by Renée Jaggér
“Not quite,” Fenris replied. “Rather, I’ve come to inform you of how, if you will work according to the plans I’ve laid, you may participate in the gods’ fall. I’ve already convinced the frost trolls to join me. Whatever your opinion of their intelligence, you cannot deny that they are useful in situations where brute force is required.”
He could tell that he had seized Gormyr’s curiosity. The king dismissed the warband and brought Fenris closer to his throne, and the two of them spoke in relative privacy at the side of the great hall.
Fenris told him everything that had transpired thus far, and also of his plans involving Bailey. He mentioned the importance of deploying her in unimportant theaters of combat to increase her strength while also keeping her in the dark as to the ultimate agenda.
For the dark elves’ part, they needed only to make assaults on the barrier zone between their realm and that of the divinities. The idea was to distract the pantheon, to convince them that the minor skirmishes happening now were an important threat so that their brief “victory” would lull them into complacency right before the final hammer stroke fell upon their heads.
Gormyr’s black eyes were soon shining with malicious excitement, and the king began drumming his fingers on the hilt of his sword. “Although we have no specific reason to trust you, the opportunity you present is not something we are willing to pass up.”
“Of course,” Fenris said.
Gormyr went on, “Therefore, we shall agree to aid you with your plot, so long as you do nothing to convince us that it is a poor idea. I am profoundly unsurprised that you intend to rule in Asgard’s stead, but the universe could do no worse than it does at present under the current gods. Do not betray us or disappoint us, Fenris, or you will find us an enemy worse than any you’ve encountered. Keep to your bargain, and you will discover that we are excellent people to have as friends.”
The wolf-father reached out and clasped forearms with the elves’ monarch. “I am pleased to hear that,” he remarked.
Park said through the communications device, “Fire in the hole!”
Everyone ducked, covering their ears and opening their mouths per the agents’ instructions as the explosive charge went off, collapsing the wall of rock that separated the central path out of the valley from the right-hand one. There was a juncture between the pathways beyond the wall, so collapsing it gave them more space to work with while only having to defend the same area from an incursion from the crones.
Bailey wondered why they couldn’t simply have her destroy it, but Park seemed set on blowing something up.
Alternately, it could have been because they didn’t want Bailey’s attention divided between too many places at once since around a hundred of the phantoms had massed beyond the energy barrier created by the poles.
The werewitch dashed ahead, saving the central pole from the avalanche of smoking rubble and tossing it back toward the agents as the howling specters converged on her. Behind her, she faintly heard Roland tell some of the witches who were new to this, “You folks ain’t seen nothing yet.”
Bailey filled the entire sky and air in front of her with flames. It was as though a forest fire had begun on that one spot, or a huge bomb had gone off and somehow exploded in a wall-shaped line instead of an expanding sphere. She blocked the heat from radiating back in her direction, thus protecting the others from it, and pushed the sheet of deadly fire forward to engulf the ghost-crones.
They shrieked, their semi-substantial bodies burning and their incorporeal elements partially disrupted by the intensity of the blaze. The flames died out as they moved, but more than half of the creatures were destroyed or at least badly incapacitated, and the rest were in retreat.
“Holy mother of shit!” someone exclaimed.
The agents and witches swept in to mop up the bedraggled remainder of the ghosts while Bailey shielded them from stray attacks.
As the agents vacuumed up the arcane essences left behind, the goddess used telekinesis to clear the mass of rubble created by the explosion, much of which was now glowing a dull red from the heat of the fire-wall she’d conjured. She tossed the hot stones over the mountaintops to the sides and cooled the passage down with a shower of cold rain.
The mortals advanced over the steaming rock. Bailey was out in front, knowing the crones would attack again soon. In the rear, two of Velasquez’s men held a pair of the silver poles, seeking to further expand the size of their safe zone.
About halfway to the canyon, the remainder of the first group of phantoms turned around and attacked again. This time they floated in high and tried to bear down on the mortals from above. Bailey conjured a veritable forest of lightning bolts that struck every last one of them. Most vaporized, and those that survived were stunned into immobility. The agents finished them off with the green beams of their disruptor rifles.
Park laughed. “We’re on a roll. Everyone stay tight, though. Once we come out of this passage and into the main canyon, things are gonna get ugly, fast.”
As they neared the end of the crevasse, Bailey instantly saw why. Roland had told her what to expect. And she’d seen a lot of strange, frightening shit in her short life. But somehow, nothing could have prepared her for what lay ahead.
Like a patch of collapsed wood near the foundation of an old house where termites had formed a colony, the big ragged gorge swarmed with hideous specters, hundreds if not a thousand of them. Her brain needed a moment to fully comprehend what she was looking at.
“Hey!” she called over her shoulder. “Can I just nuke the center of the canyon and be done with it?”
Velasquez’s voice replied with, “Negative. We can’t risk damaging the target object before we know what we’re dealing with if indeed it’s there.”
Roland confirmed this. “Sorry, dear. I’ll make it up to you with a really nice engagement ring, I promise.”
“Might want to throw in a six-pack of beer on the side,” she suggested, still staring at the canyon.
From a distance, the vast space had looked like a single pit, but as they drew closer, it became clear that it was an irregular area of different shelves of rock that crisscrossed the walls, random and labyrinthine.
They paused, and the agents conferred on tactics. They now realized that the terrain was rougher than expected, so they’d have a tough time getting in deeper. It also meant they could more easily claim and defend territory.
Velasquez waved to the men in back. “All right, put those poles at the edge of the passage. If we get lucky, we might be able to carve off a quarter of this goddamn canyon and add it to our safe zone, but for now, we have the whole pathway under control.”
He turned to Bailey. “There’s more coming up. Do your thing.”
She raised her arms, and a tsunami of water rose a hundred feet high in front of her, the colossal wave crashing down the rambling steps of the inner canyon to engulf the leading wave of crone-ghosts. The deluge spread itself thin only a fifth of the way into the canyon, but by then, it had done its damage.
“Ooh!” Dante exclaimed, “everything’s wet. Stand back, folks.”
He tossed a single small bolt of lightning onto the slick rocks ahead.
Sparks and steam rose as electricity crackled down through the gorge, wreaking further havoc on the struggling phantoms. Bailey and Roland maintained powerful deflective shields as the agents moved in to neutralize what resistance remained.
Other specters began to filter out around them from small caves and crevasses that hadn’t been visible from higher up. The auxiliary witches were pressed into battle again, and streams of elemental magic, arcanoplasm, and glowing shields filled the air.
Bailey turned back and forth, her mind racing as she balanced the needs of helping her comrades against the harrying strikes from the sides and the need to stave off the next wave of the advancing horde.
“Hey,” she shouted. “All you guys, focus on getting rid of these fuckers.” She flapped her hand to indicate the
crones that had ambushed them. “I’ll keep the ones up ahead busy.”
Two hundred or more were advancing up the jagged slopes. From a distance, they resembled a weedy brown field writhing unnaturally, and the werewitch’s spine went cold as their awful screeches wafted toward her on the stuffy air.
Confident that her allies could handle the battle going on behind and to the sides of her, Bailey decided to try something more precise than a single big blast.
She extended her arm and channeled plasma into a continuous stream of short bolts like firing a machine gun, and sprayed the projectiles into the advancing ranks of the crones. Magenta flames rose to the sky as the creatures ignited or disintegrated under the onslaught, but for every dozen that perished, another dozen advanced.
“Clear!” Park’s voice yelled. A quick glance assured Bailey that they were finished dealing with the other phantoms.
She decided it would stop the rest of the horde from advancing at the same time as she neutralized the ones at the front. Breathing deeply as she quickly visualized the next spell, she threw out her hands.
A sheet of ice several hundred feet tall and the width of the canyon materialized in front of the undead legion. Dozens upon dozens of the clone-spirits were trapped in the frozen water, and the ones behind them were blocked from attacking. The ice wall was so massive that the light in the canyon went about three shades darker.
“Nice!” Deanna complimented her.
Bailey nodded. “Thanks.”
Velasquez directed his men to approach the ice wall and use their rifles to carve out and destroy the crones nearest the front surface, asking Bailey to keep an eye out in case the whole thing started to collapse. To prevent that, she plugged the holes their weapons made with more ice and surrounded the frozen barrier with sub-zero air.
“Okay,” the senior agent announced, “we made a lot of progress, so break and recoup.”
His men brought up more of the field-generation poles and positioned them so the arcane barrier coincided with the edge of the ice wall. The mortals now had control over their entire end of the canyon, as well as the paths back to the valley where they’d first portaled in.
Velasquez grinned. “And,” he gloated, “we took out, what, a hundred of them? And by ‘we’ I mostly mean Bailey, yeah, but everyone has done a great job. Well done.”
They rested, and those who were hungry again dug into the MREs again. Once it seemed safe to assume they’d purchased some breathing room and were in no immediate danger of further attack, Velasquez and Park pulled out folding tablets and asked all present to pay attention.
“Okay,” Park began, “while we were waiting for Bailey to show up, Velasquez and I sent Roland’s and Dante’s suggestions back to the eggheads, and they sent us back a program that coincides with what we’re looking for. I think. I’m new at this, sue me.”
Velasquez picked up where his partner left off. “This software, in conjunction with the tracking tech we already have, picks up major concentrations of arcane energy that aren’t tied to living things. So, if we scan the surrounding area of this region of the Other...”
He turned the screen to them, and it displayed a crude terrain map that they recognized as the canyon with many dots of magical presences in front of them, representing the remainder of the witch-ghosts on the other side of the ice. But also...
“We can see that well outside this gorge, there are other blobs of light that look totally different. Big, pulsating auras that don’t seem anything like these low-level apparitions we’ve been fighting, and they’re not moving. If we’re looking for inanimate objects, those might be it.”
Roland, Dante, and the other witches agreed that making for the nearest such point on the map should be their next objective.
“And, you know,” Dante added, “it must have taken Callie weeks or months to create this many clones. We wiped out about a quarter of them in one day. There’s no way she’ll be able to replenish them at the same rate.”
“Right,” Park agreed. “And if these mysterious light-blobs are their, uh, horcruxes or whatever, we can move in for the kill and deal with all of them at once.”
Velasquez turned to Bailey. “Will you be able to stick around and help us through to the end? Honestly, we might not need you at this point, but life would be easier with you around.”
She thought about it.
“Well, Agent, I do have other things I need to deal with which, no offense, are equally important to this. If you really need me, I’ll try to come back, but that ice will hold for a long time. If you need to go through it, you’ve got good witches who can help you with that. Carve a tunnel through and lead the crones into a bottleneck, that sort of thing. Or if you can find a way up and out to investigate those auras, the ice wall will protect you while you do. Keep an eye out for any of the crones that try to float over the top, though. Pretty sure they can do that.”
Everyone seemed disappointed at the prospect of her leaving. It occurred to her that she might be failing them in her duty as a goddess.
Then again, gods weren’t supposed to do everything for people. Mortals had to solve their own problems to some degree.
She embraced Roland and kissed him goodbye. “Keep being smart,” she told him. “And we’ll see each other again soon, then we can talk about that engagement ring.”
“Absolutely,” he agreed. “Take care of yourself.”
Waving to everyone, the werewitch re-ascended into the path, feeling as though she should be out of physical sight before she departed. Then she opened a portal to Earth and stepped through.
Bailey was strangely unsurprised to find a familiar face was waiting for her by her pole barn out back. What was surprising, though, was that it was someone she’d never seen outside a certain crystalline hall.
“Coyote,” she marveled. “I didn’t expect to see you here. Don’t take this the wrong way, but usually when a god comes to meet me, that’s a bad sign.”
The trickster chuckled at this. “How does one define ‘bad,’ exactly? In any event, I know much of what you’ve been doing lately, dear girl, and that you’re tired. The good news is that I haven’t come to drag you into anything too strenuous. Not yet.”
She sighed. “I’ll take what I can get. So, what’s the bad news?”
He gave her a half-apologetic smile. “That we, the council, have been long in conference, and Loki is among us. Everything he told you, we know too. The implications are most dire, and you are heavily involved in them.”
Her gut clenched. Coyote extended a hand and placed it gently on her arm. “And though it was not much discussed, there is something else I know: that in a way, you love Fenris, even if—correct me if I’m wrong—you know the truth and have finally accepted it.”
She had no idea how to respond to his words. In fact, she couldn’t respond, because it took all her strength and self-control not to burst into tears.
To take her mind off the awful mess of emotions within her, she focused on business. “We can talk about that later. Why are you here?”
“To oversee the next phase of your training,” he stated. “You will soon be called upon to do terribly difficult things. We’re with you, as Loki said, and for once, I’d say you can trust him. With our help, you can prevail.”
“Okay,” Bailey acknowledged, “though if you don’t mind, I’d like to take a break. Been busy doing goddess stuff, as you might be aware.”
Coyote smiled. “Yes, quite all right. In fact, as long as I’m here on Earth in mortal form, I thought we might have dinner together.”
She cocked an eyebrow. “Sounds good. You might want to, uh, look a little more human, though. A third of this town is werewolves, true, so a...half-coyote...were-man...person wouldn’t attract that much attention, maybe, but still.”
“So be it.” The god shrugged, and in the blink of an eye, his canine features vanished.
In place of the strange yet oddly pleasant-looking humanoid creature he usually appe
ared as was a fiftyish Native American man in a maroon t-shirt and blue jeans. His face was lined and weathered, yet his eyes twinkled with good humor, and the strands of gray at the temples of his long black hair gave him a distinguished look.
Bailey pursed her lips and bobbed her head. “Yeah, that’ll work. I’d say let’s go to the diner, but honestly, I was there earlier, so I’m thinking the sandwich shop instead if that’s okay with you. They got good cheesesteaks.”
Coyote replied, “cheesesteaks are a personal favorite. A guilty pleasure, you might say. Shall we walk or drive?”
Normally she would have preferred to walk, but after fighting a small army of witch specters, she decided to take the truck. During the short drive, she listened with a grave expression as Coyote summed up how the other gods had reacted to Loki’s bad news.
“You know,” she pointed out, “Loki doesn’t have the best reputation for trustworthiness, but he makes a convincing case.”
The man beside her concurred but didn’t press the issue.
They parked in the lot behind the shop and wandered in. It was a small establishment, with only three tables plus bar space. Two of the tables were full, so Bailey and Coyote went to the bar.
The young woman behind the counter, a freckled redhead, gave Coyote a curious look or two but didn’t ask about him. It wasn’t uncommon for Bailey to be seen in the company of strangers from out of town.
While waiting for their sandwiches, they sipped their drinks. Bailey’s was an orange soda, Coyote’s a cola.
“Admittedly,” he commented, “I’m not a fan of mainstream sodas. More partial to quirky third party independent or lesser-known brands since they’re usually more interesting and could use the support.”
“Gotcha,” said Bailey. “I’ll see if Gunney can round you up one of those sometime. He occasionally picks up weird stuff, but it’s usually good.”
Seconds after their cheesesteaks arrived, the doors behind them opened, and in strode four young men. Bailey recognized them, not personally or individually, but as a type: vacationers from somewhere closer to the coast, or maybe California. Mixed backgrounds, but they all looked rowdy and cocky. They’d probably been drinking up on one of the mountains before they’d come down into Greenhearth.
