He might have marked it, but he wasn’t keeping it. “Does he have the weapon mold?” I asked. It wouldn’t matter if Anna came through with what we needed from Hades—the place, not the dead god—if we didn’t have a way to construct a weapon out of it.
“Do you think I would have him come along if he did? I would’ve taken it and had him send me back . . . blessedly alone. Right now his company isn’t that enthralling. Hell, neither is his hygiene, and considering I clean the bar’s bathrooms, that’s saying something.” Leo studied his foster brother, which was as close an approximation I could come to how the Norse gods sketched out their family tree, although fostering had a much different connotation to the Norse gods and the Norse people. It built ties of loyalty among families where before there had been none. Leo lifted his upper lip with an emotion that appeared to be anything but familial or loyal, and brotherly love was completely out of the picture. “I try to destroy the world once and they give me holy hell about it forever, but golden boy spends his life staggering here and there, leaving vomit behind him like a trail of bread crumbs for Hansel and Gretel to follow out of the woods, and he’s raised on high. Worshipped above all others. Vikings named everything including their dicks after him. Unbelievable.”
“I thought Thor was a great warrior, per mythology anyway.” Griffin left the kitchen and went in for a closer look at mythology come to life. “Not to mention somewhat of a compadre of yours until you caused too much trouble for him to overlook.”
“We were ‘compadres’ until I outgrew the drinking, until I puked every day all day, which would’ve been a week after I started drinking. Every creature he killed, it was because he passed out on top of it and smothered the poor bastard. He was born with a horn of mead in one hand and a woman’s breast in the other. The hammer I gave him? The weapon of myth and mystery? He cracks walnuts with it.” Thor was bringing out the Loki in Leo in a big way.
At Leo’s last words, Thor’s snoring hitched. “Walnuts . . . good.” He drooled a tad more copiously and the snoring began again. As muscle-bound as artists of old had depicted him, he was dressed in a tank top—all the rage for Colorado in February—and a pair of sweatpants. One foot was covered with a black sneaker and the other one was bare. He did have shoulder-length blond hair, but from the dark roots and artificially even color, it was dyed. Worse, not only dyed, but it was a genuine at-home, from-a-box job. If you drank, that was your problem. If you drank too much to find a good hair salon, that was my problem, visually and aesthetically.
Being a god didn’t automatically mean you were a shape-shifter. It also could mean you were big, dumb, and just very, very difficult to kill. Thor fell into the latter category. In fact, he might have been the entire category, hogging it all to himself.
“That’s it. I need hair of the dog.” The drunken dog that was lying on the couch. Leo headed for the refrigerator.
“Since he is here, in all his glory.” I ducked as Zeke tossed Griffin a can of room deodorizer that was applied in earnest to the pile of Norse muscles, from big feet to bad dye job. He was pungent, there was no doubt. “Does that mean he’s going to help find the weapon mold, knows where it is, or is he here to laugh at you when Cronus squashes us like bugs on a windshield?” I asked. “Not that I can’t understand the entertainment value if I weren’t one of the bugs myself.”
Leo already had a beer open and half of it down. “He’s going to help. I humiliated myself and apologized . . . several times as he kept nodding off and missing parts of it. It’s all forgive and forget for now—unless he sobers up, but as I’ve not seen that happen since Leif the Lucky discovered America, pissed on a tree, and then left, I think we’re safe.” He drained the rest of the bottle. “We just need to get to LA. Hopefully by then our stand-in from a bad wrestling movie will be awake, but still not especially coherent. We can point, he can send one of us in, and we have the mold.”
“Which is where?” I stood and whispered the word “car” to Zeke. His face lit up with an enthusiasm that did not bode well for anyone who wasn’t us, in particular the neighbors who were such a good release valve for his anger management issues in the past.
Griffin watched him make for the back door. “What did you say to him? Car? Did . . . oh hell.” He followed after Zeke, but I imagined he’d be too late. Those unlucky neighbors were about to lose their temporary house on wheels.
“Which is where?” I repeated as the door slammed shut.
“The Natural History Museum in Los Angeles. Thor gave it to a pretty archeologist who worked there years ago and they put it in the Latin America exhibit recently.” He shrugged. “You know how Namaru tech works.”
I did. A strangely shifting race who built strangely shifting things. People saw what they wanted to see in what the Namaru had created, which is why archeologists had never found proof of the Namaru. They saw what they wanted to see and as they were unaware that the Namaru had existed, they never saw that. And as most of their work had been done in a material that resembled volcanic rock or black glass, Latin America wasn’t that far of a stretch. Mayans had used knives of volcanic glass, beautiful things for a less than beautiful purpose.
“The question is,” he continued, “did you get what we need to put in it? It’s pointless to have a weapon-making device if there’s nothing to put in it.”
“Ye of little faith. I would think hanging around demons and angels would change that. I have someone working on it.” I moved over to Thor’s feet. “You take the other end, the potentially vomit-spewing end. Let’s get him on the floor at least.”
“The things I do for you, not counting celibate showers,” he grumbled, and took his time wedging an arm behind Thor, securing his upper body and moving it to the coffee table, which took less than a second to collapse under the weight. “Well, he’s on the floor, more or less. So you have someone working on getting into Hades, finding the River Lethe, and getting back out, and they’re perfectly fine with this supernatural Mission: Impossible?”
“I engender love and goodwill wherever I go. People, dead people included, jump at the chance to do me a favor.” I bent down and secured a hold of Thor’s feet. “Ready?”
“Ready, yes. Convinced, no.” But he bent down and we carried Thor out to the scrap of rock and sand front yard. It was a little after two p.m. and the afternoon sun did nothing for the god’s orange skin. The Norse gods were a pasty group, excluding shape-shifters who were also pale in their original form, and they didn’t tan unless they sprayed it on. This looked like another DIY job. Thor needed to start embracing outsourcing.
I waved a hand at the still-snoring, now-sandy god. “You bring this to the table and you have problems with whom I send into Greek Hell? I know you must be joking.”
“No, I have confidence in whomever you sent. You’re on a job. You’re a professional. It’s the love and goodwill issue that I was doubting,” he said, as dry as the sand beneath our feet. “You can’t blame me, with Cronus and Eligos showing up routinely. I know neither has love of any sort for you.”
“Neither does the Angel of Death. It’s an epidemic lack of taste around here.” To the left of us, a car started as I saw a man and a woman running away from us and down the block, which would be the type of reaction that Zeke tended to engender. Love and goodwill? He had Griffin, he has his guns—what in the world could he possibly need with goodwill? It wasn’t necessarily the worst attitude to have, not in his particular business or his life, for that matter. It made things much more simple and expedient, as in blowing up your neighbor’s house for being drug dealers and then “borrowing” the car they were subsequently living in.