Trapped

and this was one of those times: I couldn’t shift away from Bacchus, because the damn tree slapped my hand away every time I tried to touch it, thanks to the dryad inside. New experience, but not cool.

“Should we go invisible?” Granuaile asked.

“No, they’d smell the magic and chase us.”

“The man is mine,” Bacchus said to his horde of maenads, “but you can entertain yourselves with the woman.” And then he charged me with all the confidence of the truly immortal.

“Don’t grapple,” I advised Granuaile quickly. “Keep them at a distance. They’re stronger than you are but not as quick.”

It might have been better to advise her to run, but she was already moving toward them. There were close to a hundred of them and only one of her, but since the Bacchants were half stupid with liquor and secure in their numbers, they had difficulty processing the fact that Granuaile was attacking them. Nor would they be immune to wood. I caught a flash of her lunging forward and flipping Scáthmhaide down hard on a skull just to set the proper tone. The Bacchant crumpled and Granuaile sprang away, content now to lead the drunken savages on a merry chase. I loved how she always struck first when threatened; she appreciated the value of surprise and wielded it with often deadly results.

I didn’t get to watch her much after that; Bacchus was in my face. Like his followers, he was immune to iron, so Fragarach was useless and I left it in its sheath. We had never tangled personally, and I’d rather hoped we never would. But I’d seen him fight before against Leif, and he wasn’t terribly skilled, just terribly strong. I leapt about eight feet straight up, and he bull-rushed headfirst into the dryad’s tree, which cracked and groaned.

“Ow, watch it!” the dryad said.

I’d tucked my legs underneath me for the leap but kicked out with my right as I fell, to take advantage of Bacchus’s rebound. He took it on the chin and flopped backward after staggering a couple of paces. His skin was changing before my eyes: The baby-faced libertine was being replaced by the wine-mad monster. Where a soft blue tracery of veins might show beneath a pink blush of skin in his contentment, now they throbbed green and stood out like vines, and the whites of his eyes flooded with a deep burgundy. If he got hold of me, I’d be in trouble. Goading him would work in my favor though, since he would lose even more discipline the crazier he got. And since I knew exactly what kind of guy he was, I employed the advice I’d given to Granuaile and said, “Come on, bitch. Charge me again and see what happens.”

He lost his mind completely after that. He purpled and drooled as he roared and gave not a single shit about it. He rose and quivered and just yelled inchoately in a roid rage, until his lungs gave out. I bore this display with patience and used the time to figure out how to beat him. Unlike the Norse or the Tuatha Dé Danann—or me—the bloody Olympians couldn’t be killed. They could be harmed, but they could heal from anything; even if they were disintegrated or blown to tiny bits, they simply regenerated on Olympus and put on a fresh toga. There had to be a solution to him, or else the Morrigan would be here fighting him for me, fulfilling her oath.

The best solution would be to run and use some other tree to shift away. In fact, I hoped Granuaile would do exactly that. But the cries of pain I heard in the forest weren’t hers; in battle, as in charity, it is better to give than to receive.

Bacchus finished emoting and charged me again. I crouched, ready to jump, and then it was a simple matter to fake the leap and watch Bacchus launch himself over my head. His face met the tree for the second time, and while he was in the air above me, I punched him in the groin as hard as I could. In my mind’s eye, he was supposed to curl up and cradle his crushed grapes, but that’s not what happened. It toppled him so that he fell headfirst down my back, and he grabbed clumsily at my legs as he hit the ground. It wasn’t a move or a punch or anything more than a desperate flail on his part, but it knocked me off my feet and sent me sprawling.

Before I could scramble away, he managed to clap a hand around my ankle and haul me toward him. I twisted around and aimed a kick at his head. It rocked his neck back and he lost teeth, but he shook it off and grinned bloodily.

“No, you’re not getting away now that I have you.”

He aimed a vengeful punch at my groin, but I turned in time to take it on the thigh instead. That would be a nice bruise. I kicked him in the face again, and the fucker laughed. Apparently he could turn off pain much like I could, but, unlike me, he found physical punishment amusing. I tried to make him laugh harder by kicking him some more.

Bacchus tired of it after all and slapped my leg down on the next kick, then leapfrogged on top of my knees, pinning them. I bucked, crunched up, and landed a solid blow on his temple, but this failed to dislodge him. He grabbed my shoulders and slammed me back to the ground. Against a normal opponent, that would have been a stupid move because I could still deliver rib-cracking blows to his body, but Bacchus simply didn’t care. He wanted to taunt me and he was saying something in Latin, but I ignored this and crafted a binding in Old Irish between his toga and the dryad’s tree. The binding worked, but this also failed to dislodge Bacchus. He lunged forward, bore down, and let the toga tear away from him rather than let me go. His strength was such that I began to doubt I could match him. I reached for power, felt that it was abnormally low, and remembered that Granuaile had left the portal open. I was going to need her help to get out of this—though she might very well be thinking she’d need my help to escape the Bacchants at this point.

I shouted for help in Russian and added that she should break the wine god’s elbow. I kept shouting it in a loop.

“What is it you say?” Bacchus said. “Some pithy insult?”

His fingers dug into my shoulders painfully, until his thumbs ground into bone. My blows were having no effect. He merely pushed down on my right shoulder and began to pull on my left one, and soon enough he had torn my arm loose from its socket. He kept pulling; he really did mean to tear me apart, limb from limb.

He never saw what hit him, and neither did I. But I saw—and he definitely felt—his left arm bending the wrong way, heard the crack and tearing of tissue, marveled at the white bone splinters shredding the inside of his arm. He collapsed on top of me in shock, and I was finally able to dislodge him; a few Bacchants trailed by, seeking an invisible Granuaile.

I got to my feet and put a bit of distance between Bacchus and me. We both had useless left arms, but only one of us now had a clear plan of how to proceed. Bacchus was howling over his shredded arm and spurting what passed for blood among the Olympians—ichor, I think they called it. He’d heal up far faster than I would with a similar injury, but he was seriously jacked up for the present and kneeling only ten feet or so in front of the still- open portal. He’d probably never even seen it, since he’d originally approached me perpendicular to it. I walked toward him coolly, right side first, and he staggered to his feet once he saw this. He backed up as he did so, putting himself closer to the portal. Bacchants streamed between us, still pursuing Granuaile, mindlessly obeying the last order they were given when they could have easily taken me out. Bacchus roared and waved me forward with his right hand, daring me to charge. I chose my spot carefully, waiting for two Bacchants to pass between us before I shot toward him with juiced speed and planted a swift kick to his chest. He tried to grab my foot with his right hand, but he wasn’t quick enough. He staggered back and through the portal, realizing too late that there was no ground underneath him anymore.

I grinned as I closed the portal on his bellow of rage. “It’s going to take him a thousand years to finish falling on his ass,” I said.

Chapter 26

Abruptly cut off from Bacchus, the maenads stopped caring about Granuaile and began wondering where the hell they were and why they were wearing white nighties.

“Oh, my God, what happened to your teeth?” one said.

“My teeth? What’s up with yours?”

“My teeth are fine! Wait.” She put fingers with torn nails up to her lips and discovered she had a mouthful of fangs. “Oh, Jesus, they’re all pointy and shit!”

The screams, once they began, were contagious. Part of it was the terror of sheer confusion; part of it was terror at their future dental bills. I actually was happy for them: We’d discovered a way to free them from their thrall, and they could be human again.