Hammered [3] Read Online Free PDF

follow your instincts.
    “Kill ’em all, Atticus,” imaginary Kirk said in my right ear. “One blow from Moralltach is all it takes. They can’t see you; it’ll be easy.”
    “That would be unwise,” imaginary Spock said to the fragments of cartilage dangling on my left. A German witch had shot off most of my left ear three weeks ago, and while the healing was going better than the time a demon had chewed off my right one, it still didn’t look very good. “A better course of action would be to complete the mission stealthily. The probability of injury ordeath increases exponentially once your presence is discovered, coupled with time for the alarm to spread.”
    Kirk kissed his self-control good-bye. “Damn it, Spock, we’re on a different plane of existence here, and sometimes you just have to say fuck it and let your balls swing heavy, free, and low. Right, Atticus? Kill ’em all! For Ratatosk!”
    “Captain, our mission here is to purloin an apple that confers the vitality of youth to those who consume it, nothing more. Wholesale slaughter is neither advisable nor necessary.”
    “What is it with you, Spock? Always prudence and caution and tiptoeing through the tulips. Don’t you have any stones in your Vulcan panties?”
    “My reproductive organs are both present and in perfect working order, Captain, but that is hardly germane to our discussion. One cannot solve every problem through sheer machismo and violence.”
    “Why not? It works for Chuck Norris.”
    This is how I entertain myself when I have to run for hours and I can’t worry anymore about the ninety-nine ways I could die. I should have brought an iPod.
    The moorish demesne of Yggdrasil gave way beneath my churning feet to the Plain of Idavoll, an impressive expanse of untamed grassland that hid plump pheasants, prairie voles, and sleek red foxes. Clouds hung like torn cotton in an achingly blue sky, and a late-autumn breeze blew scents of grass and earth in my face. It was a lovely day, but I could not enjoy it. A novice tracker could follow the trail I was leaving with little difficulty, and even though it was a planned tactic in the coming game of Seek and Destroy the Intruder, I couldn’t help but feel nervous about it.
    I caught myself wishing that Scotty—the patron saint of all travelers?—could simply beam me across the plain to Idunn’s hall. Teleportation was his godlike power—thatand getting his engines not only to warp speed, but to warp speed
faster
with nothing more than some auxiliary tubes and mysterious bypasses.
    People used to think that Druids were capable of teleportation, but of course that’s nonsense. I’ve never disintegrated my atoms in one place and reassembled them in another. I have, however, run tirelessly for miles, as I was currently doing, faster than any normal man could huff and puff. And I’ve cheated by taking shortcuts through Tír na nÓg, where any grove can be bound to any Fae woodland on earth—Fae in the sense that it’s a healthy forest. Getting to Russia from Arizona took me less than five minutes: I shifted planes to Tír na nÓg, found the knots that led to a forest in Siberia like a railroad in my sight, then pulled myself along them until I was standing on the other side of the globe in the land of borscht and amusing furry hats. In order to make that shift, however, I’d had to get down to the Aravaipa Canyon Wilderness from Tempe, and that had taken me nearly two hours. And once in Russia in a proper forest, it was a healthy three-hour trip overland to the high tundra lake bound to the Well of Mimir.
    There were no shortcuts for me now. I’d have to run everywhere. But that, I came to decide, was not necessarily a bad thing. My longing for teleportation waned as I grew accustomed to the feel of the earth and the flow of magic beneath it. As far as ontological projections of human angst about the afterlife go, Asgard is one of the nicer ones. It is somewhat spare in its diversity