Hunt the Moon

Page 37

“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.”
Chapter Nineteen
“That what you call lunch?”
I looked up to see Marco loitering in the doorway of the kitchen, massive arms crossed over an even bigger chest. When Marco fills a doorway, I thought vaguely, he does it right. I wiped chocolate off my mouth and swilled some now-tepid tea. “Only thing here.”
“Gonna make you sick.”
I shrugged.
He sighed and swung a massive thigh over a kitchen chair. It groaned. “Wanna tell Papa Marco about it?”
“You’re not my papa.”
“Coulda been. I had a little girl once.”
I looked up from sorting through the mage’s abandoned candy box, trying to find another cream. “I didn’t know that.”
He nodded. “Kinda looked like you. ’Cept she smiled more.”
I thought briefly about asking what had happened to her, but that sort of thing was risky with vamps. The answer usually didn’t make anybody happy. “I smile,” I said instead.
“Just not today.”
“The damn mage ate all the creams.”
One bushy eyebrow rose. “And here I thought it was that old coot pissing you off.”
“That, too.”
He sat back and the chair shrieked for mercy. “What is it this time?”
I crunched a toffee. “Well, Marco, apparently we’re in the middle of the Norse version of Armageddon and just didn’t know it. Ares, god of war, is out to get us, and the only way to defeat him is to find Hel—the goddess, not the place—who may or may not also be known as Artemis, and may or may not actually be a person instead of a spell or a weapon or a jelly doughnut. But we have to find her, because, despite the fact that the old legends say she defeats Ares, they said the same thing about the ouroboros spell and Apollo, so, clearly, the old legends are whacked.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So Jonas needs to know who or what or where, and expects me to tell him.” I threw my chocolate-stained hands up. “Somehow. See how that works?”
“No.”
“Yeah, me neither.”
“So you’re sittin’ here, eating candy.”
“Chocolate.”
“And that’s different?”
“Candy is candy. Chocolate is therapy.”
“Got plans for this afternoon?”
“Eating more chocolate.”
Marco just shook his head. “You shouldn’t let that old guy get to you. He’s nuts.”
“Yeah.” I was kind of coming around to Marco’s way of thinking.
“Where’d he go off to, anyway?”
“Home.” Or wherever he went when he wasn’t blowing my mind.
“And the mage?”
“Same.” At least, Pritkin had said he was going to his room. I chose to believe him, because if I shifted down there and didn’t find him resting, I was going to lose it. And I was close enough anyway.
“Well, I’m going to bed,” Marco announced, placing massive hands on the table and levering himself to his feet. He didn’t need the help, even in the middle of the day, but vamps like to play martyr when they have to be up past sunrise.
“I thought you went an hour ago.”
“Wanted to wait till everyone cleared out.”
I rolled my eyes. Yeah. Because Jonas or Pritkin might suddenly decide to take a cleaver to my head.
He ruffled my hair and left. I found a coconut cream hiding in the second layer and sucked out the ooey-gooey innards. Things were looking up.
And Marco was probably right about not paying too much attention to Jonas. The guy told me one minute that he knew visions couldn’t be made to order, and then the next he asked for exactly that. I was supposed to hand him Artemis on a silver platter with nothing, absolutely nothing, to go on except a name that might not even be hers.
I’d tried to explain how unlikely that was. Like really, really unlikely. Like not-going-to-happen unlikely. But all he’d done was tell me that he was sure I’d come up with something.
Yeah, right.
To find someone, I’d need at least a photo, preferably something she’d owned and touched, or, even better, a trip to her last known place of residence. And even then, I wasn’t a damn hound dog. I might get a flash of something; I might not. But under the circumstances—
No. Just no. Even assuming Artemis actually existed, even assuming she was a person and not a metaphor, even assuming Jonas hadn’t made up this whole crazy thing in that brilliant but cracked head of his, the answer would still be no. There were no photos, nothing she’d personally owned, and she hadn’t been at her last known place of residence for something like three thousand years.
Not that I wasn’t going to try, because what the hell. But my track record for made-to-order visions wasn’t great. Actually, my track record for made-to-order visions was zero, but Jonas had looked so hopeful, I hadn’t wanted to tell him that.
He’d find out soon enough.
I sighed and sat back, hearing my own chair creak. Probably not a good sign. Probably should lay off the creams, not that there were any left.
I scrubbed my face with my palms, feeling a little light-headed from all the sugar. Maybe ordering some real food might be smart, after all. The phone was on the counter, all of five feet away, but it seemed really far for some reason. I sighed again and followed Marco’s example, putting my hands on the table to lever myself up—
And went in the other direction instead.
The room spun wildly, my legs collapsed underneath me and I dropped like a stone. Something shot overhead as I hit the tile, and a loud crack reverberated around the kitchen. I looked up, dizzy and confused and wondering why there was a knife bisecting the back of my chair.
I stared for a split second at the shiny, shiny blade, which was still quivering, slinging little shards of light around the room. And then I shifted.
Or I tried. But the woozy feeling that had sent me to the floor made it hard to concentrate, and when I finally did feel the familiar swoop catching me, it stuttered and jerked and wobbled and fractured. And the next thing I knew, I was kneeling by the fridge, staring at a familiar pair of glossy black shoes.
The vamps should have told him, I thought vaguely; they were totally the wrong color for the season.
And then one of them kicked me in the head.
It hurt like a bitch, despite the fact that I’d dodged at the last second and it only clipped my ear. I grabbed the fridge door and swung it open, hard, just as three more enchanted knives ripped through the flimsy material. Stainless steel, my ass.
I’d have been dead, but I was on my knees and the knives burst through overhead, shattering plastic and breaking condiments, before slamming into something behind me. I couldn’t see—literally—because I’d just gotten a face full of pickle juice. I blinked it away to find that the knives had also exploded some hot sauce, forever ruining my blouse, which concerned me less than the eyes peering at me through the lacerated fridge door.
They had been my would-be date’s best feature, a soft, melting, cornflower blue that had looked a little girlie for a war mage. That wasn’t so much a problem now. I stared into something cold and black and boiling, and then I threw the rest of the hot sauce at them and scrambled away on all fours.
The mage screamed and it was nothing human, but a high-pitched, keening cry of pure rage. The eyes had been a big clue, but that sealed it. Whatever had possessed me before must have hitched a ride in a new body, obviously with the idea of finishing what it had started.