing on the ground.
    “Oberon, what do you smell?” Granuaile asked.
    His nose twitched for a few moments before he gave a mental shrug.
    “All right, we’ll just take it slow.” I crept forward and led them toward the alder tree. We had to go clockwise around this one. I peered up into the branches but spied no threats. The first orbit around the tree was uneventful, and I began to hope. But the second trip around put us halfway between the planes, and we saw what was waiting for us if we kept going: A semitransparent second world overlaid the one we were walking. And waiting there, in Tír na nÓg, one more circle around the tree, was the guardian we’d been expecting all along.
    I should say, rather, that we expected
a
guardian—but not this particular guardian.
    “Eep!” Granuaile squeaked, startled. Oberon barked at it. I raised Fragarach and watched it carefully. It smiled at us with three rows of jagged teeth but did not move, except to raise its tail. The end of it was blackened and bristling with what looked like very large cactus thorns. Except for the tail and the human face with an abnormally toothy grin, it had the body of a red lion. The face was framed all around by a magnificent mane,with the lush hair growing out from the neck reminding me of nineteenth-century American Romantic poets.
    “If that’s what I think it is, then it’s not Greco–Roman,” Granuaile said, “and it’s not Fae either.”
    “No, this guy