Kevin Hearne - Hounded: The Iron Druid Chronicles

Hounded is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously.

A Del Rey Mass Market Original

Copyright 2011 by Kevin Hearne
Excerpt from Hexed by Kevin Hearne copyright 2011 by Kevin Hearne

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

D EL R EY is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming book Hexed by Kevin Hearne. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflecct the final content for the forthcoming edition.

eISBN: 978-0-345-52253-5

www.delreybooks.com

Cover illustration by Gene Mollica

v3.1

Look, Mom, I made this!
Can we put it on the fridge?

Let it be known from the beginning that readers are free to pronounce the names in this book however they see fit. Its supposed to be a good time, so I do not wish to steal anyones marshmallows by telling them theyre saying it wrong. However, for those readers who place a premium on accuracy, I have provided an informal guide to some names and words that may be a bit confusing for English readers, since Irish phonetics arent necessarily those of English. One thing to keep in mind is that diacritical marks above the vowels do not indicate a stressed syllable but rather a certain vowel sound.

Aenghus g = Angus OHG (long o, as in doe, not short o, as in log)

Airmid = AIR mit

Bres = Bress

Brighid = BRI yit (or close to BREE yit) in Old Irish. Modern Irish has changed this to Brd (pronounced like Breed), changing the vowel sound and eliminating the g entirely because English speakers kept pronouncing the g with a j sound. Names like Bridget are Anglicized versions of the original Irish name

Cairbre = CAR bre, where you kind of roll the r and the e is pronounced as in egg

Conaire = KON uh ra

Cchulainn = Koo HOO lin (the Irish ch is pronounced like an h low in the throat, like a Spanish j, never with a hard k sound or as in the English chew)

Dian Cecht = DEE an KAY

Fianna = Fee AH na

Finn Mac Cumhaill = FIN mac COO will

Flidais = FLIH dish

Fragarach = FRAG ah rah

Granuaile = GRAWN ya WALE

Lugh Lmhfhada = Loo LAW wah duh

Manannan Mac Lir = MAH nah NON mac LEER

Miach = ME ah

Mogh Nuadhat = Moh NU ah dah

Moralltach = MOR ul TAH

Suileabhin = Oh SULL uh ven (pronounced like OSullivan, its just the Irish spelling)

Siodhachan = SHE ya han (remember the guttural h for the Irish ch; dont go near a hard k sound)

Tuatha D Danann = Too AH ha day DAN an

Gabhra = GO rah

Mag Mell = Mah MEL

Magh Lna = Moy LAY na

Tr na ng = TEER na NOHG (long o)

Coinnigh = con NEE (to hold, keep)

Digh = doy (to burn)

Dn = doon (to close or seal)

Oscail = OS kill (to open)

Fearn = fairn

Idho = EE yo

Ngetal = NYET ul

Tinne = CHIN neh

Ura = OO ra (make sure youre not turning this into a military cheer. Both syllables are very clipped and you roll the r a wee bit)

There are many perks to living for twenty-one centuries, and foremost among them is bearing witness to the rare birth of genius. It invariably goes like this: Someone shrugs off the weight of his cultural traditions, ignores the baleful stares of authority, and does something his countrymen think to be completely batshit insane. Of those, Galileo was my personal favorite. Van Gogh comes in second, but he really was batshit insane.

Thank the Goddess I dont look like a guy who met Galileoor who saw Shakespeares plays when they first debuted or rode with the hordes of Genghis Khan. When people ask how old I am, I just tell them twenty-one, and if they assume I mean years instead of decades or centuries, then that cant be my fault, can it? I still get carded, in fact, which any senior citizen will tell you is immensely flattering.

The young-Irish-lad faade does not stand me in good stead when Im trying to appear scholarly at my place of businessI run an occult bookshop with an apothecarys counter squeezed in the cornerbut it has one outstanding advantage. When I go to the grocery store, for example, and people see my curly red hair, fair skin, and long goatee, they suspect that I play soccer and drink lots of Guinness. If Im going sleeveless and they see the tattoos all up and down my right arm, they assume Im in a rock band and smoke lots of weed. It never enters their mind for a moment that I could be an ancient Druidand thats the main reason why I like this look. If I grew a white beard and got myself a pointy hat, oozed dignity and sagacity and glowed with beatitude, people might start to get the wrongor the rightidea.

Sometimes I forget what I look like and I do something out of character, such as sing shepherd tunes in Aramaic while Im waiting in line at Starbucks, but the nice bit about living in urban America is that people tend to either ignore eccentrics or move to the suburbs to escape them.

That never would have happened in the old days. People who were different back then got burned at the stake or stoned to death. There is still a downside to being different today, of course, which is why I put so much effort into blending in, but the downside is usually just harassment and discrimination, and that is a vast improvement over dying for the common mans entertainment.

Living in the modern world contains quite a few vast improvements like that. Most old souls I know think the attraction of modernity rests on clever ideas like indoor plumbing and sunglasses. But for me, the true attraction of America is that its practically godless. When I was younger and dodging the Romans, I could hardly walk a mile in Europe without stepping on a stone sacred to some god or other. But out here in Arizona, all I have to worry about is the occasional encounter with Coyote, and I actually rather like him. (Hes nothing like Thor, for one thing, and that right there means were going to get along fine. The local college kids would describe Thor as a major asshat if they ever had the misfortune to meet him.)

Even better than the low god density in Arizona is the near total absence of faeries. I dont mean those cute winged creatures that Disney calls fairies; I mean the Fae, the Sidhe, the actual descendants of the Tuatha D Danann, born in Tr na ng, the land of eternal youth, each one of them as likely to gut you as hug you. They dont dig me all that much, so I try to settle in places they cant reach very easily. They have all sorts of gateways to earth in the Old World, but in the New World they need oak, ash, and thorn to make the journey, and those trees dont grow together too often in Arizona. I have found a couple of likely places, like the White Mountains near the border with New Mexico and a riparian area near Tucson, but those are both over a hundred miles away from my well-paved neighborhood near the university in Tempe. I figured the chances of the Fae entering the world there and then crossing a treeless desert to look for a rogue Druid were extremely small, so when I found this place in the late nineties, I decided to stay until the locals grew suspicious.