“A little flame like that?” rumbled the Jotun. “Against a son of Muspelheim?”
Dammit. Fire was my go-to exactly because it usually did the trick.
The Jotun snorted contemptuously. Then he swung his axe broadside at a building, which put up about as much resistance as dandelions do to machetes, and sent a cloud of broken glass and concrete and steel at me.
I lifted my arm to cover my face and brought up my shield. Broken glass rattled against the spell-armored sleeve of my duster. One piece got by and my ear suddenly went hot and tingly. The rest slammed into my shield and drove me back until I hit the hood of a parked car, taking my legs out from under me and sending me crashing to my back on the sidewalk.
My heart slammed with terror.
This wasn’t a fight; it was an earthquake—and I was running around in the middle of it like a damned fool.
Svangar took a couple of huge strides and the axe came down.
I braced the end of my staff against the hollow of my shoulder, the way I would have a rifle, and screamed, “Forzare!”
The air was too thick with energy that night. I’d given the spell a lot more than I meant to. The staff kicked back against me like a mule. I heard my shoulder re-dislocate with an audible tearing sound and a burst of pain-static—but I held on and was flung violently away from the descending axe.
I fetched up against another car, hard enough to drive the wind right out of me.
The Jotun turned his axe sideways like a flyswatter, took a stride toward me, and raised it.
And that was when I saw Bradley vanish into the haze, the last of the company of escapees—but Murphy hadn’t gone with them.
She was standing next to her Harley, and the box labeled CAMPING SUPPLIES was wide open.
I watched her draw out a round tube with a couple of grip points and a control pad, painted olive drab. She extended the tube, flipped up some kind of little doohickey on it, lifted it to her freaking shoulder, and settled her fingers lightly on the control pad.
“You fight like a woman, seidrmadr,” Svangar snarled.
“Hey, drittsekk!” Murphy shouted.
Svangar turned his head toward her, his expression furious.
One corner of her mouth crooked up in a smile and her blue eyes were cold. “Me, too.”
And she fired the weapon.
I don’t know a lot about military hardware. But if you’re going to fight a Jotun, it seems to me a bazooka is about the right caliber.
I didn’t really see the rocket fly. That’s not how those things work. They move at about the speed of a handgun bullet. There was simply an explosion followed almost instantaneously by another explosion in the hollow of Svangar’s throat. CrackBOOM.
Resisting fire was a nifty trick, but in the end, again, Sir Isaac will always weigh in on matters. Fire is an absolute, a collection point of energy, and it can always get hotter. Eventually, as with any defense, there’s a limit to what it can do, a point of catastrophic failure—and Murphy’s rocket found that limit.
Ever see a watermelon get smashed with a sledgehammer?
It was sort of like that.
Flesh and blood exploded from the Jotun in a cloud of aerial chum. I could see Svangar’s cracked and blackened collarbone and his freaking spine through the hole in his neck. The Jotun staggered, his shoulder smashing into a building, raised his axe one last time—and fell as it dropped from his suddenly nerveless fingers.
The giant’s body crushed two cars and knocked over a streetlight as it came down. One outflung hand landed not three feet from my toes.
And suddenly the street was silent and very still.
I got up and walked toward her, taking slow steps, wide around the fallen Jotun. It was a little difficult to keep my balance. I might not have been able to feel it, but the pain was taking its physical toll on me. My entire body tingled unpleasantly.
“Fight like a woman, my ass,” Murphy muttered darkly, glowering at the dead giant.
She stood there with the rocket launcher on her shoulder and one hand on her hip and grinned at me as I came close.
“Seriously?” I asked. “A bazooka?”
“Had two. That other one was my practice launch,” she said.
“You never told me about it.”
Her grin widened. “No, you great gawking man-child. You’d have wanted to play with it.”
I put a hand over my heart and gave her a wounded look. “Ow.”
“Truth hurts, huh?”
“Drittsekk?” I asked her.
“Norwegian for, ah, scumbag,” she said. Then she glanced at my expression and said, “I’m a cop, Harry. There’s tradition to consider.”
Before I could respond, Rudolph’s panicky voice screamed, “Both of you, don’t move! Don’t either of you scumbags move a fucking muscle!”
I blinked and looked to one side. Rudolph had a shiner on his jawline that had already swollen into a proper mouse. He was standing on his feet, wobbling, his face pasty and his eyes wide and confused. His suit was torn and wrinkled and sprinkled with bits of blood from what appeared to be a broken nose. But he was in a Weaver stance, had recovered his gun from where Bradley had lost it, and had the weapon leveled at Murphy.
“Terrorist!” he gabbled. “You’re a goddamned terrorist!”
“Rudolph,” Murphy said, “you don’t know what’s going on.”
The whites of his eyes got bigger. “You just killed someone with a rocket launcher!”
Murphy eyed the fallen Jotun. “That was the idea, yeah.”
“Hey, hey, Rudolph,” I said. “Easy. Easy. Look, we can’t be here for very long. There’s more of the enemy coming. We all need to go.”
“Shut up, shut up!” Rudolph screamed, tracking the gun to me. “Shut the fuck up, you lowlife!”
I began to lift a hand, to flick a wave of force at him, to take the gun out of his hand—but I didn’t.
I looked at my arm. I told it to rise. It ignored me. I couldn’t tell what was going on behind the cloud of static flooding my nervous system. Christ, that was the shoulder I’d dislocated, again. Without being able to sense the pain of the injury, I hadn’t noticed.
“Rudolph!” Murphy said, her voice cracking with authority. “We’re trying to help you. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, man, at least take your finger off the trigger.”
Rudolph swung the weapon back to Murphy and began to shriek in a high-pitched voice, pushing the gun forward for emphasis. “I don’t need you to—”