![Hunted (The Iron Druid Chronicles, Book Six)]()
Hunted (The Iron Druid Chronicles, Book Six)
keep running.>
There was a pause before the answer came.
She was right about that. The huntresses would be coming along and we couldn’t delay. It occurred to me that perhaps the elves’ sole function was to delay us.
The last time we’d encountered dark elves was in Thessalonika, and we barely escaped. There were fewer of them here, however, and Granuaile was now a full Druid with powers they probably did not expect.
Did the vampire know what we could do to him? He might be a young one and somewhat out of the loop regarding Druids. But I saw his utility to the group: He was a sensor array. We would not be able to sneak up on them unawares. He’d smell us or hear us far in advance.
Granuaile shifted but remained invisible and evidently had a complaint when she asked Oberon for her throwing knives, for I heard my hound say,
I shifted to human and focused on the vampire, speaking the words that would separate him into nothing more than carbon, water, and trace elements. With him gone, the dark elves would have to rely on their more limited senses. I heard Granuaile’s footsteps fade as she ran down the slope toward the road. She would flank them to the north while I would be charging in from the northeast.
Alerted by something he either smelled or heard, the vampire turned and pointed in my direction, but he crumpled inside his clothing once I energized the binding, and his jeans dropped to the ground with a sort of red sludge spilling out the legs. I dropped my camouflage, drew Fragarach, and charged, naked and howling, just like we Celts used to do in the good old days.
For their part, the dark elves dropped all pretense of being human. Upon the vampire’s demise, they pulled out page one of their playbook from
Sigr af Reykr
, the martial art that means Victory from Smoke, and turned incorporeal to avoid getting stabbed or shot or otherwise ambushed. It would have been a fabulous tactic against someone who couldn’t view them in the magical spectrum; they would have melted into the night and been untraceable. But I could see them plainly as clouds of white energy, and, furthermore, I knew they could maintain their smoke forms for only five seconds. They could spend as little as one second in corporeal form before turning to smoke again, but for that one second they would be vulnerable, and if I was right, once theywere wounded, they couldn’t go smoky again until they healed.
Each would have a black knife bonded to him that could dissolve and re-form like his body, but as such it was magical and couldn’t penetrate my aura. Granuaile and Oberon could be hurt by those knives, however, so I wanted the dark elves to try to stab me all they wanted while Granuaile bushwhacked them.
As I pelted down the hill and crossed the field to their position by the road, I noticed that they weren’t heading for trees on the far side of the road or forming up to face me. They were remaining in their positions, solidifying briefly and then going smoky again but waiting for me to close the gap.
That was odd. Alarm bells went off in my head and I stopped yelling as I tried to figure out what was up. There were no telltales of a magical booby trap, but perhaps they decided to go with something more mundane. They could have planted mines around their position and I would blow myself up.
Oberon, tell Granuaile to approach on the road. There might be mines
.
I contacted Carpathia. //Query: Shallow buried metal ahead of my current path?//
//Yes//
I stopped running. //Show me//
The images filtered into my head. A semicircle of M16A2 bounding anti-personnel mines surrounded the dark elves on either side of the road but easily two hundred feet from their position.
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