by Karen Chance
It looked like he’d showered before he came over, which, ironically, had left him clean except for the large patch of skin that had been covered by the bandage. I started on the dirt and the grass and the God knew what that he had somehow ground into the wound. And for once, he just sat there, without trying to give me orders or critique me or tell me a better way to proceed. It was odd but nice.
“What happened?” I asked after a few moments.
He cleared his throat. “I was ambushed.”
“Why didn’t you go back through the portal?” I was assuming he’d used the one the Circle had recently opened, since it was pretty much the only option available right now.
“I would have, had I been near it at the time. But I’d already made my way to the village where one of my contacts lives—or I should say, where he used to live.”
Some blood had dried around his belly button. I scrubbed at it with a fingernail until it came off. “Is he dead?”
“What?” Pritkin sounded a little strange.
“Your friend. Associate. Whatever.”
“Er . . . no. At least . . . I’m not sure.”
He fidgeted, and I tightened my hand on his thigh. “Don’t.” I was about to start cleaning the actual stitches now and I didn’t want to rip any out. He froze.
I pushed his jeans down enough that I could see the bottom of the wound, and it wasn’t a pretty sight. He’d already started to heal around the thick black cord he’d used as thread, but the wound itself was ugly and looked infected. And when I gently put the back of my hand against it, it was like a line of fire against my skin.
“Are you supposed to be this hot?” I asked, frowning.
He didn’t answer, and I looked up. And found him staring at me with a strange expression, part tender, part exasperated, part . . . something. I didn’t get a chance to figure it out before he looked away.
“Yes. When I’m healing.”
I decided to take his world for it, since I didn’t have a lot of choice. Pritkin had a severe allergy to doctors, and I knew better than to suggest one. I rinsed out the rag and carefully started cleaning the angry red line.
“What did you mean, you’re not sure?” I asked. “About your friend?”
“I meant . . . his village was deserted. There were clothes dropped in the road and many doors and windows had been left wide-open. I went into a few houses, and found half-eaten food on the table in one and a dog tied out back of another. I let the dog loose, and it took off down a road. I followed it—”
“Of course you did,” I said sourly.
“—and picked up the trail of the villagers almost at once. That in itself was strange enough—”
He broke off, probably because I’d gotten the rag a little too wet that time. “Sorry,” I said, wiping up the dribbles below the wound before they wet the front of his jeans. He closed his eyes.
“The Fey are excellent hunters and trackers,” he told me roughly. “They are usually very difficult to follow.”
“But not this time.”
“No. I found a number of personal items that had been discarded along the way, haphazardly, as if they had fallen out of . . . of peoples’ arms while they ran. It had rained and the forest had a number of muddy areas, and the footprints I saw were running, too. Clearly, the villagers were fleeing some—” He looked down suddenly, his face a little flushed. “Are you almost done?”
“Almost. So you followed them?” I prompted.
“Yes. And that was when I was ambushed. I foolishly hadn’t considered that they might leave some of their number behind, to slow down whoever was pursuing them. That is, I hadn’t considered it until—” He sucked in a breath.
“I’m being as careful as I can,” I told him, patting him dry.
“Just hurry it up, will you?” he said harshly.
“I wouldn’t have to do this if you’d done a better job yourself,” I pointed out. “Having sped-up healing won’t do you any good if you get an infection.”
“I’m not worried about a damn infection!”
“Well, you won’t have to be now,” I said, smacking on a new bandage. And this one, I decided grimly, wasn’t going anywhere.
Pritkin watched me work for a moment in silence. “That’s adhesive tape,” he finally said.
“Mm-hm.”
“That’s . . . rather a lot, wouldn’t you say?”
“Never hurts to be sure.”
“But it’s going to hurt like the devil when I have to take it off.”
“Is it?” I looked up innocently and slapped on another piece.
His eyes narrowed, but before he could say anything, Jonas poked his head out the door. “Are you two done, then?” he asked politely.
“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, b
ut 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 kill two more gods?”
“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 she defeats Ares, they said the same thing about the ouroboros spell and Apollo, so, clearly, the old legends are whacked.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So Jonas needs to know who or what or where, and expects me to tell him.” I threw my chocolate-stained hands up. “Somehow. See how that works?”
“No.”
“Yeah, me neither.”
“So you’re sittin’ here, eating candy.”
“Chocolate.”
“And that’s different?”
“Candy is candy. Chocolate is therapy.”
“Got plans for this afternoon?”
“Eating more chocolate.”
Marco just shook his head. “You shouldn’t let that old guy get to you. He’s nuts.”
“Yeah.” I was kind of coming around to Marco’s way of thinking.
“Where’d he go off to, anyway?”
“Home.” Or wherever he went when he wasn’t blowing my mind.
“And the mage?”
“Same.” At least, Pritkin had said he was going to his room. I chose to believe him, because if I shifted down there and didn’t find him resting, I was going to lose it. And I was close enough anyway.
“Well, I’m going to bed,” Marco announced, placing massive hands on the table and levering himself to his feet. He didn’t need the help, even in the middle of the day, but vamps like to play martyr when they have to be up past sunrise.
“I thought you went an hour ago.”
“Wanted to wait till everyone cleared out.”
I rolled my eyes. Yeah. Because Jonas or Pritkin might suddenly decide to take a cleaver to my head.
He ruffled my hair and left. I found a coconut cream hiding in the second layer and sucked out the ooey-gooey innards. Things were looking up.
And Marco was probably right about not paying too much attention to Jonas. The guy told me one minute that he knew visions couldn’t be made to order, and then the next he asked for exactly that. I was supposed to hand him Artemis on a silver platter with nothing, absolutely nothing, to go on except a name that might not even be hers.
I’d tried to explain how unlikely that was. Like really, really unlikely. Like not-going-to-happen unlikely. But all he’d done was tell me that he was sure I’d come up with something.
Yeah, right.
To find someone, I’d need at least a photo, preferably something she’d owned and touched, or, even better, a trip to her last known place of residence. And even then, I wasn’t a damn hound dog. I might get a flash of something; I might not. But under the circumstances—
No. Just no. Even assuming Artemis actually existed, even assuming she was a person and not a metaphor, even assuming Jonas hadn’t made up this whole crazy thing in that brilliant but cracked head of his, the answer would still be no. There were no photos, nothing she’d personally owned, and she hadn’t been at her last known place of residence for something like three thousand years.
Not that I wasn’t going to try, because what the hell. But my track record for made-to-order visions wasn’t great. Actually, my track record for made-to-order visions was zero, but Jonas had looked so hopeful, I hadn’t wanted to tell him that.
He’d find out soon enough.
I sighed and sat back, hearing my own chair creak. Probably not a good sign. Probably should lay off the creams, not that there were any left.
I scrubbed my face with my palms, feeling a little light-headed from all the sugar. Maybe ordering some real food might be smart, after all. The phone was on the counter, all of five feet away, but it seemed really far for some reason. I sighed again and followed Marco’s example, putting my hands on the table to lever myself up—
And went in
the other direction instead.
The room spun wildly, my legs collapsed underneath me and I dropped like a stone. Something shot overhead as I hit the tile, and a loud crack reverberated around the kitchen. I looked up, dizzy and confused and wondering why there was a knife bisecting the back of my chair.
I stared for a split second at the shiny, shiny blade, which was still quivering, slinging little shards of light around the room. And then I shifted.
Or I tried. But the woozy feeling that had sent me to the floor made it hard to concentrate, and when I finally did feel the familiar swoop catching me, it stuttered and jerked and wobbled and fractured. And the next thing I knew, I was kneeling by the fridge, staring at a familiar pair of glossy black shoes.
The vamps should have told him, I thought vaguely; they were totally the wrong color for the season.
And then one of them kicked me in the head.
It hurt like a bitch, despite the fact that I’d dodged at the last second and it only clipped my ear. I grabbed the fridge door and swung it open, hard, just as three more enchanted knives ripped through the flimsy material. Stainless steel, my ass.
I’d have been dead, but I was on my knees and the knives burst through overhead, shattering plastic and breaking condiments, before slamming into something behind me. I couldn’t see—literally—because I’d just gotten a face full of pickle juice. I blinked it away to find that the knives had also exploded some hot sauce, forever ruining my blouse, which concerned me less than the eyes peering at me through the lacerated fridge door.
They had been my would-be date’s best feature, a soft, melting, cornflower blue that had looked a little girlie for a war mage. That wasn’t so much a problem now. I stared into something cold and black and boiling, and then I threw the rest of the hot sauce at them and scrambled away on all fours.
The mage screamed and it was nothing human, but a high-pitched, keening cry of pure rage. The eyes had been a big clue, but that sealed it. Whatever had possessed me before must have hitched a ride in a new body, obviously with the idea of finishing what it had started.
Awesome.
I scrambled for cover behind the table, eyes burning, head spinning and fingers fumbling for the little pouch Pritkin had made for me—only to remember that I didn’t have it anymore. Goddamned Niall! If I lived, I was going to send him back to the desert—this time the freaking Gobi.