Kevin Hearne - Hammered

//Favor granted// Sonora replied, and I sent him my thanks. Bacchus touched down and unleashed his leopards with the Latin equivalent of “Sic ’em!” before leaping out of his chariot to follow behind. The leopards sprang at Leif, who was now disentangled from the vines that had tripped him, but he dodged out of the way with vampiric speed and let them continue on. He stepped forward to confront the god of wine—who was notably bereft of his thyrsus and showing no sign that he’d had a pinecone stuck between his eyes an hour ago—while Gunnar advanced to meet the two leopards.

“Just chuck him back upstream, Leif; don’t test your strength against his!” I shouted as Gunnar and the leopards collided in a mess of fur, claws, and teeth. Bacchus wasn’t completely incompetent as a fighter, as evidenced by his stance as Leif approached, but neither was he used to confronting vampires with a thousand years of martial arts experience. Leif jabbed a couple of lightning raps to his jaw to set him back on his heels, then he spun and dropped the wine god on his ass with a kick to the side of the knees. While Bacchus was still down, Leif quickly grabbed him by the feet and yanked to deny him leverage for a kick, then spun him around in a discus toss, finally throwing him several hundred yards away up the canyon. He landed heavily in the rocky creek bed and probably broke something. Shame about that.

In the meantime, Gunnar had lamed the two leopards, but not without taking on significant damage himself. The good news was that he would heal and the leopards wouldn’t be pulling Bacchus along to harry us anytime soon.

“Nice throw,” I said. “Come on, let’s go. It’s just a little bit farther.”

I gathered Gunnar’s jeans and shoes and carried them with my sandals as Leif scooped me up again to continue down the canyon. Gunnar kept pace alongside now that he was in wolf form.

“Keep to the creek bed if you can,” I requested. Leif obligingly swerved to take the requested course, which would allow me to keep a sort of jittery surveillance on Bacchus. The Olympian staggered to his feet in a fury and located us easily. He had one hand pressed to a spot on his lower back, but as I watched, he brought both hands around in front of him at waist height and slowly raised them, a clear gesture commanding something to rise from the ground—vines of some sort, no doubt. Thanks to Sonora’s help, nothing happened. Leif ran unencumbered, and I chuckled.

Speaking in a conversational tone, I said in Latin, “Lord Bacchus, can you hear me? Nod if you can hear me.”

Bacchus dropped his hands and nodded.

“You have never killed a Druid all by yourself, and you never will. Only with hordes of Bacchants and Roman legionnaires and the aid of Minerva have you ever managed to slay a single one of us. Your lackeys may get me eventually, and I know that I will never be able to slay you, but admit to yourself now that you, alone, will never prove my equal. The earth obeys me , son, not some petty god of grape and goblet.” I switched to English for a postscript. “So suck on that, bitch.”

Bacchus didn’t bother to compose an intelligible reply. He merely roared his defiance and came after us. But he wasn’t especially fast on his feet; he was no quicker than any mortal man, and he had hundreds of yards to make up.

“Find me a nice tree, Leif, anywhere near here,” I said. Leif immediately steered us out of the creek bed and deposited me at the base of an impressive sycamore. Unlike the Fae, who specifically needed oak, ash, and thorn to shift planes, I could use any stand of timber that was sufficiently robust to connect to Tír na nÓg. It didn’t matter if I used a sycamore or a sequoia; all I needed was a healthy forest.

Gunnar sat on his haunches next to us, panting and bleeding. “All right, both of you touch me and the sycamore at the same time.” I looked at Gunnar to make sure he understood. He responded by rising on his hind legs and placing one huge paw on my chest, the other against the trunk of the tree. I needed skin contact, so I poked a finger of my left hand—the one holding the shoes and jeans—into his fur. Leif condescendingly put a hand on my head and the other on the tree.

I took one last look upstream to check on the wine god’s position. He was sprinting somewhat spastically down the creek and not paying enough attention to his footwork. He slipped on a moss-covered rock and looked very mortal as he executed a spectacularly graceless face plant. I laughed, because I knew he could hear me and I wanted him to know I’d seen his humiliation. We still had plenty of time to shift.

Sensing that I was about to escape, Bacchus looked up from where he lay in the streambed. “Your insults will be paid in good time,” he said in a voice of barely restrained fury. “I swear to Jupiter I will tear you apart myself, Druid. Your death is long overdue.”

“Perhaps I deserve to die,” I admitted. “But you don’t deserve to live. Your very existence is nothing but a feeble echo of Dionysos. You are a weak copy of a better god.”

I gave him no chance to respond, proceeding on the maxim that it’s always best to have the last word. I closed my eyes, sought the tether to Tír na nÓg, and pulled us through to the land of the Fae.

Werewolves are generally immune to any magic that’s not Pack, but Gunnar came through all right. I neglected to tell him I’d been worried about it at all. The binding wasn’t centered on him, anyway; it was centered on myself and what I wanted to bring along. He yakked up his dinner—which Leif and I pointedly did not notice—and he was fine.

When he was finished, I recommended he revert to human form before we shifted back to earth. I tossed his jeans and shoes to him and turned my back during the change so I wouldn’t lose my lunch.

It was night in this part of Tír na nÓg, just as it was in Arizona. We couldn’t switch right away to Nadym, because it was already after dawn there and Leif would sizzle away to greasy ash. Nor could we stay in Tír na nÓg; faeries wouldn’t take well to Leif’s presence, and even now they would be drawn to our location, sensing something wrong. We would shift instead to a forest about twenty-five miles north of Prague at Leif’s request. He’d have a couple of hours before sunrise.

Gunnar got himself dressed and announced his readiness to go. Even with bloody scratches across his bare chest, he looked better than he did in that rugby shirt. He was healing quickly, but I could tell he’d lost something between the rapid changes, the fight, and the plane shift. He had one more to endure.

As before, Leif and Gunnar put one hand on me and another on the tree, then we shifted to a wooded hillside some distance from the wee hamlet of Osinalice in the Czech Republic. Gunnar was promptly sick again.

“I’ll meet you at this tree tomorrow night,” Leif said, wrinkling his nose. “It should be a simple matter for me to find it again.”

“Where are you going?”

“I’m in Zdenik’s territory,” he explained. “I must pay my respects. Tomorrow night we will go the rest of the way. Please rest.” He melted into the night until all we could see was his corn-silk hair, and then even that was gone.

“The shift was no better in human form,” Gunnar muttered.

“Sorry,” I said. “You’re the first werewolf planewalker, so far as I know. There was no baseline data in the lore to predict how you’d handle it.”

“What lore?”

“Druid lore.”