Three Slices

by Kevin Hearne

  A curtain of lank, dirty blond hair obscures his features at first, but as soon as he looks up at my approach and I see the scarred, puckered tissue around his eyes and his condescending smirk, I tell Orlaith to run back to the cabin and hide inside using the doggie door.

  Go as fast as you can or he will hurt you. Don’t argue; just go.

 

  No, he needs me for something. But he will use you to control me. If you are out of his reach, he can’t control me. Go.

  Orlaith turns and runs but speaks as she does.

  I will.

  Loki’s smug grin at my approach fades as he sees Orlaith bound away.

  “Aw, where’s she going? We came to such a lovely understanding last time.” Last time, he did something to Orlaith’s mind and used her as a hostage; I wouldn’t let him do that again.

  “You’re not welcome here, Loki. Leave.”

  He affects a hurt expression. “Where’s your hospitality, Miss MacTiernan?”

  I brandish my staff and my axe and say, “Right here. If you’d like a sample of my hospitality, say the word.”

  Loki’s hair ignites as he scowls at me, perturbed by my attitude. “You went to Asgard.”

  “Indeed I did.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m sure Odin would love to tell you all about it. He’s anxious to see you, in fact. Why don’t you go ask him?”

  “I’m asking you.”

  “I’m not answering. Leave now.”

  The flames around Loki’s head flare up and his eyes turn dark. “Perhaps you need a reminder of how this relationship works. When I need something, you get it for me, whether that be the Lost Arrows of Vayu or a simple answer to a simple question. Tell me why you went to Asgard and what you discussed with Odin,” he says, and then points a finger at the cabin before adding, “or does your hound need to pay for your mouth?”

  Seeing him fall back on that same threat angers me—not only because he’s threatening an innocent creature but because he thinks so little of me that he doesn’t think I’d have prepared for it. That’s okay: He’s already revealed that has a short fuse and I exactly how to set him off. “Suck my balls,” I tell him.

  Loki blinks. “You don’t even have—”

  “They’re still bigger than yours.”

  He flinches as if I’d slapped him—and I suppose that, verbally, I had. Not only had I cast aspersions on his manly man-bits but I’d interrupted him to do it.

  “Bitch,” he growls, immediately grasping for the world that most men do when they encounter a woman they can’t control. His entire body ignites into a pillar of flame and his voice snarls out of it, “It seems you need a lesson.”

  He rockets straight up in a ball of fire and then arcs over my head toward the cabin. You’re inside now, right, Orlaith?

 

  Good. Stay there and don’t come out, no matter what you hear.

  While Loki’s eyes are off me, I trigger invisibility using the bindings carved into Scáthmhaide and jog uphill, craning my neck to follow his progress. I’m curious as to how precisely the wards will affect him when he hits them, and I murmur bindings to increase my strength and speed.

  When Loki hits the Druidic wards against fire, he doesn’t smash against them like a bird hitting a window, which I was kind of hoping for. Instead, his fire is simply snuffed out like a candle wick between fingers, and he keeps going on inertia, a thin smoking body that’s now falling out of the sky instead of flying through it. His initial cry of surprise is followed by a cry of terror as he realizes he won’t be able to control his landing, and I shift from a jog to a full sprint, closing on where he’ll land.

  He breaks his right arm trying to cushion his fall, a sharp crack and then a wounded howl as he rolls in front of our cabin. He cradles it with his left arm for a couple of revolutions and then, as he struggles to push himself to his feet with his one good arm, I leap onto his back and sink my axe into it until the blade disappears. It’s buried in his left shoulder blade and I leave it there, jumping off as he rears back and screams anew.

  “Now here’s a lesson for you, Loki: You fucked with the wrong Druid.”

  The god of mischief staggers to his feet and whirls around, trying to locate me, his arms dangling like useless vines. I can see him trying to reignite, little puffs of smoke popping out all around him. He won’t be able to spark up until he’s outside the circumference of the ward, and he shouts, “Where are—” before the edge of Scáthmhaide smashes into his teeth from his left, sending a fine collection of them spraying to the right in a mist of blood.

  “Shut up,” I say, twirling my staff and jabbing up into his diaphragm to drive all the air out of his lungs. “You arrange matters so that I have to watch my father get killed, lure me into a pit to get all my bones broken by some monster, and then while I’m helpless, you brand me like I fucking belong to you?”

  Loki takes a wheezing breath and looks like he wants to answer, so I tee off on his ribs and crack a few.

  “I’ve been trying to figure out how to get rid of your mark, and it occurred to me that the simplest thing to do would be to get rid of you.” The mask of pain on Loki’s face shifts to fear as he realizes that there’s no bottom to the deep pool of shit he’s stepped in. “And it’s not really a selfish revenge thing on my part. It’s kind of a public service, right? Because you admitted to me that you want to wipe out everything on Midgard and start over. Well, as a Druid of Gaia, I take issue with that. I am duty-bound to make sure it doesn’t happen, in fact. And so, for crimes you have already committed and greater crimes you intend to commit, Loki Firestarter, your life is forfeit. I judge you guilty and sentence you to death.”

  Bleeding and gasping for breath, eyes wide and unfocused, Loki backs away from my voice and stumbles over a bush, startling a hare that sprints away. He tumbles backward and I charge forward, whipping Scáthmhaide down in a punishing arc at his face, but the end of my staff whiffs through his head and pounds the earth instead. His body dissolves into vapor and I look up to locate the hare, realizing he duped me with an illusion. I find it still running straight away, an uncommonly slow hare, its fur puffing and popping with attempts to ignite until finally it escapes the circle of our wards and blooms into flame. Loki’s shape forms briefly, still mangled and with my axe in his back, though now the wooden handle’s on fire. He glares in my general direction but says nothing—probably can’t with his jaw broken. Since he can’t locate me precisely and is probably worried about being taken down again, he launches himself into the sky and passes beyond my reach.

  At first, I’m annoyed with myself because I should have thought to bind him to the earth right away to prevent his escape, or at least triggered magical sight so he couldn’t pull a fake like that. But then I grin and laugh out loud because it felt good to get a measure of vengeance and show Loki he is not invincible; I had not expected to be so successful. Retracing my steps and examining the ground for blood, I find a handful of Loki’s teeth and scoop them up. I scan the canopy of surrounding trees, and it isn’t long before I spy Hugin and Munin staring back at me from an aspen. I hold up the teeth in triumph.

  “Not bad, eh, Odin? We have him now.”

  One of the ravens croaks a response but I don’t speak corvidae.

  “Hold on, I’ll make a box for them.” Using the same binding principles I had used earlier to make targets for my hawk practice, I fashion a small wooden cube out of some reformed branches, drop the teeth in, and then I grab a few blood-splattered leaves and add them before sealing it up. “Ready to hop on the Bifrost.” An affirmative croak, and the ravens leap off the branch and flap out of sight, returning to Odin.

  Orlaith, you can come out now, but come straight to me. I don’t want her straying outside the wards in case Loki decides to come back.

  She comes bounding out of the house, tail sawing the air, and I kneel to give her a hug.

  �
�We’re going to go back to Asgard now and stay a while.”

 

  “Odin might be able to get rid of Loki’s mark for me, and then we can go wherever we want without having to worry about him showing up.”

 

  “I will let the elemental know where we are and she will tell Atticus when he gets back. He will understand and explain to Oberon. Once we are back on this plane, we can live wherever we want except here. Is there someplace you’d like to go?”

 

  “Good. Because we were thinking of a place kind of like this one in Oregon.” Atticus had already told his attorney, Hal Hauk, to find a suitable place near or in the Willamette Valley.

  I return to the creek and hastily shove some dirt over Loki’s fire to extinguish it, tell the elemental where I’m going, and soon afterward, the Bifrost shimmers before me, inviting me to Asgard. Loki will know where I’ve gone and might put together that I’ve taken his teeth to Odin, but let him. He will know that my death sentence is tacitly approved by Odin. And he’ll have to start Ragnarok now if he wants to get his teeth back, and Odin is clearly prepared to take that risk.

  On my previous visit, the one-eyed god determined that Loki’s mark operates much like the cold iron bound to Atticus’s aura. It isn’t really a thing but rather a proxy of a thing—a proxy of Loki himself, bound with a genetic key. As such, Gaia doesn’t recognize it as a wound to be healed, for it is something I wear like clothes—except I can’t take it off without Loki’s help. The solution, Odin told me, was to kill Loki if I could—plan A, which would set Hel off for sure but forestall other plans Loki might have in motion—or go to plan B, which was to get some of Loki’s genetic material to use in crafting a countermark. Blood and teeth should serve very well.

  There is a lightness to my step as I walk on the Bifrost again. Loki may have gotten the better of me in India, but I had certainly gotten the better of him in Colorado, and that did much to heal the humiliation I suffered there, especially the knowledge that he’ll never be able to smile about his victory again.

  I am under no illusions about what this means: I am as much under Loki’s death sentence now as he is under mine. But that means there will be no more games, and I am content with that. A couple lines from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass come to mind, which in their original context have absolutely nothing to do with my situation but nevertheless seem appropriate now: I will therefore let flame from me the burning fires that were threatening to consume me.

  Yeah. That works.

  We did five-minute miles to reach the baobab tree thanks to some assistance from Gaia, but we didn’t get to it until after dark because it was closer to fifteen miles than ten and Mekera took some time gathering her essentials and wrapping them up for a hard run. It turned out to be too much time.

  Tethering a new tree is not an instantaneous process. It’s a secure path between our plane and Tir na nÓg, after all, and even though it may take only fifteen minutes if executed perfectly, you have to have fifteen minutes free of distractions. If you interrupt the binding, then you have to start over from the beginning. Using a different headspace to deal with verbal distractions usually works, but sometimes, especially in nature, you have to worry about other things. I’ve had bees, for example, try to pollinate my nostril or ear because my red hair attracts them like a cluster of flowers, and once I get six legs and a pair of wings buzzing around in there, I forget about what I’m doing in all of my headspaces and just freak out. Facebees are the worst.

  I learned to ask the elemental to keep other animals from bothering me after that happened a couple of times. Well, that and the constrictor that tried to slither up my pants that one time in Panama—literal trouser snakes are primally frightening.

  Before I began, I told Oberon and Mekera to try to keep conversation to a minimum and took the trouble to camouflage us all to throw off the thrall, presuming he was still trailing behind us somewhere. I also gave us all night vision before contacting the elemental, asking for a short span of time free of insects and predators around the baobab tree. That done, I divided my consciousness between my Old Irish headspace for the tethering and English for everything else, and informed my companions that I was beginning. In fifteen minutes, we’d be able to shift away to Tir na nÓg, and from there, we could shift again to Emhain Ablach, where Mekera would have her safety and solitude.

  Apart from a knapsack of clothes and some bubble-wrapped vials of bacteria cultures and vegetable rennet for her future work, she had brought her bow and quiver along with a wheel of hard cheese she said was precious to her. I assumed it was the stuff she ate to prolong her life; she had already been a couple hundred years old when I met her in the sixteenth century. The rest of her cheese she had to abandon, and this triggered Oberon’s sympathy so much that he spent much of the run trying to compose the “Abandoned Cheese Bleus.” I would give him a snack later for the pun.

  Mekera had occasion to pull out her bow about four or five minutes later when the thrall showed up, proving that he not only existed but that he possessed extraordinary stamina. A slim man built for long-distance running, he had the satellite phone she’d spoken of to his ear, and he was speaking into it as he approached. The vampires had equipped him well; he was wearing night vision goggles. If they were the kind that amplified and enhanced ambient light and the lower end of infrared spectrum they wouldn’t let him see through our camouflage. If they were thermal imagers, however, he’d spot us. The camouflage binding did nothing to disguise our body heat, and that’s how a sniper was able to target me once in Germany.

  Without discussing it with me, I heard Mekera draw an arrow from her quiver, nock it on her bowstring, and shoot the thrall in the chest as he slowed to a walk near the tree, searching for us—he clearly didn’t have the thermal imaging. He squawked as he went down, and I broke off her camouflage because I wanted to see what she was doing. She ran out to finish him off if he needed finishing, dropping her bow and yanking out her hunting knife. I saw her dip out of sight in the grass for a couple of seconds, but she rose again with the sat phone up to her ear, speaking loudly enough that I could hear her. The connection was still open, and evidently, the thrall offered no resistance to her taking the phone.

  “You’re too late,” she said. “We killed your thrall and we’re shifting out of here now. Tell Drasche I said his clothing is about as attractive as a festering baboon’s ass.” She listened for a few seconds and then disconnected with a thumb before tossing the phone into the grass.

  I couldn’t say much because I had to keep speaking the words of the binding in Old Irish, but I dropped my camouflage too, and my face must have communicated a challenge to Mekera when she returned.

  “What? I told you I have a strict no-stalking policy.”

  “Noted,” I said, when I could find a pause in the phrases of the binding to slip in an English word.

  “Anyway, they’re going to be here soon. As in a few minutes. As in before you finish whatever you’re doing. Don’t know how many, though.”

  Even one was too many. There was no way that Mekera or Oberon could stand up to a vampire. She might be able to surprise one with an arrow to the heart; I noticed that she had wooden shafts, expertly fletched, and those would serve if she could get in a lucky shot, but she wouldn’t get more than one.

  I couldn’t imagine that there would have been time to gather a large number of vampires here so quickly after sundown. We could be looking at two or three, no more—the surrounding population wouldn’t support any more. These had to have come from Gambela itself or perhaps Gore to the east. More would be coming in, though, if they thought they could delay me—and they could. They already had, because I couldn’t ignore them. My best option would be to deal with them as quickly as possible and then begin the tethering again, hoping that no more vampires showed up in the interim. Sighing in frustration, I halted the binding and stood, slapping at my
jeans to get the dust off them.

  “I’d like you and Oberon behind the tree,” I said to Mekera. The trunk was easily wide enough to conceal them both.

  “They’ll know we’re there.”

  “I know, but they’re after me anyway and I want their eyes on the prize.”

 

  I know, buddy, but these guys are really fast and strong. If you try to fight them, you’ll get hurt, no doubt about it, and I don’t want that.

 

  I’ll do my best not to.

  They turned out not to be guys. The vampires were two women in loose-fitting robes that streamed behind them as they ran. But unlike the vampire that had ambushed us in close quarters, these two were far enough away that they could be dispatched easily. I triggered my charm of unbinding repeatedly as they approached, using it as a range-finding exercise. When it finally hit them about a hundred yards away, they both clutched their chests and did a faceplant. That allowed me time to unbind one of them, and once that was done, I made a macro out of it, changed the target, and unbound the other without ever having to draw my sword.

  Yes, the ancient vampire Theophilus had good reason to fear Druids. And had he left me alone and not declared that he wished to wipe us out for good, I wouldn’t be terminating all of his minions in an effort to get to him. My little mercenary scheme with the yewmen had only begun to balance the scales he tipped in the vampires’ favor long ago, and I had a long way to go before those scales were even, much less tilting in my favor. If those names and addresses locked up in a Canadian bank were of the vampire leadership—an offline, secure location for crucial information—then I could use them to wreak significant havoc. Especially if they included the whereabouts of Theophilus himself.

  “All right, you two,” I said, “let’s reset the clock. Camouflage back on. Fifteen minutes to departure. Let me know if you hear or smell any more coming.”