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.”
Chapter 17
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.
Chapter 18
“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, <Sort of like an NFL referee, then.> 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.
“We don’t have to snag a Bacchant and interrogate her anymore. I know precisely what’s going on—what’s
“Right. Except we weren’t trapped. We got away.”
“The trap is Olympus itself. It’s the only place we can bind you right now, and twice we’ve had to interrupt the ritual because of it. We’ve been operating on Lord Grundlebeard’s theory that the entire Eurasian plate was disrupted because Perun’s plane got burned up by Loki. I never really bought it—the trembling in North America faded right away and we were able to shift just fine, so why would the trembling last so much longer in Europe?— but I didn’t have a better theory to offer. Now I do. It’s been a month and a half. If the burning of Perun’s plane was the source of the disturbance, wouldn’t there have been some fluctuations throughout Europe? Wouldn’t the severity of the disturbance vary, being stronger in Russia and less so in Spain and Italy and so on, and shouldn’t it have tapered off a bit by now? But it’s still going strong. Something is producing the disruption consistently, and it’s purposely leaving Olympus alone.”
“I thought you agreed the Olympians were protecting their turf.”
“They are. But they’re also responsible for jacking up everything else, and it’s all to catch us in their net. It’s Faunus, Granuaile. Faunus and that worthless sot, Bacchus.”
“How are they responsible?”
“Pandemonium, you see.”
“No, I don’t see.”
“I didn’t see either, because I was thinking of the Roman god’s name and not the original Greek. Pandemonium is the disruption of order—it’s chaos, in other words. That’s what’s disrupting all the forests on the Eurasian plate so that we can’t shift anywhere else. This is a power that both Pan and Faunus possess—it’s explicitly stated in the mythology, and of course it’s inherent in the etymology of the word. And none of the Tuatha Dé Danann or the Fae recognize it for what it is. It probably hasn’t been used since truly ancient times, and even then it was never on this scale. This might be the first time it’s been used outside Greece, so that’s why the Fae are fumbling for explanations.”
