The Trap (16 page)

T
he 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.

Clearly TiVo had not made it to Asgard. And the channel-surfing method was primitive. On the other hand, this was some very real-looking 3-D.

“How do we escape?” Mack asked Nott.

She waved her hand to encompass the various holograms. “Each is a portal.”

Xiao set Stefan down. He stood about two feet tall. She switched to her human look.

Risky coming from one direction. Thor—recovered from his wound but not recovered from the humiliation—and Fenrir from the other.

Time for a quick decision.

“Follow me!” Mack yelled. And he dived headfirst into the nearest pool. It happened to be one of the two soccer games.

If there was regular water in the pool, it sure didn't feel like it. In fact, it felt as if he was diving through a giant bubble. Not like it popped but like it kind of slid over his skin like a superthin membrane.

And all at once, there he was at midfield in the middle of a soccer game. Mack, Xiao, Jarrah, Dietmar, and a midget Stefan, all on the trampled grass.

Now, when you hear the words
soccer game
, maybe you're thinking about the kind of games you know from Saturday junior leagues all over the country, with girls or boys in bright uniforms sort of indifferently chasing a ball around while coaches yell unheeded advice and parents sit on the sidelines in fold-out chairs secretly checking their BlackBerries.

This wasn't like that.

In this game the players looked like they'd been constructed out of action figures. And where the parents would normally be sitting, there were something like thirty thousand people in a huge arc of stands.

At the exact instant Mack and his friends appeared, one of the players was taking a shot on goal. All thirty thousand people were on their feet shouting. Also gesticulating and making faces. (It's almost impossible to shout without also making faces, and once you've gone that far, you might as well gesticulate.)

In any case, it was a roar of noise.

Then the player noticed that there were four kids and a little person standing in the middle of the field. His foot missed. The ball flew wide.

The stadium went from frenzied roar to utter silence—silence so profound that Mack could hear his own heartbeat.

Thirty thousand pairs of eyes, totaling 59,999 eyes in all—an old dude up in row 14 had a glass eye, which doesn't really count—went from staring at the kicker and the goalkeeper to staring at the sudden apparition in midfield.

You could almost hear the eyeballs snap.

TV cameras swung around.

The camera that hung above the field on a wire scooted toward them.

“They've spotted us,” Dietmar said.

“I believe you may be right,” Mack said.

The crowd had indeed spotted them. And the crowd was not happy about it. Thirty thousand voices bellowed in outrage. Not astonishment or surprise or disbelief, mind you: outrage. Fury. Hatred. Because while it was definitely unusual for a bunch of kids to suddenly pop up in midfield, the really important thing was that the goal had been missed.

Black-and-white-striped officials ran at them.

Players from both teams ran at them, and they were faster and scarier.

And just as they were closing in, a big hand reached out of midair and grabbed Jarrah. A hand, an arm, and no body. And it was big enough to close its grip right around Jarrah.

Once again the stands fell silent. Because now they were finally seeing something even more important than the match.

The arm and hand began to withdraw into . . . into nothing, really. The hand had reached out of thin air. And it was drawing Jarrah away into thin air.

Dietmar was quickest and closest. He grabbed on to Jarrah's hand and held on tight. But the hand was still pulling, so Mack grabbed Dietmar, and Xiao grabbed Mack, and Stefan—who was an adorable eighteen inches tall—grabbed Xiao's ankle, and they all pulled back.

It was tug-of-war with an unseen god, which sounds like it might be the metaphorical title of a sermon, but in this case was a literal description of reality.

Jarrah slipped out of sight, drawn into nothing. But then she reappeared, pulled back.

Suddenly, the soccer players started getting into the act. They didn't like kids wandering around midfield, but they were even more opposed to giant hands. So they began to pummel the mighty god fingers and pull on Jarrah, and they kept it up until a gigantic wolf's head poked into view and roared so loudly, with such angry ferocity, that some pretty tough-looking guys lost their grip and ran screaming like little girls.

Only one player managed to hold on as Jarrah, Dietmar, Mack, Xiao, and tiny Stefan were yanked powerfully through the portal, to land in a disorganized heap on the floor of the observatory.

The hand did not belong to Thor as they had expected. It was mighty Odin's mighty hand. And Odin the mighty was mightily angry.

“I had a three-hundred-mark bet on that match!” Odin raged.

“You mean three thousand euros,” Dietmar corrected him.

Odin blinked. He blinked again. Mack waited for the deathblow. As big and scary as Thor was, there was something about the very angry Odin that spelled out “No one messes with me!” in big, flashing neon letters. Odin looked old and worn down, but he looked like an old and worn-down version of a very scary guy you would not have wanted to meet when he was young and unworn.

In fact, Thor and Fenrir were hanging back and looking a bit nervous. After all, Odin might decide to blame them for this interruption in the match and the loss of his bet. Fenrir was chewing his paw, trying to look nonchalant, and Thor was paying a lot of attention to Mjolnir, which was now a guitar once more and apparently in need of polishing with Thor's sleeve.

Mack closed his eyes, prepared for death, and thought, Well, it was a good life. Short but good.

But when Mack looked again, he saw Odin's face transforming slowly from enraged mythological divinity to sheepish, starstruck fan.

Odin actually wiped a nervous hand on his tunic. He extended it to the soccer player, who stood gaping like your goldfish after you accidentally drop it on the carpet.

“You are . . . You are . . . Oh, by All-Father Me, you are Franz Müller! In the flesh! It is a great honor to meet you,” Odin said. “I'm a huge fan.”

The player extended a shaky hand and grasped two of Odin's salami-sized fingers.

“I saw you play for the national team against Spain when you scored three goals!” Odin enthused. “The greatest match I've seen in . . . well, I don't want to tell you how long; you'll think I'm—”

“A doddering old fool?”

For split second Mack was sure it was Dietmar. He didn't know Dietmar that well yet, but the kid had a distinct tendency to blurt out things that would be better kept to himself.

But it wasn't Dietmar.

Thor and Fenrir edged apart, and there she was in the space between them, striding forward with smirking confidence.

“Hel!” said Odin.

“Risky!” said Mack.

“You!” said Nott.

The daughter of the Pale Queen took a moment to pat Fenrir on his ruff.

Odin, who had seemed impossibly intimidating just seconds earlier, seemed to shrink and age as he gazed solemnly at the thin wisp of a girl.

There was no question who was more scared of who. Or whom. Whichever.

Or maybe there is a question, so let's clear up the hierarchy of fear: Odin was scared of Risky. Odin in turn scared Thor and Fenrir. Thor and Fenrir scared Nott.

And all of the above scared Mack. And none of the above scared Stefan, despite the fact that he was the size of a kitten. Jarrah lifted him up and cradled him in her arms protectively.

“So, Mack,” Risky said, revealing her perfect teeth in a smile that was at least as warm as a penguin's feet and almost as inviting as a graveyard at midnight, “did you have a nice flight from China?”

“Wait,” Thor said. But he said it politely. “We have a deal. I have your Magnifica. But before you take them, you have to pay me what you promised.”

Even when he was shaking with fear, Mack noticed things. And he noticed just the slightest flicker in Risky's amazing green eyes.

“Yes, of course; we'll talk about it later.”

Nott must have noticed something, too, because she said, “Don't trust her, you big oaf. She's lying.”

Again a slight flicker, quickly hidden by a narrowing of the princess's eyes and a baring of her teeth, which grew sharp and long and positively vampirish. “I keep my bargains.”

She snapped her fingers. The nearest of the pool-portals switched from the movie-theater view to a view of the park at the base of the Externsteine. More than a dozen blue-and-white police cars, and two orange-and-white ambulances, and a lot of cops and tourists—all agitated, many snapping pictures of the transformed monument, and some eating sandwiches—appeared and floated hologram-style.

There, in one corner, sucking on his oxygen while his flamboyantly dressed apprentice chatted with two girls, was Paddy “Nine Iron” Trout.

Risky's left arm began to grow. It stretched and turned serpentine. Or more accurately, octopoid (which is a real word). There were suckers lining the bottom of this fantastic appendage.

Risky extended her octo-arm into the hologram, wrapped it around Nine Iron, and pulled. He disappeared from the hologram and appeared, dazed and breathless, before them.

Risky didn't waste time on pleasantries or explanations. “Paddy, the money.”

Nine Iron's eyes—yellowish and evil—flitted left and right. He gulped. He fumbled for his oxygen. And for just a moment Mack had the impression that Nine Iron was blushing. Like a little girl. A little girl with very bad skin.

“The money, Paddy,” Risky said in a low voice.

“The money, is it?” Nine Iron stalled.

“Yes. The money.”

“Ah, well, as to the money . . . My apprentice put it all on one of these newfangled cards.”

“Your apprentice,” Risky said.

“The lad with the pantaloons.”

Using her octo-arm, Risky yanked Valin into the room.

“Gee-ah-ah-aaah!” Valin said upon seeing Odin, Thor, Nott, the Magnificent Four, the Asgard TV room, and Risky.

Risky held out her hand. Her actual hand. “The money.”

Mack was pleased to see that Valin fumbled repeatedly in his effort to extract what turned out to be a debit card.

“What is this?” Odin demanded.

“It's the way they do things now,” Risky said. She was clearly impatient. “Can I take my prisoners now?”

Odin looked unhappily at the card, turned it over, flicked it with his fingernail, and said, “Strange money.”

“Yes, time marches on,” Risky said. It was clearly a struggle for her to remain polite. But just as clearly, she didn't want to be distracted by a fight with Odin and the others. “It's the money, Odin. I don't lie.”

“I doubt that,” Dietmar said. “You are evil, and evil creatures would not hesitate to lie.”

This time Mack kind of appreciated Dietmar's bluntness. Because Odin was obviously unconvinced, and Thor kept looking around anxiously, like he was waiting for someone or something.

Finally Thor asked, “Where are they?”

An impatient growl escaped from Risky's perfect white throat. “They are waiting for you,” Risky said smoothly—too smoothly. “In fact, they are very excited to meet you, Thor.”

“Are they?” The god of thunder looked pleased.

Mack smelled a rat. “Who?”

Thor grinned. “Led Zeppelin. I'm playing a real gig with Led Zeppelin.”