Hunted (The Iron Druid Chronicles, Book Six) by Kevin Hearne Page A

who are favorably disposed toward us. Goibhniu, for one, and Manannan Mac Lir, who are powerful and influential in their own right.”
    “But wait a second,” Granuaile said. “If he’s doing all this to avenge his brother’s death at your hands, shouldn’the have been destroyed years ago when Brighid and the Morrigan did their purge? They went around putting people down after Aenghus Óg tried to take over, didn’t they?”
    “Excellent point. He must have concealed his allegiance very well.”
    “Unless he was never allied with Aenghus at all. If he’s Aenghus’s half brother, then he’s Brighid’s too, isn’t he?”
    “Yes.”
    “So he might have been in Brighid’s camp all along.”
    “True. But if that’s the case, that would still make him antagonistic to us now, since we are not Brighid’s favorite Druids.”
    “Speak for yourself,” Granuaile said. “She likes me just fine.”
    I grinned, acknowledging that she had a point there. “Either way, he’s still around and could have both the means and motive to wish us harm. We need to investigate when we get the chance.”
    
    “What? Oberon, that doesn’t make any sense.”
    
    “Do you perhaps mean pi, the mathematical symbol?”
    
    My efforts over the years to instruct Oberon in basic timekeeping and other mathematical concepts had failed utterly—except in the realm of vocabulary, I suppose. He soaked that all up and spouted it out later in unpredictable combinations. He had tried, for example, to rate dry dog food on “the quotient of the beef correlationcoefficient” and sausage on a “pork echelon matrix.” But he still got confused if you asked him to count beyond twenty.
    “Oh, I think I see now,” I said. “You are using shepherd’s pie as a unit of measurement.”
    
    “But that’s math.”
    
    “Didn’t you use gravy in this manner before?”
    contains
a rich beef gravy. So pie is on another level than gravy, see?>
    “I think so. This means that cold chicken, for example, would be a kind of gravy, while a slow-roasted tri-tip would be …?”
    
    “Got it. I think you’re right, buddy,” I said. “Brighid is totally jealous.”
    Granuaile and I shifted to our hooved forms and we picked up our pace again.

Chapter 9
    It was unfortunate that we had no time to savor our surroundings on such a beautiful day. The mixed woods of Germany were the sort that deserved a good savoring—no, a
savouring
, with a British
u
in there for the sake of decadence, as
colours
are somehow more vibrant to me than mere colors. It was in the woods of Germany that big bad wolves ate grandmothers and girls who dressed in red. It was Germany that hid the gingerbread house of a witch who hungered for children to roast in her oven. And somewhere in the mountains that we were doing our best to avoid, Rübezahl still wandered with his storm harp, shaking the earth or fogging the skies as the notion took him.
    We had successfully navigated northwest through farmlands and river crossings and had recently threaded the space between Bergen on the north and Celle on the south. As we headed into a lovely wooded stretch that gave way to dank moors here and there, the sun sank before us and filtered through the needled branches of evergreens.
    Usually there are only two kinds of script one sees in forests: signs that warn off trespassers and