Hunted (The Iron Druid Chronicles, Book Six)

powers arrayed against me are too numerous and in a different league. I’m not going to quit, but I feel like I’m on a soccer team losing 3–0 with ten minutes left on the clock. While winning in that scenario is still theoretically possible, I don’t see a way to make it happen all by myself and I half-wish that the end would hurry up and get here, banishing the dread of its approach.
    We crossed the border into the Netherlands, and the elemental directed me to turn sharply to the southwest to avoid the bulk of cities by the sea. We’d have had to turn south at some point anyway to reach the French coast.
    It’s odd, sometimes, how a border can seemingly change the character of the land. The German landscapehad been sharp, clean, and precise, whereas the Dutch, even at night, had a bit of a gauzy filter over it, as if the ghost of Rembrandt had pulled his brush across it to soften the edges just a little bit. The colors I saw in my night vision, too, appeared subtly textured and mixed by the master, not so stark as they had been in Germany. Or perhaps it was no different at all, and only my melancholia made it so.
    Noting the change of direction, Oberon said in a subdued tone,
    
    He let some time pass, and all we heard was the pounding of my hooves and the pads of his paws on the earth. They beat out a rhythm of cycling thought, the percussive notes repeating
Atticus
over and over if you were inclined to hear it that way, and we were. Then he said,
    
    
    The horns sounded again. Perhaps my imagination magnified the sound a bit.
    
    
    Predator
? Yeah, I’ve seen it.>
    
     I felt as if my eyes should be flooding with tears, but horses don’t cry the same way humans do. Oberon continued, not waiting for me to finish.
    
    
    
    
    
     I told him.
    
    Oberon abruptly quit running, and I had to stop too. We were in the middle of a large barley field.
     He turned to face the northeast and growled.
    My instinct for self-preservation spoke up. It told me I could survive this. I could drop Scáthmhaide, abandonOberon, and turn into a peregrine falcon. I could fly straight across the channel to England, find a tethered tree, and shift away to safety. They couldn’t have pandemonium going on over there too, I thought. Somewhere in