Placing the golden apple carefully in the crook of a tree branch, I stripped off everything and folded it into a neat pile, glad to be out of the damp leather. I wrote another quick note—“You take unusual delight in sheep asses and everyone knows it. Neener-neener, Bacchus”—and set it on top. The sword I placed off to one side. I asked the earth to part for me and it obliged, opening a hole about two feet deep and about as wide. I placed the pile of clothes and my pouch inside with the note on top and then had the earth bury it for me. I paused to say a few soft words for Ratatosk, because his bones were in my pouch. Then I redistributed leaves over the spot and rose, satisfied. If anyone, such as Heimdall, sniffed me out to this point and then dug up the clothes, they’d get nothing but frustrated.

I sure hoped Odin was missing all of this. I took the apple down from the tree and laid it gently on the ground a few paces away. Then I slung Moralltach across my body and adjusted the strap to a custom length so that it sagged ridiculously on my right side. The sword slid down my back and I hitched it up, then got down on all fours so that the strap hung beneath my torso and even brushed the ground. After a few more tugs and shrugs to position the sword properly across my back, I was ready: I triggered the charm on my necklace that let me shape-shift into a stag, and when the transformation was complete, the sword and its strap was fitted snugly around my body.

This procedure had taken much practice and many hours of making custom straps, but it was worth it since it was a part of Plans A through Q. Now I could run much faster and still have the sword available in case I had to fight in close quarters. I gingerly picked up the golden apple between my deer lips and cast camouflage on myself, the apple, and Moralltach. I was exuding a markedly different scent now that I was a deer—my werewolf friends in Arizona confirmed for me that they could not tell, strictly by scent, that I was the same being when I shape-shifted—and unless Odin somehow figured out what was going on, I didn’t foresee any trouble getting back to Yggdrasil in maybe five or six hours, compared to the eight it had taken me to get out here. Who was going to see a camouflaged stag running at night across the Plain of Idavoll?

I wasn’t naïve enough to seriously believe I’d have no trouble, though. I just didn’t foresee it.

Chapter 4

Occasionally I am smitten with an acute case of Smug. It can happen to anyone, but it happens most often to people who think they’ve been especially clever. I felt a case of it coming on as I got closer and closer to Yggdrasil with no signs of pursuit or even alarm. Through a combination of surprise, speed, and guile, I had thrown an entire pantheon into such confusion that they didn’t know their legs from lutefisk. My supreme cock-up with the Norns should have balanced that out, but I was firmly blocking that and choosing to feel the Smug instead.

With about ten miles to go, near the trunk of Yggdrasil but still miles away from the root leading to Jötunheim, my acute case of Smug turned to a gibbering case of Oh, Shit! I believe that’s a bona fide psychological term; if it isn’t, it should be.

I present my facts to a candid world: When a person steals anything from anyone and runs away, the first thing they say when they realize they’re being chased is “Oh, shit!” in whatever language they spoke as a child. It’s really not possible to say anything else at that point. Some Britons cling to long-standing tradition and say “Oh, bugger!” first, but once they confirm that they are, in fact, being chased, they invariably correct course and join the rest of humanity in saying “Shit!”

Except for the part where I was a stag and I had an apple between lips that couldn’t say it out loud anyway, I went the conventional route. When I saw what was after me, I screamed “Oh, shit!” in my mind and did my best to achieve maximum warp, Scotty and his engines be damned.

A routine paranoid check of my surroundings had revealed two ravens keeping pace above me. They hadn’t been there ten minutes earlier, during my last routine paranoid check. It meant Odin knew where I was, and it might also mean he was on his way to intercept me. I’m not sure how well the ravens could see me while I was camouflaged and running in the dark, but clearly it was well enough to locate my relative position. If nothing else, they could follow the sound of my hooves pounding across the plain.

An hour earlier I had seen the golden trail of Gullinbursti and dark clouds of Thor returning to Freyr’s hall. They appeared in the sky to the north, since I was returning a few miles to the south to avoid running into just such a party. They knew the Norns were missing, and perhaps they knew about Ratatosk as well; now they were following the trail I’d left them. At least I knew they wouldn’t be waiting for me at Yggdrasil.

Yet a whisper of thunder behind me caused me to risk a look. The sound suggested a mass of cavalry, but instead it was only a single horse on the horizon. It was a massive horse, the height of a camel rather than any thoroughbred, and it had eight legs rather than the four I was accustomed to seeing. It was Sleipnir, the steed of Odin, and on its back rode the one-eyed god, spear in hand. Above the horizon, twelve flying horses galloped in the air, each bearing an armored maiden with shield and sword. They were Valkyries, which meant the shit I was in was deeper than the Mariana Trench. They were the Choosers of the Slain on this plane, the Norse equivalent of the Morrigan except with funny winged helmets, and somehow I didn’t think they would choose Odin to die.

I turned tail and ran for it. Cool, a chase scene, I thought manically as I huffed around the apple in my lips. If I’d brought my iPod, I could have loaded in Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” for the soundtrack. Though, on reflection, it was dreary stuff and wouldn’t lend me any speed. Perhaps it would have been more amusing and inspirational to play something culturally jarring and utterly absurd, like Jerry Reed’s banjo anthem for those seventies bootlegging movies; Odin and the Valkyries could play the role of Smokey, and I’d be the legendary Bandit. Odin looked a bit more competent than Sheriff Buford T. Justice, unfortunately, and I wasn’t exactly moving like a 1977 Trans Am. The rumble of Sleipnir’s hooves was growing steadily louder; he was gaining on me.

Odin’s spear, Gungnir, was a neat piece of magic like Moralltach or Fragarach. Thanks to the runes carved on its head, it was always supposed to hit its target, and its target always died. That sort of magic tended to work; I had firsthand experience, using both Fragarach and Moralltach. I wondered, though, what kind of range he had. Did the magic work in such a way that he could simply target me, then give the spear a halfhearted throw in my general direction and let the runes do the rest? Or did he have to be within the range of his natural (albeit godlike) strength to chuck it after me? It was times like this when I wished I had a parietal eye.

The blowing of a war horn forced me to look around. Valkyries don’t blow war horns for the fun of it; they do so only with a purpose, as a signal in battle. I was in time to see Odin, still more than a quarter mile away, rise from his saddle and hurl Gungnir up into a high arc, the terminus of which was undoubtedly intended to be my heart or brain. At the same time, the Valkyries surged behind it, raising their swords and then pointing them all at me. My cold iron amulet sprouted frost crystals and trembled on my chest, and I knew that they had just chosen me to die. I suppose I could have depended on my amulet to protect me from their death sentence, but I’m too paranoid to leave everything up to a hunk of metal when I have options. What if the amulet didn’t affect the targeting until the spear hit my aura? I couldn’t let the spear get within a couple of inches of my skin and then try to dodge. I wanted to try out something else.

My idea was to shake off both Gungnir’s targeting and the Valkyries’ doom by changing the nature of the target. I bounded for a couple of leaps to the right to avoid the path of the spear and then did three things in less than a second: I dissolved my camouflage, changed back into human form, and stopped running. The apple popped out of my human lips and I caught it in my left hand. It was covered in deer slobber but otherwise unmarred.

The stag that Gungnir had been sent to kill wasn’t there anymore, and I heard the spear whistle over my head before my eyes caught up to see it thud menacingly into the moor some forty yards along my previous path. I checked on my pursuit and saw Odin and the Valkyries pull up to make sure they weren’t hallucinating.

They couldn’t believe their eyes. The spear that never missed had just missed. The chosen slain wasn’t slain but prancing around na**d in the Plain of Idavoll with an apple in his hand and a defiant grin on his face. As they watched, the red-haired demon held up a hand in a clear signal for them to wait, then strode confidently toward Gungnir as if it were no more than a common spear he had thrown himself. Then the creature had the unmitigated gall to lay his hands on it—Odin’s spear!—and yank it disrespectfully out of the ground. And then he—he—

Odin bellowed at the Valkyries as he saw what I intended. He was not clad in full armor, but neither was he abroad as an avuncular traveler with a wide droopy hat and a gray cloak. He wore a spectacled helmet and a mail shirt under a tunic made of reindeer hide. He goaded his horse forward, and the Valkyries followed suit.

It had been a long time since I’d thrown a spear or javelin, but it seemed like a good night to pick up the habit again. If Gungnir hit something, then they’d falter and I’d get a chance to put some distance between us; if it missed, then they’d slow down to retrieve the weapon and I’d still get a chance to put some distance between us.

Directing my strength through my back and shoulder and trying to remember my technique, I hurled the spear powerfully at my enemy’s strategic weakness—not at Odin, but at Sleipnir. Without pausing to watch its flight, I dropped immediately to all fours and shifted back into a stag, grasping the apple between my lips once more and shrugging against the fit of the scabbard strap. As I raised my head to resume my run, I saw the spear sink home at the base of the mighty stallion’s throat, and he reared, neighing in pain and throwing Odin to the ground before he himself toppled.

That almost made me drop the apple. I hadn’t expected my aim to be that good; the runecraft must work for whoever threw the spear. The Valkyries immediately whirled around to help Odin, and I shagged it out of there while I had the chance.

Two limp black forms rained out of the sky as I bounded toward the root, and I realized they were the ravens, Hugin and Munin—Thought and Memory. For them to fall meant Odin must be either unconscious or dead. I had to get out of there before I caused any more damage. I recast camouflage on myself, on the theory that the Valkyries wouldn’t be able to see me without Odin’s help, and worried about what to do next.

Moralltach was a problem. There was no way I could afford to take it with me down Ratatosk’s bolt-hole in the root of Yggdrasil. Now that I was being pursued, I wouldn’t have the necessary time to climb down that shaft using the excruciatingly slow process of binding my skin to the bark with each step. I had to fly down, but there was no way I could carry the sword as an owl.

I had no choice but to leave it behind. Checking my six as I approached the root, I saw that a few Valkyries had taken to the air again and they were circling aimlessly, looking for me. Hugin and Munin hadn’t returned to the sky, so Odin was still out of it. Cursing the necessity, I returned to my human form and unslung the sword from my shoulders after I caught the apple popping from my mouth. I knelt on the ground and asked it to part for me. It did, accepting the sword that I drove straight down to the depth of my elbow, so that it would remain there like a spike in the earth. As satisfied as possible under the circumstances, I carefully closed the earth over it, making sure that the turf on top looked undisturbed, even going so far as to back away ten paces and spending the effort to remove all traces of footprints.

They might find it; if Heimdall knew to look for it, he probably would. But if I simply left while Odin was still zonked, there was no reason they wouldn’t assume I’d taken it with me. I already had a reason to come back to Asgard, in any case: I’d promised my attorney and friend, the vampire Leif Helgarson, that I would bring him there to settle an old grudge against Thor the violent way.

I shape-shifted to a great horned owl and picked up the apple in my talons as gingerly as possible. I couldn’t avoid puncturing its thin skin a little bit, but I figured Laksha would just have to deal with it. I flew up to the hole in the root and then, once over the lip, folded my wings against the sides of my body and dove for the bottom.

After swooping out of the hole underneath Asgard, I dove again for the bottom of the root. The Well of Mimir was unattended, as it had been when I arrived. Mimir had long since been beheaded by the Vanir, but I expected that such an important site would be watched. Since it was now Black Friday, perhaps its keeper was off somewhere taking advantage of a DoorBuster sale. I pulled out of my dive, dropped the apple in the snow, and shifted to plain old Atticus. I promptly began to shiver.

Hugging the tree root and clutching the blasted apple, I found the tether to earth and pulled my center along it until I returned to what everyone thinks of as the “real” world. It was just as cold in Siberia as it was in Jötunheim, and I had no clothes. I groaned out loud and took a moment to enjoy the feeling of not being chased. I also needed to give my body a bit of a break. Despite the fact that all the energy I’d used had come from the earth, the rapid shape-shifting was taking its toll; I felt shaky and weak, and my liver wanted to know if it would get to spend some time in its wonted shape.

Unfortunately, the answer was no. I wasn’t out of danger yet. The Norse were perfectly capable of following me to this plane, and I had no doubt that they would, sooner or later. Once they followed my clear trail to Idunn and Bragi’s hall, they’d start to piece things together. If they found my buried clothes in the orchard, they’d know I came from Midgard; if they found the Norns, they’d know a sword killed them; if they found Moralltach, they’d recognize it as a Fae weapon and chase that lead until they found out the truth—namely, the being responsible for stealing a golden apple and knocking Odin on his ass wasn’t a demon or a god but rather a Druid.