“Then why could Orlaith take them out?” I say.
“Any dog, even small ones, can do this to nocnice. They guardian against many spirits. They bark at night sometimes and you think, what you barking for? Stop that. Sometimes dogs hearing and seeing things we do not, and they scare them away, protect us. Roosters do this too, but nobody like roosters except hens. Good thing you like dogs.”
Orlaith, is this true? Do you bark at spirits sometimes?
<Maybe. I never saw one before now. But sometimes I feel something bad coming, and I bark until the bad feeling goes away. Oberon does this too.>
Well, thank you.
“That was not the kind of fight I hoped for,” Shango says.
“Loki rarely gives you that,” I reply. “You have to find a way to surprise him.”
We continue from there, much more paranoid than before, but nothing else attacks on the way into Warsaw. I lead Mi?osz and our escorts to the same bound poplar tree in Pole Mokotowskie, where I assume I’ll find the coven, but it’s only Malina herself.
“An hour before dawn is a hell of a time to return victorious, Granuaile,” she says, shivering in the cold. “I couldn’t believe the divination when I saw it. But since it is victory, I’ll forgive you.” She grins in wonder at Mi?osz. “Wow. The white horse of ?wi?towit. Did you have any trouble? Oh!” Her eyes drop to my bloodstained shirt. “I see that you did.”
“Yes, plenty. But I’ll be all right eventually.” Getting slammed to the ground by the nocnica had not done my injuries any favors. I would be an utter wreck without Gaia’s continuing aid.
“And these gentlemen are?” Malina asks, looking at Shango and Perun. I’m not sure that I should introduce them as such.
“Hired muscle,” I say, and hope the lie isn’t utterly obvious on my face. I suppose it might be technically true in Shango’s case. He’d said something about Odin wanting him to help me give Loki the finger on this one, and maybe he paid in the currency of his favor. Not that Shango would give a damn about favors from Odin. Regardless, they’re keeping their distance, signaling that they feel no need to be introduced, and I respect that. “They don’t talk much, and they’ll leave once the horse is safe.”
“Right. We should get going, then. We’ll take him to my place. The house and all the land surrounding it is warded.”
“Warded how, if I may ask? I mean, against what?”
“Well, fire, of course. Loki will not be burning everything around him like he did in that onion field.”
“What about demons and spirits?”
Malina smirks. “No problem. If they get past our wards, we have hellwhips for those. You can relax. We channel the powers of the Zoryas and they are protective goddesses. We know how to protect our homes.”
I figure that must be true. If Odin is fine with Mi?osz staying with the sisters, it must be as safe as any place he could find in Asgard.
Malina had seen we’d be arriving on foot, of course, so she rode her bike to the park. “We have to cross the river, so it will be a few more kilometers. I suppose your early arrival is good for something—we’ll have the streets practically to ourselves.”
She leads the way, blond hair resting on a red coat, and we follow through a city getting its last few minutes of sleep. It’s slower going, since so much of it is paved and I have to run without any juice from the earth. The sun isn’t above the horizon, but the eastern sky has lightened from pitch to merely gloomy by the time we cross the Wis?a River. There’s a genuine ray of sunshine announcing the dawn when we turn onto Ulice Lipkowksa in the Rado?? neighborhood of Warsaw. It’s quite nearly bucolic—fenced properties on an acre or two, mixed in with wooded areas. Pines grow there, since the soil is somewhat sandy on that side of the river and the pines send their roots deep enough to hold on. Once in the canopy of the neighborhood, the urban hum fades and you don’t think that you’re only five minutes away from a city of two million people getting ready for Christmas or assorted pagan good times.
Perun and Shango take their leave at the gate to Malina’s property. They summon winds and lift up into the skies, and once they’re clear of trees, Shango flies south and Perun heads north. It blows their cover pretty spectacularly.
“Hired muscle, eh?” Malina says, her tone drier than a week-old bagel.
“Yeah! But also thunder gods. Forgot to mention it, sorry. I thought you would know already.”