Trapped

We stood in a meadow of bunch grass and clover. The sky washed us in cerulean blue, and the sun kissed Granuaile’s red hair with gold—mine too, I suppose. We had stopped dyeing our hair black because no one was looking for two redheads anymore. And after twelve uncomfortable years of being clean-shaven—my goatee had been distinguishable and damn difficult to dye—I was enjoying my new beard. Oberon looked as if he wanted to plop down and bask in the light for a while. Our backpacks were weighted down with camping gear that we’d bought at Peace Surplus in Flagstaff, but after Granuaile retrieved the fulgurites, we jogged over as best we could to the nearest stand of Ponderosa pine trees. I confirmed that there was a functioning tether to Tír na nÓg there and then looked up for signs of Perun’s arrival.

Granuaile noticed and craned her neck upward. “What’s up there, sensei?” she wondered aloud. “I don’t see anything but sky.”

“I’m looking for Perun. I’m assuming he’s going to fly in. There, see?” I pointed to a dark streak in the northwestern sky trailed by lightning bolts. And, behind that, at a distance of perhaps five to ten miles—I couldn’t tell from so far away—burned an orange ball of fire.

Granuaile squinted. “What’s that thing that looks like the Phoenix Suns logo? Is that him?”

“No, Perun is in front of it, throwing all the lightning.”

“Oh, so what is it? A meteor or a cherub or something?”

“Or something. It doesn’t look friendly. That’s not a warm, cozy hearth fire that you gather ’round with your friends to read some Longfellow while you toast s’mores. That’s more like napalm with a heart of phosphorus and a side of hell sauce.” The lightning and the fireball were turning in the sky and heading directly our way.

Oberon said.

I hear ya, buddy. I’m ready to scoot too. But let’s see if we can talk to Perun first.

The sky darkened and boomed above, making everything shudder; Perun was traveling at supersonic speeds. He crashed into the meadow about fifty yards away from us, and large chunks of turf exploded around a newly formed crater. I felt the impact in my feet, and a wave of displaced air knocked me backward a bit. Before the turf could fall back to earth, a heavily muscled figure carpeted in hair bounded out of it toward us, panic writ large on his features.

“Atticus! We must flee this plane! Is not safe! Take me—save me!”

Normally thunder gods are not prone to panic. The ability to blast away problems tends to turn the jagged edges of fear into silly little pillows of insouciance. So when an utter badass like Perun looks as if he’s about to soil himself, I hope I can be forgiven if I nearly shat kine—especially when the fireball whoomped into the crater Perun had just vacated and sucked all the oxygen out of my lungs.

Granuaile ducked and shrieked in surprise; Oberon whimpered. Perun was tossed through the air toward us like a stuntman in a Michael Bay film, but, upon rolling gracefully through the landing, he leapt back up, his legs churning toward us.

Behind Perun, the fire didn’t spread but rather began to shrink and coalesce and … laugh. A high, thin, maniacal laugh, straight out of creepy cartoons. And the fire swirled, torus-like, around a figure twelve feet tall, until it gradually wicked out and left a lean giant with a narrow face standing fifty yards before us, his orange and yellow hair starting from his skull like a sunburst. The grin on his face wasn’t the affable, friendly sort; it was more like the sociopathic rictus of the irretrievably, bugfuckeringly insane.

His eyes were the worst. They were melted around the edges, as if they’d been burned with acid, and where a normal person would have laugh lines or crow’s-feet, he had bubbly pink scars and a nightmare of blistered tissue. The whites of his eyes were a red mist of broken blood vessels, but the irises were an ice blue frosted with madness. He blinked them savagely, as if he had soap in them or something, and soon I recognized it as a nervous tic, since his head jerked to the right at odd intervals and then continued to twitch uncertainly afterward, like a bobble-head doll.

“Go, my friend, go! We must flee!” Perun said, huffing as he reached us and putting one hand on my shoulder and another on the pine. Granuaile followed suit; she knew the drill, and so did Oberon, who reared up on his hind legs and leaned one paw against me and the other on the tree.

“Who in hell is that, Perun?” I said.

The giant laughed again and I shuddered involuntarily. His voice was smooth and fluffy, like marshmallow crème—if the crème also had shards of glass in it. But he had a thick Scandinavian accent to go with the nervous tic.

“This p-p-place—is M-Merrica, yes?”

A twitch, a stutter, and an English-language learner. He’d drive me insane just listening to him. “Yes,” I replied.

“Hah? Who? Thppt! Raah!” He spat a fire loogie and shook his head violently. Perhaps this was more than a twitch. It might be full-blown Tourette’s syndrome. Or it might be something else, as the signs all pointed to a highly unpleasant conclusion.

“Who gah, guh, gods here?” He giggled to himself after this, pleased that he’d managed to ask the question. There was a disturbingly high squealing noise coming from his head, like the sound of fat screaming in a frying pan or air slowly leaking out of a balloon. The giant rested his hands on his knees and scrunched up his shoulders in an attempt to steady his noggin, but this had the unsettling effect of turning his flamelike hair to actual flames. The noise intensified.

“You are a god here,” I said, taking an educated guess. I could have confirmed this by looking at him in the magical spectrum, but there was no need. There wasn’t much else that Perun would fear. “But I don’t know which one. Who are you?”

The giant threw back his head and roared in delight, clapping like a child and high-stepping as if I’d asked him if he wanted ice cream. My jaw dropped, and Granuaile muttered a bewildered “What the fuck?” which mirrored my own thoughts. What had happened to his mind?

Perun chucked me urgently on the shoulder. “Atticus, is Loki! He is free. We must go. Is smart thing to do.”

“Gods below,” I breathed, gooseflesh rising on my arms. I’d feared he was Loki once I saw the eyes, but I’d also clung to the hope that he was something a bit less apocalyptic, like an escaped military experiment along the lines of Sharktopus. Instead, Loki, the old Norse villain of the Eddas, whose release from captivity heralded the start of Ragnarok, was unbound and ready to paint the town batshit.

Perun and Oberon were right; the smart thing to do would be to leave. But the smarter thing to do would be to get Loki to leave too. I didn’t want to scarper off and leave Kaibab at his mercy; I wanted Loki off this plane as quickly as possible. Time to lie to the god of lies.

“I am Eldhár,” I called out to him in Old Norse. His laughter, already dying out, choked off abruptly, and he focused those blue-and-blood eyes on me. The name was one I’d used before: It meant “flame hair” in Old Norse, and I’d employed it years ago when I’d gone to Asgard to steal a golden apple. “I am a construct of the dwarfs of Nidavellir.” Tapping into my adrenaline and an older, more primitive part of my psyche, I smiled at the giant in the same disconcerting way he had smiled at us. “Glad am I that you are free, Loki, for that means your wife is free also, and I was built specifically to destroy her and all your spawn. I will behead the serpent. Eviscerate the wolf. And as for Hel: Even the queen of death can die.” I laughed menacingly, hoped that it was convincing, and thought that would serve as a good exit line.

Without giving him a chance to respond, I pulled my center along the tether to Tír na nÓg, bringing Granuaile, Oberon, and Perun with me, shifting us safely away from earth and leaving Loki to consider how to address this new problem. Hopefully he’d return to the Norse plane and start asking questions—and hopefully the dwarfs had fire insurance.

I had plenty of questions for Perun—like how had Loki gained entrance to the Slavic plane, what was Hel up to now, and whether Fenris was still fettered—but foremost among them was finding out what idiot had thought it a good idea to teach an old god of mischief how to speak English.