Trapped

Before I could scramble away, he managed to clap a hand around my ankle and haul me toward him. I twisted around and aimed a kick at his head. It rocked his neck back and he lost teeth, but he shook it off and grinned bloodily.

“No, you’re not getting away now that I have you.”

He aimed a vengeful punch at my groin, but I turned in time to take it on the thigh instead. That would be a nice bruise. I kicked him in the face again, and the f**ker laughed. Apparently he could turn off pain much like I could, but, unlike me, he found physical punishment amusing. I tried to make him laugh harder by kicking him some more.

Bacchus tired of it after all and slapped my leg down on the next kick, then leapfrogged on top of my knees, pinning them. I bucked, crunched up, and landed a solid blow on his temple, but this failed to dislodge him. He grabbed my shoulders and slammed me back to the ground. Against a normal opponent, that would have been a stupid move because I could still deliver rib-cracking blows to his body, but Bacchus simply didn’t care. He wanted to taunt me and he was saying something in Latin, but I ignored this and crafted a binding in Old Irish between his toga and the dryad’s tree. The binding worked, but this also failed to dislodge Bacchus. He lunged forward, bore down, and let the toga tear away from him rather than let me go. His strength was such that I began to doubt I could match him. I reached for power, felt that it was abnormally low, and remembered that Granuaile had left the portal open. I was going to need her help to get out of this—though she might very well be thinking she’d need my help to escape the Bacchants at this point.

I shouted for help in Russian and added that she should break the wine god’s elbow. I kept shouting it in a loop.

“What is it you say?” Bacchus said. “Some pithy insult?”

His fingers dug into my shoulders painfully, until his thumbs ground into bone. My blows were having no effect. He merely pushed down on my right shoulder and began to pull on my left one, and soon enough he had torn my arm loose from its socket. He kept pulling; he really did mean to tear me apart, limb from limb.

He never saw what hit him, and neither did I. But I saw—and he definitely felt—his left arm bending the wrong way, heard the crack and tearing of tissue, marveled at the white bone splinters shredding the inside of his arm. He collapsed on top of me in shock, and I was finally able to dislodge him; a few Bacchants trailed by, seeking an invisible Granuaile.

I got to my feet and put a bit of distance between Bacchus and me. We both had useless left arms, but only one of us now had a clear plan of how to proceed. Bacchus was howling over his shredded arm and spurting what passed for blood among the Olympians—ichor, I think they called it. He’d heal up far faster than I would with a similar injury, but he was seriously jacked up for the present and kneeling only ten feet or so in front of the still-open portal. He’d probably never even seen it, since he’d originally approached me perpendicular to it. I walked toward him coolly, right side first, and he staggered to his feet once he saw this. He backed up as he did so, putting himself closer to the portal. Bacchants streamed between us, still pursuing Granuaile, mindlessly obeying the last order they were given when they could have easily taken me out. Bacchus roared and waved me forward with his right hand, daring me to charge. I chose my spot carefully, waiting for two Bacchants to pass between us before I shot toward him with juiced speed and planted a swift kick to his chest. He tried to grab my foot with his right hand, but he wasn’t quick enough. He staggered back and through the portal, realizing too late that there was no ground underneath him anymore.

I grinned as I closed the portal on his bellow of rage. “It’s going to take him a thousand years to finish falling on his ass,” I said.

Chapter 26

Abruptly cut off from Bacchus, the maenads stopped caring about Granuaile and began wondering where the hell they were and why they were wearing white nighties.

“Oh, my God, what happened to your teeth?” one said.

“My teeth? What’s up with yours?”

“My teeth are fine! Wait.” She put fingers with torn nails up to her lips and discovered she had a mouthful of fangs. “Oh, Jesus, they’re all pointy and shit!”

The screams, once they began, were contagious. Part of it was the terror of sheer confusion; part of it was terror at their future dental bills. I actually was happy for them: We’d discovered a way to free them from their thrall, and they could be human again.

Granuaile appeared, Scáthmhaide in hand, and looked worried about my dangling left arm.

“Yes, you do get to shove it back in,” I said.

“I was afraid of that,” she said.

“Thanks for the assist. Normally I would chew you out for leaving open a portal that long, but this time I’ll let it slide.”

She grinned and gave me a quick kiss. “Thanks.”

Letting an amateur shove your arm back into its socket is unpleasant, but when you have magic at your disposal, it’s better than getting insurance and waiting five hours for a professional to do it. Jogging north together until we found a tethered tree without an annoyed dryad inside, we shifted to our cabin near Camp Bird Mine to greet our happy hound.

"Great news, Atticus!" Oberon said as he bounded toward us, fresh from getting a drink in the Uncompahgre River. "I have independently verified that there are no Balrogs in this mine. And no goblins or cave trolls either. Only rats. I don’t know what they’re eating though. It makes you wonder about those rats in First Blood, remember them? They were hanging out, no visible nests, just waiting deep in this abandoned mine for a tortured Vietnam veteran to pass by in his attempt to escape a brutal small-town sheriff with the ability to boss around the state police and the National Guard."

“Oberon, did you go into the mine?”

"No, I just listened at the entrance and sniffed around a bit, honest!"

“Oberon?”

"Okay, I might have set foot across the threshold. I was only trying to ditch those two ravens."

“What two ravens?”

"The two that have been following me around for a while now. See them on the roof over there?"

Casting my eyes toward the mine foreman’s house, I saw the ravens he was talking about. They weren’t the normal kind. They were a bit bigger than usual, and each had one eye that gleamed white.

“That’s Hugin and Munin,” I said.

Granuaile tensed. “Odin’s ravens?”

“Yep.”

She began to scan the area. “He’s here somewhere?”

“I doubt it. He won’t get within striking distance of me again if he can help it. He probably has backup ravens and everything. I bet this is a call to arms from Frigg. She’ll be wanting me to kill Fenris now that you’re bound to the earth. But stay on your guard in case I’m wrong.”

We began walking toward the foreman’s house, our eyes never resting but searching for threats. None appeared, though Hugin and Munin did their best to serve us up some turbo-grim memento mori action.

As we neared the front porch, Frigg floated from the backyard to meet us. She was wearing another of her Dalek dresses, but this one was blue and green with white swirls reminiscent of marshmallows melting in chocolate. She smiled and greeted us, the very picture of hospitality, her sour expression from months ago now gone. An arm appeared from underneath her hair and waved gracefully at the door to the abandoned house. “Shall we go in?”

I winced. “It’s probably not a good idea,” I said. “It’s been vacant for years, and the last time I was in there it was full of rodent droppings.”

“Oh, I am well aware. But that is no longer true.” She lowered her voice conspiratorially. “A dwarf owed me a favor, and I permitted him to clean the place for our use. He has been very industrious; I am sure you won’t recognize it. But I should warn you—he is in mourning.”

“I’m sorry to hear,” Granuaile said. “But why does that require warning?”

“Well.” Frigg pulled at imaginary tufts of hair on her chin—or else it was a sign language of some sort. “He’s … you know. In mourning.”

“No, we don’t know,” I said. “We’ve never seen a real Norse dwarf before.”

"I’ll bet he doesn’t have a Scottish accent. He won’t be calling you laddie."

“Oh. Well, you’re probably expecting the beard, but it won’t be there, you see. They shave them off to express their grief.”

“Instead of crying?”

“Precisely.”

“Would it be rude to ask why he’s in mourning?” Granuaile asked.

Frigg smiled. “You won’t have to ask. He will tell you all about it. That’s part of their process. And in truth, Druids, his story is why I’m here. If this doesn’t convince you to help us against Fenris, nothing will. Oh, one more word of caution,” she said, pausing before the door. “He is a Runeskald, so please forgive his unusual speech. Even in English, he tends to wax poetic.”

She preceded us into the house, understanding that we’d want to have no one at our backs, and waited for us to enter. The interior had been utterly transformed.

Where an old chewed-up beige carpet had rested, riddled with the piss and shit of untold numbers of rats, a gleaming hardwood floor awaited instead. The peeling wallpaper had been replaced with something new and warm.

Well, that was probably a lie. The colors were actually cool, but I had once spent a purgatorial week forced to watch HGTV, and during that time I noticed that the hosts and designers described everything they wanted to do as “warm.” Even if they were working with ice blues, they were warm ice blues. I learned that warm was the best possible all-purpose adjective to use when remodeling; home owners couldn’t hear the word enough. A designer could tell a couple that she was going to place a warm steel sculpture of Beira’s frigid tits on top of a white marble pedestal in a walk-in freezer and the couple would nod enthusiastically, blocking out everything except the warm. Let it be known, therefore, that the entire miraculous remodel of the foreman’s manse was warm. Even the dwarf responsible for it, who was introduced to us as Fjalar, greeted us warmly.

Fjalar was very clearly in mourning. His red-rimmed eyes regarded us tragically, and I did my best not to laugh at his sad little chin, a white pocked moonlet gleaming underneath a pouting lower lip and the cantilevered overhang of his epic mustache. The reason dwarfs grow beards became obvious as he spoke: Their chins are too emotionally expressive, capable of quivering and frowning and lending the dwarf an air of vulnerability that they no doubt feel would attract unwelcome advances.

His voice was a lusty, sonorous baritone, bereft of Scottish accent and thick with a Norse one, and he used it to invite us to a place at the table. I noticed that all his dark hair was braided into multiple lengths, not like dreadlocks but not like any fashion I had seen before on males. Each length had something clasped or tied around it, usually gold or silver, but I saw colored strips of ribbon as well. He saw that I was curious about it and pointed to his braids with a thick finger.

“You spy my braids, to be worn for a year and a day. Signs of mourning, brother-memories, friendship flags, and rings of clan and craft.”

“Yes, Frigg told us. I’m very sorry.”

“All will I tell you, speaking fulsome, time in hand,” he said. “For now, bread and mead call us, appetites whetted, to witness what I have been nursing, encased in iron, licked by flame, and tended with relish.”

He waved grandly to a cook pot over a fire. The hearth looked good as new, and in front of it was a long wooden table with benches and candles. Pitchers of mead waited to be poured into drinking horns, and loaves of crusty bread waited in wooden bowls. Crossed axes and shields hung on the walls. Fjalar had done his best to turn the living room into a mead hall. A warm one.

He ladled out a bowl for each of us, including Oberon once we requested it. Fjalar looked to Frigg first to see if she was okay with it, and she shrugged her shoulders and said, “Druids.” Fjalar shrugged back and filled up a bowl for the hound.

Oberon had nothing but praise for his meal. "Atticus, you really need to find out how he made this. If this is how Norse dwarfs cook every day, you need to make friends with them. Really. Seriously. I mean, really."

Okay, Oberon, I hear you.

"But you’re just sitting there! Clever Girl, tell the dwarf he’s awesome."

“This is fabulous, Fjalar. I wish we could enjoy the hospitality of dwarfs more often,” she said.

"Thanks, Granuaile! It’s about time somebody listened to the hound! Now tell him his chin looks like a dimpled golf ball."

Oberon made this last comment as Granuaile was taking a sip of mead, listening to Fjalar’s gracious reply. She managed both to spit mead and choke at the same time.

Fjalar and Frigg looked alarmed, and I looked like an ass because I laughed. Oberon chuffed.

“You’d better get used to it,” I said, pounding her on the back a couple of times, “because that’s the way it’s going to be. He’s like that all the time.”

“Thanks for the timely heads-up,” she wheezed. We then had to spend a few moments apologizing to our hosts for our terrible manners.

After dinner was finished and we had showered Fjalar with another round of compliments and thanks, he cleared away the dishes and brought us cups of Irish coffee.

“Many thanks, Fjalar,” I said. “You’ve researched your guests’ preferences well.”

“Glad I am that I could so satiate you, for I have a tale long in the telling to share, if your leisure serves.”