Hunt the Moon

Chapter Eighteen

“Breathe,” Pritkin told me, and I tried. But suddenly, that seemed a lot harder than normal.

“It’s merely a theory,” Jonas said, fussing about the kitchen. We’d moved after that little revelation, because he’d declared that we needed tea. Personally, I didn’t think tea was going to fix this.

“Even if we accept the identification of Thor with Apollo,” Pritkin said, “which many scholars do not—”

“They don’t, you know,” Jonas assured me. “Really they don’t.”

“—there remains the fact that the creature in question is dead. Whatever his name, he is no longer an issue.”

“That’s very true.” Jonas and his hair nodded emphatically.

“Then why did you bring it up?” I asked harshly.

“Why, because of the others, of course.”

Pritkin and I looked at each other, while Jonas kept opening cabinets. He paused slightly when he came to one that had a fork sticking out of it, half-buried in the wood, but he didn’t comment. “You haven’t any tea?” he finally asked me, looking as if he knew that couldn’t be right.

“No.”

He blinked. “None whatsoever?”

“In there,” Pritkin said. He nodded at one of the lower cabinets.

“Oh, good.” Jonas looked vastly relieved, as if a major crisis had been averted.

I started to wonder if I was insane.

After a moment, I cleared my throat. “What others?” I asked, as Jonas began examining Pritkin’s little boxes and tins.

“Hm? Oh, the other two gods, of course,” he said absently. “Ah, Nuwara Eliya. Yes, very nice.”

“Nuwara Eliya is a god?” I asked, confused.

He regarded me strangely. “No. It’s a town in Sri Lanka.”

I looked at him.

“Where they grow tea. Very good tea, too.”

Pritkin put a heavy hand on my shoulder, which was just as well. It probably wouldn’t have looked good to choke the head of the Silver Circle to death right before the coronation. Then again, my reputation was shot to hell anyway....

“What other two gods?” Pritkin asked quickly.

“Oh, didn’t I say? Ah, well that’s where it really becomes interesting. According to the sagas, Ragnarok involves the deaths of three main gods: Thor, Tyr and Odin. The legends state that the war will end only when all three are dead, and that the three children of Loki are the ones fated to kill them.”

“Meaning?”

“Well, that’s just it,” Jonas started filling up the kettle. “I’m not sure. But I did locate some clues that might be useful. The first child of Loki was Jörmungandr, which we now know stood for the ouroboros spell. The snake was opposed by Thor, or Apollo if you prefer. He defeated the spell, but died soon afterward. This, of course, has already happened.”

“Of course,” I said faintly.

“Now, the second child of Loki was Hel,” Jonas said. He reached across the counter to draw what looked like a crooked smile or possibly a banana on his blackboard, which he’d set up just outside. “She was thrown into the underworld by Odin and became the goddess of death.”

“Hell?” I repeated. “You mean, like the place?”

“Yes, in a sense. Our modern word derives from her name. She was said to have power over the nine hell regions—”

“Nine?’

“Yes, the same number that Dante would later record in his Inferno. Fascinating how the myths intersect on so many—”

“Jonas.” That was Pritkin.

“Yes, well. In any case, she was said to have control over the hells, as well as the pathways between worlds. Quite a powerful figure.”

“Like the Greek goddess Persephone,” Pritkin said.

Jonas wrinkled his nose. “No, not exactly. Persephone was queen of the underworld, yes, but only because of her marriage to Hades, who already ruled it. Hel was queen in her own right. She was one of those powerful virgin goddesses you find sprinkled throughout the pages of mythology who lived independently of the authority of any man. Which is why I don’t think Persephone quite fits the bill. And, of course, the moon wasn’t her symbol—”

“Hel’s symbol was the moon?” I asked, finally figuring out what the banana was supposed to be.

“Yes, the dark side, at least. She was—”

“The dark side?”

I guess my voice must have changed, because Jonas looked up sharply. “Yes, why?”

“It’s probably nothing,” I said, wishing I’d kept my mouth shut. I wasn’t thrilled with the idea of explaining my little toy to Jonas. But he was standing there, looking at me intently, and I didn’t really have a choice now. “It’s just . . . I have this tarot deck and—”

“You saw something?”

“Well, no. I mean, I didn’t have a vision or anything, you know, magic—”

“Forgive me, my dear, but the tarot in the hands of the Pythia is magic. Yes, indeed. What did you see?”

“Well, it’s not a normal deck,” I explained awkwardly. “So I didn’t have a spread to go on, just the one card—”

“The Moon, I take it?”

“The Moon reversed.”

“Ahhh.” Jonas slowly sat down.

“Like I said, it probably doesn’t mean anything—”

“Oh, I wouldn’t be too sure about that,” he said mildly, staring off into space. “No, no. I shouldn’t at all, really.”

I just sat and looked at him for a while, but he didn’t say anything else. Pritkin tried to ask something, but Jonas just waved a hand. “Talk amongst yourselves,” he said vaguely.

I looked at Pritkin helplessly. Most of the time I thought Jonas was a sharp old bastard who was playing some kind of weird mind game with everyone for his own amusement. But there were days when I honestly wondered if the magical world was being led by a complete nut.

“It isn’t even a real deck,” I told him, trying again.

Nothing.

“It’s a toy I was given as a child.”

Nada.

“I don’t even choose the card. It chooses for me!”

May as well have been talking to the wall.

“I’ll be right back,” Pritkin said, apparently giving up. He headed out of the kitchen and I went along because, frankly, it was getting kind of creepy in there.

“I’m just going back to my room for a moment,” he told me, when he realized I was following him. Which would have been fine, if he hadn’t turned around and tripped on the stairs leading from the living room to the foyer.

He caught himself before he face-planted, and for anybody else, it would have been no big deal. I tripped over that same step an average of once a day. But Pritkin wasn’t me and he didn’t regularly fall over his own two feet.

I grabbed him before he could escape, and I didn’t need to ask what the problem was. Blood was seeping through the lower part of his shirt, staining the soft gray cotton. Of course it was, I thought furiously. Of course it bloody well was.

“Damn it, Pritkin!”

“I’m fine,” he told me, which was less than comforting, considering he’d probably say the same thing after losing a limb. I crouched down and pushed up his T-shirt.

“Fine?” I said, staring up at him angrily. The blood was leaking out of a bandage that covered half his stomach.

“Well enough,” he said, trying to push his shirt back down. I slapped his hands and started to pry up the edge of the soaked bandage with a fingernail. It had already come loose and would have to be replaced, and I needed to see—

A steel-like grip caught my wrist. “I’m fine,” Pritkin repeated. “It will be healed by tonight, by the morning at the latest—”

“And what kind of a wound takes you that long to heal?” I demanded. I’d seen him shrug off a knife to the chest in a matter of minutes.

“A Fey one,” he admitted.

I said a bad word and started to pull off the bandage with my other hand, but he caught that wrist, too. And then he tugged me to my feet. “You said you were going to see friends!” I accused.

“Acquaintances.”

“Do your acquaintances usually want to kill you?”

“It’s not completely unknown,” he said wryly. And then he saw my face.

“Let me go,” I told him dangerously.

“So you can slap me?”

“So I can get you a new bandage!” I’d slap him later.

Pritkin let go and I stalked off. We didn’t have a medicine cabinet in the suite; we had a medicine closet. I didn’t know what the guys were preparing for, but they could have stocked a small clinic out of there. Usually, I thought it was a big waste, since I was the only person around here who could benefit from that stuff, and if I needed that much I was a goner, anyway. Today, I was grateful for it.

I grabbed what I needed and went back to the living room, but it was empty. I found Pritkin in the lounge, seated at the card table. I guess he didn’t want to bleed all over the new sofa. The vamps had cleared out, leaving us alone except for a forest of plants and a guy eating chocolate in a corner.

“What are you still doing here?” I demanded.

The blond mage jumped slightly and looked up. “I—No one told me to leave.”

“Leave.” I slammed the medical supplies down on the table.

He scurried off.

I glared at Pritkin. “You swore you’d be all right!”

“And as you can see—”

“You lied!”

“I didn’t lie. I merely didn’t anticipate walking into a—What are you doing?”

I’d knelt on the floor and now I was pushing his legs apart so I could fit between them. “I’m going to rebandage you. If you’re smart, you’ll sit there and let me.”

“I can do that my—” He stopped when my fingernails sank into his thighs.

“Open your legs and hold your shirt up,” I snapped. And to my surprise, he did.

The bandage came off easily since it hadn’t been put on right to begin with, and underneath was—

I sucked in a breath.

Pritkin started to say something, but stopped when I glared up at him, so angry I could barely see. “Don’t.”

He didn’t.

The thing about having superhuman healing abilities is that you’re seriously out of practice when you actually need to do some first aid on yourself. At least, I assumed that was why the bandage had merely been slapped into place, why the cleanup job underneath had been halfassed and why the line of black stitches holding an ugly red wound together might have been done by a farsighted three-year-old. Or maybe he was just trying to piss me off.

If so, it was working really well. I was so mad my hands were shaking, but I didn’t know if it was at him or at me for letting him go. Damn it, I’d known this was going to happen. He was Pritkin. He couldn’t walk across a freaking street without getting shot at, and I’d let him go into goddamn Faerie.

I must have been out of my mind.

“I suppose you had to sew yourself up?” I asked harshly, going into the kitchen to run some water into a bowl.

“It seemed . . . advisable.”

Yeah. If the alternative was spilling your guts everywhere.

I brought back the water and the hand soap. Marco had told me that hydrogen peroxide wasn’t a good idea in deep cuts. Apparently, it could cause bubbles to form in the bloodstream that would kill you a lot faster than whatever had caused the cut in the first place.

I sat everything down on the floor and knelt back in place. I thought about asking him to unzip, because his jeans were in the way, but he usually went commando so I didn’t. I just tugged the fabric, which was soft and old and loose, down enough that I could see to work.

It looked like he’d showered before he came over, which, ironically, had left him clean except for the large patch of skin that had been covered by the bandage. I started on the dirt and the grass and the God knew what that he had somehow ground into the wound. And for once, he just sat there, without trying to give me orders or critique me or tell me a better way to proceed. It was odd but nice.

“What happened?” I asked after a few moments.

He cleared his throat. “I was ambushed.”

“Why didn’t you go back through the portal?” I was assuming he’d used the one the Circle had recently opened, since it was pretty much the only option available right now.

“I would have, had I been near it at the time. But I’d already made my way to the village where one of my contacts lives—or I should say, where he used to live.”

Some blood had dried around his belly button. I scrubbed at it with a fingernail until it came off. “Is he dead?”

“What?” Pritkin sounded a little strange.

“Your friend. Associate. Whatever.”

“Er . . . no. At least . . . I’m not sure.”

He fidgeted, and I tightened my hand on his thigh. “Don’t.” I was about to start cleaning the actual stitches now and I didn’t want to rip any out. He froze.

I pushed his jeans down enough that I could see the bottom of the wound, and it wasn’t a pretty sight. He’d already started to heal around the thick black cord he’d used as thread, but the wound itself was ugly and looked infected. And when I gently put the back of my hand against it, it was like a line of fire against my skin.

“Are you supposed to be this hot?” I asked, frowning.

He didn’t answer, and I looked up. And found him staring at me with a strange expression, part tender, part exasperated, part . . . something. I didn’t get a chance to figure it out before he looked away.

“Yes. When I’m healing.”

I decided to take his world for it, since I didn’t have a lot of choice. Pritkin had a severe allergy to doctors, and I knew better than to suggest one. I rinsed out the rag and carefully started cleaning the angry red line.

“What did you mean, you’re not sure?” I asked. “About your friend?”

“I meant . . . his village was deserted. There were clothes dropped in the road and many doors and windows had been left wide-open. I went into a few houses, and found half-eaten food on the table in one and a dog tied out back of another. I let the dog loose, and it took off down a road. I followed it—”

“Of course you did,” I said sourly.

“—and picked up the trail of the villagers almost at once. That in itself was strange enough—”

He broke off, probably because I’d gotten the rag a little too wet that time. “Sorry,” I said, wiping up the dribbles below the wound before they wet the front of his jeans. He closed his eyes.

“The Fey are excellent hunters and trackers,” he told me roughly. “They are usually very difficult to follow.”

“But not this time.”

“No. I found a number of personal items that had been discarded along the way, haphazardly, as if they had fallen out of . . . of peoples’ arms while they ran. It had rained and the forest had a number of muddy areas, and the footprints I saw were running, too. Clearly, the villagers were fleeing some—” He looked down suddenly, his face a little flushed. “Are you almost done?”

“Almost. So you followed them?” I prompted.

“Yes. And that was when I was ambushed. I foolishly hadn’t considered that they might leave some of their number behind, to slow down whoever was pursuing them. That is, I hadn’t considered it until—” He sucked in a breath.

“I’m being as careful as I can,” I told him, patting him dry.

“Just hurry it up, will you?” he said harshly.

“I wouldn’t have to do this if you’d done a better job yourself,” I pointed out. “Having sped-up healing won’t do you any good if you get an infection.”

“I’m not worried about a damn infection!”

“Well, you won’t have to be now,” I said, smacking on a new bandage. And this one, I decided grimly, wasn’t going anywhere.

Pritkin watched me work for a moment in silence. “That’s adhesive tape,” he finally said.

“Mm-hm.”

“That’s . . . rather a lot, wouldn’t you say?”

“Never hurts to be sure.”

“But it’s going to hurt like the devil when I have to take it off.”

“Is it?” I looked up innocently and slapped on another piece.

His eyes narrowed, but before he could say anything, Jonas poked his head out the door. “Are you two done, then?” he asked politely.

“Yes,” I told him, cleaning up the cleaning supplies. “Pritkin is about to tell us what happens when you follow a bunch of panicked Fey into an unknown forest all by yourself.”

“Oh yes?” Jonas said curiously.

Pritkin closed his eyes and leaned his head back, looking martyred. “I ended up swinging from a rope, upside down, while some of the village men poked at me with poisoned spears,” he said dully. “I managed to convince them that I was not one of their enemies, but not before—”

“They gutted you like a pig?” I asked brightly.

He flushed and cracked an eye at me, but whatever brilliant riposte he’d managed to come up with was ruined by Jonas. “Who were these enemies?”

“The Alorestri,” Pritkin said, sitting up and wincing.

“The Green Fey,” Jonas translated for me. “They share a border with the Dark and have had an on-again, offagain struggle over land, resources, hunting rights”—he shrugged—“what have you, for millennia.”

“And currently it appears to be on again,” Pritkin said. “According to the villagers, the Green Fey broke through the border defenses a few days ago and overwhelmed the local Dark Fey forces. They were fleeing ahead of a contingent of Green Fey said to be coming their way.”

“There was an invasion?” I asked, my stomach sinking. I had a friend at the Dark Fey court, and I liked the idea of him remaining in one piece.

Pritkin noticed my expression. “This sort of thing isn’t unusual,” he told me. “The Dark Fey army will regroup and likely battle them back within a few weeks. But in the meantime, there is no way to reach my contacts, or even to know for certain where they are. And without them, there is no way to know what attacked you.”

Frankly, I couldn’t have cared less. I was just grateful to have him back, beat up and bloody or not. “It may not even be Fey,” I reminded him. “Billy’s decided it’s Apollo’s ghost come back to haunt me!”

“Oh no,” Jonas said, apparently serious. “I shouldn’t think so.”

“Well, yeah. I wasn’t actually suggesting—”

“This world leeched the gods’ power; it did not feed them. That is why all the old legends speak of them visiting Earth but living elsewhere: Asgard, Vanaheim, Olympus. And if they could not feed while alive, they certainly could not do so dead.”

“Yeah, well. Like I said—”

“No, I believe the gods we are dealing with are still quite alive.”

“Jonas, please!” I looked at him impatiently. “This isn’t freaking Ragnarok, all right?”

“It would be nice to think so,” he said mildly, the same way someone might say that it would be nice if it wasn’t raining, while standing in the middle of a deluge.

I was about to reply, but the kettle started whistling its head off, so we trooped back into the kitchen. Jonas made tea, and I waited for some kind of an explanation. A coherent one, preferably, but I wasn’t hopeful. Which was why it was a shock when a suddenly brisk Jonas sat down at the table.

“Three children of Loki; three gods to be overcome,” he told us. “Apollo has already been dealt with, leaving two. The difficulty was in knowing which god would be opposing us next, but I believe your tarot may have shown us that, Cassie. It is an invaluable aid, but it leaves us with a daunting challenge.”

“Jonas—”

He patted my hand. “Almost done. Now, I believe that the second child of Loki, Hel, may be another name for the Greek goddess Artemis. Not only was she a virgin goddess with the moon as her symbol, but she was also associated with hunting. Not personally, in her case, but in the form of the Moon Dogs she loaned Odin for the Wild Hunt every year.”

“Okay,” I said wearily, not because I understood what he was talking about, but because it was simpler just to go with it.

But, of course, Pritkin had to argue. “But Artemis wasn’t a death goddess.”

“Oh, but she was, dear boy,” Jonas said. “Most certainly. If you wanted a quick death in ancient Greece, you didn’t pray to Persephone or Hecate, but to Artemis, who would give you ‘a death as swift as her arrows.’”

“But Hecate is more traditionally associated—”

“But we don’t care about tradition,” Jonas interrupted, a little sharply. “Hecate has nothing to do with our current situation, whereas Artemis has been deeply involved from the beginning. I think there is little doubt that the goddess we are searching for is Artemis.”

“Searching for?” I asked. “When did we decide—”

Jonas leaned over the table. “If we assume that Artemis and Hel are the same individual, as Thor and Apollo were, then she becomes a person of the utmost importance. According to legend, she is protected by a fierce guard dog named Garm, and together they are destined to defeat Tyr in Ragnarok.”

“Tyr?” I asked, feeling more confused by the minute.

“Ares,” Pritkin said. “If Jonas’s reasoning is correct.”

“Yes, the identification is a bit easier there,” Jonas agreed. “As far back as ancient Rome, it was assumed that the war gods were one and the same. They even celebrated Ares, or Mars as they called him, on Tuesday.”

“Why Tuesday?” I asked, my head spinning.

“Because it means ‘Tyr’s day.’ Just as Thursday was named after Thor.” He looked at the chalkboard. “There is, of course, a third child of Loki, the wolf Fenrir. He was shackled by Odin, king of the gods, but eventually escaped and killed him. But I do not believe we are there yet.”

I stared at the wildly decorated chalkboard for a moment, and the sick feeling in my stomach settled into a familiar, ulcer-inducing burn. “Wait. Are you trying to tell me that to win the war, we have to kill two more gods?”

“Oh, no, nothing like that,” Jonas said, and I felt my spine unknot slightly. “We have to help the children of Loki kill them.”