Hunted

Chapter 26

Get right behind me and stay low! I ordered Oberon, and then I shouted, “Don’t kill him or Ragnarok begins!” a few scant seconds before Loki landed in our midst and sprayed his surroundings with fire, just to make sure we noticed him. My cold iron amulet protected me and my body shielded Oberon. Perun didn’t think fast enough to protect Flidais and she hadn’t expected such an attack, so she got tagged badly and screamed as flames engulfed her. Perun and the Olympians weren’t harmed by the fire but didn’t like the intention behind it; Hermes avoided the fire altogether by flying above it. Zeus and Jupiter called down lightning bolts on Loki from their portable storm clouds overhead but didn’t know from experience that he was as immune to them as they were to his fire. Perun did know, however, and he’d obviously been thinking about how to handle Loki Flamehair if a rematch became necessary. He summoned wind and snuffed out Loki’s flames as if they were candles.

The mad fucker just laughed that insane laugh and pulled his sword out of his ass. Zeus, now afflicted with acute priapism, gasped and asked him to do that again. Jupiter slapped him to the ground and barked at him to get his priorities straight. Obviously there was some tension between them.

Perun had the right of it. Neutralization was more important than defeating Loki right now. But Perun had already crouched down to aid Flidais rather than press his advantage. Before I could step into the fray, Herne called up his lads; Loki’s initial fire burst had set the edges of the clearing aflame, and since it was all part of Windsor Forest, that shot Loki right to the top of Herne’s list of people to kill.

“For the King’s Forest!” he yelled. He and his hunters charged, confident, hounds at their heels, and Loki grinned and waved them on.

“Yah! Yah! Yah!” he said, a wide smile of malevolence splitting his face. That didn’t seem right; the charge of an armed ghost cavalry should have scared the scars off his face. Behind him, a giant hound, six feet tall at the shoulders, winked onto the clearing and woofed, then vanished as suddenly as he’d appeared.

“Herne, wait!” I called. But it was too late. The first huntsman, eager to strike a blow for England, did nothing to avoid the sweep of Loki’s sword, thinking it would pass through him as all other weapons did. But Loki—father of Hel, Queen of the Dead—didn’t swing an ordinary hunk of steel. When the sword met the huntsman’s form and continued on, a ripping noise like someone’s jeans tearing announced that something untoward was happening. The nameless huntsman and his horse split apart and exploded into puffs of floating blue ectoplasm, then faded entirely from view. Loki didn’t just wound the ghost; he annihilated him completely. Herne and the other hunter almost followed in short order, having charged in too far to escape Loki’s reach in time, but they managed to muster a defense and were merely knocked off their horses. The spectral hounds, unable to process that the rules had abruptly changed, kept right on going. They nipped at Loki from all sides, and his sword could dispatch only one at a time. “Fff-fff-ffucking dogs!” he spat, kicking ineffectually at them.

Oberon said.

A few more frantic stabs of Loki’s sword ended the poor pooches, but they had drawn blood and he limped slightly. It did much to subdue his confidence, and by that time Herne and the remaining huntsman had regained their feet and approached him warily. Loki took them in and looked annoyed. As successful as he’d been thus far, he had not come here to fight ghosts. Hel must have placed an enchantment on that sword to make it effective against the undead. I wondered if it had a name.

Loki backed up, keeping space between himself and Herne, and rested his twitching gaze on me. He raised a bony finger and waggled it in accusation.

“Y-y-you nah, nah-t dwarf con, con, ssstruct,” he said, repeating the accusation he’d made back in Poland. True. I’d told him that months ago simply to distract him, and it had worked far better than I ever imagined it would. He could have figured out the truth easily if he had bothered to listen to the dwarfs or asked his daughter, who wanted nothing so much as to please him, but apparently he was determined to do things his way and in his own time. The jerking finger panned to my right. “Zeussss. Ju-Jupiter. No fff-friends tih, tih, to dwarffffs.” I supposed that was his way of building a case against me. “Who you are?” Loki said, and I couldn’t tell if it was a question or a statement. “Fffffind out. I wuh, wuh, will!”

Oberon said.