Kevin Hearne - Trapped

“That’s reasonable,” I replied. “Come closer and we won’t have to shout.”

I turned to walk toward Vizyis. By the time Granuaile spun around to keep pace, Leif had zipped up to walk on my left. He glanced at my ruined features.

“I am sorry,” he said. “I did not think they would manage to do you any harm.”

“Eleven or twelve smoky bastards against two and you thought we’d walk out without a scratch?”

Leif shrugged a shoulder. “I have seen you lay waste to fields of opponents.”

“ Field is the key word there. There was no field in that store and therefore no magic.”

“It is magic I have come to warn you about. You are heading for the greenbelt, yes?”

“Of course.”

“Theophilus has seeded it with vampires who are searching for a human with unusual blood.”

“Beware the puppet master, eh?”

“Yes, but Theophilus is not the puppet master. He is more of a skilled apprentice, if you wish to extend a metaphor.”

“Then who’s pulling his strings?”

“Someone from your world.”

“Ireland?”

“No. The other one. Tír na nÓg.”

“The Fae are behind all this? Someone there is giving orders both to dark elves and vampires?”

“As far as I can tell, yes.”

It was no more than I had already suspected, but to have it confirmed was a bit of a shock. But maybe it wasn’t confirmed after all. I couldn’t trust anything he said.

“I know what you’re up to,” I growled.

Leif’s lips turned up at the corners. “I would be intensely disappointed if you did not.”

“You’re playing both sides and setting your own odds in Vegas, you conniving bastard. You probably have some Machiavellian shit going down on other planets. Are you expecting me to make a deal with you? An alliance?”

The vampire shrugged again, hands in pockets. “None is needed. For now our interests are the same. That will serve as well as anything else.”

“I will never forgive you for using me. For hurting Oberon.”

Leif smirked at me. “How fortunate, then, that I do not seek your forgiveness. I will go ahead and dispatch the two at the edge of the greenbelt. After that, you will be on your own. What is it that the young Americans say now? ‘Peace out, brah’?”

“No,” I said, “not unless they want to get their balls booted into their stomachs,” but Leif had already raced ahead, his amused chuckle hanging in the air and fading with distance.

The night settled about us, and for thirty seconds there was no sound except our footfalls, the muffled noise of family arguments, and the wail of emergency vehicles converging on the sporting-goods store.

Granuaile finally asked a question into what passes for silence in the city: “Do vampires have balls?”

“I don’t know.”

Once we reached the greenbelt, the elemental of Thessalonika, Macedonia, restored my magic and allowed Granuaile to tap her own. She cast night vision and sped herself up immediately, even though we were crouched underneath a tree. Under the tree behind us, nearest the street, rested the gray corpse of a vampire, courtesy of Leif, head torn from its neck and held between its hands on top of its stomach. Leif had mentioned two, but we didn’t see another.

For my part, I filled my bear charm and gave succor to my screaming skin. Now that I had a clear head and plenty of help from Macedonia, I could assess the burn damage and apply my skills to healing it in earnest.

Left alone, I’d wind up looking like Two-Face, because I had deep burns down the majority of my left side and in a few months those would turn into red hypertrophic scars, all the suppleness gone and my ability to scare children increased geometrically. But skin, fortunately, is not that difficult to regenerate. The secret is all in the dermis; maintain a healthy dermis, and cosmetically your epidermis will look just fine. Regenerating the dermis would take more time than the epidermis, of course, but it wasn’t going to be like growing bone or muscle tissue either. And if I could get hold of the right herbs, I could even make my special brew for skin health, Elastici-Tea. I’d be a bit scary-looking for a while but hopefully normal-ish in a few weeks; the underlying healing would be finished in three or four days, but the cosmetic side of things would take longer to sort itself out as the dead cells sloughed away and got replaced by fresh ones. I was well aware that I was damn lucky to be here, considering the past hour. The first battle between dark elves and Druids had yielded surprises to both parties, and foremost among them had to be that I had managed to escape. I doubted that I would have if it weren’t for Granuaile.

“You were brilliant back there, by the way,” I said. “Thank you.”

She swallowed audibly before answering. “Welcome.” Her voice was quiet.

“How many did you get?”

“Eight. Not that I’m, you know, keeping score or anything.”

“I got three. Were there only eleven, or were there twelve?”

She winced. “I thought there were twelve.”

“Me too. So that means either the last one got blown up in the firebombing of the store, or it didn’t …”

“And that means it’s either following us or reporting back to its superiors on our skills and tactics.”

“It’s not following us,” I said. “Leif wouldn’t have spoken so frankly to us if there were anyone around from the other side to hear it.”

“So next time we meet them, they’re going to use conventional weapons on us,” Granuaile said.

“Yep. And they won’t let you flank them again.”

She nodded, accepting this, then swallowed again. I realized she was trying to keep from crying. “I didn’t get there in time. Are you going to be okay?” she asked.

“Oh, yeah.” I tried to smile and realized that, the way my face looked now, it probably wasn’t the most reassuring expression I could have made. “I know it looks bad, but I’ll be okay given time.”

“All right.”

“Theophilus and Leif expect us to keep to these woods—maybe the dark elves do too—but I don’t see the upside. You can’t cast camouflage or unbind vampires yet. I could cast camouflage on you, but if we get attacked by more than one vampire at a time, it’s going to be extremely risky. We don’t need to fight this battle. The situation’s changed. We don’t have to go back to Olympus armed to the teeth to make inquiries. We can go back now, as we are, because I know what’s happening.”

“So just call a cab and go grab Oberon?” she asked.

“Yeah, go ahead. I’ll unbind the remains of this vampire first and Theophilus can suck on that.”

Granuaile grinned and rose. She jogged the short distance back to the street, put her fingers between her teeth, and whistled.

“We are about to start some shit we may not be able to finish,” I warned Granuaile. “Though we can argue that this is all Bacchus’s fault, in order to get around him we’re going to have to risk bringing the Greek pantheon into this too. They’re probably not going to care who started it.”

Oberon said, He’d taken my injuries in stride once I’d reassured him that I would be good as new eventually.

“I’m not sure what you mean, sensei.” We were speaking in the back of a limousine on our way to Olympus. We needed the privacy and the nice bucket full of ice in which to soak my burned left arm. The driver was accommodating and willing to pull over every so often so I could “get some fresh air,” but it was really so I could replenish my bear charm and continue healing as we drove. I also didn’t mind the luxury after the exertions of Thessalonika.