Part 20 (2/2)

Draugr hands gripped his wrists and tried to pry his fingers away from his sword. He held on but could do nothing as they lifted him from the deck, carrying him like a battering ram and rus.h.i.+ng to the side of the s.h.i.+p, where, without ceremony, they pitched him over.

Tumbling and falling, he heard Loki's laughter.

HERMOD LANDED DEAD center on the painted wheelchair of a handicapped parking s.p.a.ce. He felt as if his every bone had shattered to pieces the size of teeth, all the fluids in his body bursting out like a broken water balloon.

Spitting a gob of blood, he lifted his head to see Naglfar listing over the battlefield, not more than twenty or thirty feet off the tarmac. Einherjar on the ground tossed spears and shot arrows at the s.h.i.+p, but they had no more effect than toothpicks flung at a rhinoceros.

Hermod dragged himself to his feet. He spat some more blood. With limited relief, he realized he'd fallen onto the Asgard side of the battle line. The Einherjar around him were as motley a crew as Hel's fighters on the s.h.i.+p had been, though better fed and better equipped. The man closest to him wore camouflage pants, combat boots, Mickey Mouse ears, and nothing else. It's a Small World was tattooed in script across his bare chest. He rather casually pointed his sword at Hermod and took a drag off a ma.s.sive joint. ”Buddy, you landed on the wrong side of this parking lot. There's five hundred of us been waiting to kill guys like you.”

”I'm Hermod, son of Odin,” Hermod said. ”f.u.c.k off.”

He scanned the faces of the men around him, hoping to spot Grimnir and, to a lesser extent, his Aesir kin, but the battlefield was vast, the parking lot stretching into other worlds through cracks in the World Tree. Hermod could sense living wood beneath the thin layer of asphalt at his feet.

Naglfar limped across the gap between the two armies, and Hermod kept waiting to see Sleipnir leaping to the ground, away from Loki and Hel's fighters and the draugr. Admittedly, that would bring Mist onto the scene of the final battle, but then at least she'd be close by. But the s.h.i.+p continued angling down toward the ranks of trolls and giants, listing farther to starboard until it had almost completely tipped over. Dead were leaping off the deck and sliding down the dangling rigging. Hermod sprinted away from the Einherjar front line into the no-man's-land between the two armies.

The s.h.i.+p struck the ground bow-first, the hull collapsing behind it in a slow implosion of bone and cartilage. The fingernail scales flew like confetti, and the great mast toppled. Dust and debris billowed across the battlefield, and a bleeding Loki limped out from the cloud, towering over the battlefield.

AFTER THE draugr had tossed Hermod over the side of the s.h.i.+p, Mist grabbed two fistfuls of Sleipnir's mane and urged him to the rail. The horse took several galloping steps but then jerked to a stop, almost throwing Mist over his head. ”What are you doing?” Mist shouted. ”Leap over! We're going after him! Hurtle, d.a.m.n you!” She couldn't survive the fall on her own. She needed Sleipnir to make the jump, and even then all she could do was hope for the best. But Hermod was down there. She wouldn't let him face death by gravity or monster all by himself.

”Mist! Over here!” Lilly was upslope on the leaning deck. Her face bled from multiple scratches, and there was an ugly clot of blood and hair on her forehead. She made vicious thrusts with her broken spear at the draugr and Hel soldiers crowding her. Fierce as Lilly was, she'd soon be ripped apart like a live chicken tossed into a pen of starving hyenas. But Hermod needed Mist too. He was an Aesir, but despite whatever combination of courage or foolishness drove him, he was out of his league down there on that battlefield. And yeah, dammit, she loved him. Maybe loved him. Sort of loved him.

”Get me to Lilly,” Mist commanded, despairing. Sleipnir bolted up the deck, sure-footed as a mountain goat. The soldiers in Sleipnir's path held their ground against his advance, one of them scoring a hit on the horse's flank with a poleax, but Sleipnir broke the man with a mule kick, raked his tail across another man's eyes, and bit off the leg of another.

”Get on!” Mist ordered Lilly, leaning out with her hand extended. Once Lilly was seated behind her, Mist ignored the slices Sleipnir's hair was making in her fingers and grabbed hard to steer him back to the rail.

”Where are you going? The fight's up there,” Lilly yelled in her ear, pointing toward the s.h.i.+p's stern.

”Hermod got tossed over the side. I'm going after him.”

”No, we have to crash the G.o.dd.a.m.ned s.h.i.+p before it delivers Hel's army.”

”Jesus, Lilly, did you hear me? I said Hermod went over.”

Mist expected Lilly to yell back, to grab her and shake her and scream in her face. Instead, she spoke softly in Mist's ear, and even above the screams on the deck and the ring of steel and the crack of gunfire, Mist heard her.

”Okay, babe, I'm sorry. Do what you have to do. But let me off the pony first. I need to help sabotage the bad guys' s.h.i.+t.” She ran a gentle hand through Mist's hair.

”Better hop off, then, Lilly. I'm gonna think global and act local and help Hermod.”

But Sleipnir had other ideas. Wheeling around, he plowed through Hel's fighters and draugr to get to the helm. In a pounding charge, he flew up the deck but then came to a sudden, splintering halt. Mist and Lilly barely managed to stay mounted. Jostled in his harness, Winston whimpered.

”What the h.e.l.l is wrong with Glue Factory?” Lilly barked, but Mist saw why he'd put on the brakes. Loki's face was tilted up to the sky, as though he were enjoying sun and spray. Hod stood before him, one of his arms drooping, clearly dislocated. He leaned on a spear shaft, about a foot of which had been sheared off, leaving exposed raw wood and a sharp, ragged point.

”Help me guide my aim once more, Loki,” he said, ”and I will gladly throw another dart.”

Loki chortled. ”Sorry, dear, no. I have some tasks left that require me to live a bit longer. But you're a son of Odin, are you not? Surely you can throw a stick without my help. Haven't you developed a dog's sense of smell to compensate for-”

Hod hurled his stick.

The point punched into Loki's right shoulder, and Loki howled and staggered back, falling against the tiller. The deck lurched sharply downward.

”Now! This is it! Take it down!” Henry Verdant rushed past Sleipnir's legs, a blood-slicked bayonet in his hands. Loki swatted him away with the back of his hand, but Alice Kirkpatrick retrieved Henry's bayonet and took up the charge in his place. Hod demanded another dart to throw, while a ma.s.s of press-ganged dead surged forward, swarming over Loki like a pack of dogs. The trickster G.o.d was strong, but he began to sag, and with his weight on the tiller, the s.h.i.+p dropped with him.

The dragon figurehead splintered like windblown straw when it hit the ground. The corpses impaled on its teeth collapsed into jelly, and then the shock wave of impact traveled through the deck. Amid ear-gouging cracks as the s.h.i.+p's ribs and boards fractured, bodies flew, helpless as fallen leaves in a storm.

A ROAR encompa.s.sed the entire bowl of the sky, and Hermod looked up to see the Midgard serpent rise from the horizon like a mushroom cloud. Covered in brown and green and black scales, its skin reflected oil-slick rainbows. The serpent glared down at the earth, its eyes filmed over with yellow cataracts. It flared its great translucent, mucus-colored ruff and released a blast of poisonous air that drove giants and Einherjar alike to their knees, retching.

Hermod hurried toward the serpent, his throat burning. Thor was prophesied to die fighting the serpent, but he was also supposed to kill it. What if Hermod could kill the serpent instead? Wouldn't that be removing a huge link from the event chain? Could it be enough to shove Ragnarok off the rails? Of course, Hermod fully realized he wasn't Thor. He couldn't subdue Jormungandr any more than he could wrestle a tornado to the ground.

With the sound of shattering rock, Thor rumbled past in his goat cart, every vein and muscle fiber in his arms carved in high relief as he held his hammer aloft. He was monumentally huge, like a formation of earth, but Jormungandr dwarfed him.

”Thor, wait! Stop!” Hermod bellowed, but Thor paid him no mind. Hermod ran after him.

Another thought occurred to him: Removing a domino from the sequence didn't necessarily mean defeating any of the Aesir's enemies. Killing Thor would also be removing a domino, wouldn't it? But could Hermod kill his own brother? Even if it meant averting Ragnarok?

He sprinted hard. He had a clear shot at Thor's head. If he threw the Sword of Seven ... But Thor made it a moot point. He launched himself from his cart, flying like a missile into the upper reaches of the clouds, where the serpent's head was obscured behind a haze of its own poison.

The serpent's cries cut through claps of thunder, and then it wobbled like a gigantic spinning top losing its energy. It sank in an achingly slow descent, falling in a coil upon the Home Depot and the rest of the shopping center and into the distant mountains and seas of the cracked-apart worlds. Its skin burst open, spreading steaming toxins across the field. Those whom it washed over screamed, their skin burning, peeling, hanging in sheets.

Thor crawled out from between the coils, hammer-less. His face was disfigured, the texture of cottage cheese. Blood gushed from his nose. He groaned, and Hermod saw that all his teeth had fallen out.

Hermod reached his brother's side. Thor's chest rose with thin, agonized breaths. Tiny pin drops of blood beaded on his skin. And after a series of bone-fracturing convulsions, Thor died.

THE s.h.i.+P came down around Mist, wood and bone and fingernails. Winston spilled from his harness and fell the last few feet, and Mist was almost thrown from Sleipnir's back when the horse hit the ground. ”Move,” she commanded the dog and the horse, urging them clear of the falling wreckage.

On the ground, Hel's soldiers continued to clash with mutinous dead, and Mist tried to see through the clatter to spot Lilly and Hod, but she saw no sign of them.

”Miss Castillo!”

Instinctively, Mist reached for her sword, but it had gone missing in the crash.

Henry Verdant ran over the rubble, grasping hands with Alice Kirkpatrick. The two were dirty and b.l.o.o.d.y, but Mist let out a gasp of relief to see that they were intact.

”Have you seen my sister?” Mist asked.

”She and Hod went after Loki,” Alice said, waving out over the parking lot. The battle boiled with humans and monsters and frost-covered figures the size of buildings.

”We're going to try to link up with the Einherjar,” Henry said. He'd secured an a.s.sault rifle for himself. ”Join us?”

Mist turned to go with them, but then, across a pile of smashed and overturned cars, she saw a flash of red hair heading into Costco: Radgrid.

”I'll try to find you later,” she said to the Iowans. ”There's something I have to do first.”

Henry gave her a puzzled look but then flashed her a quick salute. ”We all have to do what we can. You take care, Miss Castillo.”

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