gesture. His left hand was open in front of her. She closed both of her hands around the top of the stick, exhaled, concentrated.
“Please. My stick,” he said, in her ears.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s yours.” And then, not knowing if it would mean anything, she said, “I dedicate this death to Shadow,” and she stabbed the stick into her chest, just below the breastbone, felt it writhe and change in her hands as the stick became a spear.
The boundary between sensation and pain had diffused since she had died. She felt the spear head penetrate her chest, felt it push out through her back. A moment’s resistance—she pushed harder—and the spear thrust into Mr. World. She could feel the warm breath of him on the cool skin of her neck, as he wailed in hurt and surprise, impaled on the spear.
She did not recognize the words he spoke, nor the language he said them in. She pushed the shaft of the spear further 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 which was 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 tarmac.
The bird looked at him. 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 a 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 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 must have only existed in his head, as it lasted for only a second, or less, and then it was gone.
There was nobody in the gift shop, 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