Staked (Iron Druid Chronicles) (16 page)

My eyes flick over to Greta and she nods, encouraging me to continue. She coached me on what to do next, warning me about modern cultural standards of modesty.

“The thing about shape-shifting is, ye can’t do it with your clothes on. Or if ye do it’s mighty painful and ye can hurt yourself. Better to get rid of your clothes first, and get rid of any shame about your body while you’re at it. The shape you were born with is perfect in Gaia’s eyes. That should be good enough for anybody.”

I rise from me crouch and say, “I’m going to shape-shift to a red kite now, just to show ye what I’ll have ye workin’ for in the years ahead. All the language schooling, all the mental exercises, and all the physical training will be to get you ready for the responsibility. But make no mistake. It’s fun too.”

Switching to Old Irish, I bind my shape to a red kite as I turn my back and throw off my robe. They see it fall and me shrink down to a bird of prey at the same time. I screech at them and all of them gasp, but the new pack members especially—they’ve all endured the painful transformation to a werewolf and can’t conceive of the process being fast and smooth. I take wing and circle around them a couple of times, their eyes following me, and I can see the kids are excited now. I light next to me robe and shape-shift directly to a bear, giving them a friendly grunt. They’re delighted by it, and this is Greta’s cue to come on over and drape the robe across me back. I turn around and shift back to human and the robe falls into place—all her idea.

“Nobody is going to mind a little ass,” she said to me before they arrived, “but it’s hardly necessary to show them the whole package, is it?”

I didn’t see why it mattered, but she did, so I agreed to do it her way.

The kids are so juiced they can’t stand still: A couple of them actually jump up and down and clap. And the parents are happy too, smiling down at their kids, because such joy is infectious.

“Gaia gives Druids these forms to help protect her better—our primary function is to protect the earth. And you do that by watching out for the elementals, and in turn they kind of watch out for you. When you’re bound to the earth, you’ll be able to talk to the elementals directly. But I can let ye talk to the elemental here right now. Flagstaff rests on the Colorado Plateau, so we think of this elemental as Colorado. I’ve already let it know you’ll be here today, and it’s going to give each of you a small sphere of sandstone, which I don’t want you to lose. You will use it to talk to Colorado. First, take off your shoes so the earth can feel your presence.”

I have never seen any group of kids so eager to be barefoot. They all plop down and start tugging at their shoes, and their parents laugh. Once they’re all back on their feet and wriggling their toes in the earth, I send a message to Colorado through my tattoos that the new apprentices are ready and standing opposite me. The ground in front of the kids breaks and crumbles, and spheres of sandstone rise up out of it, each with a slightly different pattern of tans and reds.

“All right, I want ye to pick up the stone, close it in your hand, and concentrate on saying hello to the earth. It doesn’t matter what language you use. It won’t use language to reply back, but you’ll feel it.”

They all bend down to pick up their stones and then scrunch their eyes closed in concentration. I have to admit it’s fecking adorable. After about ten seconds they start laughing and happy-crying when they hear Colorado in their heads, and damn if me own eyes don’t get watery at the edges. It’s tough to not get emotional when ye finally realize that you’re not trapped on the planet with things that want to eat ye or tell ye what to do. All the earth wants ye to do is thrive, and ye feel that love whenever ye contact an elemental.

I look up at the parents and tell them we’ll be at it awhile and they can let us be. “Ye can ask me any other questions ye might have later on.” They say thank you by word or gesture and depart with Greta and Sam, leaving me with the kids and the three translators. I let the kids commune until the parents are out of sight, and then I interrupt them.

“Colorado doesn’t speak in language, ye may have noticed. You get pictures and feelings. You can ask it simple questions, though, and it will understand what ye mean as long as ye think it really hard. Ask Colorado to show ye the places and creatures it loves the most. You will see.”

Some of them whisper the question aloud in their effort to think really hard, but once Colorado begins to answer, their faces switch from awe to surprise to wide smiles and more as images filter through their heads. Whatever they’re seeing, it’s all new to them, since they come from very different parts of the world and would not be familiar with the native plants and animals here.

I give them a few minutes and then thank Colorado, asking it to stop.

“All right, I want ye to tell me what you saw. Tuya, you go first.” One by one, down the line, they tell me about snakes and lizards and scorpions, mule deer and native trout, the blue-green waters of Havasupai Falls in the Grand Canyon, the sandstone buttes of the Navajo Nation and the canyons cut by floodwaters there. Thandi is last, and she begins to tell me about coyotes but then breaks off and her eyes pull away from me face to look at something over me right shoulder. She points and squeaks, “Big ugly man!”

I half expect it to be a joke and get a round of giggles out of them when I turn around to look, but she isn’t kidding. The very definition of big and ugly is coming this way out of the pine trees. It’s that fecking bog troll who says I owe him gold.

“Holy shit,” one of the translators mutters.

“All of ye run back to the house now,” I says. “Find Greta and your parents and tell ’em there’s a troll come calling. Shoo, now, go on!”

The translators herd them away and the kids scurry toward the house with jerky little kid legs, leaving their shoes behind. It’s a grim face I’m wearing when I go to meet the troll. He’s lumbering in long, plodding steps, and he still hasn’t figured out how to hide his dangly bits. What he
has
figured out is how to find me and get here without using one of the Old Ways, a feat I thought impossible. And it probably still is. What’s really happened is that he’s found someone to help him. And the bastard has also ripped up a young aspen tree to pound me with. Well, we’ll see who does the pounding.

I fish me knuckles out of the robe pocket, slip them on, and charge them up as I walk, and I also mutter the bindings to increase me strength and speed. I’d like to simply go at him, but I need to know first how he got here.

There are bound trees nearby—Siodhachan saw to that—which means one of the Tuatha Dé Danann could have brought him. It certainly wasn’t Granuaile or Siodhachan. It could not have been any of the lesser Fae, because most of them need oak, ash, and thorn to shift, especially if they’re bringing someone else with them, and there isn’t any of that growing together in this part of the country. That leaves two possibilities: He came to earth via one of the Old Ways in Europe and traveled here under a glamour—extremely unlikely—or there’s an Old Way up in the San Francisco Peaks we don’t know about.

I thought there weren’t any Old Ways on this side of the globe, but it’s possible that someone made a new one.

A shiver of dread tickles me spine at a thought and I say to the troll, all smiles, “Mornin’, lad, good mornin’. How was Fand when ye spoke to her?”

“She is fine,” he says without thinking, because trolls are grand at that.

“Good to hear, that is. She’s very helpful, eh? Helping you find me and then arranging a path for you to get here. So kind.”

“She is good, yes.”

“And all that from prison!” A prison, I might add, chosen by meself and her mother, Flidais. I had acted as Brighid’s proxy in that matter to make sure Fand would be secure, and Flidais had come along to make sure her daughter was well treated and the Fae would have no cause to complain on that score. “She’s truly powerful.”

The bog troll’s gnarled gray face squishes and moves around with great effort of thinking. “Prison? She’s not in prison.”

That tickle o’ dread becomes the uncomfortable sound o’ me bowels liquefying, for he had just confirmed me worst fear. At some point Fand had quietly escaped and was now helping bog trolls hunt down Druids, in addition to whatever other shenanigans she could think of. Since starting a war in Tír na nÓg was her last great idea, I don’t like to think of what else she might be up to now.

“Oh!” I says, chuckling at him. “That’s right, I forgot she’s out. Where is she now?”

“She’s at—wait.” The horrible accident of his face turns suspicious. “I’m not supposed to say.”

Damn. So close. At least I’d learned more than Fand would have liked.

“I’m here for my gold,” he rumbles. “You crossed my bridge and never paid. It’s time.” He twitches the tree trunk at me in a not-so-subtle threat.

Greta will never get me to buy a cell phone, but she did show me the Internet and get me signed up on this thing called Twitter, under the name @ArchdruidOwen, so I could learn how people today can socialize while being separated by hundreds or thousands of miles. And she told me about Internet trolls, which are smaller and less dangerous than bog trolls but may smell just as bad. I remember her first rule regarding them, which was actually me own rule two thousand years ago, and smile up at my uninvited guest.

“Sorry, lad, but I never feed the trolls.” And then I haul off and punch him hard, directly in the dong.

Troll skin is naturally tough and makes wearing armor unnecessary, and troll skin foreskin is no different. But me new brass knuckles could shatter rock, so I wasn’t quite sure what would happen when I made contact. In hindsight, I should have pulled me punch a bit, but I’m so mad that he’s there threatening me new Grove and that Fand’s escaped that I just go for it, which means I’m abruptly in a new kind of nightmare when me fist punctures the skin and keeps going.

I’m up to me elbow in spongy troll cock, and we’re both profoundly unhappy about it and yelling fit to beat a
ban sidhe
. He crumples inward by reflex, grabs with his massive left hand, and yanks me out of there and tosses me through the air a good thirty yards or so. I land on the exposed face of a half-buried boulder and it crunches me left shoulder blade, shooting pain through the whole arm before it goes numb and useless. I roll onto me right side in the bunch grass and lever my body up, staggering to me feet as the troll realizes he’s not going to die but just be permanently disfigured in his dank and smelly junk. He gets powerful angry about it and forgets all about getting his gold out of me. All he wants now is to stomp me to a smear in the mud. Or bash me on the head with that tree of his. He picks the latter option, bellowing and charging with the tree, though due to his injury he’s kind of lurching more than running.

The day I passively wait for a charge to arrive is the day you can dip me in a lake of salted whale shite. Speaking quickly, I throw off me robe and shape-shift to a ram. I charge him right back, lame left front leg and all—I’m still faster than he is by a far stretch. He’s a right-handed lad, so he’ll be planting his left foot to take his swing. That’s the leg I aim for as I lower me head, horns covered in the brass. He tries to adjust and take me out with his aspen trunk but whiffs over me head as I get inside his guard. I plow into his left shin and don’t completely take off his leg but it’s a near thing. The bones audibly fracture in a few places, and I stumble sideways, rocked by the collision. He goes down loud and heavy and won’t be charging me again: The bones have erupted through the back of his leg and stick up like spires.

Thing is that there’s no easy way to finish him off—and I will be finishing him off out of necessity. You can’t put your fist through a man’s wood and expect him to forgive and forget. He had gone too far in coming after me, and I had gone too far in my response. It’s a death match now, and it’s not going to be easy for either of us to survive.

Climb up on his back and he can roll over and crush me. Try to get to any of his organs, and his perfectly functioning arms and hands can get to me first. He’s already looking for me and, damn it, while I’m looking at his face he kicks out blindly with his right foot, a trick move where he’s bending it over his left while lying facedown, and it knocks me over and I land on that lame left shoulder. Bone grinds against bone and I bleat, which is a fecking awful noise. The ram form isn’t useful anymore, so I shape-shift to a bear as he rolls over to his back, pivots on his hips, and raises that log of a leg in an attempt to heel-kick me into paste. Me left arm still isn’t working of course, but I’m counting on the right one to win this. I dart in a bit closer, raise up on my back feet, and meet that troll’s leg with my claws, gouging deep grooves across the tendons at the back of his ankle and effectively halting his descent. After the reflexive recoil, he brings it down again, pain be damned, and I’m still there. I’m clubbed to the ground by the back of his calf and see spots in me vision, but I just keep lashing out with me claws until the pressure disappears and he’s rolled away to escape me. I struggle up and am unsteady on me paws, forget I’m injured, and try to put weight on my left front foot, which crashes me to the ground again. When I manage to lift myself off the ground once more, I see through blurred vision that the troll is grabbing for that tree trunk with giant fingers. He’s also spinning around somehow in the sky, but I know that can’t be really happening—he’s clocked me upside the head right well. Might as well be dead already, because I don’t have the wits left to dodge another blow, even if I can accurately judge where it’s coming from in time. Three of those trees rise up in the air and hang there for an impossible time, frozen like I was on that island for all those years, and then they begin to fall in different directions. I hear them—or it—crash back to earth but am not rightly sure where it lands except that it’s not on top of me. Me vision won’t focus and I blink furiously, trying to locate the troll, and when I finally find him he’s not moving. He’s underneath the tree, and I think that’s mighty strange. Then I see the stained grass and earth around us and realize that he bled to death. My claws must have opened a few arteries, and, combined with his broken leg and that other thing I did, he ran out of juice pretty fast.