Hunted (The Iron Druid Chronicles, Book Six) Read Free

wish. So today I do not fight for glory or honor or bloodlust or vengeance. I fight for … something else
.
    I understand. But say it anyway. For the win
.
    Love
.
    Morrigan, I—
    I felt as if something popped softly in my head, like the release of tension when a taut cord is cut. Or a binding. There was a sudden emptiness, and an overwhelming sense of vertigo caused me to stumble over a root and execute a graceless face-plant.
    Morrigan?
The silence in my head pointed to only one conclusion. Our mental bond had been like the soft electric hum of kitchen appliances or computers that you never notice until they stop. During a rather painful ritual that had regenerated an ear I’d lost to a demon, she’d slipped in the binding that allowed her to speak to me telepathically. It was gone now.
    “Atticus, what happened?” Granuaile helped me to my feet and gasped when she saw my face. “Are you hurt? Why are you crying?”
    She let go of my arm and then had to grab it again when I swayed on my feet, still a bit dizzy. “The Morrigan is dead,” I said.

Chapter 2
    “Think you can carry your staff in your mouth as a horse?” I asked, to forestall any questions about what happened. I rubbed away my tears with the heel of my palm. Granuaile understood and didn’t press the issue, though her voice sounded hollowed out by shock.
    “I suppose I could.”
    “Good. Leave your clothes here.” I began to strip and tried to clear my head of its dizziness by taking several deep breaths. “We really need to make time. We’ll hoof it and recharge from the earth as we go.”
    Granuaile peeled off her shirt. “The Morrigan said the Old Ways would be collapsed or guarded,” she said, recalling what the goddess had said to us before we took off running. “Are we going to fight our way through and use one of those?”
    “I think we’ll be running all the way to England. Or to France, anyway, then we’ll swim the channel.”
    “We’re seriously running there from
Romania
?”
    “That’s right.”
    “We can’t take a train or boost a car or something?”
    “No. You heard what the Morrigan said. The only way she saw us survive is running the whole way.”
    “That doesn’t make sense.”
    “When it comes to our survival, I don’t want to betagainst the Morrigan’s visions. She tends—I mean, tended to be accurate on matters of life and death.”
    “I’m not trying to argue the truth of what she said. I just want to understand why it’s true.”
    I shrugged. “I don’t know the answer yet. We’ll find out as we go. My guess is that we’ll have to figure out everything on the run.”
    Once divested of our clothing, with our weapons lying on the ground in front of us, we shifted to our hooved forms—a stag and a chestnut mare—and picked up our weapons in our mouths.
     Oberon said.
    I didn’t have a reply for that, but Granuaile must have, because Oberon followed that up with an outraged She obviously said he did, for he continued, He picked up one of Granuaile’s thigh holsters, where she kept three leaf-bladed throwing knives.
    The one-sided banter continued as we began to run, and I was grateful for it. Someone I had thought of as eternal had abruptly ended, and it rocked me. I couldn’t have summoned a single playful riposte to Oberon’s comments. There was simply too much else for me to deal with, not least of which was figuring out how we would continue to survive.
    Once out of the foothills of the Apuseni Mountains, we were able to pour on the speed, skirting along the edge of a small plateau and then, descending out of the wilderness, running across flat cultivated lands. We bore northwest to