"Tell Granuaile she can go. I’m going to unbind the vampire now."
I shifted to human and focused on the vampire, speaking the words that would separate him into nothing more than carbon, water, and trace elements. With him gone, the dark elves would have to rely on their more limited senses. I heard Granuaile’s footsteps fade as she ran down the slope toward the road. She would flank them to the north while I would be charging in from the northeast.
Alerted by something he either smelled or heard, the vampire turned and pointed in my direction, but he crumpled inside his clothing once I energized the binding, and his jeans dropped to the ground with a sort of red sludge spilling out the legs. I dropped my camouflage, drew Fragarach, and charged, na**d and howling, just like we Celts used to do in the good old days.
For their part, the dark elves dropped all pretense of being human. Upon the vampire’s demise, they pulled out page one of their playbook from Sigr af Reykr, the martial art that means Victory from Smoke, and turned incorporeal to avoid getting stabbed or shot or otherwise ambushed. It would have been a fabulous tactic against someone who couldn’t view them in the magical spectrum; they would have melted into the night and been untraceable. But I could see them plainly as clouds of white energy, and, furthermore, I knew they could maintain their smoke forms for only five seconds. They could spend as little as one second in corporeal form before turning to smoke again, but for that one second they would be vulnerable, and if I was right, once they were wounded, they couldn’t go smoky again until they healed.
Each would have a black knife bonded to him that could dissolve and re-form like his body, but as such it was magical and couldn’t penetrate my aura. Granuaile and Oberon could be hurt by those knives, however, so I wanted the dark elves to try to stab me all they wanted while Granuaile bushwhacked them.
As I pelted down the hill and crossed the field to their position by the road, I noticed that they weren’t heading for trees on the far side of the road or forming up to face me. They were remaining in their positions, solidifying briefly and then going smoky again but waiting for me to close the gap.
That was odd. Alarm bells went off in my head and I stopped yelling as I tried to figure out what was up. There were no telltales of a magical booby trap, but perhaps they decided to go with something more mundane. They could have planted mines around their position and I would blow myself up.
Oberon, tell Granuaile to approach on the road. There might be mines.
I contacted Carpathia.
I stopped running.
The images filtered into my head. A semicircle of M16A2 bounding anti-personnel mines surrounded the dark elves on either side of the road but easily two hundred feet from their position. It was an American design; they were scattered throughout the Middle East and Asia. Step on one, remove your foot, and the mine would pop out of the ground about three feet into the air before detonating and spraying shrapnel for a hundred feet in every direction. To avoid detection, they would have been wiser to plant the modern blast mines that used a minimum of metal, but they probably were counting on me being stupid. I was still a safe distance away and could detonate them remotely. I’m not brilliant at shifting earth, but I can move a bit of topsoil when I need to.
Oberon, tell Granuaile to stop and hit the deck for a few seconds.
Targeting a circle of sod near me, I bound it to the top of the first mine. The turf flew through the air and triggered the bounder when it landed and rolled off. The explosion boomed in the night, and shredded bits of iron sprayed out and fell harmlessly between us. I repeated the exercise until all the mines had been detonated.
Silly dark elves. Earth is for Druids.
Still they refused to move. When they solidified, they were looking in my direction, but they kept their positions by the road. That meant they had some other kind of protection and wanted me to charge in. I wouldn’t do that, because doing what the enemy wants is tantamount to taking a bath with a kitchen appliance. They might have another ring of those plastic mines after all. Carpathia would have a tough time sensing them, except perhaps as displaced soil.
Warn Granuaile to look for more booby traps. They’re too comfortable there. Take them out from the maximum distance possible.
"Okay," Oberon said.
I beckoned the elves to come forward, but once they saw this—which proved they had excellent night vision—they remained solid and copied the motion, white smiles splitting their faces. I smiled back and watched one on the far side of the road take a throwing knife in the side of his neck. So nice of him to remain still and present a target like that for Granuaile. His partner immediately went smoky, but the remaining dark elf on my side didn’t see it happen, because he was facing me. I kept smiling at him and gesturing, and in another couple of seconds he went down too. The last dark elf had to turn solid after his five seconds were up, but he tried to be clever about it and solidified in a crouch, presenting a smaller target. Granuaile anticipated it and nailed him anyway. It wasn’t a fatal shot, catching him in the shoulder, but my theory proved true: They couldn’t dissolve their substance once their skin was broken. He clutched the knife and cursed in Old Norse, remaining crouched on the ground.
Tell Granuaile to head back to you and leave the knives. We’ll get her some more. He’s neutralized now, and I don’t want to risk walking into a trap we can’t see.
After a pause, Oberon replied, "She says last one to the hound is a really old guy."
I grinned and sprinted back up the hill, leaving the lone dark elf behind to watch the bodies of his comrades melt to black tar. A regular infusion of Immortali-Tea might be keeping my body from aging, but Granuaile made me feel young again.
Chapter 3
The only way dark elves and a vampire could have been waiting at that particular spot long enough to plant land mines was if somebody had known we’d be running through there. That suggested a couple of things: Either the Olympians tipped them off—which I thought unlikely because they wouldn’t achieve their measure of glory if they let someone else kill me—or someone was following the Morrigan’s movements and made an educated guess about our route. That someone was most likely Fae. Few others would have a chance to move around the Irish planes without being seen.
Guessing our route wouldn’t have been that difficult if one assumed we were headed north; there were few passes through the Carpathians, and following a river was one of the easiest ways to shake a tail—you cross it, you cross it again, you pretend to cross but really you just run in the shallow water until you reemerge a bit upstream on the same side. Sitting on a river that led more or less straight to the pass was a fair gamble.
I said to Granuaile, “We may have a faery tail.”
"Yeah! This is the kind of faery tale with children who wander off and get in trouble in the forest. Usually they die because they don’t have a wolfhound along—or parents. You ever notice the rampant child neglect going on in faery tales?"
“No, Oberon, I said we might have a faery tail, as in a faery who is tailing us.”
My hound whined. "English is stupid sometimes."
“Look up once in a while. It’s clearly not only the goddesses hunting us. We still have vampires and dark elves to worry about, and I think they’re getting help from someone in Tír na nÓg.”
“Does anyone like us?” Granuaile asked, an edge of bitterness to her voice. “Because I’m thinking maybe we should go hang out with them if we survive this.”