She looked resplendent in a red and yellow sari and a familiar gold necklace set with a stunning ruby in the center.
“Hello, Atticus.”
“Laksha. Thank you for coming.”
“I was grateful for the invitation.”
“I hope you’re well? Or that your host is well? Or both? Sorry, I’m a bit rubbish at figuring out how to fit your situation into established patterns of polite discourse.”
She moved in close and gave me a brief hug, feeling especially warm, I supposed. She nodded in answer to my question. “Mhathini is doing very well. So well, in fact, that I think she’s ready to resume her life with her full faculties. We’ve been working hard.”
“That’s excellent news!” I said, genuinely pleased. Mhathini had suffered brain damage as a result of a car wreck and Laksha had taken up residence in her head some months ago, pledging herself to repairing the damage in return for hitching a ride in Mhathini’s skull. Granuaile didn’t think her domestic situation back in India was the best, but I had little doubt Laksha had been working on that as well.
“You will promise to take care of her afterward?” Laksha asked.
“Of course. I’ll see to whatever she needs.”
“Good. So this is where it will happen?”
“Yep.” I pointed out to the shore, visible from where we stood. A light breeze blew our hair around our faces. “Right off the coast there.”
“What will it look like?”
“I’m not sure, really. All known portraits of the World Serpent are fabrications by the artists who produced them. I figure it’s the kind of thing where you’ll know it when you see it.”
Laksha snorted, her mouth turning up at one end. “A fair prediction.” She squinted out at the sea. “This is a strange place to start the end of the world, isn’t it? It’s so peaceful and quiet. And there’s really nothing here.”
“It’s the perfect place to start, in Loki’s mind. Ireland has few defenses, and Jörmungandr needs to grow quickly. By which I mean he needs to feed. Ireland’s sheep and cattle and, yes, its people will be a fortifying snack on Jörmungandr’s way to becoming truly monstrous and unstoppable. And it has the benefit of crippling the Tuatha Dé Danann at the outset by robbing them of the majority of their believers.”
“Where are the Tuatha Dé Danann right now?”
“In Sweden, where Loki wants them to be. That’s the main event, where everyone’s supposed to be looking. This was supposed to be his stealthy strike. And I’m being stealthy in return. He can’t divine me, so he doesn’t know I’m here.”
A flicker of worry tensed the muscles around Laksha’s eyes and mouth. “And he doesn’t know about me either, right?”
“No, he wouldn’t know to worry about you.”
Her face relaxed. “I have been a quiet if deadly witch, haven’t I?”
“You have.”
She sighed happily. “And now I can be quiet and deadly one last time. But on behalf of everyone else instead of myself. There is a balance to the idea. I hope there will be a balance in karma as well. How many people will I be saving in Ireland alone?”
I shrugged. “Somewhere between four and a half and five million.”
“Ah! Much more than I ever got around to killing, then. I like this arithmetic.”
“Is it merely arithmetic, you think, that decides your next life?”
“No, of course not.”
“I’m glad. Because my ledger isn’t that great either.”
Our faces drooped and a silence lengthened as we both considered the personal accounts of our long lives. I didn’t think either of us could definitively say we had done more good than harm, though I had certainly tried. Laksha eventually tore her eyes away from the sea to stare at me. “What is it you want, Atticus?”
“Hmm? To win, of course. To survive.”
“I meant long term, if there is one.”
“Oh. Right. Well, a somewhat normal life would be nice. Where I can start a family and not have to abandon them because Aenghus Óg found me. Where I can teach them all to be Druids and not have to worry about being hunted. A future where I don’t have to be the Iron Druid anymore, just the Druid, like the elementals call me.”
“I see. You seek peace as well. A different definition of it than mine, but peace all the same.”
“Indeed.”
“I hope you find it.”
“You as well, Laksha.”
We lapsed into silence again, and perhaps Laksha, like me, was contemplating what peace might feel like. My desire to be stable and to experience life without the feeling of being hunted was real, but realistically I knew that starting a family was not in the cards or even the deck I was currently playing, because Granuaile was on a path that diverged from mine—a vital one that she needed to walk, building headspaces and wrestling with her power—and that meant I either needed to wait or move on. I figured she was worth waiting for and that I could afford to be patient and that the time would not go dully by. All assuming, of course, that we enjoyed any time after today.
The distant cry of ovine terror drew our eyes back to the shore, where something long and glistening had erupted from the ocean to eat a woolly lunch.
Jörmungandr, the World Serpent, spawn of Loki and a giantess, had come out of hiding and was growing fast, sharing his father’s talent for shape-shifting. There would be an upper limit to his growth without fuel, but with it, he could continue to swell to the genuinely mythic proportions that the Old Norse had assigned to him. And he appeared to be fueling himself quickly, gulping down a couple of sheep with his head pointed at the sky and then striking quickly to scoop up more. He was a beautiful sort of terrifying, purple and blue and green scales winking in the morning sun. I remembered the tale of Väinämöinen, who spoke of a smaller version of Jörmungandr he met off the coast of Iceland, an innocent serpent with a curious mind. Thor had come to destroy it as a sort of warmup exercise for Ragnarok, even though it had done nothing to humans and bore them no malice. Thor thought the murder justified, perhaps, since it was his destiny to meet death in battle with Jörmungandr, but instead he met his death at the blade of Moralltach, wielded by a vampire with an ancient grudge. I think Odin may have meant for me to meet my destiny with Jörmungandr in Thor’s place, but I had other ideas. And so did Laksha.
“This is it,” Laksha said, finding my hand and squeezing it. “After preying on humanity for so very long, I am hopeful and grateful and determined to do some final good. I do not know what suffering awaits me, but I accept it and go to it willingly.”
“Farewell, Laksha. May your next life be a good one.”
“Farewell.”
The body of Mhathini Palanichamy slumped abruptly, and I caught her before she could hit her head on the ground. But once she was safely lying down, I turned my gaze back to Jörmungandr, grown even larger in those few seconds than any dinosaur or creature of fable. It was just finishing its second round of whole sheep and was eyeing a third strike from the sea but probably realized it would need to come ashore if it wanted any more mutton, since the herd was pelting away from the ocean as fast as it could. Its decision made, the massive gills on the sides of its neck flared one last time and then sealed up as Jörmungandr transformed itself into an air breather. It leaned forward and then abruptly flinched, as if punched by a titan’s fist. A strangled shriek erupted from its mouth, and it shuddered from its head all down its sinuous length before going still and rigid and falling backward into the sea like strange, scaled timber. The surviving sheep bleated the ovine equivalent of “Did you see that shit just now? I’m never going near the ocean again, no ma-a-atter how green the grass is,” and the sea sloshed and hissed as the World Serpent disappeared beneath the waves.
“Yes!” That deserved a fist pump, for Laksha had succeeded. She had left Mhathini’s mind, shot through the ether, and executed a hostile takeover of Jörmungandr’s brain. She had, no doubt, simply shoved its spirit out entirely, as she did in her earliest years whenever she felt like using a new body. To prevent Jörmungandr from settling back in, however, she’d have to occupy that brain and defend it until it died. And once it died in the water, she’d die too. Creatures of the ether don’t do well in the water.