I had no way of knowing how long I remained lying in the dirt, but I didn’t pass out; I remained conscious for every single second of the expulsion of my power. When it finally seemed to be over, I got to my feet, looking up at the maelstrom of fire and air that towered all around me. I remembered being told that for only a few hours, I would have full access to the power that existed inside of me.
At that precise moment, the power that I’d expelled rushed back toward me like a nuclear sonic boom. The force threw me onto the ground again, where I remained until the ringing in my ears stopped and I could breathe normally.
I looked up at the sky and saw a helicopter high above me. How long had I been here? The forest was no longer ablaze, although whether that was from the recalling of my power or from the fact that everything was now ash, I didn’t know. The crater was large enough to hold a sizable house, and I climbed out of it slowly until I reached the crater’s edge and stood upright for the first time in what felt like hours.
I felt no different than I did prior to my “death” two years ago when facing my enemies, but I knew I was. I felt the power seething inside me. How I could wield it, the things I could do. I walked back through the forest, then jogged, and finally broke into a flat-out sprint. After five hundred meters the forest was no longer burned beyond all recognition. It was a near-perfect line of ash to green.
The helicopter wasn’t in the sky when I reached my house and found Loki outside, which hopefully meant I wasn’t about to be plastered all over the evening news.
I stopped beside Loki, offering him my hand. “Thank you for all you did for me.”
He shook it. “My pleasure.”
“You chose your name based on the actors who play Thor and Odin in the films.”
Loki nodded and smiled. “I figured ‘Tom’ was too on the nose. I saw the films over the years, and I liked that while I was the villain, I was entertaining. So now you know. Baldr is your half brother.”
“Baldr is my half brother,” I repeated. “And he knew.”
Loki nodded. “I guess so, yes.”
“I’m going to kill him,” I said. “No games, no playing. He will die by my hand. I don’t care if he’s family; he’s a psychopath who murdered countless thousands of people over the years.”
“Judging from what I just saw, you might actually have the power to back that up. You have about eighteen hours, by the way. Minus the time you spent up on the mountain. After that, your power reduces to more manageable levels while you relearn how to use it. It’ll take a few years before you’re back up to this level again.”
“How long was I up there?” I asked, looking up at the night sky.
“It’s just after three a.m., so about six hours,” Loki said. “Never seen anything like it. Not once. That’s the kind of power that will make people take notice. Your parents certainly did a good job.”
Six hours, I said to myself, completely shocked. “I assume you’re not my half brother?”
Loki smiled and shook his head. “Not related to Odin by blood. I was given by my parents to Odin and Frigg to look after. It was a sort of pact between the frost giants and Norse gods. That’s my understanding of it. Giants are weird.”
“So what are you?”
“A little bit of everything,” he said. “My father was a giant. My mother was half-conjurer, half–earth elemental. So I sort of got a bit of all three. And they reacted strangely to one another, so I can shapeshift my face and body. I’m an anomaly, according to Thor.” Loki’s smile was tinged with sadness.
“Baldr really did kill him, then?” I asked.
Loki nodded. “I couldn’t stop him. I tried. Thor threw everything at Baldr, trying to get him to stop, trying to get him to listen to reason, but it didn’t work, and Thor was eventually overpowered and killed. Baldr used a poisoned blade like the one he used on Frigg. Thor disarmed him, but not before Baldr caught him with the blade. After that it was just a matter of time.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“You’d have liked Thor. He was a spoiled brat on occasion, but he was loyal and friendly, and there was no one else I’d have wanted watching my back in a fight.”
I placed my hand on Loki’s shoulder. “Let’s go kill Baldr and give Thor, and all of the others whose lives Baldr has ruined, some justice.”
“You should know that while you were gone, the Harbingers took over Clockwork. They burned a few of the buildings down and marched pretty much the entire population to either the high school or town hall. There’s a truck outside of the school; it looks like it’s used for transporting petrol or oil or something.”
“Get to Portland. Warn everyone there that Baldr has a plan about the protest. He’s going to use that grendel blood to cause the human protesters to attack everything around them. There’s something else, too, but I’m not sure what yet.” My mind went back to when Addison had been injected with the blood, just before she’d gone wild and killed Brooke. I told Loki.
“You think that the truck has this airborne version of the blood in it?”
I nodded. “I’d put money on it. They were going to do a test run here before using it on the protesters. They want to make something happen that’s so bad that the human governments will happily give them more free rein. That the people of this country will support them having more powers. It’s all about taking what is given, little by little, until you’re in a police state that they’ll claim is for your own safety.”
“You going to be okay by yourself?”
I smiled and raised my hand, and lightning leaped between my fingers. “Once this town is free of Avalon and Nazi control, I’ll head to Portland, and we’ll stop Baldr.”
“I know you have your magic back, but I figured you’d want these.” He threw me a bag full of leather combat armor adorned with runes. I quickly changed into them and used the hose at the front of the house to wash my face and hair, removing a vast amount of dirt.
“Good shout,” I said when I’d finished getting dressed. “I must have looked like some sort of monster walking down the hill.”
“It wasn’t your finest hour,” Loki agreed. “The leather armor is inscribed with the usual runes for Hades’s people. They’ll stop some serious magical power, but a silver bullet is still going to go through. Do not forget that. You’re not immortal, Nate. Or impervious.”
I put my jacket on over the armor. I looked bulky, but Loki was right; the armor might well save my life.
“You need any weapons?” Loki asked.
I shook my head and set off at a run through the forest toward the town of Clockwork. The high school was at the far end and the town hall in the center, and seeing as how I didn’t want anyone to start firing at the people who were being kept there, I had to be silent until I got to the school. I reached the outskirts of the town and knelt in the forest, watching for patrols. The town hall was only a few minutes from me, but I didn’t want to get surprised by anyone in the town. I looked down the main street to the far end where the town and forest met. There were at least two vehicles down there. Time to go to work.