But Stefan hadn’t become King of All Bullies by being a wuss.
Stefan took the momentum and swung a 360, came around with his blade low and horizontal, aiming at Thor’s legs. The sword bit. It sliced into Thor’s leggings. But stopped there.
Stefan drew the sword back. There was blood on the blade.
For what felt like way too long a pause, Thor stared at the blood. So did Fenrir. And everyone else, too.
Thor began to breathe hard. His face grew red. His eyes bulged. The veins and tendons on his thick neck all stood out. His grip on the hammer tightened so much you could hear something snapping—probably his sinews, but maybe the actual granite.
“Berserker!” Nott cried. “Run! Run away! He is going berserk!”
Thor took Mjolnir, screamed something incoherent, and threw it with all his might straight at Stefan. Stefan fortunately was not one of those big muscle-bound guys who are slow and clumsy. Stefan was quick as a snake. He bent back, and the massive hammer went flying past his chest—so close that it ripped his shirt.
Mack was almost knocked over by the wind of the hammer’s passing. The tapestries flapped like laundry on a line in a gale. Nott’s gown whipped. Fenrir’s fur ruffled.
Mjolnir flew all the way down the hall. It smashed into the distant wall—crash!—with a sound like a freeway pileup. And then, impossibly, it came flying straight back to Thor’s high-held hand.
“Huh,” Stefan remarked. “Excellent.”
Stefan grabbed the front of his lacerated shirt, yanked it off, and tossed it aside. He was about twelve feet tall now, a giant with glistening muscles.
“Oh yeah, that’ll do,” Jarrah said admiringly. Then added, “I meant he’s big enough now to fight.”
“Muscles are not so important,” Dietmar muttered through pursed lips.
Thor wasn’t waiting around for Stefan to get any bigger. With a bellow that literally shook the walls, he leaped at Stefan.
Stefan slashed. Thor swung. Both missed.
They whirled past each other, came back around face-to-face, and Stefan raised the sword high and brought it down hard. It missed Thor’s skull but hacked off a few inches of hair. The blow threw Thor off balance so he couldn’t wield his hammer, but even falling away, he could kick. His boot caught Stefan in the chest and knocked him flying.
“Stefan!” Jarrah cried.
Stefan skidded halfway down the hallway on his back. His bare back skin made a squeegee sound.
“AAAAAAAAH!” Thor cried in loud triumph.
It had to be said that both Thor and Stefan seemed to be having a very good time.
But when Stefan got up, he had grown another several feet. He banged his head against the high, arched ceiling. He frowned, reached to one of the chandeliers, and pulled out what looked like a dark blue cloth.
“Someone want this?”
“My scarf!” Nott said. “So that’s where it was.”
Stefan had to squeeze to get his head around the chandelier and get back into the fight.
“He’s getting too big,” Mack said.
“I know. What’s the Vargran for ‘Stop growing’?”
“Like I know?” He felt Nott’s disk in his pocket. The disk that supposedly could be combined with another to unlock Vargran power words. Why a stone disk? Did none of these people understand the concept of a computer file?
“I don’t know ‘stop.’ I only know ‘larger’ and ‘smaller.’”
Thor charged with a roar.
Stefan handled the sword like a toy now. He whipped it around in a circle of steel, like a lawn-mower blade.
Thor stopped charging. He drew back mighty Mjolnir, and there was no way he could possibly miss now. Not with Stefan basically filling the entire hallway.
“Esk-ma pateet!” Jarrah yelled.
Mjolnir flew.
A bright turquoise-and-gold serpentine creature smacked into the hammer in midair. Mjolnir went flying harmlessly past Stefan, but knocked Xiao into a wall with a sickening crunch.
“Hey!” Stefan yelled. “I promised to get her back safe!”
He charged Thor—who was still waiting on Mjolnir to return—and stabbed him with the sword.
The sword went into Thor’s side and opened him up like a gutted trout. . . . Well, it would have gone straight into Thor’s side and opened him up like a gutted trout except that Stefan was shrinking. And he was shrinking even faster than he had grown. So instead of the trout-gutting move, it was a thigh-stabbing move.
Blood sprayed. It sprayed like a fire hose because there’s no such thing as a berserker without high blood pressure.
“AAAARRGH!” Thor cried.
“Yeah, try that on,” Stefan said. But it was less than effective as a triumphant gloat because he was getting a bit of a chipmunk sound in his voice as he shriveled like cashmere in a hot dryer.
Thor was yelling and dancing around in pain, holding the wound in his thigh. It was a good thing he was distracted, because Stefan was now just about hobbit sized, and that whole scene where the hobbit stabs the king of the Nazgûl in the foot is fine in a book or a movie, but this was real life.
“Make him grow again!” Mack cried.
“You can’t repeat a spell in less than twenty-four hours!”
“Huh,” Stefan said in an adorable little voice.
“Plan B: ruuuun!” Mack cried.
Xiao had recovered. She swooped low, snatched tiny Stefan up, and they all pelted past Thor, who was really being kind of a big baby about the wound in his thigh.
Mack, Jarrah, and Dietmar raced after her. Nott swept in behind them, providing a sort of shield from whatever Thor might throw their way next.
The observatory was just ahead. What exactly that meant for Mack, he wasn’t sure.
Chapter Thirty
NOT VERY LONG AGO . . .
Paddy “Nine Iron” Trout grew old in the service of the Nafia and the Pale Queen. The world changed around him, going from bad to worse. Then back to bad. Then worse again.
He lived through wars and plagues and many terrible hard times. He survived them all. He even survived the departure of Simon Cowell from American Idol.
After long, long lives, his parents died.
First his father, who drank himself to death. No, not whiskey: sow’s milk. It was the sow’s milk of August. Never drink sow’s milk in August. Sh! You don’t need to know why: just don’t.
Then, at the age of 121, Paddy’s mother died of a broken hearth.
As you know, a hearth is a fireplace. And in County Grind all the cooking was done in the hearth. Mother Trout was getting quite old, and a little forgetful. She had prepared oat-stuffed bladder a thousand times before. But this time—who knows what may have distracted the poor dear—she forgot to pierce the bladder. In the heat of the hearth the bladder swelled, swelled, bigger and bigger, and with no way for the oat vapor to be released, it exploded. The hearth blew apart, killing Mother Trout instantly.
Paddy came to her funeral.
Well, actually he was on the way to kill a guy over in County Toyle and he thought, You know, while I’m here, I could finally kill Liam. That would have been a twofer.
But when he arrived at the old house, he saw the terrible damage done, and in his heart he knew he couldn’t kill Liam. Because with the house all destroyed, the farm was worthless. The last thing Paddy wanted to do was inherit a worthless farm. Far better to let Liam live out his miserable, impoverished days on a run-down oat farm.
So, actually, it was just coincidence that Paddy happened to arrive on the day of Mother Trout’s funeral.
It was a solemn affair with all due ceremony.
Afterward Liam came over to Paddy and said, “So, what have you been up to this last nearly-a-century, little brother?”
“I’ve been working to enslave the human race and ensure the triumph of evil,” Paddy said.
“Ah, so you’re a mortgage broker. Did you never marry?”
“None of your concern,
you dull-witted oat farmer,” Paddy snapped.
But as he turned and walked away from County Grind, never to return, he remembered when he first met Ereskigal and had his heart broken as thoroughly as Mother Trout’s hearth.
Paddy knew he would never know happiness. And over the years he had begun to wonder if he would even live long enough to see the rise of the Pale Queen—the monster who could have been his mother-in-law if only things had worked out differently.
It was then, at a low point in Paddy’s life, with old age and disappointment crowding around him, with his health failing, with his almost entirely green wardrobe no longer in fashion, that she, the princess Ereskigal, appeared to him again—unchanged by the years, except for her hairstyle—and told him that he had one last great task to perform.
“There is a second Twelve, Paddy,” Risky said.
“Twenty-four?” he guessed.
“No, you doddering, gasping, wrinkled old fool, a new Magnifica, a second Twelve of Twelves. They mean to stop us.”
Paddy’s rheumy eyes glittered. His clotted lungs wheezed. “Has the first of the Twelve been revealed?”
Risky smiled her alluring yet not exactly warm smile and said, “His name is Mack.”
She slipped her business card into his hand. It read, “Ereskigal. Evil Princess.” And her email. But in pen she had written Mack’s address and a description that was heavy on the use of the word medium.
“Kill him,” Risky said. And for just a fleeting second as he took the card, his aged, arthritic, papery-skinned old fingers touched her hand and sent a shudder of disgust through her. “Kill him for Mom and me, Paddy.”
With more energy and purpose than he had known in many, many (many) years, Paddy “Nine Iron” Trout turned on his heel and marched sloooowly away to kill once more for his only love.
Chapter Thirty-one
The observatory turned out to be a god’s version of the ultimate TV room. It was a very large, spherical space made more cozy by massive timbers that held up the arched roof. Various stuffed heads had been mounted on the rough-hewn timbers: deer, elk, antelope, reindeer, wolf, wild boar, something that looked like a yak, something else that looked like a buffalo, something that may have been a dragon, and several somethings that definitely looked like humans.
Here, too, there were some empty spaces, where the best-looking heads had presumably been taken to the flea market.
All the remaining mounted heads had the fiercest expressions they could muster. It couldn’t have been easy for the taxidermist to make a moose look murderous. Much easier with the human heads, who all seemed to have huge, bristly beards and crazy blue eyes.
But all that was just decoration—sort of the berserker version of a Zac Efron poster hanging on the wall. The interesting thing about the room was that there were twelve recessed circles on the stone floor, each containing water that went right up to the rim and threatened to spill out.
Above each round pool was a 3-D image: a soccer game, a meadow, a bear sleeping in a cave, a movie theater showing Fantastic Mr. Fox 2: Chicken Apocalypse, a circle of moldering old stones, a golden temple in the middle of a lake, another soccer match, what looked like an isolated house at night, and the caldera of a volcano.
One of the circles was out of order and the picture was flickering in and out, more snow and static than picture.
It was the volcano that drew every eye. Because there, standing on a rocky promontory, was the princess Ereskigal. Or Hel as she was known around here.
Risky.
Mack had the unsettling feeling that Risky could see through the hologram and right into the observatory.
Odin, or Wotan, sat in a high throne. It looked pretty comfortable, piled deep with furs and plaid blankets. It was mounted on a sort of crude track that extended all the way around the room. By his hand Odin had a lever, like the ones you might see on a San Francisco cable car.
He was watching one of the soccer matches with great interest, leaning forward in his throne. But then he yanked the lever and his throne went scooting along its track, bringing him to a stop in front of the second soccer game.
Clearly TiVo had not made it to Asgard. And the channel-surfing method was primitive. On the other hand, this was some very real-looking 3-D.
“How do we escape?” Mack asked Nott.
She waved her hand to encompass the various holograms. “Each is a portal.”
Xiao set Stefan down. He stood about two feet tall. She switched to her human look.
Risky coming from one direction. Thor—recovered from his wound but not recovered from the humiliation—and Fenrir from the other.
Time for a quick decision.
“Follow me!” Mack yelled. And he dived headfirst into the nearest pool. It happened to be one of the two soccer games.
If there was regular water in the pool, it sure didn’t feel like it. In fact, it felt as if he was diving through a giant bubble. Not like it popped but like it kind of slid over his skin like a superthin membrane.
And all at once, there he was at midfield in the middle of a soccer game. Mack, Xiao, Jarrah, Dietmar, and a midget Stefan, all on the trampled grass.
Now, when you hear the words soccer game, maybe you’re thinking about the kind of games you know from Saturday junior leagues all over the country, with girls or boys in bright uniforms sort of indifferently chasing a ball around while coaches yell unheeded advice and parents sit on the sidelines in fold-out chairs secretly checking their BlackBerries.
This wasn’t like that.
In this game the players looked like they’d been constructed out of action figures. And where the parents would normally be sitting, there were something like thirty thousand people in a huge arc of stands.
At the exact instant Mack and his friends appeared, one of the players was taking a shot on goal. All thirty thousand people were on their feet shouting. Also gesticulating and making faces. (It’s almost impossible to shout without also making faces, and once you’ve gone that far, you might as well gesticulate.)
In any case, it was a roar of noise.
Then the player noticed that there were four kids and a little person standing in the middle of the field. His foot missed. The ball flew wide.
The stadium went from frenzied roar to utter silence—silence so profound that Mack could hear his own heartbeat.
Thirty thousand pairs of eyes, totaling 59,999 eyes in all—an old dude up in row 14 had a glass eye, which doesn’t really count—went from staring at the kicker and the goalkeeper to staring at the sudden apparition in midfield.
You could almost hear the eyeballs snap.
TV cameras swung around.
The camera that hung above the field on a wire scooted toward them.
“They’ve spotted us,” Dietmar said.
“I believe you may be right,” Mack said.
The crowd had indeed spotted them. And the crowd was not happy about it. Thirty thousand voices bellowed in outrage. Not astonishment or surprise or disbelief, mind you: outrage. Fury. Hatred. Because while it was definitely unusual for a bunch of kids to suddenly pop up in midfield, the really important thing was that the goal had been missed.
Black-and-white-striped officials ran at them.
Players from both teams ran at them, and they were faster and scarier.
And just as they were closing in, a big hand reached out of midair and grabbed Jarrah. A hand, an arm, and no body. And it was big enough to close its grip right around Jarrah.
Once again the stands fell silent. Because now they were finally seeing something even more important than the match.
The arm and hand began to withdraw into . . . into nothing, really. The hand had reached out of thin air. And it was drawing Jarrah away into thin air.
Dietmar was quickest and closest. He grabbed on to Jarrah’s hand and held on tight. But the hand was still pulling, so Mack grabbed Dietmar, and Xiao grabbed Mack, and Stefan—who was an adorable eighteen inches tall—grabbed Xiao
’s ankle, and they all pulled back.
It was tug-of-war with an unseen god, which sounds like it might be the metaphorical title of a sermon, but in this case was a literal description of reality.
Jarrah slipped out of sight, drawn into nothing. But then she reappeared, pulled back.
Suddenly, the soccer players started getting into the act. They didn’t like kids wandering around midfield, but they were even more opposed to giant hands. So they began to pummel the mighty god fingers and pull on Jarrah, and they kept it up until a gigantic wolf’s head poked into view and roared so loudly, with such angry ferocity, that some pretty tough-looking guys lost their grip and ran screaming like little girls.
Only one player managed to hold on as Jarrah, Dietmar, Mack, Xiao, and tiny Stefan were yanked powerfully through the portal, to land in a disorganized heap on the floor of the observatory.
The hand did not belong to Thor as they had expected. It was mighty Odin’s mighty hand. And Odin the mighty was mightily angry.
“I had a three-hundred-mark bet on that match!” Odin raged.
“You mean three thousand euros,” Dietmar corrected him.
Odin blinked. He blinked again. Mack waited for the deathblow. As big and scary as Thor was, there was something about the very angry Odin that spelled out “No one messes with me!” in big, flashing neon letters. Odin looked old and worn down, but he looked like an old and worn-down version of a very scary guy you would not have wanted to meet when he was young and unworn.
In fact, Thor and Fenrir were hanging back and looking a bit nervous. After all, Odin might decide to blame them for this interruption in the match and the loss of his bet. Fenrir was chewing his paw, trying to look nonchalant, and Thor was paying a lot of attention to Mjolnir, which was now a guitar once more and apparently in need of polishing with Thor’s sleeve.
Mack closed his eyes, prepared for death, and thought, Well, it was a good life. Short but good.
But when Mack looked again, he saw Odin’s face transforming slowly from enraged mythological divinity to sheepish, starstruck fan.
Odin actually wiped a nervous hand on his tunic. He extended it to the soccer player, who stood gaping like your goldfish after you accidentally drop it on the carpet.