Part 4 (2/2)
”I was dead for only a minute or two,” Harvey protested. ”But long enough to walk a few steps down the road and to see what's on the other end.”
”And Harvey was sharp-minded enough to remember his glimpse of Helheim. So, once he came to in the hospital, before he was even up and around, he decided to devote his very considerable resources to finding his way back to the road.”
Mist suddenly felt a kins.h.i.+p with this man. ”I lost someone down that road,” she said. ”If you know anything about how to get to Helheim and back ...”
To Mist's surprise, Harvey's chin quivered, just briefly, before he regained control. ”Who did you lose?” he asked, his voice gruff.
”My sister. We were both shot.”
Behind his sungla.s.ses, Harvey seemed to be looking at something off in the distance. ”When she was nine, my daughter, Brooke, died of acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Her mom did a lot of praying and crystals, a lot of talking about seeing her again in our next lives. I just kept nodding until the divorce. But then the heart attack happened, and I saw the road, and I realized that if there was another place, an afterlife, I'd have to be a real son of a b.i.t.c.h not to get my daughter the f.u.c.k out of there. It took a lot of time and a lot of my money, but eventually I learned about Hermod, and after even more time and more money, I actually found the b.a.s.t.a.r.d.”
Again, Mist wondered about Radgrid's selection methods. Any mortal commanding the wherewithal to track down a G.o.d was someone to be reckoned with. But it was highly doubtful that Harvey Silver was all that decent with a sword, and his reconfigured heart probably didn't pump Odin's blood, so a man like him would be of no interest to Radgrid. If only the Einherjar were a meritocracy.
”Will you tell me where Hermod is?”
Harvey Silver shook his head. ”Won't do you any good, dear. Hermod may be a G.o.d, but he's not any useful kind of G.o.d. I followed him around the globe for two straight years, and let me tell you, the guy gets around. But even after I offered him everything I could think of-cash, stocks, gold, girls, a house in Malibu, executive-producer credits on anything he wanted-he wouldn't work for me.”
”Are you still having him tracked?”
”I get reports, sure.”
”Tell me where he is.”
”You're wasting your time, dear.”
”It's my time to waste. And if it turns out I can convince Hermod to help me get my people back, I'll work on him to bring your daughter back too. I'm bringing back as many as I can.”
Grimnir sighed.
Harvey Silver's eyes remained hidden behind his dark lenses. ”Andre,” he said after a time, ”give me a pen.”
MIST HAD hoped for an address, but, instead, Harvey Silver had given her a list of instructions. She and Grimnir were to look for a tall, thin, shabbily dressed man. These days he reportedly had an Alaskan malamute with him. He would likely be found near the beach, because he was drawn to sh.o.r.elines. He had a tendency to walk along the borders of places. Look for him where the homeless were common and not likely to be evicted. Look for him in places where underground economies thrived, where n.o.body took credit cards.
Grimnir said he knew a few places like that, and they spent the next two days fruitlessly checking them out.
On the third day they came to Palisades Park, a crumbling ridge of gra.s.s and dirt perched above the Pacific Coast Highway. A concrete barrier had been erected to keep people away from the precipice, but much of that had itself tumbled down the cliff side, and the city ultimately relied on nothing more than signs warning people to stay at least six feet from the edge. Many of the signs had gone over the edge themselves. Was this Ragnarok, Mist wondered, or just California? All it ever took was a decent rainstorm to dissolve half the city.
Makes.h.i.+ft shelters constructed of wood sc.r.a.ps and shopping carts and plastic garbage bags sagged in the saturated air. Men in filthy donated clothes lay in the shadows of lean-tos, or on benches, or on bare ground.
Mist and Grimnir walked north, wading through mud and wet gra.s.s, past the merchants. Their setups ranged from stalls of plastic tarp and PVC pipe to mere blankets spread on the ground. Racks were hung with used clothing-winter coats, flannel s.h.i.+rts, bootleg UCLA sweats-draped in clear plastic sheeting to guard them from the wet. There were vendors hawking hothouse tomatoes and amateur apothecaries selling everything from vitamin C pills and Chinese herbs to home-brewed antibiotics. Other merchants sold batteries or gas-powered generators, always in demand since most cities' power grids hadn't been reliable for three years. With street performers playing guitars and drumming on plastic buckets for change and vendors roasting satay on hibachis, the atmosphere was almost festive.
Mist scanned the crowd. ”I've got a few other places on my list we can try,” Grimnir said, leaning over a merchant's display of switchblades with a connoisseur's eye.
”Not yet. Let's split up to cover more ground. You mill around the south end of the park and I'll take the north. Call if you find anything.”
She checked her cell phone to make sure it was getting a signal.
North, the market seemed less flea than black. Mist suspected that the girls and boys hanging around the restrooms weren't selling anything other than themselves. What some of the merchants were dealing in, however, was a little harder to figure out.
The stalls here were spa.r.s.er and less friendly to the casual browser, so to give herself something to do while visually scanning the place, she dug out a few coins to hand to a man huddled up against a tree.
”Have you seen the ocean lately?” he said, palming her coins.
Mist glanced beyond the cliff. The waters were calm today, a flat, steel-colored slab. ”It's quiet.”
”That's because the worm's sleeping. But he'll wake up before too long. I'm here, day in, day out, and I've seen him reveal himself. He shows the thinnest bit of his spine. Just a long, dark line on the horizon. It happens before a storm, usually a crazy one, like the one that took out the marina. He's testing the air, seeing if it's time.”
”Time for what?” Mist had to ask, even though she generally tried to avoid conversations with schizophrenics.
The man winked, as if revealing a juicy slice of gossip. ”When he gets restless, the world cracks apart. And he's starting to get restless.”
”Yeah, I have heard this one, actually.”
She spotted a tall man conducting business a few stalls down and moved closer. He was dressed in stained jeans and a black longsh.o.r.eman's coat. Flecks of gold glittered in the gray stubble on his cheeks and chin. Over his shoulder he carried a long duffel bag patched with duct tape. An Alaskan malamute stood alertly beside him.
He seemed to be in the middle of a negotiation with a man at a card table. The merchant held a ball about the size of an apple, wrapped tightly in brown paper.
Now she wished she hadn't split off from Grimnir. The man fit Hermod's description, but he didn't give off ... whatever it was she thought a G.o.d of the Aesir ought to give off. She reached for her phone, but at that moment the man turned his head and stared right at her with eyes the color of wet slate.
She left her phone in her pocket and strode up to him. ”I'm Mist,” she said. ”A Valkyrie under Radgrid's charge.”
”No hablo ingles,” he said.
The merchant snorted. ”He was hablo-ing ingles just fine a minute ago.”
Hermod gave him a dirty scowl and then directed the very same look at Mist. ”I'm trying to do something here, and you're interfering. Please go away. And don't come back. And don't send anybody else. Thank you very much.”
This could not possibly be Hermod, Mist thought. G.o.ds were supposed to be wrathful or capricious, not cranky.
”I've given you my name,” she said, drawing on the lessons in Asgard protocol Radgrid had given her. ”Won't you have the courtesy to tell yours to a servant of your father's?”
”I don't owe my father anything, much less his servants. If you won't go away, then at least be quiet, okay? Thank you.”
He turned back to the other man and gestured to the paper-wrapped ball in his hands. ”So how does it work? I don't see a fuse.”
”No fuse,” the man said, showing him a plastic tab curling from the ball. ”You just yank this.”
”Okay. Nice. I'll take four.”
”That's eight hundred dollars.”
”I'll give you six hundred.”
”Eight hundred dollars.”
”Seven-”
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