Two Ravens and One Crow Read online

  “Aye, sensei.”

  Gungnir was buried in the earth near our trailer and encased in iron to protect it from divination. With the help of the elemental Colorado and the iron elemental, Ferris, I retrieved it with little trouble. I inspected it to make sure it was in good condition, being careful not to touch the spearhead engraved with runes, lest my aura nullify its magic.

  This spear had shed a whole lot of blood, and now that I was returning it to Odin, it would shed a whole lot more. But people who truly want to shed blood will find a way to shed it, just as people who wish to do good will find a way to be a benediction to their neighbors.

  Building and growing are so much harder than cutting something down. I once spent twelve years training an apprentice to accept the magic of the earth, only to see him beheaded by the forces of Al-Mansur in Galicia. After I lost Cíbran, the hopelessness of training an apprentice had overwhelmed me for far too long, and I’d had serious doubts about taking on Granuaile and several thoughts along the way of giving up.

  But the meeting with Odin reassured me and gave me new hope. Now that we were sort of on the same side and he would keep my fake death a secret, I could face the remainder of Granuaile’s training with a bit more confidence that we would not be discovered and summarily destroyed.

  I had less confidence, however, in my ability to avoid distraction where Granuaile was concerned. After weeks of tiptoeing around the Morrigan’s severe mood swings, I wanted nothing so much as to talk with Granuaile, to enjoy her mind and sense of humor and appreciate a well-balanced personality. It wasn’t that Granuaile was serene or at peace with herself yet, but she was walking along that road and it was a joy to sense that and appreciate it, whereas the Morrigan was lost in the apeshit wilderness. Right now, it would be far too easy for me to forget myself and smile at Granuaile in a way that communicated how much I cared for her.

  The weather wasn’t giving me a break on the physical side of things either. It was still hot outside, and Granuaile was still wearing very tight workout clothes. She had begun a series of advanced tai chi forms while I was retrieving Gungnir from the earth.

 

  Come on, not yet. She just started.

 

  What? How can we be out of snacks?

 

  I didn’t want to believe him, but I also have a suspicious nature. I turned my head and saw that Granuaile’s forms were perfect. She was mesmerizing. And, soon enough, she caught me watching.

  Gods below, I think you’re right! Quick! To the Geekmobile!

 

  We had recently traded in Granuaile’s hybrid SUV and bought a new one with a bright-green paint job that the manufacturer called “Lime Squeeze.” It looked like Mountain Dew, the drink of choice for nerds, geeks, and dorks everywhere, so it had earned the name of Geekmobile.

  I tossed Gungnir into the back and opened the back door for Oberon so he could hop inside.

  “Hey, where are you going?” Granuaile asked.

  “We need supplies,” I said. “Running down to Chinle.” And also to Canyon de Chelly, where I could shift quickly to the cabin near Ouray and drop off Odin’s spear. Oberon and I might go hunting while we were there.

  “I want to go!”

  “No, continue your training. Target practice with the throwing knives, and don’t forget to work with the staff. We’ll get into some new martial-arts stuff tomorrow, I promise. And I want to hear how you’re progressing in your Old Irish.” I closed the cab door and started the engine before she could talk her way inside. We kicked up some dust in my haste to escape.

 

  Only six.

 

  I know. I’m running out of ideas, though.

 

  She has a mirror, Oberon.

 

  That would probably work, except that she would murder the stylist. It would never work. There was more to Granuaile than her hair.

 

  His words reminded me of my promise to fight on the side of the Norse in Ragnarok, when and if it came. We’re all doomed, I said. But for now I think I’ll count my blessings.

 

  He stuck his head between the front seats and deftly licked my ear, delivering a classic Wet Willy. I shied away and laughed. Always, buddy, I said.

  Read on for a preview of the next book in the thrilling

  IRON DRUID CHRONICLES,

  Trapped

  Coming soon from Del Rey Books!

  Chapter 1

  You know those spastic, full-body twitches you get sometimes when you’re almost asleep and your muscles want to play a practical joke on your brain? You startle wide awake and immediately get pissed at your nervous system, wondering what the hell that was all about. I’ve caught myself talking to it before: “Damn it, Dude,”—yes, I call my nervous system Dude, and the Dude abides—“I was almost asleep, and now you’ve slain all the sheep I was gonna count.”

  What I felt as I walked on the Kaibab Plateau was kind of like that, except it was Gaia doing the spastic full-body twitch. It was more of an uncomfortable shudder that I felt through my tattoos, like when you step barefoot into the garage in winter and your nipples pucker up. But as with those nervous muscle spasms, I got irritated about it and wondered what the hell was going on. And while I wasn’t about to go to sleep, I was about to enjoy the culmination of twelve years of training an apprentice—and save for the first few months of it, I’d conducted it all in peace. Granuaile was finally ready to become a full Druid, and we were searching for a place to bind her to the earth when I felt the tremor. I shot a question to the elemental, Kaibab, in the cocktail of feelings and images they use instead of language: //Confusion / Query: What was that?//

  //Confusion / Uncertainty / Fear// came the reply. That chilled me. I’ve never heard confusion from an elemental before. The fear, on the other hand, was perfectly normal: Despite their awesome power, elementals are afraid of almost everything, from placer mines to land developers to bark beetles. They can be real scaredy-cats sometimes. But they’re never uncertain about what’s going on with Gaia. Stopping in my tracks and causing Granuaile and Oberon to turn and look at me quizzically, I asked Kaibab what there was to fear.

  //Plane across ocean / Early death / Burning / Burning / Burning//

  Well, that confused me too. Kaibab wasn’t talking about an airplane. He (or she, if Granuaile was talking) meant an entire plane of existence, a plane that was tied to earth somewhere on the other side of the globe. //Query: Which plane?//

  //Name unknown / God from plane seeks you / Urgent / Query: Tell him location?//

  //Query: Which god?//

  The answer to that would tell me what plane was burning. There was a pause, during which time I stalled with Granuaile and Oberon. “Something’s up with Kaibab. Hold on.” They knew better than to interrupt, and they took this news as an invitation to be on their guard, which was wise. Anything worrisome to the avatar of the environment you currently occupy should rouse you to a caf
feinated state of paranoia.

  //God’s name: Perun// Kaibab finally said.

  Almost unconsciously, I sent //Shock// in reply, because it was truly my reaction. The Slavic plane of existence was burning, perhaps even dead? How? Why? I hoped Perun would have the answers. If he sought me in hopes that I had them, we’d both be disappointed. //Yes / Tell Perun location//

  I’d also like to know how Perun even knew to ask for me—did someone tell him I’d faked my death twelve years ago? There was another pause, during which I filled in Granuaile and Oberon.

  Oberon asked.

  Yep, that’s the one.

 

  I don’t know why, but perhaps you’ll get a chance to ask him.

  //He comes// Kaibab said. //Fast//

  “Okay, incoming,” I said out loud.

  “Incoming what, Atticus?” Granuaile asked.

  “Incoming thunder god. We should move near a tree and get ready to shift away to Tír na nÓg if necessary. And get the fulgurites out.” Fulgurites would protect us from lightning strikes; Perun had given them to us himself when Granuaile was just starting her training, but we hadn’t worn them for years, since all the thunder gods thought I was dead.

  “You think Perun is going to take a shot at us?” Granuaile asked. She shrugged off her red backpack and unzipped the pouch containing the fulgurites.

  “Well, no, but … maybe. I don’t know what’s going on, really. When in doubt, know your way out, I always say.”

  “I thought you always said, ‘When in doubt, blame the dark elves.’ ”

  “Well, yeah, that too.”

  Oberon said.

  We stood in a meadow of bunch grass and clover. The sky washed us in cerulean blue and the sun kissed Granuaile’s red hair with gold, the black dye we’d worn for years washed away, and Oberon looked like he wanted to plop down and bask in the light for a while. Our backpacks were weighted down with camping gear that we’d bought at Peace Surplus in Flagstaff, but after Granuaile retrieved the fulgurites, we jogged over as best we could to the nearest stand of ponderosa pine trees. I confirmed that there was a functioning tether to Tír na nÓg there and then started to look up for signs of Perun’s arrival.

  Granuaile noticed and craned her neck upward. “What’s up there, sensei?” she wondered aloud. “I don’t see anything but sky.”

  “I’m looking for Perun. I’m assuming he’s going to fly in. There, see?” I pointed to a dark streak trailed by lightning bolts in the northwestern sky. And behind that, at a distance of perhaps five to ten miles—I couldn’t tell from so far away—burned an orange ball of fire.

  Granuaile squinted. “What’s that thing that looks like the Phoenix Suns logo? Is that him?”

  “No, Perun is in front of it, throwing all the lightning.”

  “Oh, so what is it? A meteor or a cherub or something?”

  “Or something. It doesn’t look friendly. That’s not a warm, cozy hearth fire that you gather ’round with your friends to read some Longfellow while you toast s’mores. That’s more like napalm with a heart of phosphorus and a side of hell sauce.” The lightning and the fireball were turning in the sky and heading directly our way.

  Oberon said.

  I hear ya, buddy. I’m ready to scoot too. But let’s see if we can talk to Perun first.

  The sky darkened and boomed above. Everything shuddered; Perun was traveling at supersonic speeds. He crashed heavily into the meadow about fifty yards away from us, and large chunks of turf exploded around a newly formed crater. I felt the impact in my feet, and a wave of displaced air knocked me backward a bit. Before the turf could fall back to earth, a heavily muscled figure carpeted in hair bounded out of it toward us, panic writ large on his features.

  “Atticus! We must flee this plane! Is not safe! Take me—save me!”

  Normally, thunder gods are not prone to panic. The ability to blast away problems tends to turn the jagged edges of fear into silly little pillows of insouciance. So when an utter badass like Perun looks like he’s about to soil himself, I hope I can be forgiven if I nearly shat kine—especially when the fireball whoomped into the crater Perun had just vacated and sucked all the oxygen out of my lungs.

  Granuaile ducked and shrieked in surprise; Oberon whimpered; Perun was tossed through the air toward us like a stuntman in a Michael Bay film. But upon rolling through the landing gracefully, he leapt back up again, his legs churning toward us.

  Behind Perun, the fire didn’t spread but rather began to shrink and coalesce and … laugh. A high, thin, maniacal laugh straight out of creepy cartoons. And the fire swirled, torus-like, around a figure twelve feet tall, until it gradually wicked out and left a lean giant with a narrow face standing fifty yards before us, his orange and yellow hair starting from his skull like a sunburst. The grin on his face wasn’t the affable, friendly sort; instead, it was the sociopathic rictus of the irretrievably, bug-fuckeringly insane.

  His eyes were the worst. They were melted around the edges as if they’d been burned with acid, and where a normal person would have laugh lines or crow’s feet around them, he had bubbly pink scars and a nightmare of blistered tissue. The whites of his eyes were a red mist of broken blood vessels, but the irises were an ice blue frosted with madness. He blinked them savagely, as if he’d gotten soap into them or something, and soon I recognized it as a nervous tic, since his head jerked to his right at odd intervals and then continued to twitch uncertainly afterward, like a bobblehead doll.

  “Go, my friend, go! We must flee!” Perun said, huffing as he reached us and putting one hand on my shoulder and another on the pine. Granuaile followed suit; she knew the drill, and so did Oberon, who reared up on his hind legs and leaned one paw against me and the other on the tree.

  “Who in hell is that, Perun?” I said.

  The giant laughed again and I shuddered involuntarily. His voice was smooth and fluffy like marshmallow crème, if the crème also had shards of glass in it. But he had a thick Scandinavian accent to go with the nervous tic.

  “This puh-puh-place—is Mah, Merrica, yes?”

  A twitch, a stutter, and an English-language learner. He’d drive me insane just listening to him. “Yes,” I replied.

  “Hah? Who? Thppt! Raah!” He spat a fire loogie and shook his head violently. Perhaps this was more than a twitch. It might be full-blown Tourette’s syndrome. Or it might be something else, as the signs all pointed to a highly unpleasant conclusion.

  “Who gah-guh-gods here?” He giggled to himself after this, pleased that he’d managed to ask the question. There was a disturbingly high squealing noise coming from his head, like the sound of fat screaming in a frying pan or when you let the air slowly out of a balloon. The giant rested his hands on his knees and scrunched up his shoulders in an attempt to steady his noggin, but this produced the unsettling effect of turning his flamelike hair to actual flames. The noise intensified.

  “You are a god here,” I said, taking an educated guess. I could have confirmed this by looking at him in the magical spectrum, but there was no need. There wasn’t much else that Perun would fear. “But I don’t know which one. Who are you?”

  The giant threw back his head and roared in delight, clapping like a child and high-stepping as if I’d asked him if he wanted ice cream. My jaw dropped, and Granuaile muttered a bewildered “What the fuck,” which mirrored my own thoughts. What had happened to his mind?

  Perun chucked me urgently on the shoulder. “Atticus, is Loki! He is free. We m
ust go. Is smart thing to do.”

  “Gods Below,” I breathed, gooseflesh rising on my arms. I’d feared it was him once I saw the eyes, but I’d also clung to the hope that he was something a bit less apocalyptic, like an escaped military experiment along the lines of Sharktopus. Instead, Loki, the Old Norse villain of the Eddas, whose release from captivity heralded the start of Ragnarok, was unbound and ready to paint the town batshit.

 

  Perun and Oberon were right, the smart thing to do would be to leave. But the smarter thing to do would be to get Loki to leave too. I didn’t want to scarper off and leave Kaibab at his mercy; I wanted Loki off this plane as quickly as possible. Time to lie to the god of lies.

  “I am Eldhár,” I called out to him in Old Norse. His laughter, already dying out, choked off abruptly and he focused those blue-and-blood eyes on me. The name was one I’d used before: It meant “flame hair” in Old Norse, and I’d employed it years ago when I’d gone to Asgard to steal a golden apple. “I am a construct of the dwarfs of Nidavellir.” Tapping into my adrenaline and an older, more primitive part of my psyche, I smiled at the giant in the same disconcerting way he had smiled at us. “Glad am I that you are free, Loki, for that means your wife is free also, and I was built specifically to destroy her and all your spawn. I will behead the serpent. Eviscerate the wolf. And as for Hel … even the queen of death can die.” I laughed menacingly, hoped that it was convincing, and thought that would serve as a good exit line.

  Without giving him a chance to respond, I pulled my center along the tether to Tír na nÓg, bringing Granuaile, Oberon, and Perun with me, shifting us safely away from earth and leaving Loki to consider how to address this new problem. Hopefully he’d return to the Norse plane and start asking questions—and hopefully the dwarfs had fire insurance.

  I had plenty of questions for Perun—like how had Loki gained entrance to the Slavic plane, what was Hel up to now, and where was Fenris—but foremost among them was finding out what idiot had thought it a good idea to teach an old god of mischief how to speak English.