Hunted (The Iron Druid Chronicles, Book Six)

quite a bit more curl and frizz to hers than Granuaile did, and it made her look a bit like an eighties rocker.
    “Maybe if we tie it up in a knot?” Granuaile said.
    “Yes, but first I need to straighten.” Flidais improvised a binding that had simply never occurred to me—or to Granuaile either—and the kinks smoothed out until her hair lay flat and wavy like Granuaile’s.
    
    “Amazing,” Granuaile said, smiling.
    “Tie up your hair as you like and I will copy it,” Flidais said.
    Granuaile gathered and twisted her hair behind her in a practiced series of movements. When she was finished, it was tight against her scalp, pulled back from her ears, and piled in a neat sort of bun on top. Flidais studied it for a few seconds and then produced a matching bun on her head.
    “Not bad at all,” Granuaile said.
    “Here, let’s face him,” the huntress said.
    They turned toward me, side by side, so that I could compare. Same height and build, same skin tone, though Granuaile had a few more freckles. The hair looked identical now. Up close you could tell that Flidais’s clothes were made of a different material, but from even a mild distance away it would simply be a black silhouette. Likewise, the minor differences in facial featurescould be easily distinguished up close, but from a distance in a combat situation, anyone would have trouble telling them apart.
    “That’ll work,” I said. “How shall we proceed?”
    “We will appear from the flanks one at a time and throw a knife before going invisible again. We will alternate until we run out of knives—we only have five total, correct?”
    Granuaile nodded. She had three, to Flidais’s two.
    “Then you should go first,” Flidais said. “To them it will appear that the same person is teleporting around them. Quite the distraction. Someone should be able to take advantage of that.” She arched an eyebrow at me and I nodded.
    “If it turns out to be possible, target Diana,” I said. “She’s probably a bit more invested in this than Artemis is, and anything we can do to slow her down would be good.”
    With all of us agreed, we separated to lie in wait. I continued deeper into the woods on the same path, Flidais took off to my left, and Granuaile melted into the trees with Oberon to my right. Once I’d traveled another fifty yards or so and turned around to face my trail, the directions were switched, with Granuaile waiting somewhere off to my left and Flidais to the right.
    I drew Fragarach from its sheath and stood so that I had a good view through the trees. The first gray fingers of dawn were reaching through the canopy.
    I cast camouflage as a helicopter chopped the air above the Home Park, probably very near where we had paused after the explosion. These days, British security would be prone to suspect any attack on Windsor Castle as a terrorist strike, and not even in their wildest theories would they suspect that someone was simply trying to slam a door in my face. The two men that Granuaile and I had rendered unconscious by Frogmore Housewould become a part of the investigation now, and satellite feeds from that area would be scoured. One frame we’d be there and then the next we’d disappear. That would make them start searching in an ever-widening circle, and eventually they’d get here—maybe would even spot Artemis and Diana as they were inbound. That would complicate matters. Our duel required privacy.
    I shuddered merely thinking the word. This wouldn’t be a duel. There wouldn’t be any rules or codes. They would simply come at me knowing that the worst I could do to them was deliver some brief pain and annoyance.
    How to placate an implacable foe? The Morrigan’s advice came back to me:
Gaia loves us more than she loves the Olympians
. The solution, I realized to my chagrin, was to take hostages—figuratively as well as literally. I am not a fan of taking hostages, since it’s an act of desperation and so rarely works, and when I kicked Bacchus through a portal it was more to save my life than anything else. But now I could see how the Olympians would view it as a hostage situation. Right now my leverage was tenuous: On the one hand they said they wanted Bacchus back, but on the other a couple of them were doing everything they could to snuff me. The leverage could