Hunted (The Iron Druid Chronicles, Book Six)

gray.Adrenaline coursed through me as I attempted to get my bearings. Cold earth shifted under my right side, and I winced at the pain this small movement caused in my head. Stretching out with my left arm and feeling the boundaries of the space with my fingers, I quickly discovered that I was in a small chamber underground, obviously with some rudimentary air circulation. Fragarach rested in front of my face in its scabbard. Beyond that I had no idea where I was, except that Granuaile and Oberon weren’t with me. We had been running for our lives. Why was I not running? Why had I been reviewing my life with such self-loathing?
    //Query: Carpathia?//
    //No. Saxony//
    Saxony was a German elemental. Why was I in Germany? We’d been in Poland, and Hugin and Munin had visited us. Then we’d run, and … yes, we had crossed into Germany. There had been that attempt to find an Old Way to Tír na nÓg, and then we found that envelope on the tree—Oh.
    //Query: How did I get here?//
    //Fierce Druid placed you here / Thought you deceased//
    I blinked as I processed the fact that elementals had decided to refer to Granuaile as Fierce Druid. //Query: Then why do I have space and air to breathe?//
    //I provided / Druid had not moved on//
    No, I hadn’t. And apparently I didn’t rate an adjective in front of my title. I was just plain old Druid.
    //Query: What happened to me?//
    //Projectile impact to head//
    Someone had shot me? So
that’s
why my head ached. My fingers trailed up to my head and gently traced their way around it. There was a dimple near my left temple that hadn’t been there before, and it was tender. I was sure the exit wound on the other side had been heinous,but I didn’t want to lift my head and probe it. I was still healing.
    I let my hand drop down to my necklace, where I groped for the last charm on the left side of my necklace, the one I’d never used before.
    “Guess you worked after all,” I said.
    Granuaile had asked me what it was for once. I told her it was my version of a soulcatcher. I’d made it in response to Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. I was a medic for the Russians during that time and saw what musket fire could do, what it meant for an old Druid who had protections against magic but not against high-velocity hunks of lead. I’d seen guns before that, of course, but had avoided them as best as I could. Joining the Russians had been a sort of fact-finding tour, with the sterling bonus that I got to wear those fun furry hats.
    I decided I’d be able to survive most any hit to the body, given time to heal, except for a direct hit to the heart. I could armor myself against that. Shots to the head, however, presented a rather monumental problem. Brain death didn’t allow one time to heal, and the brain was the warehouse for the spirit. Punch a hole in that and you’d shuffle off your mortal coil right away.
    Keeping your coil unshuffled was the problem. Healing of the gross physical body could happen on autopilot as long as my tattoos had contact with the earth; I didn’t need to consciously direct that, and it technically didn’t require a beating heart. But keeping my spirit anchored to my body with a hole in my head—well, that was tougher and, as it happens, entirely necessary to keep the healing happening.
    It was sometime during the process of binding my cold iron amulet to my aura that I realized I was really altering the nature of my spirit, and if I could do that to my spirit, I might be able to do other things as well. I spent years perfecting my other charms, until I decidedin the nineteenth century to attempt the soulcatcher. (Despite the recent name I’d given to the charm, I am reluctant to use the word
soul
—it has some pretty awful baggage with it, the kind that’s been roughed up quite a bit and thrown around without any regard for what might be inside.) As I told Granuaile once, I had no idea whether it would work or not; to test it, I’d have to die.
    And I guess I had died. With rare exceptions, people who get shot in the head do that. Granuaile wouldn’t have buried me if my heart had been beating. So the charm had worked precisely as I had intended.
    All of my charms are triggered by mental commands; without them, I’d have to speak the words aloud every time for every binding, as Granuaile does. But you can’t very well trigger a mental command when your brain has been blown out. So I had triggered it back in the nineteenth century and hoped