“Yes,” I told him, cleaning up the cleaning supplies. “Pritkin is about to tell us what happens when you follow a bunch of panicked Fey into an unknown forest all by yourself.”
“Oh yes?” Jonas said curiously.
Pritkin closed his eyes and leaned his head back, looking martyred. “I ended up swinging from a rope, upside down, while some of the village men poked at me with poisoned spears,” he said dully. “I managed to convince them that I was not one of their enemies, but not before—”
“They gutted you like a pig?” I asked brightly.
He flushed and cracked an eye at me, but whatever brilliant riposte he’d managed to come up with was ruined by Jonas. “Who were these enemies?”
“The Alorestri,” Pritkin said, sitting up and wincing.
“The Green Fey,” Jonas translated for me. “They share a border with the Dark and have had an on-again, offagain struggle over land, resources, hunting rights”—he shrugged—“what have you, for millennia.”
“And currently it appears to be on again,” Pritkin said. “According to the villagers, the Green Fey broke through the border defenses a few days ago and overwhelmed the local Dark Fey forces. They were fleeing ahead of a contingent of Green Fey said to be coming their way.”
“There was an invasion?” I asked, my stomach sinking. I had a friend at the Dark Fey court, and I liked the idea of him remaining in one piece.
Pritkin noticed my expression. “This sort of thing isn’t unusual,” he told me. “The Dark Fey army will regroup and likely battle them back within a few weeks. But in the meantime, there is no way to reach my contacts, or even to know for certain where they are. And without them, there is no way to know what attacked you.”
Frankly, I couldn’t have cared less. I was just grateful to have him back, beat up and bloody or not. “It may not even be Fey,” I reminded him. “Billy’s decided it’s Apollo’s ghost come back to haunt me!”
“Oh no,” Jonas said, apparently serious. “I shouldn’t think so.”
“Well, yeah. I wasn’t actually suggesting—”
“This world leeched the gods’ power; it did not feed them. That is why all the old legends speak of them visiting Earth but living elsewhere: Asgard, Vanaheim, Olympus. And if they could not feed while alive, they certainly could not do so dead.”
“Yeah, well. Like I said—”
“No, I believe the gods we are dealing with are still quite alive.”
“Jonas, please!” I looked at him impatiently. “This isn’t freaking Ragnarok, all right?”
“It would be nice to think so,” he said mildly, the same way someone might say that it would be nice if it wasn’t raining, while standing in the middle of a deluge.
I was about to reply, but the kettle started whistling its head off, so we trooped back into the kitchen. Jonas made tea, and I waited for some kind of an explanation. A coherent one, preferably, but I wasn’t hopeful. Which was why it was a shock when a suddenly brisk Jonas sat down at the table.
“Three children of Loki; three gods to be overcome,” he told us. “Apollo has already been dealt with, leaving two. The difficulty was in knowing which god would be opposing us next, but I believe your tarot may have shown us that, Cassie. It is an invaluable aid, but it leaves us with a daunting challenge.”
“Jonas—”
He patted my hand. “Almost done. Now, I believe that the second child of Loki, Hel, may be another name for the Greek goddess Artemis. Not only was she a virgin goddess with the moon as her symbol, but she was also associated with hunting. Not personally, in her case, but in the form of the Moon Dogs she loaned Odin for the Wild Hunt every year.”
“Okay,” I said wearily, not because I understood what he was talking about, but because it was simpler just to go with it.
But, of course, Pritkin had to argue. “But Artemis wasn’t a death goddess.”
“Oh, but she was, dear boy,” Jonas said. “Most certainly. If you wanted a quick death in ancient Greece, you didn’t pray to Persephone or Hecate, but to Artemis, who would give you ‘a death as swift as her arrows.’”
“But Hecate is more traditionally associated—”
“But we don’t care about tradition,” Jonas interrupted, a little sharply. “Hecate has nothing to do with our current situation, whereas Artemis has been deeply involved from the beginning. I think there is little doubt that the goddess we are searching for is Artemis.”
“Searching for?” I asked. “When did we decide—”
Jonas leaned over the table. “If we assume that Artemis and Hel are the same individual, as Thor and Apollo were, then she becomes a person of the utmost importance. According to legend, she is protected by a fierce guard dog named Garm, and together they are destined to defeat Tyr in Ragnarok.”
“Tyr?” I asked, feeling more confused by the minute.
“Ares,” Pritkin said. “If Jonas’s reasoning is correct.”
“Yes, the identification is a bit easier there,” Jonas agreed. “As far back as ancient Rome, it was assumed that the war gods were one and the same. They even celebrated Ares, or Mars as they called him, on Tuesday.”
“Why Tuesday?” I asked, my head spinning.
“Because it means ‘Tyr’s day.’ Just as Thursday was named after Thor.” He looked at the chalkboard. “There is, of course, a third child of Loki, the wolf Fenrir. He was shackled by Odin, king of the gods, but eventually escaped and killed him. But I do not believe we are there yet.”
I stared at the wildly decorated chalkboard for a moment, and the sick feeling in my stomach settled into a familiar, ulcer-inducing burn. “Wait. Are you trying to tell me that to win the war, we have to
“Oh, no, nothing like that,” Jonas said, and I felt my spine unknot slightly. “We have to help the children of Loki kill them.”
Chapter Nineteen
“That what you call lunch?”
I looked up to see Marco loitering in the doorway of the kitchen, massive arms crossed over an even bigger chest. When Marco fills a doorway, I thought vaguely, he does it right. I wiped chocolate off my mouth and swilled some now-tepid tea. “Only thing here.”
“Gonna make you sick.”
I shrugged.
He sighed and swung a massive thigh over a kitchen chair. It groaned. “Wanna tell Papa Marco about it?”
“You’re not my papa.”
“Coulda been. I had a little girl once.”
I looked up from sorting through the mage’s abandoned candy box, trying to find another cream. “I didn’t know that.”
He nodded. “Kinda looked like you. ’Cept she smiled more.”
I thought briefly about asking what had happened to her, but that sort of thing was risky with vamps. The answer usually didn’t make anybody happy. “I smile,” I said instead.
“Just not today.”
“The damn mage ate all the creams.”
One bushy eyebrow rose. “And here I thought it was that old coot pissing you off.”
“That, too.”
He sat back and the chair shrieked for mercy. “What is it this time?”
I crunched a toffee. “Well, Marco, apparently we’re in the middle of the Norse version of Armageddon and just didn’t know it. Ares, god of war, is out to get us, and the only way to defeat him is to find Hel—the goddess, not the place—who may or may not also be known as Artemis, and may or may not actually be a person instead of a spell or a weapon or a jelly doughnut. But we have to find her, because, despite the fact that the old legends say
