فصل 07

Have You or Someone You Love Ever Suffered from Lindworms?

WE WADED into combat like one happy family.

Well, except for the fact that T.J. grabbed my arm and whispered, “Keep an eye on her, will you? I don’t want to get mauled from behind.”

So I brought up the rear with Alex Fierro.

We moved inland, picking our way through a field of corpses, all of whom we would see later, alive, at dinnertime. I could’ve taken some pretty funny photos, but camera phones were heavily discouraged on the field of combat. You know how it is. Somebody snaps a picture of you dead in an embarrassing pose, it makes the popular page on Instagram, then you get teased about it for centuries.

Halfborn and Mallory chopped us a path through a pack of berserkers. T.J. shot Charlie Flannigan in the head. Charlie thinks it is hilarious to get shot in the head. Don’t ask me why.

We dodged a volley of fiery tar balls from the balcony catapults. We had a brief sword battle with Big Lou from floor 401—great guy, but he always wants to die by decapitation. That’s hard, since Lou is almost seven feet tall. He seeks out Halfborn Gunderson on the battlefield since Halfborn is one of the few einherjar tall enough to oblige.

Somehow, we made it to the edge of the woods without getting stomped by a lindworm. T.J., Mallory, and Halfborn fanned out in front and led us into the shadows of the trees.

I moved warily through the underbrush, my shield up, my standard-issue combat sword heavy in my left hand. The sword wasn’t nearly as well-balanced or as lethal as Jack, but it was a lot less talkative. Next to me, Alex strolled along, apparently unconcerned that she was empty-handed and the most brightly colored target in our group.

After a while, the silence got to me.

“I’ve seen you before,” I told her. “Were you at the youth shelter on Winter Street?”

She sniffed. “I hated that place.”

“Yeah. I lived on the streets for two years.”

She arched her eyebrow, which made her amber left eye look paler and colder. “You think that makes us friends?”

Everything about her posture said, Get away from me. Hate me or whatever. I don’t care as long as you leave me alone.

But I’m a contrary person. On the streets, plenty of homeless folks had acted belligerent toward me and pushed me away. They didn’t trust anybody. Why should they? That just made me more determined to get to know them. The loners usually had the best stories. They were the most interesting and the savviest about staying alive.

Sam al-Abbas must’ve had some reason for bringing this kid to Valhalla. I wasn’t going to let Fierro off the hook just because she had startling eyes, an impressive sweater-vest, and a tendency to hit people.

“What did you mean earlier?” I asked. “When you said—”

“Call me she? I’m gender fluid and transgender, idiot. Look it up if you need to, but it’s not my job to educate—”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Oh, please. I saw your mouth hanging open.”

“Well, yeah. Maybe for a second. I was surprised. But…” I wasn’t sure how to continue without sounding like even more of an idiot.

The gender thing wasn’t what surprised me. A huge percentage of the homeless teens I’d met had been assigned one gender at birth but identified as another, or they felt like the whole boy/girl binary didn’t apply to them. They ended up on the streets because—shocker—their families didn’t accept them. Nothing says “tough love” like kicking your non-hetero-normative kid to the curb so they can experience abuse, drugs, high suicide rates, and constant physical danger. Thanks, Mom and Dad!

What surprised me was the way I’d reacted to Alex—how fast my impression of her had slingshot, and the kind of emotions that had stirred up. I wasn’t sure I could put that into words without turning as red as Mallory Keen’s hair.

“Wh-what I was sighing—saying—is when you were talking to the raven, you mentioned you were worried you’d been messed up. What did you mean?”

Alex looked like I’d just offered her a huge wedge of Limburger cheese. “Maybe I overreacted. I wasn’t expecting to die today or get scooped up by some Valkyrie.”

“That was Sam. She’s okay.”

Alex shook her head. “I don’t forgive her. I got here and found out…whatever. I’m dead. Immortal. I’ll never age and never change. I thought that meant…” Her voice frayed. “It doesn’t matter.”

I was pretty sure it mattered. I wanted to ask her about life back in Midgard, why she had an outdoor atrium just like mine in her suite, why all the pottery, why she would want to put the mark of Loki next to her initials on her work. I wondered if her arrival was just a coincidence…or whether it had something to do with the mark on Uncle Randolph’s face in the photo and our sudden urgent need to find Thor’s hammer.

On the other hand, I suspected that if I tried to ask her all that, she would turn into a mountain gorilla and rip my face off.

Happily, I was spared that fate when a lindworm crash-landed in front of us.

The monster hurtled out of the sky, flapping its ridiculous wings and roaring like a grizzly bear with a hundred-watt amp. Trees cracked and splintered under its weight as it landed in our midst.

“AWRGGG!” Halfborn yelled—which was Old Norse for HOLY CRUD, THERE’S A DRAGON!—just before the lindworm smacked him into the sky. Judging from the arc, Halfborn Gunderson was going to end up somewhere around floor twenty-nine, which would be a surprise to anyone relaxing on their balcony.

T.J. fired his rifle. Gun smoke blossomed harmlessly against the dragon’s chest. Mallory yelled a curse in Gaelic and charged.

The lindworm ignored her and turned toward me.

I should mention…lindworms are ugly. Like if Freddy Krueger and a Walking Dead zombie had a child—that kind of ugly. Their faces have no flesh or hide, just a carapace of bone and exposed tendons, gleaming fangs, and dark, sunken eye sockets. When the monster opened its maw, I could see straight down its rotten-meat-colored throat.

Alex crouched, her hands fumbling for something at her belt. “This isn’t good.”

“No kidding.” My hand was so sweaty I could barely hold my sword. “You go right, I’ll go left. We’ll flank it—”

“No, I mean that isn’t just any dragon. That’s Grimwolf, one of the ancient worms.”

I stared up into the monster’s dark eye sockets. He did seem bigger than most of the lindworms I’d fought, but I was usually too busy dying to ask a dragon its age or name.

“How do you know?” I asked. “And why would anybody call a dragon Grimwolf?”

The lindworm hissed, filling the air with a scent like burning tires. Apparently he was sensitive about his name.

Mallory stabbed at the dragon’s legs, screaming more angrily the longer the lindworm ignored her. “Are you two going to help,” she called back at us, “or just stand there and chat?”

T.J. stabbed at the monster with his bayonet. The point just bounced off the creature’s ribs. Being a good soldier, T.J. backed up and tried again.

Alex tugged some sort of cord from her belt loops—a dull steel wire no thicker than a kite string, with simple wooden dowels on either end for handles. “Grimwolf is one of the dragons that live at the roots of Yggdrasil. He shouldn’t be here. No one would be crazy enough to…” Her face blanched, her expression hardening as if turning into lindworm bone. “He sent it for me. He knows I’m here.”

“Who?” I demanded. “What?”

“Distract him,” she ordered. She leaped into the nearest tree and began to climb. Even without turning into a gorilla, she could definitely move like one.

I took a shaky breath. “Distract him. Sure.”

The dragon snapped at Alex, biting off several tree branches. Alex moved fast, scampering higher up the trunk, but one or two more snaps and she’d be a lindworm Lunchable. Meanwhile, Mallory and T.J. were still hacking away at the creature’s legs and belly, but they were having no luck convincing the dragon to eat them.

It’s only a practice battle, I told myself. Charge in there, Magnus! Get yourself killed like a pro!

That was the whole point of daily combat: to learn to fight any foe, to overcome our fear of death—because on the day of Ragnarok, we’d need all the skill and courage we could muster.

So why did I hesitate?

First, I’m way better at healing than I am at fighting. Oh, and running away—I’m really good at that. Also, it’s hard to charge straight to your own demise, even if you know it won’t be permanent—especially if that demise involves large amounts of pain.

The dragon snapped at Alex again, missing her rose high-tops by an inch.

As much as I hated dying, I hated even more seeing my comrades get killed. I screamed “FREY!” and ran at the lindworm.

Just my luck, Grimwolf was happy to turn his attention to me. When it comes to drawing aggro from ancient monsters, I’ve got the golden touch.

Mallory stumbled back out of my way, chucking one of her knives at the dragon’s head. T.J. also retreated, yelling, “All yours, buddy!”

As far as encouraging words you might hear before an excruciating death go, those sucked pretty bad.

I raised my shield and sword like the nice instructors had demonstrated in Viking 101. The dragon’s mouth opened wide, revealing several extra rows of teeth—just in case the outer row of teeth didn’t kill me dead enough.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Alex swaying at the top of the tree—a tense bundle of pink and green, ready to spring. I realized what she was planning: she wanted to jump onto the dragon’s neck. That was such a stupid plan it made me feel better about my own stupid way of dying.

The dragon struck. I jabbed my sword upward, hoping to impale the monster’s upper palate.

Instead, a sudden pain blinded me. My face felt like it had been doused with industrial cleaning fluid. My knees buckled, which probably saved my life. The dragon bit empty air where my head had been a millisecond before.

Somewhere to my left, Mallory screamed, “Get up, you fool!”

I tried to blink away the pain. It only got worse. My nostrils filled with the stench of burning flesh.

Grimwolf recovered his balance, snarling with irritation.

Inside my head, a familiar voice said, Come, now, my friend. Don’t struggle!

My vision doubled. I could still see the forest, the dragon looming over me, a small pink-and-green figure leaping toward the monster from the top of a tree. But there was another layer to reality—a gauzy white scene trying to burn its way through my corneas. I knelt in Uncle Randolph’s study, in the Chase family mansion in Back Bay. Standing over me was someone much worse than a lindworm—Loki, the god of evil.

He grinned down at me. There we are. How nice!

At the same time, the dragon Grimwolf struck again, opening his maw to devour me whole.