Kevin Hearne - Hounded

In practice, I do not stay for long periods in animal form, for psychological reasons. While I can eat anything the animal would eat and not suffer physically from it, mentally I have difficulty choking down whole mice when I’m an owl or eating raw venison as a hound. (We had taken down a doe in the Kaibab Forest a couple of weeks ago, and once she was down, I had walked off and waited until Oberon had had his fill.) So these hunts were for Oberon more than for me: I just enjoyed the chase and that warm fuzzy feeling you get when you know you’re making someone happy.

But something was different this time when I changed to hound form. My mind felt befuddled, and I was more than a little bloodthirsty. I smelled the sheep scent on the night air, and the nearness of the stags, but instead of accepting this input coolly, I became ravenous and started drooling a bit. It was wrong, and I should have changed back right then.

Flidais strode to the fence and ripped a section of it from the ground with a single hand, whistling once and gesturing for us to run through. We scampered underneath the links and headed for the hills we had hunted before, keeping silent so as not to alert the sheep too early that we were coming for them. There was another fence to negotiate to get into the preserve portion of the park, and Flidais obliged us there as well.

“Now go, my hounds,” she said as she ripped up another section of fence, and as she said it I felt as if I was her hound, not a Druid anymore, not even human anymore, but part of a pack. “Flush a ram out of the hills and bring him to my bow.” And then we were off, running faster than we ever had before, dodging cacti in the weak starlight of a city sky, and I was only dimly aware that there was magic at work here that was not my own. The cold iron amulet necklace, now shrunk about my neck like a collar, should protect me from it if it was sinister, so I did not worry.

It didn’t take us long to find the sheep. They were bedded down in a tangle of creosote, but they heard us scrabbling in the gravel of the desert floor and were already leaping up a nearly vertical hillside when we first laid eyes on them. Our legs spasmed as we tried to make that first leap up to the beginnings of a slope; I made it to a narrow precipice, though barely, but Oberon fell short and tumbled backward into the dirt with a whuff of breath.

I said to him.

he agreed.

I kept my eyes on the retreating flanks of the sheep ahead of me and kept pumping my legs up the hill. Incredibly, I seemed to be gaining ground on them, and I felt so triumphant about it that I let loose with a few barks to scare them stupid. But they were built to negotiate those hills with ease, and I was not, and eventually I lost some ground as I had to scramble for footholds and find better places to jump up. When they disappeared over the peak and were headed down the other side, I started barking again to make sure they knew I was close behind and there was no time to stop. I wanted them to head straight for Oberon.

I had no way of knowing precisely where he was waiting, of course, but hopefully my barking would give him an idea of where we were headed.

Going down was much more treacherous than going up. The way the shadows fell, it was difficult to tell if the next step was a foot down or a fathom. But the pale flanks bobbing up and down ahead of me in soft, night-blue streaks gave me a good idea of what to expect. They were headed almost due south, and I heard nothing beyond their hooves clattering amongst the rocks and my own panting and barking. If Oberon and Flidais were waiting ahead, they were being careful not to reveal their positions.

I kept barking, though it was more to drown out any small noises Oberon might make than any enthusiasm I had for closing the gap between us. I fetched up at a precipice and saw that I would have to travel around to the west a bit before I could find a way down, and with every second the sheep got farther away. So I remained where I was and watched, and sure enough, Oberon was hidden behind a creosote bush not far from where the sheep finally came down off the hill. There was a gap of fifty yards or so before the next hill reared up out of the earth, with nothing but sparse desert plants in the way. Oberon cut off their approach to the next hill, and I was barking behind them, so the sheep turned east up the pass between the hills. Once they silhouetted themselves against the sky, an arrow knocked one off its feet and sent it tumbling, bleating to its doom as its fellows fled.

Oberon closed on it to finish it off, but there was no need. Flidais’s arrow had found its heart, and she would doubtless appear momentarily to claim her kill. I began to work my way down the hill, wondering if she would be satisfied. The hunt had not lasted long; we had flushed them too perfectly, owing perhaps to our recent visits and familiarity with the terrain.

But it seemed those recent visits had not gone unnoticed, unfortunately: As I reached the site of the kill, where Flidais was already gutting the animal and Oberon was standing nearby, a park ranger suddenly appeared, holding a flashlight and a gun. He demanded loudly that we freeze as he blinded us with a halogen glare.

We couldn’t have been more startled. He should not have been able to sneak up on any of us, much less all three. But it is not wise to surprise one of the Tuatha Dé Danann. Flidais whipped her knife out of its sheath and threw it to the left of the flashlight before I had even finished turning my head toward the ranger. She had not aimed, or even looked, so the knife didn’t kill him; it sank into his left shoulder and caused him to cry out and drop his flashlight, which would make it harder for him to aim that gun if he felt like shooting. It turned out he did; a few shots thundered in the night, and I felt one bullet whip over my spine and heard another smack into a barrel cactus to my left. Flidais grunted as she took a slug in the arm, then roared in outrage as she realized what had happened.

“Kill him!” she shrieked, and I unthinkingly leapt to obey, as did Oberon. But unlike Oberon, I managed an independent thought after the first couple of steps, and that stopped me. Killing a ranger would bring the law down upon us, perhaps forcing us to flee, and I did not want to leave Arizona. I changed back to my human form, and immediately the fog lifted from my mind. Flidais had been controlling me as a hound, just as she was controlling Oberon—just as she could control all animals. Unable to resist without the protection of cold iron, Oberon had not stopped, and now he had the man flat on his back, screaming. I tried to call him off, but it was no use with Flidais binding him to her will; I could not even feel his mental presence as I normally could.

“Flidais! Release my hound now!” I snapped, and the man’s screams stopped. But it was already too late. Without ceremony, without any dramatic growls or shivering violins, my hound had torn out the poor man’s throat.

Oberon’s thoughts returned and a flood of questions filled my mind.

Step away from him and I’ll explain in a moment , I said. When one has seen as much death as Flidais and I have, there are no expressions of disbelief at a person’s sudden end. There is no gibbering, no wailing, no tearing of hair. There is only a cool assessment of the consequences. But if the consequences are dire, then a display of emotion is allowed.

“That was not necessary!” I shouted, but carefully kept my eyes on the corpse. “We could have disarmed him. His death will cause me and my hound much trouble.”

“I do not see how,” Flidais replied. “We can simply dispose of the body.”