Hunted

Chapter 11

A pair of horns blast behind me, I am chilled with a premonition of my own death, and I wish for the thousandth time that Atticus were here. Did he find horns to be harbingers of death and sorrow? I cannot ever ask him now.

Instead of “When the Saints Go Marching In,” I always hear “Taps” at funerals, and somehow the collective sorrow of so many final farewells builds in my mind, a great Jungian unconscious flood of tears and roses thrown on caskets and folded flags given to widows by a pair of crisp white gloves. That horn that plays in the John Williams score after Luke Skywalker finds the smoking ruins of his aunt and uncle—such a mournful sound, full and hollow at the same time, a surfeit of emptiness. And the call to charge never rouses me but rather signals that someone is going to die a violent death soon—or, if it starts a race or contest, it means there can be only one victor.

The horns that blasted behind me were dim, nasal, and stuffy sounds that nevertheless meant the goddesses were gaining on us, and they weighted down my legs, which were already straining, not from fatigue but from dolor. These were the sounds of horns and hunting that, according to myth, brought Actaeon to Diana as she was bathing. He’d been lost in the woods and thought that by following the sounds of horns he’d be saved. But Diana had turned him into a stag and set her hounds on him instead. Those horns had called him to his death.

Is she still sounding the same horn all these centuries later?

And is there anything more horrifying to the hunted than the sound of horns? Even the baying of the hounds is not so terrible; they are animals and following their instinct and training. But the murderous intellect behind the horn, the creature coldly orchestrating my doom—that’s what makes me feel like prey and sets icy wings of fear fluttering inside my throat.

I probably would have given up already if it weren’t for Oberon. And he is probably thinking the same thing regarding me. In truth, we are running only because Atticus would have wanted us to. I think we are only marginally more scared than we are depressed, and we aren’t running as fast as we had been before. The urgency is gone. I don’t see how I can survive this if Atticus and the Morrigan couldn’t. The powers of a Druid are awesome, but the powers arrayed against me are too numerous and in a different league. I’m not going to quit, but I feel like I’m on a soccer team losing 3–0 with ten minutes left on the clock. While winning in that scenario is still theoretically possible, I don’t see a way to make it happen all by myself and I half-wish that the end would hurry up and get here, banishing the dread of its approach.

We crossed the border into the Netherlands, and the elemental directed me to turn sharply to the southwest to avoid the bulk of cities by the sea. We’d have had to turn south at some point anyway to reach the French coast.

It’s odd, sometimes, how a border can seemingly change the character of the land. The German landscape had been sharp, clean, and precise, whereas the Dutch, even at night, had a bit of a gauzy filter over it, as if the ghost of Rembrandt had pulled his brush across it to soften the edges just a little bit. The colors I saw in my night vision, too, appeared subtly textured and mixed by the master, not so stark as they had been in Germany. Or perhaps it was no different at all, and only my melancholia made it so.

Noting the change of direction, Oberon said in a subdued tone,

He let some time pass, and all we heard was the pounding of my hooves and the pads of his paws on the earth. They beat out a rhythm of cycling thought, the percussive notes repeating Atticus over and over if you were inclined to hear it that way, and we were. Then he said,

The horns sounded again. Perhaps my imagination magnified the sound a bit.

Predator? Yeah, I’ve seen it.>

I felt as if my eyes should be flooding with tears, but horses don’t cry the same way humans do. Oberon continued, not waiting for me to finish.