I looked up to find the Jotun standing maybe twenty yards away, scowling down at me. It tilted its enormous head and studied me for a few seconds. Then in a voice so deep I could barely understand the word, it rumbled, “Seidrmadr.”
What the hell. I faced it and said, “Jotun.”
Its brow furrowed with cold anger. His skin was ruddy, his features rough-hewn, and his eyes were an almost violent shade of grass green within the shadows of his helm. From this close, I could see the enormous ugly scarring around his mouth, faded with time but lumpy and displeasing nonetheless. “Who are you and what have you done, that I might know whom I kill?”
Oh right. Old-school Viking. I had been recognized as someone worth fighting, and now it was time to boast, which suited me fine. I had people who needed time to escape.
I glanced back over my shoulder, to where Bradley was struggling to rise, cradling the child with great care and tenderness inside the circle of his torn and bleeding arms, and with a shock, I realized why he’d been at that day-care center in the first place.
The little girl was his.
Oh God.
If Maggie was on this street right now, I’d be losing my mind with terror for her.
Bradley staggered up drunkenly and then turned to Rudolph, who was stirring feebly.
“Get the girl out,” I said in a low, intense voice. “She’s more important. I’ll take care of Rudy.”
Bradley hesitated. Of course. No good cop leaves his partner behind. But Bradley had seen some awful things that night, and he made the choice most fathers would.
He picked up his little girl and ran to get her clear.
I turned back to the Jotun and drew myself up to my full height, which meant I was eye to lower quadriceps with him.
“I am Harry, son of Malcolm,” I shouted back. “I have battled dark sorcerers and black knights! I have fought men and beasts in numbers too great for counting, invaded the heart of Winter, confronted necromancers and the living dead, vampires and ghouls and demons in their hordes endless! I have matched wits with the six Queens of Faerie and prevailed, and thwarted the combined will of the White Council! When they came for my child, I smote the Red Court of Vampires, and laid them in ruin for all the world to see. I am Harry, son of Malcolm, and I have entered the vaults of Tartarus, and stolen its treasures beneath the gaze of Hades himself! And I’m about to add giant slaying to my résumé.”
That seemed to please the Jotun immensely. His smile grew wider and wider, showing more and more teeth the size of dinner plates. “Impressive claims.”
“Damned right,” I shouted back. “Who are you and what do you got?”
The Jotun lifted his hand. There was a groan of concrete and steel breaking, and then that damned huge axe just flew back into his hand as if it had been drawn by a cartoon magnet.
“I am Svangar, son of Svangi,” the Jotun roared back. He used one hand to gesture toward his scarred mouth, infusing it with contempt. “I have fought the Odinson and lived to tell the tale.”
I swallowed.
I didn’t know much about Thor beyond what stories, comics, and movies tell. But from what I understood he was pretty much the Jotnar’s boogeyman. If this particular Jotun had survived that boss fight, it was probably safe to assume he was no pushover.
Worse, I had hoped to keep his attention longer, while he bawled his boasts in my face. Just my luck, I had probably found the one Jotun in the universe who had a humblebrag of that magnitude. You couldn’t not use that one to boast.
My mouth was pretty dry. I didn’t reply. I just nodded.
Svangar nodded back.
Then he roared and came at me, axe whirling.
The thing about creatures as big as the Jotun is that they come without power steering. There was simply too much mass building too much momentum for them to be quick to alter course—their whole life must be like walking on a sheet of slippery ice. Not only that, but nervous systems are nervous systems. Signals that have to travel a maximum of six feet are going to be faster than ones that have to cover twenty.
I had to make that advantage count. If I could dance fast enough, maybe I could maneuver Svangar into tripping into a building or something, and run before he got loose.
With the reach that axe gave him, there was no way to get around him without coming into range—and I did not want to do that. One hit from that thing, and I’d look like a Rorschach test image.
So I ran right at him.
Svangar bellowed a war cry as the axe came down toward me.
I pointed my staff to one side, focused my will, and screamed, “Forzare!”
Even magic can’t escape a lot of fundamental physics. Project force at something and it pushes back with an equal and opposite reaction. I used a lot of force, slamming against a brick building to my right. The building slammed me back, and the impact sent me flying to one side—and out from under the axe.
The axe cleaved into the asphalt where I’d been a second before. I flew sideways and forward, dropping into a roll as I came down to the ground. The giant roared, his momentum taking him into his own axe. The handle jabbed him in the gut with a whoosh of expelled air that sound like a miniature gale.
I made my feet again and darted up the street a dozen paces, to force the Jotun to face me and turn his back on the escapees.
Svangar wasn’t a dummy, though. He knew he was slower.
So he twisted his blazing axe, melted a bunch of the street’s asphalt into a blob of burning tar that could have filled a small hot tub, and flung it at me even before he’d begun to turn.
I dodged that one easily enough—but Svangar had never intended to turn me into a living, screaming tar baby. As the Jotun turned, he simply seized a disabled car in one hand and flung it at me sidearm at the speed of a major-league fastball.
I brought my shield up in time, angling it to my left as I darted right. The car hit the shield, which flared into nearly coherent green-gold light. Broken glass and fiberglass and metal flew out from the impact. The smashed car spun wildly away, but even so, Isaac Newton had his two bits. I was knocked to my right, staggered, and had to put a hand on the street to keep from falling.
I recovered my balance, drew my blasting rod from my coat, slammed my will through it, and shouted, “Fuego!”
The raw energy of the terrified city supercharged my spell. The beam of molten-gold energy that lashed out from its tip, as bright as any arc welder’s fire, forced me to close my eyes and turn away from its intensity in the smoldering ember light of the burning city, and left a blazon of blue-purple light across the insides of my eyelids.
I blinked them open again frantically to find the Jotun eyeing me, with a large section of the mail over his heart glowing deep orange.