Besieged: Stories from the Iron Druid Chronicles by Kevin Hearne

Author:Kevin Hearne [Hearne, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3, pdf
ISBN: 9780356509563
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2017-07-10T22:00:00+00:00

This story, narrated by Archdruid Owen Kennedy, takes place after Staked, Book 8 of The Iron Druid Chronicles, but before the events of Oberon’s Meaty Mysteries:

The Purloined Poodle.

It doesn’t matter whether we make love or war or both when we go running together in the woods; Greta always likes to snuggle up afterward for something she calls “pillow talk,” even though we never have any pillows with us. Perhaps it’s because we are so fecking savage when we play together, and she wants a quiet time of conversation to set aside the beast and reassert her humanity. I don’t know; that might be reading more into the bones of the thing than are really there. But, like her, I have come to look forward to our talks as much as the fighting and the sex. She has some wild fecking stories, the kind of thing you’re sure can’t be real except in the fevered dreams of a talk radio host armed only with a microphone and two handfuls of batshit.

Hunting down wendigos in Manitoba, for instance. Negotiating with ghouls to make sure the pack has access to efficient body disposal. And she claims they had to destroy an actual modern-day necromancer who had raised the dead in Phoenix just to make him tacos and margaritas, and he had to die before he decided to use his power for something more sinister.

She tells me it’s me turn to share as we lie naked and bleeding on the slopes of Mount Humphreys near Flagstaff. She still shudders from the pain of her shift from wolf to human and clasps me hand as we stare up at a blue sky through the pickets of white-trunked aspens. Seen from the forest floor like that, they seem to be the clutching finger bones of giants long buried in the earth, reaching for one last fine day in the sun.

When I point this out to her, she squints up at them as if there’s something wrong with her vision. “What if that were true?” she says, and nestles into the crook of me arm. “How do you suppose they would come to be here, lying in the cold ground?”

I snort at the question. “Might as well ask how we came to be here, lying on top of it.”

Her head raises enough to look me in the eye. “All right, then. I’ll ask: How did we get here?”

“What? Are ye serious? Ye already know that. Siodhachan fetched me off that fecking timesuck in Tír na nÓg, and we met at Hal’s house.”

“Right. And I was turned into a werewolf by Gunnar and Hal a long time ago. It’s one hell of a chain of cause and effect. But you’ve never shared with me a crucial link of that chain.”

“And what link is that?”

“How did you become the archdruid of Atticus O’Sullivan? Is there a story worth telling behind that? Or was it an ordinary thing, like your archdruid assigned him to you?”

“Ye really want to hear about Siodhachan and me? I thought ye would rather milk a cockroach than hear tell of him again.

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