Kevin Hearne - Trapped

She snatched it, cocked it over her shoulder, and threw it directly into the back of that giant lovely hand—not hard enough to pin it to the chariot floor, but hard enough to stick in there. A bellow from below and we shot skyward as the hand disappeared. I think the cats were in a hurry, because we didn’t seem to spend so long in the snot this time. More likely Freyja had taken us through it a bit slower than necessary.

“You poisoned that blade, right?” Granuaile asked.

“Yep. We can always hope. I doubt it will take her out, though.”

I held much more hope that the Black Axes would make it out okay; I’d had no time to assess the state of their forces. I rather feared that the dwarfs in Nidavellir would have to bear a counterattack now. It would be better if Hel were somewhat cowed by this affair and rediscovered caution.

“Hey, Granuaile,” I said once we got clear of the mist and were sailing back to the wall. “Will you ask the cats to keep the portal to Midgard open for the dwarfs?”

“Sure. I don’t know if that’s something they can do, but I’ll try.”

“Thanks. I’d hate to think we were stranding all the dwarfs in Niflheim.”

Red hair streaming behind her in the cold wind, Granuaile asked our transportation to keep the door open for the dwarfs. I distinctly heard a meow in reply.

“Oberon was right about you,” I said. “You really are a cat person.”

Sound and light returned to normal once we crossed over the wall. Colors came back, and the thundering of artillery coming from the other side of the wall echoed in our ears. Once we got an angle, I could see that it was significantly damaged and Hel had made absolutely no return fire. She’d never upgraded her own defenses, assuming that she would be the one to make an attack. Perhaps that would keep her busy also.

Someone must have been watching for us, or else the dwarfs used radio or something, for the attack broke off and the ships began to rise to follow our chariot. Looking behind us, I saw more dwarf ships sailing silently over the wall, following us back. I had no way of knowing how many returned, but I knew that honor was important to them and that the dwarfs would feel better for dealing Hel this defeat.

We swerved up the root at a ninety-degree angle but thankfully did not fall out the back of the chariot. There was, instead, just a slight sense of vertigo as we completely ignored gravity.

“I could get used to cat chariots like this,” I said.

We splashed up through the pond and the night sky was full of different stars—earth’s stars—then we banked around until we found a rainbow in the dark. It was on this occasion that I discovered that Granuaile had never heard of Ronnie James Dio. My shock at this news was such that I almost completely missed the fact that we were traveling on Bifrost, the rainbow bridge to Asgard. Only when we reached Asgard and got a serious frowning from an unknown keeper of the bridge—Heimdall being dead—did I notice that we weren’t on earth anymore. The cats meowed at the frowning man and the rainbow pointed elsewhere; Freyja’s cats promptly followed it back down to Midgard, where it led to the foreman’s manse in the mountains near Ouray.

Granuaile couldn’t believe it. “You mean Frigg never left here?”

“Well, Fjalar went to such trouble to decorate it warmly.”

Outside on the porch, we delivered Freyja into Frigg’s care and reported with great satisfaction that Fenris was dead, Hel’s walls were heavily damaged, and that at least half of the Black Axes, at minimum, would be returning to Nidavellir. Frigg turned her head to a patch of shadow under the roof of the front porch: “Tell him.” Two ravens took flight into the darkness.

Before Fjalar could ask us a question or issue a challenge, Frigg asked him to fix some broth for Freyja. He gave us a dire eye but obeyed without a word.

“Thank you, Druids,” Frigg said. “You have dealt a serious blow to Hel’s plans. We will keep you informed of any developments.”

She bent her head to Freyja then, in clear dismissal, and we made our farewells.

We walked in silence back to our cabin, where Oberon waited, full of something he’d killed and therefore drowsy and uninterested in what we’d been doing.

he said with a yawn and a halfhearted wag of his tail.

We laughed at him, and Granuaile rubbed his belly while I built a small fire for him in the hearth. Once he was satisfied, I made hot chocolate with marshmallows while Granuaile changed out of her blood-soaked shirt. We clinked our cups together in the kitchen and kissed.

“So what now?” Granuaile asked.

“Well, we could go figure out who’s trying to get us killed in Tír na nÓg,” I said, “or start binding your iron amulet to your aura, or find out whether all the evil clowns in the world have been dark elves all along.”

Granuaile poked me in the chest. “I have a better idea. How about introducing me to all the elementals one by one? I’ve only met a few so far.”

“A sort of Druid World Tour? We could make T-shirts with a list of all the elementals on the back.”

“Yeah. But first let’s go somewhere with a name I can’t pronounce that has a really nice hotel with a giant bed in it.”

“Gods below, you are brilliant.”

Oberon roused himself to full wakefulness in the living room.

The giant bed we found in Tlalpujahua, Mexico, had been sufficient for our purposes, and it was not long after that we picked up Oberon from his guest stay at a poodle ranch in Vermont and embarked on the Druid World Tour. I was showing Granuaile some of the Old World doorways to Tír na nÓg that humans could walk. Occasionally, humans discovered them by accident and found themselves in Tír na nÓg, and if they were extraordinarily lucky they managed to find their way back.

The old doors were good to know, I argued, because even though they were sparsely distributed, they functioned even when the trees did not. They were constructed in caves, which were not subject to the same whims and forces that trees were.

Part of the exercise was just damn cool, because caves are like that, and I emphasized this to Granuaile. But, in truth, I had another agenda: I wanted Granuaile to be impossible to catch. Strategically speaking, falling in love with her was a mistake, the sort of thing that Machiavellian types would exploit, for my enemies—vampires, dark elves, you name it—would always view Granuaile as a lever to use against me. She was quite the badass in her own right now, capable of feats I couldn’t match, but during our connubial sequestration in Mexico it occurred to me that we would have precious little chance to lay low going forward. She’d never get an opportunity to truly enjoy her powers and nurture a sense of harmony in the world as it stood. I kept thinking back to that conversation with Jesus where he said if I’d remained meek, I would have inherited the earth. But there was no going back to that idyllic time when only one god wanted to kill me. Now I just wanted the earth to stick around so someone meek could inherit it. And I hoped that we two Druids would manage to stick around as well. I wasn’t nearly through staring at her yet.

We emerged from a cavern in the Apuseni Mountains in Romania; the range—in the western part of the Carpathians, in the old province of Transylvania—was famous for its hundreds of caves. The vista we beheld at the cave’s mouth smacked of the bucolic rather than the vampiric. Sheep and cattle competed contentedly for their share of abundant grassland directly below, a friendly forest waved at us a short distance beyond, and zero stone edifices loomed over the landscape with palpable auras of ickiness.