Kevin Hearne: Tricked

I, on the other hand, wasn’t safe at all, because I had people to look out for. Perun could spend the next century as an eagle and they’d never find him. Zhang Guo Lao, I’d heard, was capable of true invisibility when he stood still; since he could go full ninja, they’d never get him either. I could go to a nice plane somewhere and be safe — I could even take Oberon and Granuaile with me — but without true contact with the elementals of earth, Granuaile wouldn’t be able to advance her training as a Druid, and the world desperately needs more Druids. So my choices were to stay on earth and die or leave earth and let the world slowly die of neglect — which wouldn’t truly help, since all planes connected to earth would die at the same time.

I decided to stay and die. Loudly.

Týr and Vidar found me quickly enough once they knew who to ask for. I’d blown my cover somewhat spectacularly some months earlier by killing Aenghus Óg, so by now almost anyone paranormal or supernatural could have pointed them to Arizona. They chased me up to Tuba City, towing along five thunder gods for backup: Ukko from Finland, Indra from India, Lei Gong from China, Raijin from Japan, and Shango from Nigeria. All of them are very powerful gods and quite beloved by their people, but few are the tales in which we hear of their wit or perception.

Indra was quite the character, for example, and undoubtedly the most powerful of the lot currently. He had a reputation for lovin’ the ladies, a tendency I couldn’t criticize myself, but he got himself into some awful trouble for it once. He chose to lay down with the wife of a magician, who of course found out immediately that Indra was “in da house” and assigned him a punishment worthy of Dante: Since the thunder god could think of nothing but vaginas, the cuckolded husband cursed Indra with a thousand vaginas all over his body. Indra had to walk around like that for a while, until Krishna took pity on him and commuted the sentence by turning all the vaginas into eyes. Still, think of the optometrist appointments.

The Morrigan observed, “They may be sharing the brain of a nuthatch between them.” She was perched on the water tower beside me in the shape of a battle crow, making sure that I “died” precisely as her vision foretold. We’d both been worried initially about her vision of my death — she because it meant she’d break her oath to keep me alive, and I for obvious reasons — until I remembered the Plan. I’d conceived the Plan before the Morrigan shared her vision with me but realized only later that the Plan could fulfill her vision of my death without me actually having to die for it. Now we watched with faint amusement as someone who looked like me cursed the circling thunder gods and asserted that they all were spawned from the puffy red asses of baboons. The gods sent bolt after bolt of lightning at him with no apparent effect as he stood in a puddle of mud.

“Give them a little credit, Morrigan,” I said. “They found me here, after all.”

“Only after you allowed them to by parading around this foolish copy of yourself. It still took them a week, but, very well: They are sharing the brains of two nuthatches.”

The Atticus O’Sullivan they assaulted was a near-perfect replica. The tattoos on his right side were a precise copy of mine. The slightly curly mane of red hair would have shone luxuriantly in the sun had it not been pouring rain on him, and the goatee blazed with character on his chin. He was foulmouthed and had his Irish up, and he had my wallet and my cell phone in the pockets of his jeans. There was an iron amulet on a silver chain around his neck, with five square charms on either side of it and a fulgurite talisman in the back protecting him from the lightning. The fulgurite was real, but the amulet and charms were little more than costume jewelry. He did, however, carry Fragarach in his right hand — the real Fragarach, not a facsimile — for extra special verisimilitude.

Yet a clever enemy would not have been fooled. He didn’t have Oberon or Granuaile by his side, for one thing, and he wasn’t casting a single Druidic binding — not that this bunch would know it if he did. They were still trying to fry him electrically.

“What are they thinking?” the Morrigan asked. “If the first hundred lightning bolts don’t work, the hundred-and-first one will?”

“That strategy would require them to count,” I said, “which is improbable if they’re sharing two nuthatch brains.”

“Good point,” the Morrigan conceded.

Týr, the Norse god of single combat, waved off the thunder gods to approach my double with a shield and an axe. Vidar, Odin’s son, armed with a long sword, followed close behind. The thunder gods floated down to the muddy earth behind the faux Atticus to cut off any escape.

Poor Týr clearly didn’t know anything about Fragarach. The only people who saw me use it in Asgard died immediately afterward, and thus he’d never been told that my ancient Fae sword cut through shields and armor like a chainsaw through mozzarella. Týr crouched behind his shield as my double charged, thinking to take the blow and then strike back quickly with his axe. He took the blow all right. He took it right through the center of his body, as Fragarach sliced down through his shield, his forearm, and his torso. Everyone — including my double — was startled that Týr was now half off. Literally.

But Vidar, the god of vengeance, recovered first. Yelling, “For Odin!” he thrust his long sword into the unprotected left side of that handsome Irish lad’s rib cage, definitely stabbing a lung and maybe the liver too. The man who was supposed to be me cried out his pain magnificently—“Garrl! Urk! Auggh!”—and tried to raise Fragarach for another blow, but the strength wasn’t in his limbs anymore. Vidar yanked out his sword with a slurping noise, and the Druid poseur collapsed in the mud.

They apparently knew enough about Druids not to leave it there. They didn’t want me healing from a wound that would be mortal to anyone else. So they all descended on the body and chopped it up into pieces with whatever gigantic, godlike phallus-weapon they had, far beyond my capacity to heal.

“Yeesh. What a mess,” I said. “Cue the Chooser of the Slain.”

“Yes, let’s finish this,” the Morrigan said, leaping off the tower and flapping through the rain as Vidar finally ceased his butchery and shook his fist at the sky.

“Vengeance is miiiine!” he roared.

I snorted quietly at him from my vantage point. “Dream on.”

The Morrigan is a spooky creature by default, but she can turn up the spookiness to eleven whenever she wishes. Her eyes glow red and minor harmonics creep into her voice, vibrating on a frequency guaranteed to produce shuddering fits, liquid bowels, and tiny screams of fear. At least that’s what her voice o’ doom does to normal people. Gods are able to take it a little better. Still, they flinch. The Morrigan shifted to her human form about twenty yards away from the cluster of gods, a svelte seductress with milk-white skin and coal-black hair, and advanced toward them.

“I have come for the Druid,” her voice boomed and scraped, and the gods jumped at the sound, crouching into defensive positions. They didn’t relax either when they saw that the Morrigan was unarmed — she was naked, in fact — so maybe they each had a brain after all. She didn’t need to be armed or clothed to do them serious harm. Indra’s thousand eyes were busy, presumably searching her for weapons.

“Who are you?” Shango demanded. It was pretty easy to hear them, despite the distance and noise from the storm. They were all trying to intimidate one another, so they were using GodSurround Sound and scored a little reverb off the ceiling of clouds.