It was an American design; they were scattered throughout the Middle East and Asia. Step on one, remove your foot, and the mine would pop out of the ground about three feet into the air before detonating and spraying shrapnel for a hundred feet in every direction. To avoid detection, they would have been wiser to plant the modern blast minesthat used a minimum of metal, but they probably were counting on me being stupid. I was still a safe distance away and could detonate them remotely. I’m not brilliant at shifting earth, but I can move a bit of topsoil when I need to.
Oberon, tell Granuaile to stop and hit the deck for a few seconds
.
Targeting a circle of sod near me, I bound it to the top of the first mine. The turf flew through the air and triggered the bounder when it landed and rolled off. The explosion boomed in the night, and shredded bits of iron sprayed out and fell harmlessly between us. I repeated the exercise until all the mines had been detonated.
Silly dark elves. Earth is for Druids.
Still they refused to move. When they solidified, they were looking in my direction, but they kept their positions by the road. That meant they had some other kind of protection and wanted me to charge in. I wouldn’t do that, because doing what the enemy wants is tantamount to taking a bath with a kitchen appliance. They might have another ring of those plastic mines after all. Carpathia would have a tough time sensing them, except perhaps as displaced soil.
Warn Granuaile to look for more booby traps. They’re too comfortable there. Take them out from the maximum distance possible
.
Oberon said.
I beckoned the elves to come forward, but once they saw this—which proved they had excellent night vision—they remained solid and copied the motion, white smiles splitting their faces. I smiled back and watched one on the far side of the road take a throwing knife in the side of his neck. So nice of him to remain still and present a target like that for Granuaile. His partner immediately went smoky, but the remaining dark elf on my sidedidn’t see it happen, because he was facing me. I kept smiling at him and gesturing, and in another couple of seconds he went down too. The last dark elf had to turn solid after his five seconds were up, but he tried to be clever about it and solidified in a crouch, presenting a smaller target. Granuaile anticipated it and nailed him anyway. It wasn’t a fatal shot, catching him in the shoulder, but my theory proved true: They couldn’t dissolve their substance once their skin was broken. He clutched the knife and cursed in Old Norse, remaining crouched on the ground.
Tell Granuaile to head back to you and leave the knives. We’ll get her some more. He’s neutralized now, and I don’t want to risk walking into a trap we can’t see
.
After a pause, Oberon replied,
I grinned and sprinted back up the hill, leaving the lone dark elf behind to watch the bodies of his comrades melt to black tar. A regular infusion of Immortali-Tea might be keeping my body from aging, but Granuaile made me feel young again.
Chapter 3
The only way dark elves and a vampire could have been waiting at that particular spot long enough to plant land mines was if somebody had known we’d be running through there. That suggested a couple of things: Either the Olympians tipped them off—which I thought unlikely because they wouldn’t achieve their measure of glory if they let someone else kill me—or someone was following the Morrigan’s movements and made an educated guess about our route. That someone was most likely Fae. Few others would have a chance to move around the Irish planes without being seen.
Guessing our route wouldn’t have been that difficult if one assumed we were headed north; there were few passes through the Carpathians, and following a river was one of the easiest ways to shake a tail—you cross it, you cross it again, you pretend to cross but really you just run in the shallow water until you reemerge a bit upstream on the same side. Sitting on a river that led more or less straight to the pass was a fair gamble.
I said to Granuaile, “We may have a faery tail.”
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