She did not recognize the words he spoke, nor the language he said them in. She pushed the shaft of the spear farther in, forcing it through her body, into and through his.
She could feel his hot blood spurting onto her back.
“Bitch,” he said, in English. “You fucking bitch.” There was a wet gurgling quality to his voice. She guessed that the blade of the spear must have sliced a lung. Mr.’World was moving now, or trying to move, and every move he made rocked her too: they were joined by the pole, impaled together like two fish on a single spear. He now had a knife in one hand, she saw, and he stabbed her chest and breasts randomly and wildly with the knife, unable to see what he was doing. She did not care. What are knife cuts to a corpse?
She brought her fist down, hard, on his waving wrist, and the knife went flying to the floor of the cavern. She kicked it away.
And now he was crying and wailing. She could feel him pushing against her, his hands fumbling at her back, his hot tears on her neck. His blood was soaking her back, spurting down the back of her legs.
“This must look so undignified,” she said, in a dead whisper, not without a certain dark amusement.
She felt Mr. World stumble behind her, and she stumbled too, and then she slipped in the blood—all of it his—that was puddling on the floor of the cave, and they both went down.
The thunderbird landed in the Rock City parking lot. Rain was falling in sheets. Shadow could barely see a dozen feet in front of his face. He let go of the thunderbird’s feathers and half slipped, half tumbled to the wet asphalt.
Lightning flashed, and the bird was gone.
Shadow climbed to his feet.
The parking lot was three-quarters empty. Shadow started toward the entrance. He passed & brown Ford Explorer, parked against a rock wall. There was something deeply familiar about the car, and he glanced up at it curiously, noticing the man inside the car, slumped over the steering wheel as if asleep.
Shadow pulled open the driver’s-side door.
He had last seen Mr. Town standing outside the motel in the center of America. The expression on his face was one of surprise. His neck had been expertly broken. Shadow touched the man’s face. Still warm.
Shadow could smell a scent on the air in the car; it was faint, like the perfume of someone who left a room years before, but Shadow would have known it anywhere. He slammed the door of the Explorer and made his way across the parking lot. As he walked he felt a twinge in his side, a sharp, jabbing pain that lasted for only a second, or less, and then it was gone.
There was nobody selling tickets. He walked through the building and out into the gardens of Rock City.
Thunder rumbled, and it rattled the branches of the trees and shook deep inside the huge rocks, and the rain fell with cold violence. It was late afternoon, but it was dark as night.
A trail of lightning speared across the clouds, and Shadow wondered if that was the thunderbird returning to its high crags, or just an atmospheric discharge, or whether the two ideas were, on some level, the same thing.
And of course they were. That was the point, after all.
Somewhere a man’s voice called out. Shadow heard it. The only words he recognized or thought he recognized were “... to Odin!”
Shadow hurried across Seven States Flag Court, the flagstones now running fast with rainwater. Once he slipped on the slick stone. There was a thick layer of cloud surrounding the mountain, and in the gloom and the storm beyond the courtyard he could see no states at all.
There was no sound. The place seemed utterly abandoned.
He called out, and imagined he heard something answering. He walked toward the place from which he thought the sound had come.
Nobody. Nothing. Just a chain marking the entrance to a cave as off-limits to guests.
Shadow stepped over the chain.
He looked around, peering into the darkness.
His skin prickled.
A voice from behind him, in the shadows, said, very quietly, “You have never disappointed me.”
Shadow did not turn. “That’s weird,” he said. “I disappointed myself all the way. Every time.”
“Not at all,” said the voice. “You did everything you were intended to do, and more. You took everybody’s attention, so they never looked at the hand with the coin in it. It’s called misdirection. And there’s power in the sacrifice of a son—power enough, and more than enough, to get the whole ball rolling. To tell the truth, I’m proud of you.”
“It was crooked,” said Shadow. “All of it. None of it was for real. It was just a setup for a massacre.”
“Exactly,” said Wednesday’s voice from the shadows. “It was crooked. But it was the only game in town.”
“I want Laura,” said Shadow. “I want Loki. Where are they?”
There was only silence. A spray of rain gusted at him. Thunder rumbled somewhere close at hand.