Hunted (The Iron Druid Chronicles, Book Six)

on us. I released the binding almost immediately, because I didn’t want to hurt the dolphins towing them. But those poor sea serpents were probably working up an appetite with all that thrashing around. I shot an idea to Granuaile and Manannan via Oberon:
Monsters tend to like virgins in the old stories
.
    Two things happened at the same time: Poseidon and Neptune realized that their goddesses were in trouble and stopped pushing the serpents to eat us, and we encouraged the serpents to eat the goddesses.
    Oh, it was a thing of beauty. All seven of them whipped around and dove after the huntresses in a swirling eddy of scales and flesh and then disappeared beneath the waves. Mm-mmm! Goddess Tartar! Double down!
    We had no idea if one snake had eaten both or if they’d gone into different digestive systems. It didn’t really matter. We told all the serpents to flee, and that’s what they did, streaking for the open Atlantic and deeper water. Poseidon and Neptune would rescue Artemis and Diana, of course, and the goddesses would eventually resume their hunt, but there was no way they’d keep us from reaching England now. I stupidly thought we had won.

Chapter 19
    Manannan required a bit of triage once we reached the narrow strip of beach between the white cliffs and the western docks of the port. The arrows sticking out of his back weren’t made of natural materials, and there was nothing we could do but tear them out. He would heal fine, but I suspected he would have precious little patience for the Olympians from now on. Through Oberon, he communicated that he would leave us there and remain in the strait to monitor developments. Though I wanted to ask him about the Morrigan—did he bear her to Tír na nÓg, was she at peace now, and so much more—it was neither practical nor appropriate to speak of such things through my hound, so we thanked him and bade him farewell. He swam off, the holes in his back already closed up. I shifted to human first and unbuckled the belts on Granuaile’s back after unbinding our weapons. Granuaile shifted to human and waded out of the surf with Oberon, who shook himself and sprayed us with hound-scented salt water.
    “All right, let’s get the hell off this plane and thumb our noses at the Olympians,” I said. “There should be a small coppice of trees tethered to Tír na nÓg nearby.”
    Skirting the city in camouflage, we crossed Military Road and then Folkestone Road, which led us to Elms Wood, a sliver of untouched forest that had served as aborder between farms for centuries. We placed our hands (and paws) against the trunk of an elm and searched for the connection to the Fae plane. It wasn’t there.
    “No, not here too!” Granuaile said, slapping the tree trunk in frustration. “How’d they get here ahead of us?”
    “They’ve known where we were headed for a while now,” I said, then added, “Damn it.”
    “So they’ve managed to corrupt the forests here too?”
    “Yes.”
    
    “We’ll go to Kent. There’s an Old Way there that might not be guarded. And if it is, we’ll go just a bit beyond and get what sleep we can during the day before pressing on to Windsor. There’s not enough time to make it there before dawn, and I think we should hit it during the night if we can.”
    Following the procedures we used in our run across Europe, I shifted to a stag and remained visible while Granuaile and Oberon followed in concealment. Running through England was a bit nostalgic for me, having spent quite a bit of time there at various points of my life, but the countryside was far more developed. There used to be more Old Ways, but many had been destroyed in the name of progress, eaten up by the modern world, and there was no real incentive to make any more in protected areas when the system of using trees to shift had been so dependable until recently.
    Still, even at night, we ran through some stretches of English countryside that were utterly sublime. Oberon spotted a herd of sheep sleeping in a pasture and begged me to let him go mess with them.
    O
on the back. I’ll wear it to the dog park and everything.>
    
     When I didn’t