Sneaking back to the door and peeking around the shattered frame, I realize that while I might be invisible, the snake can still doubtless taste me in the air. It knows I’m around, but its attention is back on the ceiling, keeping track of Perun once more. There’s more blood than there was before. I can see gashes in the snake’s flesh where Perun’s talons or maybe his beak did some damage. But I figure that with Scáthmhaide and an assist from Gaia, I can deliver some serious punishment and give Perun one more chance. There’s no question in my mind that I’m doing the right thing: Any friend of Loki’s is an enemy of mine. So I bound forward, leap up and spin to increase the force, then bring down Scáthmhaide with every ounce of power I can deliver on top of the serpent’s uppermost coil. I hear the spine snap and the impact travels up my arms, and there will be no graceful landing for me. It takes all I have simply to hang on to my staff.
The snake makes a sort of gurgling hiss instead of a cry of pain. Then the light disappears, I’m punched in the gut and the back, and the light returns, all before I hit the ground. Once I’m there, flat on my ass, the agony begins. Not from the fall, but from the two huge fangs that punctured my torso when the snake lashed out on instinct. The left half of its mouth caught my left half; bottom fang into my guts, top fang into my back. There was venom in that bite, which hits a second later, burning like acid in my veins and throwing my muscles into convulsions. I gasp and struggle to reach the cool serenity of a headspace where I can focus on directing my healing while the other headspace suffers. Atticus told me it was a survival skill and had all these distracting tests during my training to make sure I could access the serenity while the chaos raged elsewhere, but there is no distraction quite like genuine, fiery pain. It demands that you give it your full attention and resists being shut out. So it takes several false starts and five to seven precious seconds before I can create that separation in my mind and let one headspace convulse while the other coolly deals with the internal bleeding and breaking down the toxins. And during those few seconds, while I gasp for air on the ground, my head turns to the left, I see the giant snake head of Weles slam to the ground right in front of me, and directly below its jaws, at the top of what could be considered one enormous neck, are a pair of eagle talons. Perun got him because of me, which, honestly, helps me slip into the headspace I need. I can’t talk, since everything is either pain or the healing of it, and that worries Orlaith something awful, because she’s suddenly there and licking my face and trying to say things that I can’t spare the concentration to answer if I want to live.
I really shouldn’t be picking fights with any more gods. I managed to do some serious damage to Loki recently but only because conditions were perfect: He’d been overconfident and attacked me where I had placed wards against his fire. If he had caught me anywhere outside the fire wards, or if he had brought any other weapons—like Fuilteach, the whirling blade he’d stolen from me, or the Lost Arrows of Vayu—he might have ended me. His simple failure to respect me as an adversary made him vulnerable, and he wouldn’t make the same mistake again. It strikes me that the holes in my body and the poison in my blood are a result of the same kind of arrogance: My Druidic powers, while impressive, do not truly put me in the same weight class as gods. And neither do Atticus’s. He finds a weakness, surprises them, and gets help. Going toe-to-toe will not work. Had Weles not been distracted by Perun, I don’t think I ever would have gotten close to harming him, even with invisibility. And had Perun not finished Weles off, I surely would not have this slim opportunity to heal. He would have struck again and maybe even swallowed me whole.
The venom of Weles is a nasty combination of a fasciculin and a cardiotoxin. The latter is easiest to take care of; as the toxin tries to bond to the muscle of my heart tissue, I can break it down before it depolarizes the cells and prevents contraction. The fasciculin is much worse. It’s causing involuntary contractions throughout my entire body, leading to painful spasms and twitching. During my apprenticeship, Atticus gave me extensive training in poisons and their chemistry, including snake venom, so that I would know where to focus my attention when and if I found myself poisoned. The fasciculin attacks a certain kind of neuron that uses acetylcholine as a transmitter of signals. It annihilates acetylcholinesterase, which functionally tells muscles to stop contracting, thereby causing those involuntary contractions. Can’t fight back when your muscles won’t obey you. It also causes more agony than you’d think something like that should. To combat it and restore voluntary function, I have to not only break down the toxin but rebuild acetylcholinesterase. And beyond the venom, there’s the matter of two rather large puncture wounds, with significant tissue damage and bleeding.