The Trap (The Magnificent 12 2)

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.