Tricked (9 page)

Frank Chischilly was suddenly unbelievably strong, because he held what must have been a two-ton boulder above his head with one hand. As I watched, he jumped high into the air with it, one of those super anime leaps that are wholly unnecessary but completely awesome, and then came down with that boulder in his hand like he was dunking a basketball—a two-ton sandstone basketball that he slammed onto the head of the third
draugr
. The creature just disappeared under that rock, and Frank crouched down to land on top. If he’d been in the movies, he would have stayed there and risen slowly, heroically, as the dust cleared, but he leapt right down off that boulder and charged the last
draugr
, who was coming for me. Frank’s shirt strained at the buttons as muscles he didn’t have before threatened to burst out. His eyes were completely white and glowed a bit. I switched my vision to the magical spectrum, and Frank didn’t have that cute little white line in his aura anymore; he was almost entirely made of white magic now, at godlike levels. He whipped around his right arm in a backhand swing at the
draugr
’s head, and when his fist connected, it was like he had teed off on the fourth hole. The head sailed away into the north sky, in the direction
that Hel had run, and the dead blue corpse sank to the ground. Frank roared at it, and the veins on his trunk-size neck stood out; the turquoise stone of his bolo tie snapped off the cord and went zinging away, and his massive quivering pecs reminded me of Lou Ferrigno’s. His opinion of the
draugr
established, he turned in a circle, searching for more foes. He looked faintly disappointed not to find any more—Hel was gone—and those glowing eyes examined us again for an uncomfortable few seconds, to make sure we weren’t legal targets. And then he began to deflate, the light winked out of his eyes, and he coughed once, violently, before slumping into a faint. Coyote darted in quickly to catch him; he was a frail old man again.

“Okay, Coy—Mr. Benally, I mean—what the fuck just happened?”

“I should ask you the same thing, Mr. Collins!” Coyote snarled. “Who was that lady and what were those things?”

“Tell me about Frank first. Is he going to be okay?”

“Yeah, he’ll be all right,” Coyote said, the anger in his voice modulating to regret. Frank’s chest was still moving up and down. “Wished he hadn’t of done that, though. He ain’t gonna get another shot, and I was kinda countin’ on him to use it on somethin’ else.”

“What’d he do?”

“He called Changing Woman and told her we had monsters here. Let himself be a vessel, see? So she sent her son, Monster Slayer, to help us out, a onetime limited engagement.” So that
had
been a god inside him. An aptly named one.

Granuaile’s footsteps approached from the south. “I’m assuming it’s safe now? Ugh,” she said, looking at the headless corpses. “What are those things?”

“They’re sort of like zombies on Red Bull with a little bit of ghost mixed in,” I said.

Frank moaned and his eyes snapped open. Then he closed them again and raised a hand to his head, saying something in Navajo that made Coyote laugh. He must
have a killer headache. Coyote helped him up to a sitting position and patted him companionably on the back.

“All right, Mr. Collins,” Coyote said. “It’s your turn. Who was that lady?”

“Yeah,” Frank said. “I nearly crapped my pants.”

“That was Hel,” I said, “the Norse goddess of death.”

Frank turned to Coyote to see if he was buying it. “He’s not bullshitting?”

“Naw, this guy don’t usually tell stretchers about gods,” he answered. Then he asked me, “What did she want with you?”

“She, um, wanted my help, I guess.”

“Help with what?” Granuaile said, her lip curled. “Personal hygiene?”

“Um … destroying the world.” I tossed Moralltach aside and sat down heavily in the red dust next to Frank, executing a double face-palm. Saying that out loud took quite a bit out of me. What had I done when figures like Hel approached me as a potential ally? My primary reason for going through with the Asgard trip had been to preserve my honor by keeping my word. But I saw no honor in an unstained name now. If Ragnarok began because of me, no one would remember or care that I followed through on my promises. There would be no kind historians to write apologetics for me.

Usually I try to suppress any emotions that savor of regret, because they are invariably aperitifs to a main course of depression, and for the long-lived, that’s a recipe for suicide. But that doesn’t mean they can’t sneak up on me sometimes.

And, like, gang-tackle me.

I felt a slight spell of vertigo as the enormity of what I’d done hit me. I wept silently behind my hands for Mrs. MacDonagh, for Leif, for Gunnar, for Väinämöinen, for the Norse, and for the untold suffering to come because
of my bad decisions. Druids were supposed to be forces of preservation, not destruction, and I could not dance around the fact that my stupid pride had turned me into a misbegotten cockwaffle.

Granuaile squatted down next to me and put a gentle hand on my shoulder. “Well, clearly she didn’t like what you had to say about that,” she said.

“Just checkin’ here,” Frank said, his voice thick. “Geologists don’t normally get invited to help destroy the world, do they?”

Behind my hands, I shook my head. “No,” I said. “No, they don’t.” I pressed my tears away with my palms and then dropped them to my lap. “But don’t ask me who or what I really am right now. I’m supposed to be dead.”

“Well, it seems to be a day for dead people to be walkin’ around,” Frank said. “And disintegratin’.” He pointed over to the
draugr
bodies, which were turning into ash and mixing with the dust of the plateau.

“What was the deal with that freaky knife she had?” Coyote wondered aloud.

“It’s called Famine. She said the next thing she cut with it wouldn’t rest until it had eaten me.”

“Ew,” Granuaile said.

Oberon tried to cheer me up.

Frank Chischilly narrowed his eyes. “Did she say if it works on only one thing or on as many things as she cuts with it?”

“That’s a pretty specific question. Why do you ask?”

“Because there’s a couple of skinwalkers livin’ north of here. She’s headed right for ’em.”

Oberon asked.

Granuaile scrunched up her face. “Aren’t they shape-shifters of some kind? They use an animal skin?”

Chischilly nodded. “They have to use a different skin for each shape. They keep to themselves mostly, unless you invade their territory.”

“You say there’s two nearby?” I asked.

“Up past the ranches a few miles thataway.” He pointed in the direction Hel had gone.

I shifted my gaze and glared at Coyote. “So I guess I know why you’re so anxious to have the mine here,” I said. “Its primary qualification isn’t the proximity to Kayenta’s workforce; it’s the proximity to the skinwalkers. You figured I’d take care of them for you once they show up to defend their territory.”

Coyote shrugged, not bothering to deny it. “I can’t go after ’em myself. If they killed me, then they’d just be that much more powerful.”

Frank Chischilly frowned, clearly not understanding how killing a man could make the skinwalkers more powerful. But I understood. Skinwalkers can’t use a man’s skin—they already have their own. Coyote wasn’t a man, though, and that’s what Frank hadn’t quite figured out yet: Coyote was one of the First People, and whenever he died he always left his remnants behind. If the skinwalkers got hold of a Coyote skin, as opposed to a regular coyote skin, there was no telling what kind of shredding they could do with his power. And the Morrigan, I noted, had been right about thrice-cursed trickster gods. They were torrential fucksluices spraying their happy juices on the innocent and the damned alike.

To distract the
hataałii
from asking an uncomfortable question of Coyote, I asked him one instead: “How would you handle a skinwalker, Frank?”

He was so surprised by the question that he started to chuckle, and that morphed into a hacking cough. When
the fit passed, he said, “You can’t handle ’em. Just protect against ’em and wait for dawn.”

That made them sound like vampires. “They can’t be killed?”

Frank hawked up something green and spat on the ground. “Maybe they can, but I never heard of anyone pulling it off. Least not by any normal way you’d kill a man. They’re wicked fast.”

Granuaile asked, “They only come out at night?”

“Usually. Sunlight won’t kill ’em, but they sure don’t like it much.”

“So you’ve run into them before. You have personal experience.”

Frank nodded. “Long time ago.”

“How’d you deal with that one?”

“We reversed a curse on it. We never woulda stood a chance otherwise. But it shot a bone bead into someone and then came back to make sure it was working the next night. We got it then, when it was standing still.”

I squinted at him. “Got it how?”

“Shot it with the same bead. The bead was cursed. They’re basically witches, and if you know how they worked a spell on someone, you can probably turn it back against them. These two ain’t like the ones I’ve seen in the past, though. They don’t use ceremonial magic. They just physically punish people. Can’t fight back against ’em that way.”

“Well, if they tend to come out at night, we’d better get inside before sundown.”

“Yep,” the
hataałii
agreed, and then he patted his chest as Coyote helped him stand. “Damn. Where’d my bolo tie go?” he said.

“It kind of popped off and sailed away over there,” Coyote said, pointing.

As everyone looked around uncertainly, I shot a quick thought to my hound.

Oberon, think you can find it and bring it to me?

He trotted off in the direction of the turquoise’s last known trajectory.

I rose from the ground and retrieved Moralltach, but Frank stopped me before I could take a step back toward the hogan site. “Whatever you are, Mr. Collins—if that’s your name—I get the feeling that you were brought here as Plan B.” His eyes shifted to indicate Coyote. “Except now you’re Plan A.”

I favored Coyote with another glare. “Yeah, the plan is sort of revealing itself to me as we go,” I said. “How many of the others are in on this plan, Frank?”

“Oh, you mean Darren and Sophie and everybody? They all know about the skinwalkers.”

“Damn it, Frank,” Coyote grated softly.

“What? He wasn’t supposed to know? Then why’s he here?”

“Too late now. Tell me everything,” I said.

“Well, Mr. Benally says we’re buildin’ a mine and stuff, but we’re also baiting the skinwalkers with where we’re buildin’ it. Not everyone believes in them, you know. Lot o’ people think they’re just myths—I mean a lot o’ the Diné who buy into the idea that there ain’t nothin’ in the world but science. And they also think I’m crazy and oughtta be locked up for sayin’ they’re real. But Mr. Benally believes me, and so does Sophie and the rest of this crew. What about you, Mr. Collins? Would you be willing to believe in skinwalkers?”

“Yeah, I’d be willing to believe most any monster is real—or was real at some point.”

“Yeah, I figured,” Frank said. “Guy who talks to Norse goddesses oughtta believe in a monster or two.”

“I’m going to stop at the car for a minute. Meet you up at the site,” I told Frank. He waved and started up to the mesa, but I held Coyote behind with my eyes.

“You, sir,” I said, “have all the dignity of a badger
with the clap. Shark shit has more fiber than you. I’m going to tie you nuts-first to a monkey’s cage and make a mix tape of the resulting noise. Then I’m going to take a bag of marshmallows and a pair of granny panties and—”

Coyote held up his hands in surrender and spoke in low tones to prevent the departing Frank from overhearing. “I hear ya, Mr. Druid, but, look, it really don’t make any differ’nce. You wanted to make a trade and you agreed to the terms.”

“I didn’t agree to kill any skinwalkers for you.”

“And Frank didn’t agree to kill those blue-skinned zombie things.”

“No, but I didn’t lead Frank here to confront them either. Don’t expect me to give you any bonus services. The skinwalkers are your problem.”

Coyote chuckled. “Well, they might be your problem now too, if that goddess o’ death takes her knife to ’em. Can’t blame me for that, Mr. Druid. She didn’t show up here at my invitation with her hungry silverware.”

Oberon returned with Frank’s turquoise in his mouth. he said.

“Thanks, Oberon,” I said, wiping the turquoise off on my jeans. “Let’s go see if we can find you one in the car.” I turned my back on Coyote without saying another word. He didn’t want to know what I was going to do with those granny panties.

Surprisingly, Granuaile did. “Sensei, what were you going to do with those marshmallows and panties?” she whispered as we walked together. “I mean, I’m sure it had to be dire, but it just didn’t sound as threatening as the potential havoc a monkey could wreak on his sack.”

“There was more to that recipe,” I admitted. “He cut me off before I could get to the Icy Hot and the gopher snake.”

“Ew. What would you do with that?”

“I will leave it to you as an exercise.”

I decided it would be best to keep Moralltach on me from now on. It wouldn’t be conducive to maintaining the fiction that I was nothing but a geologist, but that wasn’t much of a priority now, if it ever was. Frank and the rest of them could think whatever they liked about me; they’d never guess the truth.

Of more concern to me was who Hel might talk to now that she’d discovered the slayer of the Norns in Arizona a couple of days after said slayer was supposed to have died. My elaborate attempt to disappear through faking my death would all come to naught if Hel spread it around that I was still walking the earth. She needed to be faked out as well—or eliminated. But trying to invade Niflheim to take on Hel in her home territory didn’t sound like a win to me. She’d have a nearly infinite supply of
draugar
at her command, a moon-devouring wolf hiding in her basement and itching for action, and the original Helhound, Garm, would probably consider me to be a light snack.