Trapped

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.

<Listen to the hairy guy, Atticus. Tall, scarred, and fiery there is stranger danger if I ever saw it.>

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.

Chapter 2

I didn’t linger in Tír na nÓg but rather shifted us right away to an island in the middle of Third Cranberry Lake in Manitoba. It was one of my favorite escapes, covered with evergreens and rarely visited by humans.

I was breathing heavily even though I hadn’t run anywhere yet. “It’s too soon,” I huffed. “He’s not supposed to be going around burning things yet. We have a year left.”

“What are you talking about?” Granuaile asked. She crossed one leg over the other and leaned on her staff.

“Perun will remember this,” I said, catching his eye. “Remember when we were in Siberia and we ate that rabbit stew and told stories before we went to Asgard?”

“Da, I remember. I say, ‘Next time, eat bear.’ ”

<I like the way this guy thinks.>

“Well, after dinner, Väinämöinen told us that story about the sea serpent. And I didn’t say anything then, but there is this old time-bomb prophecy that the sirens spoke to Odysseus when he was tied to the mast—the only one that hasn’t come true yet, and I thought the clock started ticking then. The prophecy goes like this: ‘Thirteen years from the date a white beard sups on hares and talks of sea serpents, the world will burn.’ ”

“That’s weird,” Granuaile said.

“Is more than weird. Is unhappy stomach from spicy food. Is ass on fire,” Perun asserted.

“What?” Granuaile cried, unused to Perun’s attempts to be colorful in English.

Perun shrugged and tried again. “I mean is much discomfort. Ass on fire is very bad, yes?”

“Agreed,” I said, “but those same sirens accurately predicted the rise of Genghis Khan, the American Revolution, and the bombing of Hiroshima. That pattern suggests they’re talking about something bigger than a small fire, camp or ass or otherwise.”

<That reminds me! I never did muster my horde on the Mongolian steppes.>

“You think my world is world of this prophecy?” Perun asked.

“No, I don’t think the sirens would speak of planes other than this one. Plus we’re a year too early. But that’s what has me worried: The prophecies regarding Ragnarok aren’t worth a damn anymore, yet it still might happen now that Loki’s free. The sirens of Odysseus were always right, but maybe this time they’re going to be wrong—or maybe just off by a year. I don’t know. Killing the Norns screwed up everything. I suppose all I know is that there’s a tsunami of shit heading toward a ten-dollar fan and we’re standing on the fan. Jesus spoke to me of cataclysms, plural, and maybe we could avoid them if we got rid of both Loki and Hel, but who knows if Ganesha and his gang will let me pursue that now, because I promised I’d wait until—”

“Atticus,” Granuaile said, touching me gently on the arm. “You’ve stopped making sense. Calm down.”

“Right. Thanks. I need to slow down. You know what sucks about prophecies?”

“They never predict anything fun,” Granuaile answered. “Just once I’d like to hear a prophet tell someone, ‘Thou shalt win a bitchin’ Camaro on a game show.’ ”

“Good point, but I was going to say that everybody has them. Prophets have been around as long as prostitutes.”

<Often in the same bed, ba-doom-boom!>

“You can’t figure out who to believe,” I continued, “so you wind up treating all the prophets like Cassandras, but some of them really are correct. Hitting on the right one before their prophecy comes true, though—that’s the trick. Worse odds than roulette.”

“You hit women named Cassandra?” Perun said, frowning. “Is not right to hit women, even if name is ugly.”

“What? Perun, I think you misunderstood.”

“Oh.” He looked crestfallen. “I am reminded many times. English is not best language for me.”

“I speak Russian now, though it’s not my best language either,” Granuaile said. “We could switch to that if you’d like, if you would talk slowly and pronounce everything clearly.”

Perun grinned. “Da, that would be wonderful!” We made the switch, and I tried to speak slowly for Granuaile’s benefit.

“I’ve been thinking for a while now,” I said, “that this prophecy about the world burning might be linked to Ragnarok, thanks to what we did in Asgard. That’s why seeing Loki free is seriously disturbing. His release was always the trigger of Ragnarok in the old tales.”

Granuaile frowned. “Yeah, but wasn’t he supposed to ride a ship of the dead up to the Field of Vigrid, and it