But I had never tried to run across Europe before. I’d hiked it once and stayed in youth hostels and put little patches on my backpack because I thought it was a funny disguise, but I took my time doing that, and climbing up mountains was an experience to be savored. I rather thought dealing with mountains now would do nothing but slow us down, and, besides, I didn’t want to telegraph our intended destination. To get to the Strait of Dover directly, we could simply run north of west and hit it. But that route would present us not only with several mountain ranges but plenty of well-paved cities like Budapest and Vienna. We needed misdirection and the ability to keep in touch with the earth at all times. That’s why I took a sharp turn north at the Hungarian border: Once we crossed the Carpathians, we could stick to flattish land or, at the worst, low rolling hills all the way to France. While we moved northwest through Poland and Germany, we’d keep them thinking we were headed for Sweden via Denmark. To get the best possible route, however, avoiding the majority of villages while also minimizing our exposure to survivalists in the woods awaiting the apocalypse, I would need to consult elementals along the way. Using my Latin headspace, I reached out to the Carpathian elemental, who was dominant across several human political borders that were meaningless to Gaia.

After some back-and-forth with Carpathia, we settled on a route that would take us north through rural areas of Hungary and Slovakia until we reached the proper Carpathian Mountains.

With a plan in place and an hour of trail behind us, I had time to feel, and much of that feeling leaked out of my eyes as I ran. I had spent nearly my entire life worshipping the Morrigan, and, in recent years, more than that. She was the darkness for me, an unexpectedly beautiful harbinger of doom and pain who forced me to struggle, who pushed me to improve myself. She was a necessary balance to Brighid, not something merely to be feared but to be treasured. As Brighid brought light and craft and poetry to our lives, the Morrigan brought an edge, a tangible sharpness to my existence by sharing hers with me.

With the clarity of hindsight, I saw the signs that the Morrigan had favored me far more than she had the average mortal. Six years ago, especially, when she took me away from Granuaile to repair the tattoos on the back of my hand, she’d been uncharacteristically candid with me, but I had dismissed it because we were in a room enchanted with bindings that encouraged harmony. Now I saw that our interlude there had been haunting her ever since. As soon as she left that room, she reverted to her cruel self, when she had not necessarily wished to do so. And that was what made her snap—not her love for some dude but her lack of freedom to love or not as she desired.

I’d tried to be her friend, which probably made it all worse. We’d gone to a few baseball games together simply to hang out, and she couldn’t keep herself from remarking on the fear of failure the players felt, or their guilt or despair at poor performance, and only noticed their triumphs when I observed them aloud. Each time I did, she cringed, taking it as a rebuke. She seemed to think she should have seen it first, or at least at the same time, but she had a filter blocking all such things from her sight. Each time we’d gone out to the ballpark, she began the night flushed with optimism, convinced that this time she would be able to enjoy the competition and my company on a purely superficial level and ignore all the feelings she was attuned to feel as a goddess associated with death and war and lust. Usually that optimism had fled by the third inning and she sat in silence, distrusting herself to say anything lest it be perceived as accentuating the negative. My attempts to cheer her up with happy observations only emphasized that she lacked the social facility to engage on that level.

We caught a game in St. Louis once, and after a quick visit to the team shop I was struck by how different she looked in a Cardinals jersey and cap. She looked damn cute—not hot or sultry or sexy but the sort of innocent, wholesome beauty that lifts your spirit and makes you grateful to be alive to see it. But when I told the Morrigan she looked cute, she didn’t understand the nuance, nor did she appreciate it when I tried to explain it to her. She thought I was asking for sex, discovered that I wasn’t, and then we both felt frustrated and embarrassed. Despite these failures, I thought that we were making progress, becoming friends after two millennia of being uneasy allies against Aenghus Óg. I suppose the Morrigan didn’t feel the progress was sufficient or of the right kind.

Perhaps just as frustrating for her was the inability to enlist the aid of an iron elemental in binding a cold iron amulet to her aura. No matter how she tried, she could not free herself from the conditions of her godhood and project friendliness.

I supposed she was free now—most importantly, free of those constraints and, to a lesser extent, of an idiot Druid who never recognized her true feelings. If I had looked at her in the magical spectrum, I might have seen those emotional bonds, much as Granuaile had seen them between us soon after she’d gained her magical sight. But I never dared to look at the Morrigan that way. She would know and consider it an invasion of privacy, and she dealt with such invasions harshly.

I supposed I was free now, too, but, unlike the Morrigan, I didn’t want to be. Ridiculous as it seemed, I wanted to see her eyes flash red at me again and tell me I was doomed. I wanted to see another baseball game with her and train her in the hallowed yet disgusting art of chewing sunflower seeds.

And, admittedly, I wanted to feel protected again. She’d been the only one looking out for me. Without the Morrigan’s aegis, I was once again vulnerable to violent death. That had been the case for the vast majority of my long life, of course, but I knew I would miss the last twelve years of relative security. The frequency of attempts on my life had increased dramatically since I’d decided to stop running from Aenghus Óg, and having a goddess in my corner had been a comfort. Her aid had been sporadic and never free of pain, but without it I would certainly already be dead. With her gone now and two immortals on my trail, perhaps the sand in my hourglass was finally running out.

We quickly discovered that all three of us running in concealment was impractical. We lost one another and spread out unintentionally or even bumped into each other. I remained visible, since a stag running through fields was not all that remarkable and decidedly no cause for alarm. Someone might try to round up Granuaile as a horse, however, and Oberon might be reported as a stray. It was easiest for Granuaile to remain completely invisible and Oberon camouflaged, and in such a fashion they followed my lead.

Unaided, we were pretty fast critters; each of us could reach thirty miles an hour and maintain that for perhaps a mile or three before we had to rest. But with Gaia’s help, we could push that to forty to forty-five miles an hour and keep it up indefinitely, replenishing spent muscles and preventing oxygen debt.

The eastern half of Slovakia is largely rural and we had an easy time of it, especially after everyone had gone home for the evening. We slowed down to cross the occasional road or vault a low fence but otherwise stayed in a zone and ran without speaking, hopefully developing a gap that the huntresses would never be able to close. Our first trouble waited for us to the north of a lake called Vel’ká Domaša.

Domaša was oriented north to south, formed by a dam on the Ondava River. It was about eight miles long, and its surface, silvered with reflected moonlight, had slid by on our left as we ran through the forested hills on its eastern side. It was one of those mature forests that give humans a sense of security, because the undergrowth had been either choked out or taught to mind its manners and couldn’t hide large, man-eating predators. People hiked through it and preyed on wild mushrooms instead.

We slipped down from the hills after we’d cleared a wee town on its northeastern shore, a village of maybe five hundred people that I later learned was called Turany nad Ondavou. At that point, Oberon’s nose picked up something and so did mine.

"Hey, Atticus. Either something’s dead or there’s a vampire around here somewhere."

"I smell it too," I replied.

"Clever Girl says she smells it."

"Okay, let’s just chill here a second, and tell her not to shift. If she switches to human, the vampire will sense her."

"Doesn’t he sense us now?"

"We’re harmless animals now, and he’s probably looking for humans."

There was a road ahead of us that led to a border crossing—and thus a pass through the Carpathians. The plan was to follow roughly along its eastern side. I saw nothing on the road heading north, but, scanning to the south, back toward the town, I saw four figures—two on either side of the road. They were all looking south and clearly waiting for something. They wore jeans and hoodies with the hoods pulled up, hands jammed into their pockets.

Triggering magical sight, I saw that one had the telltale gray aura of a vampire. The other three were far more dangerous, in my view. "Dark elves," I said.

"Granuaile says she wants to set them on fire."

I gave a sort of mental snort. The dark elves wouldn’t remain solid long enough to burn. "I should probably quip here that revenge is a dish best served cold."

"You need to explain that saying sometime. You say it like it’s a bad thing, but to me it suggests ice cream, because that’s also best served cold. I think more people would seek revenge if it were served with ice cream. Or maybe gelato or frozen yogurt, but not the kind with fruit mixed in—"

"Oberon."

"Yeah?"

"Ask Granuaile seriously if she wants to take them out or keep running."

There was a pause before the answer came. "She says yes. She doesn’t want them joining up with the goddesses and ganging up on us. But we need to do it quick if we’re going to do it."

She was right about that. The huntresses would be coming along and we couldn’t delay. It occurred to me that perhaps the elves’ sole function was to delay us.

The last time we’d encountered dark elves was in Thessalonika, and we barely escaped. There were fewer of them here, however, and Granuaile was now a full Druid with powers they probably did not expect.

Did the vampire know what we could do to him? He might be a young one and somewhat out of the loop regarding Druids. But I saw his utility to the group: He was a sensor array. We would not be able to sneak up on them unawares. He’d smell us or hear us far in advance.

"I’ll unbind the vampire first and charge from here in plain view. Granuaile should stay invisible and flank the dark elves. If she uses magical sight, she should be able to keep track of them in the dark when they turn to smoke."

Granuaile shifted but remained invisible and evidently had a complaint when she asked Oberon for her throwing knives, for I heard my hound say, "Slobber is just one of the many fine services I provide for free."

"Oberon, please stay here. There’s nothing you can bite down there."

"Okay, that’s fine with me. I’ve been meaning to do some serious maintenance of the undercarriage, if you know what I mean, and you guys always freak out when I go downtown."

"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.