“Has Hel or Loki emerged yet?” Brighid asked, her gaze turning to the volcano’s slopes, which still poured out more and more draugar.
“Not visibly. They may have, though. Either could be wearing a disguise and watching us right now.”
“Hmm.” Brighid considered and shook her head. “Perhaps that would be true of Hel. She has the same blackened heart but does not have the bloated ego of her father. Loki will reveal himself, I feel sure. His constitution demands it. He must preen and be seen to be powerful. He may be part of the horde now, but eventually he will make himself a target.”
“That sounds quite likely to me. When he does, though—is there already a plan that you know of to take him out? Because he is immune to both fire and lightning.”
“Lightning?” Brighid scowled. “Didn’t Thor used to punish him with that?”
“Perhaps so, in the past. But Perun sent multiple bolts at Loki since he escaped, and he was unaffected.”
“Well. He is not immune to steel. And we have plenty of that to go around.” Brighid’s eyes slid left and right to make sure no one else was in listening range and then she lowered her voice. “In fact, we have a little wager afoot on who’s going to get him. My money’s on Ares. You want in?”
“Sure. Who’s available?”
“You are, for one.”
“I am? Nobody thinks I’ll be the one to get him?”
“Not so far. The gods of war and the thunder gods are taken, as are the Apollos and all the Norse gods. So am I, plus Fand and Manannan.”
“Well, what if I do get him and nobody’s bet on me?”
“Then you win everything. The one to get him gets half the winnings, and whoever bet on that person gets the other half.”
“Nobody’s taken the goddesses of wisdom?”
“They’re free.”
“Then give me twenty on Athena.”
Brighid scowled. “When I said ‘money’ I was speaking metaphorically. I did not mean we are using modern systems of payment.”
“Then what’s the buy-in? Not favors to be named later, I hope.”
“No, it’s…” She paused, sighed, and rolled her eyes. “It wasn’t my idea, all right? Odin insisted, and it’s all your fault.”
“Of course it is. Everything’s my fault.”
“We’re using Girl Scout Cookies. One thousand boxes, winner chooses what kind.”
“Are you joking with me right now?”
“I am not. Odin is obsessed with them, ever since that time you gave him Samoas.”
“Then a thousand boxes of Girl Scout Cookies on Athena.”
“Fine.”
“Out of curiosity, who did Odin pick?”
“Freyja. Now if you will excuse me, I must greet Manannan and Fand.”
I was abruptly alone again and hyperaware that I may have as many enemies on my side as against the forces of Hel. The Olympians did not come over to say hi, nor did the Fae or the dark elves. I might have to watch my back every bit as much as my front—though except for the dark elves and some of the Fae, I did not think of the forces on our side as backstabbers. Certainly not any of the deities.
Though there was one I was hoping to see precisely because of his backstabbing ability but didn’t see yet: Coyote hadn’t shown up, and he’d left me little hope that he would.
I was pretty sure we’d get some interference from normal folks soon, however: “mere mortals,” as the Olympians might call them. Every scientific instrument they had pointed in this general direction must be going bonkers. So far, three different portals had opened near here, and there’d been an unheralded eruption to boot. Add to that the atmospheric disturbances that Zeus and Jupiter were no doubt causing by floating there, and we could expect all kinds of investigation soon from the Swedish government, and probably other governments as well, at least via satellite. The amount of fodder this would provide the tinfoil-hat crew would last for decades.
I wished I could joke with Oberon about it. He’d make me laugh and calm me down. But at the same time, I was glad he wasn’t here. The likelihood of him surviving such a battle as this would be small. My own chances looked fairly dismal.
The draugar continued to pour out of the mountain and sort themselves on its slope and its base, facing our own mustered forces. Once the flow finally trickled to a stop, the mountain convulsed near the top, but what erupted was not lava. I groaned and got to my feet.
It was a massive gray hound, much bigger than Oberon, and its name was Garm, the hound of Hel. And Hel came with him.
There are few motifs more tiresome in history than the power-mad guy who wants to shape the world to suit his desires. Sometimes the power-mad guy spawns hellish offspring that are just as bad or worse, though, wee monsters that grow up to be big monsters, bereft of empathy or much in the way of soul that is not a small, starved, mewling thing. Loki and his children were cut from that cloth.
Hel stepped out of the caldera and kept growing, half of her a gray-skinned corpse and half of her exposed bone and flesh and pulsing organs. Behind her, the bright fiery hair of Loki rose. The god of mischief grinned madly as he emerged, swelling to gargantuan proportions. They towered over the field using their shape-shifting ability, standing sixty meters tall or more, like some giant mecha suit from an apocalyptic anime. Loki held a flaming sword that I recognized, though it too was much larger than it used to be, and he pointed it in our general direction. His voice boomed across the fields like thunder.
“Kill them all,” he said. “Scourge them from the plane of Midgard.” The much larger army of draugar surged forward to meet ours, outnumbering us four or five to one.
Someone on our side blew a horn high up in the air, and it came from behind me, to the right, where the Bifrost Bridge had settled. I turned to see who had signaled the charge, expecting to see Odin, but it wasn’t him at all. There was a latecomer to the party: a chariot floating in the air, drawn by two goats, and a red-haired, heavily muscled figure standing in it.
“No, it can’t be,” I mumbled, but he let the horn fall away from his bearded face and held up a hammer to the sky. Lightning coalesced around it and he redirected it to strike amongst the oncoming horde, a pointless gesture since the draugar were unaffected by the electricity, allowing the bolts to pass through their phantasmal flesh. He’d have to hammer them into oblivion if he wanted to make them go away, because Loki and Hel would not let something so elementary as lightning thwart them now. But the stark fact of his presence was proof that he’d never gone away when I thought he had.
“They suckered me somehow,” I breathed. “That’s bloody Thor.”
seven Star Mountain explodes again. It is a howling, ravenous force with which I am unprepared to deal. This is a battle meant for gods, not a woman from Kansas by way of Arizona.
“Wukong,” I say, “I still do not know why I am here.”
“And the answer still remains: to learn and grow.” The grin he flashes me is mischievous. He knows full well how annoying he’s being right now.
“To learn what, though? To grow in what way? I am willing to do both and to work for whatever goal you set before me, but what you have said so far is too vague for me to understand.”
“Do you think you were brought here to fight the hordes of the Yama Kings? To fight perhaps the Yama Kings themselves?”
“No. I do not. That is the source of my doubt. You cannot possibly expect me to fight them.”
“Oh, but I do. But they are not the true fight. They will kill you if you do not strive your utmost—do not mistake my words—but defeating them is not your true purpose. You must defeat something else.”
“What? My secret desire to live on nothing but breakfast pastries? My growing addiction to anime?”
“Your comfortable assumptions. Your habits of thought. They are not merely ruts in the road keeping you on the path you’re following, they are like blindfolds, preventing you from even seeing that there are other paths.”
“I know that there are other paths.”
The Monkey King smirked. “You feel comfortable saying that, don’t you?”