Hunted (The Iron Druid Chronicles, Book Six)

slick ankle boots like Leifhad been wearing, the kind with extra-long pointy toes. Not exactly beachwear. His suit was gray with a gray paisley waistcoat, and a silk cravat in an alarming soda-pop orange writhed around his neck, seemingly aware of its own hideousness.
    It could be no other than Werner Drasche. I had to admit that Leif was right—he dressed like a dandy. But I think perhaps the idea behind the cravat was to distract from his face. His cheeks were entirely tattooed with alchemical symbols, the sort of squiggly signs that are reminiscent of astrology but based in elemental magic. They didn’t cross his nose or mouth, but they continued above his brow and onto his shaven scalp. I didn’t have time to examine them closely, but I’m sure they weren’t a random configuration; they were equations. Formulae. And they represented a binding to the elements of life, the way my tattoos were a binding to the earth. Leif had called them “odd cosmetic decisions,” but that was either an understatement or a failure to understand what they represented. Probably the latter: A vampire would have no need to understand alchemy.
    I did not bother introducing myself. He knew who I was already. “Why are you looking for me?” I called while he was still twenty yards away.
    He answered me in German.
“Manche Leute muss man einfach umbringen,”
he said, and then reached into his suit and pulled a Glock 20 from a shoulder holster. I energized the binding I’d made and watched him spread out his arms in a futile attempt to regain balance as he was yanked backward onto the beach and held there by his suit jacket. He held on to the gun, but he was spread-eagled now and unable to point it at me.
    I was a little bit stunned at his stone-cold attitude; he’d simply announced his intention to kill me and pulled a gun.
    If Leif had been telling the truth, this was the ladwho’d arranged to have me shot. Whether or not it was true, he’d just tried to kill me himself. And he was trying again, albeit in a different way. Raising his bald head from the sand and baring his teeth, he tried to drain me. I felt the hit on my cold iron amulet; it pulled away from my chest as if someone were tugging on it.
    My patience bid farewell. Though I would have much rather spoken with Herr Drasche in an attempt to learn more about Theophilus, he had now put us on a kill-or-be-killed footing three different times. Removing Fragarach from its scabbard, I charged with the intention of decapitating him, but then a sudden thought caused me to change my mind. Instead, I brought the blade down hard on his right arm between the wrist and elbow, severing it and spraying blood on the sand.
    “Manchen Leuten muss man einfach ihre Hände abhacken,”
I told him. He bellowed incoherently as I sheathed Fragarach and picked up his amputated hand. Making sure he could see me, I removed the Glock 20 from its grip and tossed it into the ocean. Admiring the simplicity of it, I shrugged and followed up by tossing his hand into the ocean too.
    When Werner saw that, his roar went subhuman, and I felt through my tattoos that he was drawing energy from the earth—but not in the same way that I did. All the little microorganisms in the sand, any insects or small vertebrates nearby—he was draining them all since he couldn’t drain me. I pointed Fragarach at him and said, “Stop that, or you lose the other hand.” He stopped, taking loud gasps of breath between clenched teeth, but I noticed that his arm ceased squirting blood and a flicker of orange lit his eyes.
    “Now that you’re disarmed,” I said in German, “I’m curious. You wish to kill me but appear to know very little about what I can do. It leads me to speculate on your source of information. Since your source obviouslyleft out some critical details regarding my abilities, perhaps he or she was less than honest regarding other things as well. Now, I will freely tell you that I was informed of your existence less than thirty minutes ago. This intelligence came from a vampire named Leif Helgarson.”
    Werner Drasche cursed creatively and I smiled.
    “Ah, yes. We have both been played, you and I. Leif expected me to kill you before I could learn of his role in sending you after me. Am I correct in thinking your removal would allow him to get closer to Theophilus?”
    The lifeleech considered, then nodded.
    “And he warned me of your coming in order to gain a measure of my trust. But I have had