by C. Gockel
Taking a step back, she watches as the water beyond the great beast’s head rises, and then the immense coils break the surface as the giant head glides closer and closer to the shore. The creature’s eyes blink a few times, and then the lids rise and do not blink anymore.
The creature lays in the surf, waves crashing against its head and coils. Claire swallows. Up close she can see that it’s nearly as tall as a house. She takes a step forward. The creature’s eyes still do not follow her movements. Maybe she is too small to eat or maybe it’s dead.
At that thought, the jaws of the creature spring open. Claire gasps in fear. But the creature doesn’t dart toward her; its eyes stay focused on nothing, and then something tumbles out of the creature’s mouth onto the icy beach. Claire bends down, trying to get a closer view. It looks like the creature has spit out a giant boulder. She takes a step closer. The boulder uncoils and stands.
Claire’s mouth drops open and her eyes go wide. It’s Thor. He has no helmet, his red hair is dark and wet, and pieces of his armor are missing on his arms and legs. He sways as though caught in a breeze.
“Thor!” Claire screams, running forward, heedless of the monster behind him.
He turns his head in her direction. As her feet race through the snow, her magic races to her limbs, the world speeds by her.
Thor takes one step. And then another, his hammer swinging awkwardly in one hand.
He’s only gone six steps when she reaches him and he falls. “No!” Claire screams. Her magic is already flowing through her, and when he falls onto her shoulder, she’s able to bear his weight. He’s enormous though, and even with her strength, it’s hard to hold him.
“Little Valkyrie, put me down,” he whispers.
She doesn’t know what to do, so she helps him sit down on the ice. He immediately falls backward.
“Thor, I have to get you to Dr. Amy,” Claire says. She can’t see any gaping wounds, but his body is covered in scratches and bruises. Maybe there is something below his chest plate? Claire wishes she’d seen a clot under a microscope. Maybe if she had, she could help him.
“Strange I would meet you here,” he whispers.
“You left without me,” she says, her voice accusatory, even though she knows that’s mean, and you shouldn’t be mean to someone who is hurt. But it felt like betrayal. “Thor, you told my dad I could be a warrior, and then you left without me. I have to go! I have to go get him!”
Dropping his hammer, Thor pats her hand. Even with her humongous mittens on, his hand dwarfs hers. “You do need to go get him.” Grasping his hammer again, he pulls it to his lips, whispering words quietly in another language. And then he pushes it toward her. “Take this. It is yours now.”
“What?” says Claire, sitting back on her heels, staring at the weapon. She can feel the air around it hum.
“It’s yours,” says Thor. “Use it wisely.”
Claire looks to Thor’s eyes, they’re half-closed and dark blue, like storm clouds. A few months ago, she wouldn’t have known what he was saying, but now she’s seen death and she does know. “No,” she says, “Thor, you can’t die.” People died, but not Thor. He had fought Loki, had gone to Nornheim, laughs as loud as thunder, and says that she is a warrior. He’s larger than life, and beings that big don’t die.
“I hope I can,” he whispers.
Claire’s mouth drops open, but she’s too caught off guard by that answer to know what to say.
He smiles weakly. “I betrayed my word for my father, and then I betrayed my father for my word.” His eyes slip closed for a minute.
“Thor, wake up!” Claire cries, tears so hot they burn rolling down her cheeks. She grabs his hands.
His lids flutter open. “I had a daughter,” he whispers. “She was like you. She had a brave heart. I tried to break it, but failed, and she became a Valkyrie … and then …” He sighs.
Claire sniffs. “Thor, I can’t … you can’t.” Her grandmother says you can never give up, or let people give up. Lifting her chin, she says with feigned sternness, “I’m too young, Thor.” Her voice sounds like a tiny version of her dad’s.
“You are too young,” Thor whispers.
Claire crumples. “So you see why you have to live.” Leaning over him, she puts her hands on his shoulders. “I can carry you back to the Keep, and then Dr. Amy will save you.” But how will she bear his weight under the trees? They’ll steal her strength away. Her lip curls in anger—she will find a way ...
Thor grabs her wrists. “Jörmungandr and I, we fought for hours … nearly a day. It was glorious. But now his venom is in my veins. By the time we get there, I will be dead, and my body will be too cold, even for Dr. Amy.”
Claire shakes her head.
Squeezing her hands, Thor whispers. “Claire, you must take my hammer, and you must go to Asgard.” He coughs.
“I can’t go to Asgard,” Claire protests. “I can’t open a World Gate.”
Thor coughs again. It sounds weak and sickly, and it makes Claire’s heart hurt. “You will find a way,” Thor gasps. “My father, he will hurt Captain … your father. Your father needs a hero, and it has to be you.”
“I can’t leave you here,” Claire sobs. “My dad, he’s a Marine, and he says Marines never leave anyone behind.”
He smiles. “They are allowed to leave their dead behind, Claire.”
“But you’re not …”
Lifting his head, Thor’s smile melts away. “You must save your father and Bohdi, Claire.”
And then his head falls back onto the ice. He should blink. But his eyes remain open, staring at the sky. Claire feels as though the universe has just released a breath. The air around her goes from cold to unbearable.
“Thor?” Claire says. She pounds his chest and screams, “Thor!” He doesn’t respond. She sobs and pounds more, and of course there is no reaction. It’s just so wrong, and horrible, she wants to scream at the universe. She does scream.
Pulling back, she continues to sob, and her eyes fall on the hammer. Thor said Odin will kill her father, and Bohdi, too. She looks at Thor. His lips are open, his eyes are getting cloudy, and it’s like his huge body is just an empty shell. She can’t let this be their fate. She won’t.
Wiping away her tears, she picks up the hammer. It’s not as heavy as she would have expected. Or maybe that’s just magic. She thinks of lightning, and it crackles. She looks around, and nearly breaks into sobs again but grits her teeth instead.
Thor said she’d find a way to get to Asgard. She needs a miracle. She swallows. She knows that Dr. Amy once had a miracle happen. She prayed for help, and Loki came for her. Her dad told her sometimes magical creatures heard it when humans called them, or thought stuff to them, and Loki had heard his thoughts, too. Claire looks at the hammer. Tucker says they’re not really humans anymore, now that they’re magical. But Tucker was wrong about some stuff. She wipes her face and closes her eyes. She squeezes the hammer tight and feels lightning spark up her hand. “I have to save my dad, and I have to save Bohdi … he’s kind of like my big brother, or my uncle … and I have to get to Asgard to do it, and I just need someone, anyone, to help me.”
x x x x
“Do you see what you have done?” Heimdall roars. The scene disappears and Bohdi turns to Asgard’s guardian. “You killed Thor! You are Chaos, Death, and Destruction. Without the power of Odin you bring only despair.”
For a moment Bohdi stares at Heimdall. He does bring despair. He thinks of all the humans who died during the troll invasion of Earth. But, he shakes his head. “No! I did not kill Thor,” Bohdi snarls as his skin heats, and red tinges his vision. “Odin killed Thor; he ordered Jörmungandr to kill everyone on the boat but me.”
“No,” says Heimdall.
“It’s true,” Bohdi says.
“He didn’t know,” Heimdall hisses.
Bohdi snorts. “Yeah, I get it, no one is perfect. But if he hadn’t given a dumb-ass order to Jörmungandr, my friend and my …”
His voice catches, thinking of the wistfulness in Jörmungandr’s voice when he talked of swimming through the seas together. “... my son wouldn’t be dead.”
Bohdi looks up to Asgard’s guardian. He’s staring at Bohdi, mouth agape. His hands drop to the pommel of his sword, but he does not draw it.
Bohdi hopes that means that he’s getting through to him. “We can stop this now, you and I, Heimdall. I just want Steve back. I don’t want to fight Odin, and I don’t want to fight you.” Bohdi licks his lips. Jörmungandr liked him; maybe deep down, Heimdall does too. “I know your mothers were the Norns.” In the myths Heimdall had nine mothers, but Bohdi guesses that was just a euphemism for nine sets of arms. “And I know that your father was—”
“No!” Heimdall screams, drawing his sword.
Bohdi draws his Glock instinctively. Heimdall lunges forward, and Bohdi jumps backward as something gleaming spins through the air in his direction. And he knows it’s over, that the random factors of Chaos cannot save him now. Bohdi fires and hits Heimdall square in the forehead. He feels pain, sees Heimdall crashing backward, and then he feels nothing at all.
x x x x
Lionel sits on top of Steve. He bangs a shackled hand at the space just to the side of Steve’s head, clipping his ear. Steve yelps in surprise.
“I’m sorry!” Lionel whispers.
The door swings open behind him, and before Lionel can say anything more, he’s hauled off Steve. Another man leans over Steve, raising a club. Steve swings up his legs, clipping the man under the chin. The man staggers a step backward. Before he can regain his footing, Steve spins on the ground, hooking his shackled ankles around the man’s ankles and knocking him to the ground. Steve rolls over and wraps the chain between his wrists and ankle around the other man’s neck; the chain gets caught between the helmet and chest plating of his armor. The man beats his club, hitting Steve’s forearms. Gritting his teeth, Steve leans back, and he feels the chain slide deeper into the man’s neck.
Behind him he hears a club hitting flesh and chains rattling. That sound stops and then a second club hits him in his injured eye. Steve’s body jerks on the impact, his grip loosens. Body tensing for another blow, he pulls hard on the chain around the guard’s neck—he’ll take one with him.
… and the next blow never comes. Steve hears a choking, sputtering sound behind him.
The man wrapped in his chains goes limp. Steve pants and looks back. Lionel is standing behind the other guard who is kneeling on the floor, clutching a chain similarly wrapped around his neck. Steve hears a light rattling. It takes Steve a moment to realize that the Light Elf is shaking so badly his ankle chains are shaking.
Steve hears shouts in the hallway. “Lionel,” he says. “We have to hurry.”
The Light Elf looks up at Steve, his mouth open, a look of pure horror on his face.
“Come on,” Steve says gently, “We have to go.”
Lionel nods over and over, too rapidly. He blinks. “I must go first.” He slips his chain away from the fallen guard and goes awkwardly to the door—it’s open just a crack. Steve sees what looks like the shadow of a bent elbow. “Come on,” Lionel whispers, pushing through the door.
Steve hears guards shouting and scrambles to his feet, following Lionel into the hall. He promptly bumps into a solid invisible wall. He’s about to swear when he sees Lionel and himself down the hall screaming, “Don’t shoot us!” just before disappearing down the stairs. Following Steve’s doppelganger and the elf down the steps, two guards rush past them. Steve’s mouth gapes. To his side, from the floor the Fire Giant who had just held the door open spits and swears in the direction of the two apparitions.
From the invisible wall comes Lionel’s voice. “That will keep them busy for a few minutes. Hurry, to the guard room, let’s get the keys to these shackles.” Steve looks down at his bonds—realizes he’s invisible—and promptly comes back into view. The Fire Giant looks up at him in alarm. Steve says, “We’ll be back for you, play dumb or dead.” The words tumble out in the Fire Giant’s harsh guttural tongue before Steve’s even thought about it.
Lionel appears halfway between the guardroom and Steve’s cell. “Hurry!”
Steve shambles after him, pain stabbing through his ribs and from his wrists and ankles. He hears shouting below as he enters the guard room. Lionel’s already got the keys out and is releasing his own wrist shackles. “I’m sorry but I’m horrible at telekinesis,” the Light Elf says. He looks up at Steve. “And I’m afraid that I won’t be able to fix your eye, but your other wounds I shall heal quickly.” At those words, Lionel’s ankle shackles fall away and he immediately begins working on Steve’s own bonds. As his wrist bonds clatter to the floor, Steve feels his pain disappearing everywhere but his eye.
“Lionel,” he says, “what sort of magic can you do?”
“A lot,” says Lionel, as Steve’s ankle bonds pop away. “I can slip through World Gates so easily it is a fault; besides that I can start fires, create ice, illusions, be invisible, and I have very limited sight.”
Steve shakes his head. Of all the dumb luck to get stuck in a cell with a powerful magic user.
“I’m not certain how we’ll get past the men downstairs,” Lionel says.
From down below comes the sound of explosions. Steve and Lionel both duck instinctively, but Steve grins, having a feeling he knows who it is. “Don’t you worry, Lionel, Chaos is on my side.”
From down the hall comes the sound of scuffling. Lionel, face deadly serious, says, “I have met Chaos, Steve Rogers, and he thinks only of himself.”
There is a whizzing in the air, a crack, a thud, and the elf slumps into Steve’s arms.
“Lionel?” Steve cries, looking down at the man’s face. It’s badly bruised. He’d healed Steve’s injuries before his own. “Lionel!” Steve says again, and then sees the crossbow bolt protruding from the elf’s back, and a hole cut clear through the door of the guard room. The door swings open.
There is an Einherjar there. Steve can’t see his face, it’s covered by a mask. In his hand is a loaded crossbow pointed at Steve. Steve stares at the tip. Chaos has failed, or overflowed, and he is going to die. He won’t be able to help Bohdi or Lewis, and his daughter is alone somewhere … Claire … who will take care of her?
Chapter 35
“Ratatoskr is opening up the World Gate in the bornut tree.”
Where he grazes on the Vanaheim plain, Sleipnir perks his ears toward Star Clover, the unicorn mare who has made the pronouncement.
Pearl Horn, the other mare in his small family, shakes her head and whinnies. “It’s Ragnarok! I wonder what gossip he has to tell us? Let’s go sniff it out.”
Sleipnir’s trotting toward the tree before Pearl Horn has finished. The mares have been talking about Ragnarok every day since they formed a herd. They’ve lived through two Ragnaroks, which is two more than Sleipnir. They’ve assured him that Ragnarok isn’t the end of the all-plain, it’s just a change within the all-herd: a new Creator and Destroyer have already been chosen. Now it’s time for a new Order, and they’re very excited to see what it will be.
Sleipnir isn’t excited; he’s worried. He’s certain that Ragnarok is why Bohdi, his two-leg-mother, has disappeared from Earth without a trace. Sleipnir’s head bows. He misses meeting Bohdi in the grassland between the lake edge and the sparkling city in the human realm. He enjoyed sneaking up on his human parent while he pedaled his two-wheeled mechanical horse and knocking him flat. Every time, Bohdi cursed at him and then offered him apples, carrots, and the magical drink the humans call lemon iced tea.
Approaching the hollow at the tree base, he feels magic tickling his muzzle and smells squirrel, seeds, nuts, and—
“A human!” says Pearl Horn. Sleipnir’s ears swivel as the mares rear back in alarm.
Sleipnir sniffs the air; he smells a human and blood. It is not Bohdi he smells, which makes him both relieved and alarmed. He recognizes the scent. He tosses his head. “It is
one of my rescuers.”
From the tree hollow comes a rush of obscenities in the language of squirrel—which is, to be fair, mostly obscenities. Amid insults such as “your mother is the bacterium in the putrid cyst of an infected anal gland,” Sleipnir hears, “Let me go! You’re squeezing me too tight!”
And then comes the loud booming voice of the human male known as Dale. “I’m not all the way through!”
Dale’s head pops out of the tree hollow, but his shoulders get stuck. From within the hollow comes Ratatoskr’s muffled cheeping.
“The human’s bleeding,” Star Clover sniffs, and Sleipnir can hear both mares backing away. Sleipnir feels the urge himself. Pawing the ground, he reminds himself he was trained as a warhorse and has smelled far worse before. And then, reaching down, he grabs hold of the faux hide attached to the back of the human’s neck and pulls. The human screams as Sleipnir drags him out of the tree, Ratatoskr swears, and then both the man and the squirrel are flat on their stomachs at Sleipnir’s hooves. The human rolls over fast, and then seeing Sleipnir, he releases a loud breath. “Sleipnir! Oh, thank—argh!” Dale screams, releasing Ratatoskr from his grip.
Removing his teeth from Dale’s hand, Ratatoskr darts up the tree, swishing his tail. “So long—” What follows is a litany of abuse so obscene it makes Sleipnir snort, stamp, and protest. “Not in front of my family, rodent!”
Dale snorts, too. “You said it, Sleipnir. That’s disgusting. Look, Ratatoskr, you promised if I helped you escape Quantico, you’d help me escape.”
Shaking his tail, Ratatoskr laughs again. “And I did! Welcome to Vanaheim, two-footed cripple!” In a swish of his tail, the rodent darts through a smaller World Gate to his home world.
Dale inhales deeply and meets Sleipnir’s eyes. In other creatures, eye contact is a threatening gesture, but in certain human cultures it is a gesture of comfort and familiarity. Sleipnir doesn’t blink. Then it occurs to him— “You understood me?” he asks.