Staked (Iron Druid Chronicles) (31 page)

I gasped and coughed to get my breath back, then scrambled to my feet, even though without oxygen my muscles felt like Jell-O. The time I’d spent on the ground had let the vampires crash through the front floor-to-ceiling windows—they didn’t bother with the revolving door—meaning that almost half of them were getting away.

A faintly heard
“Sheiße”
from behind the bar was my only clue that the human server had survived.

Oberon’s voice asked in my head.

Yep! I’ll be back. Take your nap.

Jumping through the jagged portal of glass, I saw that the vampires had split into two groups. One had gone left at a diagonal angle toward the S-Bahn station at Hackescher Markt, and another had gone right toward Monbijou Park and the Spree River.

Considering my low reserves of energy, I hauled off after the group to the right, since chasing them through the park would allow me to reconnect with Gaia and replenish. There was a flower bed, now sad and brown for the winter, surrounding a pedestal with a bust of somebody on top staring with blank bronze eyes at me. The straggling vampire in the back was approaching it as I unbound him. He exploded and covered the statue in gore.

It said
CHAMISSO
underneath the bust, and I recognized it as I passed. “Hey! Adelbert von Chamisso! ’Sup, Bert?” I’d helped him back in the day to “discover” and classify some flower species. He was a good guy; I didn’t realize he’d been so well thought of in Berlin, and it’s not every botanist who gets a statue made of him. “Sorry about the vampire guts, big guy.”

I caught five more, able to move faster than them, with Gaia’s aid. Four in the park, and the last one in the Spree River. He jumped in out of desperation and disappeared underwater; since he didn’t need to breathe, he wouldn’t come up until he was good and ready. But that same lack of buoyancy made vampires terrible swimmers. They sank to the bottom and had to walk instead of swim, much slower than anything else. He couldn’t float up; he’d have to claw and crawl his way out, if I ever let him get that far. I splashed after him, shape-shifted to a sea otter, swam right out of my clothes, and held the stake between my wee front paws until I was able to close the gap between us. Then I shifted back to human and sank the stake into the vampire’s calf. He dissolved in the river beneath the Bode Museum and got washed away by the current.

That left me naked in the Spree River, and I’m not ashamed to say the temperature led to some shrinkage.

That was nineteen very old vampires erased from the world, however, and all I got was naked and some bruising. Not bad. Quite good, in fact. And if one of the unbound had been Theophilus, then I would count it as a perfect ambush. But eleven of them had escaped cleanly to the S-Bahn, and there was no telling where they had gone.

I returned to the Monbijou Hotel in shivering camouflage to avoid alarming the local populace. My priorities amused me and I snorted into the darkness. I had no problem disassembling vampires in plain view but didn’t want to truly terrify anyone with my full frontal nudity. Once outside the hotel, I called Oberon to come join me outside.
And bring my jacket, will you, please?
I asked.

Twilight Zone
eyes.>

Sirens began to wail and grow closer.
Yes, I imagine so. He just saw men crash through the window, and if he’s been into the lounge he’s seen an awful lot of blood. The sudden appearance of a huge hound after all that probably made him lose bladder control.

We scooted around the corner to a Nike store on Hackescher Markt, where I was able to discreetly snatch a pair of sweatpants and a shirt. I didn’t bother with shoes, and the leather jacket didn’t exactly match, but it was better than bare skin in this weather. I made a mental note to come back and pay for them later.

Let’s head back to the park, Oberon. You have a fateful date with a squirrel.

I wondered how the hotel staff would explain to the police what had happened. I wondered if maybe I’d been caught on a security video, unbinding vampires—a distinct possibility and one I hadn’t worried about as I had in the past. If that encounter was recorded, it could prove problematic, but I doubted it would make the news. There were too many uncomfortable questions for police to answer: Did I have a new, horrifying weapon that liquefied or exploded people on contact, or were those victims not exactly human? Or both? They couldn’t let that get out until they had the answers. Governments have been in the habit of suppressing information “for the population’s own protection” for centuries now; it’s how gods and monsters can still walk the earth and the mass of humanity thinks of them as mere stories for their entertainment, an escape from a lifetime of toil to pay the bills. Maybe they would call in the real-life equivalent of Fox Mulder to investigate this. Or the authorities might be so desperate to catch me that I would find a screen cap of my face on every television in Germany.

Either way, the vampires who escaped wouldn’t remain in Berlin for long, and I figured I shouldn’t either. A hot shower, a real change of clothes, and a few hours of blissful slumber far away from sirens were what I needed. A reunion with Granuaile would be perfect, if I could catch up with her, but we had no home base until the place in Oregon was ready, and I doubted I’d be able to divine her location now if she’d secured a divination cloak from the Polish coven, as Perun had suggested. Not that I had my divination wands on me anyway.

“I’m up for sleeping someplace warm,” I told Oberon as we jogged back to Tiergarten in the rain. “We need to visit the Southern Hemisphere.”

“That sounds perfect right now.”

K
nowing that there’s something ye should be doing but can’t is like having an itchy arsehole ye want to scour clean but you’re at Court and that sort of thing is frowned upon. I should be helping Brighid hunt down Fand and Manannan Mac Lir, but I have apprentices to protect and teach. I suppose I should take comfort in the fact that this is something I can and should do. It should be fecking joyous. I think it would be, except for me itching.

I tried to tell Brighid what happened, but her gaggle of Fae chamberlains wouldn’t rouse her. She was excessively wearied after some trip to Svartálfheim, they said. She left explicit instructions not to be disturbed unless an actual physical attack was under way, and me wishing to speak to her didn’t qualify. So I wrote a note.

And I don’t try to see Flidais about the problem, because what if it really isn’t Flidais I’m talking to but Fand in a glamour? Best to let Brighid deal with it as she wishes, when she wishes, and bear the itching in the meantime.

Divination is no help. I cast wands, watch the birdies for some augury, and all I get is the vague idea that they’re hiding in a swamp. But no indication of where that swamp might be, not even if it’s on this plane or one of the Irish ones or somewhere else.

So it’s work for me now, instead of worry.

I’ve started the kids on both Latin and English. Nouns for the earth and sky and sun and adjectives to describe them, things like that. Verbs for things you can do outside, and we do those things, like run and eat lunch and smell pine needles. And I start them using Latin to talk to Colorado—phrases that they repeat verbatim but backed by thoughts and images, to begin the process of separating headspaces. I’ll start them on Irish in a couple of years.

The house has an unfinished basement, and the pack has been working on it during the day and I’ve begun working on it for a couple hours after dinner each night, warding it every way I know how. The promised help from Tír na nÓg hasn’t arrived yet, but I hope it will soon. It’s going to be a sanctuary for the kids during full moons and all other emergencies, like troops of trolls barging through your land, smelling like exactly the wrong cheese. We’ve already coached them in what the full-moon drill is, after that troll business.

Hal Hauk arrives around dinnertime with whiskey and the new identity that Siodhachan asked for. Ty and Sam are with him too, just being friendly and neighborly pack leaders but also because they’re hoping for a finger of the bottle Hal brought. They get one as Greta pulls out glasses for everyone and Hal pours. It’s Midleton, which I’m told is very fine, and we all raise our glasses as Hal proposes a toast.

“An impromptu wake for Sean Flanagan, a fine identity that got shot down in Toronto, and a welcome to the new Siodhachan, who will henceforth walk the world as Connor Molloy. As soon as he pays me for the trouble.” There are wry chuckles at this, and I join in. “But mostly this is a rare, fine drink with rarer, finer friends. It’s my privilege to call you such.”

I say, “Aye, lad,” but everyone else says, “Hear, hear,” or maybe “Here, here,” and I don’t understand why they would say either one. English has way too many fecking homophones, and when you combine something like that with what might be a slang term or polite jargon, it’s just not fair to lads like me trying to pick up the language. I’m getting much better with it already, but little things like that are probably going to keep me stepping on me own bollocks for years.

Midleton is as fine as reported, and then I offer everyone a spot of lamb stew and soda bread. It’s fortunate that I made a great big batch, thinking we’d have leftovers, but with extra guests it’s just as well I erred on the side of generosity. And it’s also a good thing, I decide, that Greta found a place much bigger than I thought we’d need. It has a huge dining room and extra seating in the kitchen area, so it’s already a place people like to visit.

We’re all there—the apprentices, their parents, the translators, the pack leaders—having a laugh and being happy, when all the wolves freeze or put down their spoons and cock their heads, listening. Some of them look toward the big bay window leading to the backyard.

“No—” Sam says, the instant before the glass shatters and bullets riddle the room. The parents instinctively place themselves in the line of fire, protecting the children, and they take a few rounds as a result. That’s going to trigger transformations for sure, and I’m not the only one to shout, “Full-moon drill! Go!”

It’s only me and a few parents who aren’t werewolves, so it’s our job to make sure the kids get safely down to the basement. The wee ones move fast and stay low to the ground; they already know they don’t want to be anywhere around when their parents’ bones start snapping and the teeth come out. We hear the snarls and cracks and howls of pain begin before we’re out of the room, though. They’re all turning, including Greta, and the gunfire continues and just accelerates the transformations, so they don’t have time to tear off their clothes first. They’re going to rip right through them as they transform, and that will increase the pain of it. The pack is going to be fecking irate, and I almost feel sorry for whoever’s doing this.

I leave the kids in the basement with Tuya’s mother, Meg, and she locks the silver-lined gate we installed at the bottom of the stairs. They have food and water down here and emergency buckets; they can last for days if need be, by which point the danger should be long over. Then I slip on me knuckles, cast camouflage, and exit out the front door while I’m hearing all kinds of ruckus going on in the back.

The camouflage turns out to be a good idea, since some fecking arse almost takes me head off with a bullet as soon as the door opens. I duck down and scramble to the side and search for who’s responsible. There’s a tall figure with a handgun maybe forty yards away, and his hearing must be stellar, because he fires two more rounds that come damn close—one grazes the back of me calf as I’m running. Balls to that: I need to change the rules on him. I tumble onto the front lawn and shuck off me shirt before shape-shifting to a kite, which lets me fall out of the pants. Another round hits the turf where me body was a second before the shift, and I hop away from there as quietly as I can. Me torn shoulder muscles won’t let me fly yet, but of all my forms this is also the quietest one on the ground. I make little bird-hops in his direction, and he hears even that. But since he has no idea what’s making the sound, he’s aiming too high. A dart to the left and then a leap up, extending me talons to latch on his right wrist, since he’s left his whole arm out there for me to perch on, but it’s not a gentle landing. I clutch as hard as I can and that hand shears clean off, dropping onto the ground along with the gun. I’m expecting a scream or some cursing as I drop with it, but instead the spooky lad
hisses,
and the blood pumping out of him is dark, like it would be when it’s starved for oxygen. I hop away—not caring about the noise I’m making now, because he can’t shoot me—and see him bend down to snatch up his right hand with his left. He doesn’t give a damn about the gun anymore: He just jams that hand back onto his stump like it will help, and then he turns and runs down the road leading to town—
fast
.