Underworlds #2: When Monsters Escape (6 page)

L
OKI
.

My heart battered the inside of my chest as if it wanted to jump out and walk around.

Jon sighed. “We had to look, didn’t we? We couldn’t just go home, we had to look.”

“The glove told me he was nearby,” Dana whispered. “It knew somehow. It must have the same runic charm that makes his armor so powerful. If it knows when Loki is nearby, we can use it….”

Loki stood on the black earth next to his sledge, watching the trail of flaming torches recede into the north. His silver armor reflected their red glow. “Look, Fenrir,” he said. “Hades and his heroes march to the fringes of their realm. How quaint. I won’t be there when they come. My trick has worked. All they’ll meet are an army of dragons. A rather large army.”

“Trick?” Sydney whispered. “Hades is heading into an ambush?”

I didn’t want it to be true. Loki had played a trick, sending his forces to fake an attack on Hades’ northern lands, while he escaped to continue his quest.

A moment later, an army of Draugs marched up behind the sledge. They raised their swords high, then stood at attention.

“These guys are everywhere you look,” said Jon under his breath. “Just how many dead Vikings are there?”

“Millions,” said Dana.

“The children destroyed the forge? I will find another,” Loki said to the Draugs. “They captured
the two Cyclopes? I will unleash an army of giants. They stole my glove? I sense it near. And I will have it back.”

Dana trembled beside me and looked down at her hand. “Uh-oh. Maybe this isn’t such a good thing….”

We crouched perfectly still behind a stack of fallen trees and watched as Loki slipped a dagger out of his cloak and etched a new symbol on the side of the sledge.

“Hades plans to stop us in the north,” Loki continued, choking with laughter, “but alas, Fenrir, we travel … east. To the land of the twin rivers. The palace of beasts. The horned, the clawed, the fanged. All of them will join me.”

My mind was a whirlwind. I had no idea what I was seeing and hearing. But the bottom line was that Loki needed to be stopped. He needed to be stopped from whatever horror he was planning. Turn our whole world into a burning, freezing, dead place, all because he was mad at Odin? No. I couldn’t
not
try to stop it. The idea of a war between the gods was too horrifying.

But I was learning that horrifying was also the new normal.

“What are we going to do?” Sydney whispered.

“We have to tell Hades,” Jon put in, glancing back at the last of the torches.

“There’s no time,” I said.

“But we won today,” said Sydney. “The hourglass isn’t ticking anymore. Dana’s free.”

“So is Loki,” I whispered. “Free to do what he wants. We’ll lose him if we —”

“Don’t even go there,” said Jon. “Come on. Charon’s waiting for us. School. Home.”

Loki finished carving the rune into the sledge. His armor flashed as if a surge of power raced through it. Dana winced. I turned to her.

“Does it hurt badly?” I whispered.

She took a deep breath and nodded. “I can take it. Are you okay with the lyre?”

I didn’t know how to answer. Then I nodded. “Fine.”

Loki uttered a dark command to the Draugs.
The dead Vikings bowed and assembled behind the sledge.

“We can’t stop him,” Sydney whispered. “Not here. Not with all of these Draugs nearby. There must be a thousand of them. What could we possibly do?”

My brain knew she was right.
Turn now,
it said.
Go to the river, take Charon’s ferry home, go to sleep. Worry about the war in the morning.

But something else in me said,
You can’t let Loki go! You saw the oracle’s vision. He’ll destroy our world. Our families, Dana’s parents, everyone is in danger!

All that was true, too. My blood thundered in my ears. My heart battered my ribs. My brain came up with logical arguments for saving myself and forgetting Loki until tomorrow.

Unfortunately, my brain lost.

When Loki’s head was turned, and the Draugs had set their sights on the distant hills, I touched Dana’s good hand lightly, glanced at Jon and Sydney with what must have been a pretty dumb expression, and crept silently over to Loki’s magical sledge.

Without a thought in my head, I lifted the heavy furs on the back end of the sledge and crawled underneath them. I made myself as small as I possibly could and hoped it wasn’t the stupidest thing I’d ever done.

When the heavy furs lifted a few moments later, I almost choked.

But it wasn’t Loki.

Dana, Jon, and Sydney crawled under the furs next to me.

I was so glad my friends were just as stupid as I was.

I breathed out a long silent breath of relief, held the smelly furs tight with all my strength, and felt Loki’s sudden weight on the sledge. We heard the Draugs march away. We heard Loki whip the reins. We heard Fenrir’s triumphant roar, and felt the heat of his fiery breath.

Then the magic sledge jerked forward, bounding over the scorched earth. We traveled mile after mile, hour after hour. The surface of the ground changed. There was what felt like snow, then ice. The whole time, none of us spoke. We barely breathed.

Finally, the sledge began to slow.

The
shush
of the sledge’s rails up and down a series of gentle slopes lasted for a little while, then it stopped.

Silence.

We heard Loki whisper a command to Fenrir, followed by the jostle of reins. Then both of them left. After five minutes passed, ten, twenty, and we were sure Loki and his wolf were really gone, we lifted the furs and slid to the ground.

To the sand.

The air was hot under a starry night sky. A crescent moon shone over endless seas of sand.

A desert.

Not far away from us stood a desert city. It was monstrous — walled in amber stone, with statues of tall lion-headed creatures. There was a massive blue gate glistening in the moonlight, with studded doors as tall as a house. Crimson towers rose inside the walls. So did a huge cone-shaped temple of white and blue stones, hanging with luxurious gardens.

“So where are we?” Jon asked. “Dana?”

She frowned. “I know Norse and Greek the best,” she said. “But if I had to guess, I’d say we’re in the Babylonian Underworld.”

In the distance, something moved. Lots of somethings.

What at first had seemed like statues of men with lion heads along the amber walls, we saw now were sentinels — living creatures that patrolled the city.

Hundreds of them.

As far as the eye could see.

I drew in a long breath. “In other words, we’re a long way from home.”

Asgard
(Norse Mythology): home of the Norse gods and the court of Odin

Charon
(Greek Mythology): a ferryman who leads the souls of the dead across the River Styx to the Underworld

Cyclopes
(Greek Mythology): one-eyed giants

Draugs
(Norse Mythology): death walkers; souls living in dead bodies

Fenrir
(Norse Mythology): a giant, fire-breathing red wolf

Hades
(Greek Mythology): the ruler of the Underworld

Jason
(Greek Mythology): a human hero of many adventures; sailed a ship named the
Argo

Loki
(Norse Mythology): a trickster god

Lyre of Orpheus
(Greek Mythology): a stringed instrument that charms people, animals, and objects into doing things for Orpheus

Myrmidons
(Greek Mythology): skilled warriors

Odin
(Norse Mythology): the chief Norse god

Orpheus
(Greek Mythology): a musician who traveled to the Underworld to bring his wife back from the dead

River Styx
(Greek Mythology): a river that divides the land of the living from the land of the dead

Valkyries
(Norse Mythology): women who work for Odin and choose who lives and dies in battle

“P
REPARE YOURSELVES
,” P
ANU WHISPERED
.

Kingu was an insect over ten feet tall.

His body was formed of overlapping black plates that shifted as he moved. His legs — eight of them — looked like jackhammers, hinged with massive talons on the ends. He had industrial-size pincers for arms. His head was enormous, all knobby and angled, and his fanged mouth looked like a mechanical claw.

Finally, each large eye was yellow and deep, like fire blazing at the end of a tunnel.

Jon gasped. “He’s a … bug!”

“Scorpion,” said Panu. “Marduk cursed him into the shape of a giant, deadly desert scorpion. Kingu is now the Scorpion King.”

PHOTO BY DOLORES ABBOTT

TONY ABBOTT is the author of more than ninety books for young readers, including the popular The Secrets of Droon series;
Kringle; Firegirl,
which won SCBWI’s 2006 Golden Kite Award; The
Postcard
, winner of the 2009 Edgar Award for best juvenile mystery; and The Haunting of Derek Stone series.

Tony Abbott was born in Ohio and lives with his wife and two daughters in Connecticut. For more information about Tony, visit
www.tonyabbottbooks.com
.