“Well if you have free will, then so do I. I don’t have to do what my father expects of me. I sure as fu—I sure don’t want to.”
“I know. That’s why I’m defying my father and letting you stay at my house.”
That just made me feel guilty. “Thanks.”
Chapter 6
We had dinner together. I even set the table. It was so incredibly motherfucking wholesome I could hardly stand it. The only thing missing was a father, and maybe a cute little sibling and a dog. Joshua and his mom loved each other, they really did. I’d only seen this through a screen, a distant kind of life that I’d never have and always ached for. It was easier to take when it was an abstraction, just something on TV. But this was right in my face. It made me feel horrible and good at the same time. I was an outsider, but I got to sort of play house for a while. They were really nice to me and I was on my best behavior. We played board games after dinner and I wondered if I could ask to stay longer than a few days. Maybe a few weeks, or a few months. Maybe forever.
Mew-Mew came back to give me a report after dinner. I went up to my temporary bedroom to see him in private and he gave me the lowdown. Mew-Mew had talked to Emily, Colin, and Elliot. Colin reported that Stefan had gotten an earful from his dad and Thor about how Ragnarok was inevitable and he shouldn’t try to stop it. He pointed out to them that although it might be destined to happen, it didn’t have to happen right now. If he could delay it, he would. There’s a lot of fatalism in that family. Almost as bad as mine.
Mew-Mew let them know I was fine and where I was staying. Everyone was shocked, as expected. I mean, I was still shocked I was here. That night I went to bed debating if I should ask to stay longer and wondering if they would mind. It was just so nice to be around a family, even if it was just the two of them, that actually loved each other and did all that wholesome family shit. And oh yeah, I was supposed to go to the children’s hospital the next day and try to help sick kids. Honestly, I was looking forward to that. Sort of dreading it too, but still looking forward to it.
That all went to shit in the middle of the night. I woke to a tapping at my window. Mew-Mew was already up, hopping off the bed. I followed him to the window and pulled back the shades. There was a raven tapping his beak against the glass. Ravens were messengers, so I was a little nervous as I opened the window, hoping it wasn’t bad news. “Stefan needs to see you,” the raven said. “He’s on his way. Does your protection reach to the backyard? He wants to talk to you there.”
If he was coming to see me in the middle of the night, then it wasn’t good news. I would have to risk going out into the yard and hope Joshua’s protection wasn’t just on literally the house but on his home, which would include his tiny backyard. I crept downstairs with Mew-Mew at my heels, hoping I didn’t wake Joshua or his mom. My heart hammered as I went out the back door, wondering if I was making a big mistake and Satan would swoop down and grab me as soon as I stepped out of the doorway.
I walked a few paces across the grass, looking in the shadows for Stefan. After a few minutes he appeared. He’s lucky. He’s got a pretty good grasp of teleportation. It might take him a few tries to get somewhere, but he did get where he wanted to go eventually. I’m so fucking jealous of him. He’s been trying to teach me how to get better at my own teleportation, but my power is spotty. Stefan has an easier time of it when his raven goes there first like it just had. His raven is sort of like Mew-Mew is to me, although Stefan’s raven mostly lives wild and runs errands and messages for him.
“What is it?” I asked him. I was still cringing a little, waiting for my father to show up. I had to keep from glancing around, looking for him. It’s not like I wouldn’t feel him the second he showed up.
Stefan looked a little pale, even in the darkness. “Fenrir just broke loose.” His voice shook.
I about shit a brick. “Oh fuck.” Sköll eating the sun was bad, starting-down-the-path-to-the-world-ending bad, but this was worse. Fenrir breaking loose was farther down the chain of events that led to Ragnarok. In fact, if I remembered right, it was just before the big battle. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”
“Yeah that’s the right word for it. We’re fucked.” The raven flew over and landed on his shoulder. It made him look very Goth.
For a minute all I could do was stand there and feel sick. Then my stubbornness reared its head again. “No. No we’re not. We stopped Sköll from eating the sun and now we’re gonna stop Fenrir from eating your dad.”
“How the hell are we supposed to do that? Even the gods can’t stop him. Fenrir is going to eat Odin and then Vidar kills him. That’s it. No one else can stop him. It took three tries to get a fetter strong enough to hold him. We’re just a bunch of teenage demigods and we don’t have any weapons.”
“Then we’ll go get weapons, like last time. Do you honestly want to sit back and watch your dad get eaten and watch all your relatives get killed? Not to mention the rest of us. There’s an awful damn short list of people that survive Ragnarok, and I didn’t see your name on it. Mine either.” I paced on Joshua’s tiny patch of lawn. “There’s got to be some kind of weapon that can stop Fenrir.”
“Not even Thor’s hammer can stop him.” Stefan shook his head.
“Then we’ll go looking for weapons from other pantheons.” I kept pacing, back and forth, back and forth. “We need to get the others and figure this out.”
“If you leave, your father will be able to find you,” Stefan pointed out.
“So fucking what? This is the end of the fucking world we’re talking about.” And yes there was a quiver of fear in my stomach at the idea of leaving the safety of Joshua’s house, but I couldn’t hide out while the world ended. “Hey, maybe he’ll help us. Joshua, I mean. You go get the others and we’ll meet at the cemetery in New Orleans. Saint Louis Number One. It’s strong enough to keep me at least a little shielded, and chances are if my father was looking for me he would have checked there already, so it might be a while before he checks again.”
“Alright, I’ll go get them. How long until we meet?”
I had to think of how long it would take me to talk to Joshua, hopefully convince him to come with us, and get to the cemetery so I could use the portal to Saint Louis Number One. “Two hours.” That should be enough time for Stefan to get the others too.
“Saint Louis Number One in two hours. We’ll be there.” And with that, both him and his raven disappeared.
I hurried back inside and went to Joshua’s room. I hesitated a little before leaning down to shake him. It felt weird to be in his bedroom while he was sleeping. Maybe I didn’t like the idea of seeing him when he was so vulnerable. I was supposed to be his mortal enemy and shit. I shook him until he opened his eyes. “Sorry to wake you, but we’ve got a problem.”
He sat up and turned on the bedside lamp. “What kind of problem?” He rubbed at his eyes.
“Fenrir is loose.”
He blinked at me. “Who?”
“The wolf that’s going to eat Odin.”
He blinked again.
“Are you fucking kidding me? You don’t know Norse mythology?”
He shook his head. “I know there are other gods out there, but I don’t interfere with them and they don’t interfere with me.”
Uh oh. This was gonna be a hard sell. “Ok, CliffsNotes version. Fenrir is a huge wolf that’s been tied up for who knows how long, and a prophecy says that one day he’ll break loose and eat Odin. That’s the head of the Norse pantheon and my friend’s dad. When he eats Odin it sets off a huge battle between the Aesir, the Norse gods, and the giants, and the battle is so huge it ends the world.”
“Oh.” He looked more awake now. “But you’re supposed to help the devil bring about the end of the world. The Norse gods don’t cause Armageddon.”
“Yeah, but a battle that ends the world? Sounds familiar doesn’t it? This is worse than Sköll eating the sun, and that would have started the end of the world, too.” How many times was I going t
o have to prevent Ragnarok? Maybe it really was inevitable if it was still going to happen despite what we’d done. “Same pantheon, and they’re at it again.”
He frowned a little, studying me. “You’re going to stop it again, aren’t you?”
“Fu—I mean, of course I am. And I want you to help us.” I’m not sure what he could do, but he had to have some kind of powers that would be useful against a huge, divine wolf. “It’s the end of the world. You don’t want that to happen.”
Now he looked wary. “No, I don’t want that to happen, but I’m not sure about fighting Norse gods. I don’t want to get involved.”
“So you’d rather let Ragnarok happen?” I tried to keep my temper in check. “You’re not on the list of survivors for that war, so you just might end up dead along with the rest of us.”
“Alex, I can’t get involved. It’s not my pantheon.”
“You’re only a demigod, like me. We don’t have to follow the rules of noninterference.”
“But I’m not a fighter, Alex. I’m not like you.”
Was that supposed to be a dig or a compliment? “Fine. Then sit here and wait for us to save the world for you. If you change your mind, I’m going to the cemetery and using the gateway to get to Saint Louis Number One in New Orleans. Meet us there if you want to help out. We can do it without you—we did it last time, but we can use all the help we can get.”
He looked guilty. “Good luck, Alex. Really, I mean it.”
I wanted to yell at him, to shake him until he realized how serious this was and agreed to help us. This was his world even more than it was mine and he was supposed to love humanity and all that shit, but he was just going to sit there and let Ragnarok happen because it wasn’t his pantheon. Arrg… it was so fucking frustrating. But for a change, I showed good judgment and didn’t go all ragey on him. I took a long, deep breath and made sure my skin wasn’t heating up. I was calm enough. No immolating things in his bedroom. “Fine. Then stay here. I’ll go save the world for you.” I turned and left.
At the doorway, I paused. “And thank you for letting me stay here. Tell your mom thank you, too.” See? I can be civil if I try really hard.
Quietly, he said, “You’re welcome.”
I left. Mew-Mew trotted along behind me as I made my way to the cemetery. I tried to keep my shoulders from tightening with nervousness. I was healed enough to take another beating if I had to, but I was more worried about Satan finding me before I could stop Fenrir. Could we take Ra’s spears again, even though we’d wrecked those last two we’d taken? Or would we have to go looking for another weapon? The spears had worked, but they’d also been hard to handle. Maybe we could get something smaller that only needed one of us to wield. It would also be nice if each of us could have a weapon of our own.
I got to the cemetery and my body relaxed a little. Satan hadn’t found me on the way here, and the power of the cemetery would protect me a little. Since it was the middle of the night, the ghosts were at their most active. On the way to the gateway, I asked them if they knew of any supernaturally powerful weapons that might be able to kill, or at least defeat, Fenrir. I asked them if they could ask around, check with other ghosts and other cemeteries to see if any of them knew. Even though they were dead, I was betting most of them didn’t want the world to end, either. After all, they liked to hang out on Earth instead of spending all their time in the afterlife. A few of them were stuck here, but most of them came and went as they pleased. The ghosts I talked to agreed to pass the word that we needed weapons.
I took the gateway to Saint Louis Number One and found Elliot almost right away. He was pale and looked like he might throw up any second. “I don’t know if I can go through that again. The first time was bad enough.”
“Hey, you didn’t even fight Sköll last time. All you had to do was switch the horses.”
He wrapped his arms around himself. “That was bad enough.”
Shit, was he gonna be useless against Fenrir? You’d think the son of a fucking war god would have more balls, but no. “I’m gonna start calling you Ferdinand.”
“What?” he asked.
“Ferdinand, as in the bull. You should be this badass son of Ares, but you’d rather sit around smelling flowers than fight.”
Elliot made a face. “I don’t just smell them, I grow them. And there’s nothing wrong about not wanting to fight. Not everyone is as violent as you.”
“But sometimes you have to fight.”
He looked at me for a moment before dropping his eyes. “I wish there was a better way.”
“Well, if you think of one, let me know.”
Colin showed up, then Stefan arrived with Emily. The ghosts pestered all of us with questions as we made our way to some benches near the non-Catholic part of the cemetery. I asked the ghosts to see if they could find out about any weapons that might help us fight Fenrir and a few of them went off, happy to have something to do. The others kept hanging around, so I figured they might as well be useful and help us come up with a plan.
“So, Fenrir,” I said.
“If we want to stop him, we need to tie him up again,” Stefan said.
“That sounds like a job for Elliot.” I turned to him. “You can go take a look at the fetter and see if it can be fixed. And if so, find a way to fix it.” If we could get him chained up again, it would put Ragnarok on hold. The problem was we had to get him back to where he’d been kept prisoner for so long and I didn’t think he’d follow after us like a good little dog. We had to trick him, drag him, or beat the shit out of him so we could get him back in those chains. Sometimes I can be full of myself, but I didn’t really entertain the idea that we could kill him. I could hope, but the plan had to be to tie him up again.
We tossed around several ideas, but it all came back to us needing weapons. We really didn’t have time to go shopping for supernatural weaponry. Fenrir could be attacking Odin right now for all we knew, but we also couldn’t just run after Fenrir with nothing. Not if we didn’t want to get chomped on, ourselves. I mean, if this wolf could gulp down Odin, a full-blown god, he’d have no trouble gobbling up some teenage demigods.
“We could try to get Excalibur,” Colin offered.
“Seriously? We need some major ass-kicking weapons. We don’t have time to go play knights of the fucking round table,” I said.
He frowned at me. “I am serious. Excalibur is a very powerful weapon.”
“Ok, fine. But isn’t it buried with Arthur in Avalon?”
“Yes, it’s in Avalon and it’s in Arthur’s tomb but not literally buried with him. It’s in a chamber in his tomb, shoved into a stone like the way he found it when he was a boy.”
“If it’s stuck in the stone, what good does it do us? And we can’t even get to Avalon, it’s protected.” Fuck, that would be a great place to hide from my father, but no way would they let me in there.
“We could at least try, unless you have a better idea,” Colin said.
“How are we even going to fucking get there?” I asked him. It was well-guarded and we couldn’t just waltz in.
“I can get my mom to take us. We don’t have to tell her why we’re going. We can just say we want to see Arthur’s grave.”
I shook my head. “She might take the rest of you, but not me.”
“Sure she will. I’ve talked to her about you, and she knows you love cemeteries and ghosts and stuff. She can give us a tour,” Colin said.
It sounded crazy, but I have a weakness for crazy plans. I love them. It’s not like we had a better idea, and the ghosts would ask around for us to see if they could find any other weapons that might be able to take on Fenrir.
So Colin went to ask his mom if he could take all his friends to Avalon, like right now, and the rest of us sat around trying to come up with a better plan and failing.
Chapter 7
Not only did Brigid show up, the Morrigan came too, and she vouched for me. There was this look on her face, like maybe she knew w
hat we were up to, but she was gonna play along. She’s a battle goddess, but I doubt she wants the whole world to end in war and fire the way Ragnarok goes down. The goddesses took us directly from the cemetery to Avalon. I was so jealous of how easy it was for them. Someday I was going to get that good at teleporting.
It was like the weirdest field trip ever. Five demigods and two goddesses taking a trip to Avalon to visit Arthur’s tomb. Brigid straight up gave us a tour, complete with a history lesson. Arthur was buried in a huge stone casket carved with his likeness on top. The sculpture depicted him holding Excalibur in his arms. The real thing was in a chamber beyond, stuck in a stone just like Colin had said. He went up to the sword as if to examine it and not too subtly leaned closer and grabbed the handle. He tugged a few times, then gave it one more yank before stepping away, looking embarrassed. “Sorry. I had to try.”
Brigid waved it off. “I suppose everyone would want to try. It does no harm.”
“I think you should all try it,” the Morrigan suggested. Yeah, I totally think she was on to us, which gave me some hope that this boneheaded plan might actually work.
We encouraged Emily to go for it next. She was the only girl and we did a half-joking ladies first, although Colin had already given it a try. It didn’t come out for her either. Then Stefan went and part of me expected it to work. He was the oldest and the most king-like of all of us. But nothing. The sword didn’t even budge. Elliot gave it a try, although he looked like he didn’t want to. We just peer pressured him into it, like we did with most things. After a few tries, he shrugged and stepped away.
My heart sank. So much for that plan. Everyone looked at me. “What? That’s a sword for a good guy. I’m the son of the fucking devil.”
“Try it, just for fun,” the Morrigan said. “It’s part of the tour experience.” That was definitely a joke. I tried to imagine her as a teacher in some kind of demigod high school we all went to. Maybe gym class? The thought almost made me laugh.
Not My Apocalypse Page 6