“No!” Týr shouted, breaking into a run toward Thor, his unfinished duel with Zhang Guo Lao forgotten. “He cannot die! He was supposed to slay the world serpent!”
Týr had just made himself vulnerable by giving in to his emotions—the same way I had a few moments ago. The emotions were still there and they wanted all my attention—grief for Gunnar and for Leif and for my inability to stop any of this from happening—but I firmly held them in check and concentrated on damage control. “Hey, Perun, we have to do something about Týr. See if your lightning works again. Thor’s dead, so perhaps his protection is gone. But don’t kill him.”
“Is good idea,” he said, nodding. “I give him baby bolt.” Týr howled as a lightning strike shot through his body, scorching his skin and sending him into an epic flop-and-twitch.
“Excellent. Now can you get a wind to fly us over there?”
“I think yes,” he replied, and I stifled a grunt of pain as the sudden lift tugged at the arrow in my side and we awkwardly flew to the gory aftermath of the duel. The frost Jötnar were walking over to confirm Thor’s demise, and Zhang Guo Lao was casually paralyzing the helpless Týr with his pressure-point technique so the Æsir could bother us no more. Once past them, I had eyes only for Leif—my magical ones.
The mess of his head was splattered across the snow, not a single bone of it left intact. Thor’s hammer had pulverized it down to the neck. But the red ember of vampirism still glowed faintly within his chest. If he didn’t drain out completely, there was still a chance he could recover.
My bear charm was nearly out of juice thanks to multiple shifts and the strain of keeping myself from lapsing into shock and worse. I’d need to touch the earth if I wanted to do much more than keep from passing out. I nearly did when Perun set us down next to Leif’s body; it might have been a swoon.
“Hrym, could you clear some snow away right here so I can touch the ground?” I asked as the giant approached.
“Graah,” he affirmed. He pointed his ice club at the spot I’d indicated and the snow lifted away, piling up at Leif’s feet.
I stepped onto the frozen ground and felt the energy waiting for me there. “Thank you,” I said. Magic flowed up through my tattoos, enough so that I could dull the pain, stabilize the trauma, and keep functioning. Dealing with it properly would take time I didn’t have right now. “I’m sorry for the people you lost today,” I added.
Incredibly, the frost Jötunn responded with an indifferent shrug. “We lost some but won much today. Thor is dead. Ullr and Heimdall, Freyr and the Valkyries too. Odin is an empty shell. And we finally have Freyja. Usually we win nothing.”
“Oh,” I said, unsure of how else to answer. Hrym’s tally of the dead brought home to me how much trouble I was in—and I meant beyond the arrow lodged in my guts. Once news of this battle spread throughout the world, a whole lot of supernatural folk besides the surviving Norse would be looking for me.
“You were true to your word, tiny Atticus man,” Hrym said. “I will tell my people this. We go now.”
“Right, yes, don’t let me keep you,” I said. The frost Jötnar dropped their clubs and shape-shifted into giant eagles. Suttung, bringing up the rear, gripped the frozen Freyja in his talons as they lifted off and flew toward Ratatosk’s hole in the root of Yggdrasil. I felt sorry for her as I watched them go. I knew I’d promised her to them to secure their help, but I never thought they’d actually take her alive and return to Jötunheim safely. I didn’t like to think what a tribe of horny giants would do to her once she thawed out.
I wasn’t the only one who felt this way. A streak of gray flashed in front of my eyes, a feline yowl split the night air, then Suttung screeched as said streak slammed into his underside. He dropped Freyja and began to circle around, as did the other eagles, to see what had attacked him. It was Freyja’s flying cats, still harnessed to her chariot, one of the craziest conveyances in all mythology. They had the same agility and speed in the air that normal cats have on the ground, and they swooped underneath Freyja and caught her in her chariot as she fell. Some of the ice shattered on impact, and the goddess broke through the rest on her own, urging her cats to flee.
Those were some pretty smart kittehs. They wouldn’t have stood a chance against the frost Jötnar in bipedal form, but the giants couldn’t bash them with ice clubs as eagles or whip around any elemental magic. All the cats had to do now was outrun the eagles in the air, and I thought their chances were pretty good. They flew southwest toward Freyja’s hall, Fólkvangr, with the eagles screaming after them.
I shook my head to clear it and turned my attention to Leif. Part of me thought it might be best to leave him here. The Norse might be comforted knowing that Thor’s killer was also dead. But I doubted it.
On the other hand, there was no doubt that I had put Hal in a terrible position. The one thing he’d asked me to do—bring them both back alive—I couldn’t deliver. He’d feel betrayed, no doubt, and I already felt guilty beyond words and terrified of facing him. But perhaps, if I got extremely lucky, I could do something to save Leif. Sort of.
Peering through my faerie specs, I sealed up all the leaking vessels in his neck with a binding so that he’d lose no more blood. Whatever that red glow in his chest was, it needed blood to survive. That was the easy part. The hard part would be figuring out how to bring in new blood, new energy, without any fangs or a head to keep them in. If left alone, the vampire would eventually grow a new head, but would it still be Leif, or would it simply be an unthinking, bloodsucking monster? Vampires of that sort tended not to last long. They killed too many humans, and other vampires destroyed them to keep their existence a secret.
There was no charm I could use for what I wished to do. I had to laboriously speak the bindings from scratch and improvise much of it, because I’d never tried anything like it before. Slowly, as Perun and Zhang Guo Lao stood sentinel nearby, listening to Týr curse impotently at us in the snow, I bound as much solid matter as I could back together. There were some chunks of brain here and there, carbon and calcium fragments that used to be his skull, and strands of hair as well. All of these I bound together in something resembling a head shape, a sort of grotesque mockery of Leif that looked like the head of a primitive voodoo doll. There was no question of me sculpting it back to any semblance of Leif’s actual features or re-creating the complexity of bone and tissues he needed. I was simply trying to give the resurrection engine in his chest as much material to work with as possible, so that Leif would have a fighting chance to come back as some shadow of his former self. Once the head and a rudimentary neck were assembled, I attached them to the stump atop his shoulders, sealed it all around, and then reopened the vessels inside so that the blood could flow into the head and the vampire could begin the work of rebuilding itself.
“That’s all I can do,” I said, sighing. The lump of matter that used to be Leif’s head looked ridiculous on top of a black leather jacket, and smaller without all the fluid, but it was the limit of my capabilities. My old archdruid had taught me only the theory of unbinding a vampire’s component parts, and I hadn’t actually had to do it until centuries later. No one had ever taught me how to put a vampire back together again or even discussed it as a hypothetical necessity. I don’t think anyone else would have considered it a good idea. I wasn’t sure it was a good idea either; it was more of a desperate attempt to salvage something positive out of this bloodbath. If Leif could come back from this and prevent a vampire war in Arizona, that had to be good.
Perun curled his lip in uncertainty. “This will work?” he said.
“I have no idea. I hope so. But we haven’t escaped yet. We need to leave now.”
“Is good plan.” He clapped me lightly on the shoulder. “I like.”
Chapter 27
There were still three of the Æsir scattered about the field. More would be coming soon but probably not before dawn. Heimdall’s horn had called everyone. Frigg, Odin’s wife, would no doubt appear to
take charge of her husband’s care. If anyone could restore him, she could.
I needed to see to my own care, but I couldn’t do it safely in Asgard. I needed to get back to Midgard or one of the Fae planes, where I wouldn’t be disturbed, because once I started this sort of healing I’d probably fall into a trance. First, there were things to do and words to speak. We collected my swords and Odin’s spear—I figured it was mine now—and placed them against the root of Yggdrasil, along with the bodies of our fallen. Perun’s strength, like Thor’s, was Herculean, and he was able to drag Gullinbursti off Gunnar using only his right hand, even wounded as he was.
After that, Perun and I limped and winced our way over to the paralyzed and cursing Týr, while Zhang Guo Lao accompanied us in serenity. He had acquitted himself remarkably well, accomplishing his revenge and suffering nothing but a bruise or two from his extended duel with Týr. He’d been sipping on his elixir to restore himself.
It took Týr a good couple of minutes to shut up long enough to listen to us. He thought we were there to finish him off, so he wanted to make sure he cursed us good before he went to Hel. The thing about uttering death curses is, they don’t work unless you follow through and die, and we had no intention of killing him. When I finally convinced Týr we meant him no harm, he glared at me while Perun kept an eye on the west. Vidar hadn’t moved from Odin’s side, and the remaining raven still circled above. Neither Freyja nor the frost giants had returned from the southwest.
“Your worthy opponent will release you from paralysis in a moment and you will be free to leave,” I said to Týr in Old Norse. “If you attempt to attack us once he does, you will be slain. I want you to return to Gladsheim and report what happened here today, but, more importantly, I want you to know why this happened. We came for Thor and Thor only, but of course he was too cowardly to face us alone. His centuries of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts, his casual slaughters, have brought this day of reckoning upon you all. Should we kill all the Æsir and the Vanir too, it would not be sufficient blood price for Thor’s villainy. If you have even a passing knowledge of his activities on Midgard, you know this to be truth.” I suspected he did. The one-armed man with Thor in Leif’s tale had probably been Týr.
“Who are you?” Týr asked. He saw me standing there with an arrow in my side, apparently unconcerned by it, but in truth the effort of keeping myself together was very taxing. His question was too good a straight line to pass up, though.
I preened. “I am the immortal Bacchus of the Olympians. I represent a consortium of individuals who had scores to settle with Thor. That includes the dark elves, who showed me how to get here without using Bifrost. You really should have been nicer to them in the old days.”
I doubted that would hold up under scrutiny, especially if the frost giants ever talked, but one could always hope the Norse would swallow it for a time. It would give me a head start on hiding and give Bacchus a headache. I turned to Master Zhang and asked him in Mandarin to release Týr from his paralysis but to be on guard afterward. He lunged forward, causing Týr’s eyes to bug out, and struck him in five places with one of his iron rods. He didn’t bother to do it gently. Those hits were going to leave marks.
We backed off and Týr leapt to his feet, death in his eyes. His shield and sword were still in the snow, so perhaps he thought we’d wrestle.
“Go in peace and see the sunrise,” I said, “or a bolt from the sky will strike you down where you stand.”
He took his time thinking about it. He really wanted to come after us, but eventually he counted and saw that we were three, he was only one, plus there was the lightning thing. He took a few steps back, hurling insults he thought were dire, like “craven weasel puke” and “maple-flavored whale shit.”
A muttered request to Perun lifted us in the air back to the root. There I picked up my swords, and Zhang Guo Lao graciously agreed to carry Gungnir for me.
We took one last look at the southwestern sky. No eagles flew there. I hoped the frost giants were not so stupid as to follow Freyja all the way to Fólkvangr.
“Let’s go, Perun,” I said. “Hrym and his people can find their own way back to Jötunheim.”
As he had done on our trip up the root, Perun summoned tightly controlled winds to carry us—including the bodies of Leif, Gunnar, and Väinämöinen—through Ratatosk’s tunnel. On the way back down, I finally let the emotions I’d been repressing out. Anger and guilt for myself, grief and regret for Gunnar and Leif, fear and uncertainty about what consequences this would hold in the future: All of it came roaring out of my throat and eyes and was consigned to the wind.
I’d kept my word and my friends had avenged themselves, but I doubted the Tempe Pack would thank me for losing their alpha. I don’t know what I could have done differently, once the battle started, to save either of them; I just kept returning to the idea that I never should have taken them there in the first place. My word would have been worth nothing and they’d have hated me, but they’d both be alive. Now my word was still good but they were dead (or as good as dead). How was this any better? I’d cocked everything up so badly, and Hal might never forgive me. He was alpha now and Leif was out of commission for who know how long, perhaps never to regain his old personality. There would probably be a vampire war anyway, despite my efforts to give Leif a chance at coming back.
At the Well of Mimir, we wasted no time, because we had only a few hours of darkness left. We retrieved the packs we’d left behind—I checked Väinämöinen’s to make sure my wallet and cell phone were still in there—and clustered around the root. We had some difficulty arranging ourselves, since three of our party were dead, but I pulled us through to earth and breathed a heavy sigh of relief—at least as heavy as I could with an arrow in my side. Our campsite was undisturbed, and there were no signs that anyone had visited the area since we’d left.
“All right, I’ve stalled long enough,” I said, wincing. “Perun, if you push through my one arrow and break off the tip, I’ll do all three of yours.”
“Is deal,” he said. “Ready?”
“One thing. Can you tell if it’s going to come out where my tattoos are on the right side?”
He and Zhang Guo Lao both examined the angle of the arrow and determined that it would come out slightly in front of them on the stomach side.
“Good, that makes things a bit easier,” I said. The tats renewed themselves as part of my skin whenever I took my Immortali-Tea; they looked new instead of two thousand years old. But if they were torn completely, I’d need to get them touched up, and at this point that meant going to one of the Tuatha Dé Danann. No thanks.
Feeling the comfort of the earth underneath my feet, I asked Zhang Guo Lao if I could use one of his iron rods. He handed it over and I put it between my teeth, at which he blanched. Who knew he was a germophobe?
“Okay.” I nodded at Perun. “Do it.”
Yes, I cheated and dulled my pain receptors. You would too. I still felt a blazing stab, and the unspeakable discomfort of things tearing inside cannot be ignored, pain or no pain. This wasn’t simply hemorrhaging tissue; there were gastric acid and other toxic fluids loose. Without the earth’s help, it would have been a mortal wound.
We weren’t finished. Perun snapped off the arrowhead and I felt the twinge of it through my core. He did his best to clear away any splinters, and then I bit down hard on the iron rod as he yanked the shaft back through me.
Thank the Gods Below I didn’t have to deal with this while stranded on cement somewhere. The earth gave so much to me, and as I used its energy to bind my insides back together, I was reminded again that I still needed to help the earth heal itself in the Superstition Mountains. Every moment that it gave of its substance to help me renew myself only increased my debt.
After an indeterminate time, I became aware of an ache in my jaw and realized I still had my teeth clenched around a rod of iron. My companions were staring at me. I withdrew it from my mouth, now a bit slobbery, and o
ffered it to Zhang Guo Lao with my thanks.
“Consider it a gift,” he said, a trifle horrified. “I will get a new one.”
I thanked him again and refocused on my healing, closing my eyes. When I opened them again, Perun’s arrows had been removed, and he was urging a giggling Zhang Guo Lao to have just one more shot of vodka with him as they sat on the boulders around the fire pit. And it was daytime.
“Where’s Leif?” I said. “Guys? Where’s Leif?”
“Druid speaks!” Perun gushed, throwing his hands up in the air. The growth underneath his arms was nearly as full as his beard. A gigantic smile split his hairy face, and he said, “We should have drink!”
“Honored Druid,” the immortal Zhang Guo Lao began, waving at me. He must have been deep in his cups, for this action caused him to slip off his boulder and fall backward, feet in the air. This set off Perun and he nearly fell over himself.
“Guys? Seriously. Where’s Leif?”
“Is fine,” Perun managed. “Is safe. We bury him behind you.” He pointed, and I turned to see three grave-shaped mounds of dirt. Perun’s voice was sober in my ears, hilarity gone: “We bury others also. Is okay?”
I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. “You buried Gunnar?”
“Da. You sleep standing up, could not wake, so we make us busy.”
Zhang Guo Lao raised himself up to a sitting position and waved for my attention. “Honored Druid, I have a question.”
“Yes?”
“I have a question,” he repeated.
“You said already,” Perun pointed out.
“Thank you for your attention. My question is this: When are you going to put on some clothes?”
I looked down and realized with some embarrassment that I’d left my clothes back in Asgard. It was precisely the reaction they’d been hoping for, and they clutched at their bellies and roared with unbridled mirth.
Chapter 28