Loki's Wolves (22 page)

Matt smiled. “I can do that. Never been here—my parents don’t approve of Deadwood, past or present—but I know all the stories. They called Deadwood the last frontier because the town itself wasn’t even legal. The land was supposed to belong to the Native Americans, but General Custer found gold here and that started a gold rush, which started the town of Deadwood. Because it was illegal, though, there wasn’t a whole lotta law and order, not until Seth Bullock—a Canadian guy who became the first sheriff—came along.”

Matt continued with the tour as Fen trailed along behind, shaking his head.

As they walked, Matt managed to find all the famous graves—Wild Bill, Calamity Jane, Seth Bullock, Preacher Smith, and Potato Creek Johnny—but they didn’t find the twins. And they took so long getting to the back of the cemetery that they then had to search on the way out, in case the twins had come in during the meantime. Fen complained about that… and about the fact that Matt continued to stop for things he’d missed the first time, including Potter’s Field. He explained to Laurie that was where most of the unmarked graves were.

“I’m going to put
you
in an unmarked grave if you say one more sentence with the word
dead
in it,” Fen muttered.

“Does that include
Deadwood
?” Matt said, grinning.

“Yes.”

Matt laughed, but Fen had a point. They really should get back to the front of the cemetery and watch for the twins.

They found a place to hide behind a monument and waited. An hour passed. Then another. Dark began to fall. Matt was out stretching his legs when he heard something cracking and snapping. He looked up to see a flag whipping in the wind.

“See something?” Laurie whispered as she crept out from behind the monument.

Matt shook his head. “Just the flag.” He squinted up at it in the twilight. “It’s weird. They don’t lower it at sunset like most places. I read that they leave it up twenty-four hours a day and—”

“Are you at it again?” Fen said. “I swear I’ll find you a nice empty grave if you keep it up.”

“I’m not too worried,” Matt said. “Cemetery’s full.” He thought of stopping there, but really, it was fun to push Fen’s buttons sometimes. Especially when there wasn’t much else to do for entertainment. “You know, though, there actually might be some empty graves. Back in frontier days, they’d bury prospectors here, and then sometimes their families would find out and want the bodies sent home. Except, of
course, by that point, the person had been dead awhile, so digging them up and mailing them would be pretty gross. They’d just send back the bones, which meant they had to boil—”

“Hey!” Fen jabbed a finger at Laurie. “You think she really needs to hear this?”

“Actually…” Laurie began.

“No.” Fen swung his scowl on Matt. “Shut it, Thorsen. Or I’ll shut it for you.”

“Before or after you put me in the empty grave?”

Fen growled. Matt grinned back.

Laurie stepped between them. “He’s baiting you, Fen.” She turned to Matt. “Stop that.” Then to Fen. “You stop it, too.”

“But he started—”

Her look silenced Fen, and she stalked back behind the monument. Matt and Fen followed. As Matt stepped behind the monument, though, he thought he heard something. He looked around. When he didn’t see anything and turned away to ignore it, he felt a… brain twitch. That was the only way he could describe it. Like the weird sense of someone watching you, except it wasn’t the hairs rising on his neck, it was a
ping
in his brain that said
Pay attention.

Then he really felt the ping as his amulet jumped and began to heat up. He opened his mouth to say something, but wasn’t sure what exactly to say and leaned out from the
monument instead, peering into the growing darkness. That’s when he saw two figures making their way toward the cemetery.

Norns? Valkyries? Trolls? His amulet had reacted to all three. As the figures drew closer, though, he saw that it was the twins—Ray and Reyna. So he could detect descendants, too? That hadn’t happened before. Maybe it was a new power.

He tapped Laurie on the shoulder and pointed. She saw the twins and murmured that they should wait until they got closer. Fen shuffled impatiently, but he didn’t argue.

Matt wasn’t sure what to make of the twins. They weren’t the kind of kids you saw in Blackwell or Lead or even Deadwood. Not that there was anything wrong with being different. He just… he didn’t know what to make of them. That meant he didn’t know how to talk to them or how to convince them to join the fight.

But that’s your job, isn’t it? That’s the test the Valkyries gave you. Find the others and get them to join up.

The fighting part was so much easier.

He sized up the twins. The answer seemed to be to ignore the weird clothes and the makeup and just talk to them. But Laurie had already tried that.

The heat of his amulet flared, as if to remind him that he could
make
the twins join up. Scare them into it. The very thought made him queasy. That wasn’t how a leader acted. It wasn’t how Thor had acted, either. Sometimes people
thought he had, but in the old stories, he always used his strength for good. To help others, not hurt them.

Matt watched the twins, now close enough for him to see their faces, set in that same the-world-bores-me look they’d had earlier. And he realized he had no idea what they could do now that they hadn’t done earlier, and Fen and Laurie were expecting him to do more, to find the right words, except he didn’t know them and now they’d gone through all this for nothing and—

He took a deep breath. He’d talk to them. He’d be reasonable. Use logic.

Logic? They were telling these kids that they had to help them save the world. Fight a giant serpent before wolves ate the sun and moon and plunged Earth into eternal winter. Logic didn’t even—

His amulet began to vibrate now. He tugged the new cord and flicked it outside his shirt so he could concentrate. Only even as he was moving it, he felt the vibration, and it wasn’t coming from his warm amulet. He dropped quickly and pressed his fingers to the ground.
It
was vibrating. Which meant it wasn’t the twins making his necklace react.

Matt leaped up. “Tro—!”

He didn’t even finish the word before two headstones sprang to life. They vaulted over the wall before Matt could get out from behind the monument. The twins turned and gaped.

The trolls scooped them up and swung them over their shoulders. The boy—Ray—froze. Reyna pounded at her captor’s back and shouted. Matt raced from the monument, Fen and Laurie behind him, but the trolls moved lightning-fast, swinging back over the wall. As the trolls ran, another headstone jumped up and followed, and the three tore through the cemetery. All the while, Reyna was howling and struggling.

Matt raced after them, but by the time he reached the spot where they’d jumped the wall, they’d vanished into the dark cemetery. He ran in the direction they’d gone. There was no sign of them, though, and he slowed, squinting as he kept jogging forward. Finally, he saw something move over by the monument to Wild Bill Hickok.

He stopped Fen and Laurie and pointed. The troll who’d been playing backup for the kidnappers had stopped at the fence surrounding Wild Bill’s grave. He was trying to shove his hand through the chain-link fence to grab at something.

“The coins,” Matt whispered, remembering Laurie throwing one to the troll at Mount Rushmore.

As he moved from headstone to headstone, he could see he was right. Earlier, they’d noticed that people had reached through the fence to leave “offerings” on Wild Bill’s grave. There were a couple bottles of whiskey, a flower, a set of aces, and coins. It was the last that had caught the troll’s attention.

As Matt watched the troll struggling to get the money,
he had to stifle the urge to laugh. It was kinda funny, like watching a six-hundred-pound tiger stop chasing a gazelle to bat at a butterfly. The other trolls were long gone.

“I’ll circle around,” Fen whispered. “When I give the signal, we’ll both run out and jump him. Make him tell us where they took the twins.”

A day ago, Matt would have thought this was a perfectly brilliant plan. But he’d fought the last troll. He knew that, as silly as this one looked, grunting and grumbling and straining for pocket change, it was still a living pile of rock… with a sledgehammer punch. Forcing Leaf to reveal the twins’ whereabouts hadn’t worked so well. So he motioned for Fen to hold off and just watch.

The troll spent about five minutes trying to get its oversized arm through the wire before it realized that the fence barely came up to its chest. Then it took a few more minutes to figure out how to climb over.

“Not too bright, are they?” Laurie said with a soft laugh.

That was an understatement. And something Matt needed to remember if they had to take this guy on. They didn’t, though. It got the money, climbed back over the fence, and loped off. Matt motioned for them to follow.

With the other two trolls long gone, this one didn’t seem to be in as much of a rush, and they were able to keep up. The troll continued over the hills, occasionally disappearing behind clumps of trees or melding with gray headstones
then emerging a moment later, still on the move. Finally, nearly at the far side of the cemetery, Matt heard the twins.

“Do you really think we’re stupid?” Reyna was saying. “You’re working with those kids. They tell us stories about gods and trolls, and you guys show up wearing troll costumes.
Lame
troll costumes. I can see the zipper in the back, you know.”

“I don’t see a zipper,” Ray’s whispered voice drifted over on the breeze.

“Well, there must be,” his sister said. “They’ve put on costumes to kidnap us for ransom. That’s what you want, isn’t it? Ransom?”

“Treasure,” one of the trolls rumbled. “Aerik want treasure.”

“See?” Reyna said.

Matt darted along the headstones until he could see the trolls. The third one had joined its companions, and all three crouched around the twins, who sat, bound back-to-back. Ray looked terrified; Reyna looked furious.

Now that they were closer, Matt recognized one of the two trolls who’d taken the kids. He’d know the crags of that ugly face anywhere. Leaf.

It was Leaf who spoke next, turning to the one who’d been delayed and saying, “Where Sun go?”

The troll—whose skin was veined with dark red, like rusty iron—opened his hand, revealing the coins.

“More?” Leaf asked.

Sun shook his head.

Leaf grunted and turned to the twins. “You have treasure.”

“Money?” Ray said. “Sure, our parents have money. Our dad runs one of the casinos.”

“Don’t—” Reyna began.

He shot her a look that silenced her, then he turned back to the trolls. “Our dad will pay. I can give you his cell phone number. Or…” He looked them up and down. “I can call on mine.”

The trolls stared blankly at him. Then Aerik said, “Treasure. Aerik want treasure. Leaf say girl daughter Freya. Boy son Frey. God kids want. Frey and Freya have treasure.”

Laurie leaned over and whispered, “They know the twins are valuable because we wanted to find them so badly.”

Matt nodded. “And to them, valuable means treasure.”

They listened for a few more minutes, as the two sides tried—without much success—to understand each other.

“They’ll be at this for a while.” Laurie turned to Matt and asked, “Should we wait until they turn to stone?”

Matt looked up at the sky. The stars had just appeared about an hour ago. It was a long way from dawn. He glanced over at the trolls. One they could handle. Two might be okay if they could free Ray to help. Three? Not happening.

Matt nodded. “We have to.”