Hounded

Chapter 22

The Haunted Canyon trail Emily spoke of is in the Superstition wilderness, which spans the infamous range of mountains where over one hundred stupid people have died trying to find gold. Some of the most treacherous country anywhere, it’s a rocky, thorny nightmare, spotted here and there with pleasant chaparral meadows.

We drove east on U.S. 60 out past Superior and took a left on Pinto Valley Road. That led us right to a copper mine, but a public access road through that property allowed us to get to the trailhead. This was the eastern edge of the Superstitions, little traveled and fairly remote. Most people went to the Peralta trailhead, where the hiking was a bit easier and the scenery more in keeping with their preconceived notions of what Arizona was supposed to be like—majestic saguaros, ocotillo, horned toads, and Gila monsters.

The eastern side of the Superstitions was less lush high desert and more chaparral, with little cactus beyond some prickly pear and several species of agave. Still, it did not lack for spiny obstacles: There was scrub oak, manzanita, and catclaw, chokeberry bushes and whitethorn. But there were also cottonwood trees and sycamores, able to survive on the seasonal rains and flash-flooded washes winding through the canyon.

Our caravan of cars arrived at the trailhead, and Gunnar had apparently told the Pack they could let their wolves out as soon as they got there. The lot of them leapt out of their sports models and half-tore off their clothes in their eagerness to let the rage inside them loose. Gunnar Magnusson changed as well, for we had spoken of our plans thoroughly on the ride over. Only Granuaile and I were left standing on two legs, but Laksha was in control and showed little curiosity at the spectacle of twenty werewolves changing in front of us. I beckoned her over to me.

“Let Granuaile see this, will you?” I said. “I need to speak with her anyway before we go.”

“Very well,” Laksha said, and then her head lolled to one side for a moment as she went to wake Granuaile. The head snapped back up and Granuaile smiled at me for a nanosecond before she registered the contorting, howling animals around us and said, “What the hell?”

“Shhh,” I said. “You’re safe, but I wanted you to see this. This is the Tempe Pack, and you’ve probably served most of them at one time or another at Rúla Búla.”

“Where are we and what are we doing here?”

I explained the situation briefly, and she was relieved to hear that Laksha would soon have her chance at Radomila.

“I’m going to put a couple of bindings on you now before we go,” I said, “because we’re going to run through this country, not take a leisurely hike. I’ve been on this trail before; it climbs more than a thousand feet in the first couple of miles. So I’m going to bind you to me so that you can draw on my energy, which I pull from the earth—that means basically you can run all night without getting tired. That’s the first thing you’ll be able to do once you get your tattoos.

“And the other thing I’m going to do for you is give you night vision, because the sun is setting. We’re going to run behind the wolves, because you really don’t want to be running in front of them when they’re this angry. After a couple of miles I’m going to have Laksha come back and do her thing, but I want you to have this experience.”

Granuaile was a bit overwhelmed, and she confined herself to a nod and a meek little “Okay.”

It was at this point that my cell phone rang.

“Wow, you get service out here?” Granuaile said.

“We’re only six miles from the freeway.” I didn’t recognize the number, but I couldn’t afford to ignore it.

“Mr. O’Sullivan,” said a familiar Polish accent, “I have some important information for you.”

“It’s sure to be a lie, Malina,” I replied, “because that’s all I’ve heard from you up to now.”

“I never knowingly lied to you,” Malina said. “I believed everything I said to be true. It was only this afternoon that I found out that Radomila and Emily have made me seem to be a liar, that they have been plotting with Aenghus Óg and deliberately deceiving me and others. I have been lied to and manipulated just like you. I confronted them about it, but they refused to leave this foolish path they are on. So now our coven is split.”

“Split how?”

“There are six of them waiting for you in the Superstition Mountains. They have no doubt contacted you by now.”

I pretended not to hear her last sentence. “So where are the other seven?”

“We are currently at my home, and that is where we will stay while we consider what to do. We are forming a new coven and we have much to discuss.”

“Which six are in the Superstitions?”

“That ungrateful snot Emily, and Radomila of course, as well as Jadwiga, Ludmila, Miroslawa, and Zdzislawa.”

“And the witches with you are?”

“Bogumila, Berta, Kazimiera, Klaudia, Roksana, and Waclawa.”

None of the names meant anything to me, but I filed them away for future reference. “How do I know any of this is true?”

Malina huffed in exasperation. “I suppose I can prove nothing over the phone. However, when you confront my former sisters tonight, I trust you will note my absence.”

“It occurs to me that you would not be calling me if you expected me to die tonight. You’re trying to prevent me from coming after you tomorrow.”

“No, I fully expect you to die.”

“Oh. How charming.”

“I simply didn’t want you to think I betrayed you. Unlike my former sisters, I have a sense of honor.”

“We shall see,” I said, and hung up. I’d make a point of calling her tomorrow. I shucked off my shoes as the werewolves finished their changes and milled around impatiently, waiting for me to signal them to go. “Have patience, please,” I told them. “I have a couple of bindings to do.”

I gave Granuaile the bindings I had promised, then told the wolves we were ready. I had to stay in human form to carry the sword and communicate with Granuaile. “We’re going to sprint,” I told her. “Go as fast as you can; don’t worry about pacing yourself. You won’t run out of breath. Just make sure you don’t twist an ankle.”

And with that we were off, with nothing more than a couple of excited yips from the Pack. Gunnar had strictly forbidden howling and barks by prearrangement, in hopes of keeping our numbers and our distance hidden from Aenghus Óg and the witches. The werewolves could communicate via their pack link, anyway. Our enemies might have heard the painful cries of the Pack turning wolf, but then again they might not have: Tony Cabin was a good six miles away, and the hill between us might have absorbed the sound.

Something I was curious about was whether I could shield my mind from Oberon once we got in range. I had never had any occasion to wish for such a thing before, but if he sensed me nearby, his tail would start to wag as sure as a princess waves in a parade, and that would alert our enemies to our proximity. I really didn’t want to give them any warning if I could help it.

After about a half mile of running uphill at a full sprint—across rocky, treacherous terrain on a moonless night—I heard Granuaile giggle delightedly. “This is unbelievable!” she crowed. “What a trip, running with a pack of werewolves!”

“Remember this,” I said, “when you get bogged down in your studies and wonder if it’s all worth it. This is only a taste of what you will be able to do.”

“Will I be able to turn into an owl too?”

“Perhaps. You can take four different animal forms, but those are determined by a ritual and not by whim. Everyone has slightly different forms.”

“What are yours?”

“I can be an owl, wolfhound, otter, or stag. They are not forms I chose but rather forms that chose me in the ritual.”

“Wow,” she said, suitably awed. “That’s pretty fucking cool.”

I laughed and agreed with her. We crested the hill and, by prearrangement with Gunnar, we paused there at the entrance to Haunted Canyon. I had spoken with him extensively about our plans, because I could not communicate with him effectively when he was in wolf form. Communicating with Oberon was my magic, but communication amongst the Pack was their magic; I was not part of the Pack, no matter how friendly we were. And werewolves are, for the most part, immune to any magic that isn’t theirs, even the benign sort that would allow me to talk to them mind-to-mind in wolf form.

“This, unfortunately,” I said to Granuaile, “is where we need to part ways for some time. Laksha is going to need to rejoin us from here on out.”

“Oh, okay, um, master, or sensei, or whatever. What should I call you?”

I laughed. “Archdruid would be the correct term, I suppose,” I said. “But that doesn’t fall trippingly off the tongue, does it? And it would turn heads in public, and we don’t want that. So let’s stick with sensei.”

“Kick some ass, sensei.” She clasped her hands together mantis style and bowed to me, and when she rose back up Laksha was in charge.

“Why was she bowing to you?” she asked in her Tamil accent.

“I’m her sensei now.”

“I am not knowing this word.”

“It’s an honorific we’ve settled on. Listen, we’re four miles, give or take, from Tony Cabin. How close do you need to get to Radomila?”

“To take the necklace back, I’ll need to be right next to her.”

“I mean how close do you need to be to, you know, make karma happen? Do you need line of sight?”

She shook her head. “I need only this drop of blood I have heard about.”

I pulled Radomila’s note from my pocket and handed it to her. She examined it the way a normal human being would for a couple of moments, but then she pulled some creepy witch stuff and made Granuaile’s eyes roll back in their sockets so all I saw was the whites of her eyes. I knew it was something akin to my faerie specs—the Vedic third eye that allowed them to see visible traces of magic—but it was still creepy. When she had seen what she needed to see, her eyes rolled back down like slot machine tumblers to give me double pupils. They focused on me and she said, “I can kill her from as far away as a mile with this. But I cannot kill the other witches without my necklace—unless you have their blood too?”

“No, I don’t.”

“I was not thinking so. You will have to get me the necklace, then, if you want me to be helping with them.”

“I’ll probably be busy at that point,” I said dryly, thinking of Aenghus Óg. Suddenly I felt a tug at my feet, a subtle indication that someone nearby was drawing power from the earth. The only beings capable of doing that, besides me, were a few Old World dryads, Pan, and the Tuatha Dé Danann. Paranoia made me think of Aenghus Óg immediately, since I doubted Pan would be chasing any dryads in the Superstition Mountains. “Someone’s coming,” I said, drawing Fragarach from its sheath. The werewolves’ hackles rose and they spread themselves before me, facing the direction I was facing and straining with snout and ear to sense what I had sensed. Nice doggies.

I wondered if the magic of the Tuatha Dé Danann would work on the werewolves; my own didn’t seem to work very well, and it was the same as the Tuatha Dé’s, albeit somewhat weaker. Laksha, I saw peripherally, had coiled Granuaile’s body into a defensive stance that was probably some form of varma kalai, an Indian martial art based on attacking pressure points. She wasn’t dependent entirely on magic, then, like most witches, for her offense and defense—good to know. In case, you know, we weren’t on the same side someday.

The tug at my heels felt nearer—whoever it was, they were definitely coming this way. I looked down the slope into Haunted Canyon but could not spy anything moving. The choked overgrowth of scrub oak and manzanita along the trail had quite a bit to do with that; someone determined to remain concealed could do so until they were practically on top of us. As it was almost certainly one of the Tuatha Dé Danaan, they would have camouflage cast on them in any case.

I saw a couple of werewolves snarl and leap slightly off to my left, and I shifted my stance to meet whatever threat might materialize there. The werewolves oddly tried to change course in midair, but apparently they could not avoid whatever alarmed them. Instead, they collided broadside with something that sent them whirling to the ground with dismayed whimpers.

Werewolves, in my considerable experience, simply do not do that. The things that werewolves attack are usually the ones whimpering in dismay—shortly before they expire from an acute case of missing jugular.

I expected Magnusson to completely lose his shit at this point and teach that thin air a lesson, or at least give his whimpering pack members a mental bitch slap. But he and the rest of the Pack all flopped down, rolled over, and presented their throats to the air.

Werewolves never do that. I was very glad I wasn’t in hound form—and then understanding broke upon me as Flidais, goddess of the hunt, dispelled her invisibility and addressed me with a pack of submissive werewolves at her feet.

“Atticus, I must speak with you before you confront Aenghus Óg,” she said. “If you proceed as is, this magnificent pack will be destroyed.”