The tableau of death lay barely disturbed from the night before.

  The hounds had left their masters’ sides but otherwise everything was exactly how I had left it the previous night. Over two dozen corpses of men and elves lay scattered in a circular pattern around the half-destroyed cottage.

  I had hoped to see details that had been obscured by the dark, something to give me a clue as to how my pursuers had died. But with the light of the sun I saw not a single sign of violent death. Not a wound, drop or blood or even a frozen expression of surprise was evident. None of the guns or warbows that the dead carried looked to have been fired, no swords and knives removed from their sheaths. It was as if each man and elf had suddenly died for no apparent reason at the exact same moment.

  That was even more terrifying than the signs of a bloody slaughter would have been.

  “What the hell did this?” I breathed as I picked my way along the ring of bodies. “There’s no mark or wound or burn or discoloration. It’s like their souls just left their bodies.”

  “Or the threads of their lives were cut,” suggested Kris from where she was perched on my shoulder like a cartoon of someone’s conscience. From up there she could see the carnage, or lack thereof, and talk to me, but it was not secure. She nearly fell off when I gave an involuntary and full body shudder that had her holding on to my ear with both hands (that felt really weird by the way).

  “It has to be something else,” I protested.

  “What else makes sense? We are only a few miles from her territory.”

  I didn’t respond because I didn’t have reasonable argument no matter how much I disliked Kris’s theory. It was not that I thought she might be wrong it was that I was deathly afraid that she might be right. There was a whole busload of awful implications if Kris was right.

  Let me take a moment to put my graduate student hat back on.

  One thing that we modern humans have had to come to grips with after the Surge had released the ancient magic back amongst us was the reemergence of the mythological archetypes. Those omnipresent themes that abound throughout the ancient mythologies and religions across the world and even exist woven throughout the writings and art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Those basic themes that speak something so deep within us that even modern cultural inventions like Harry Potter and Star Wars resonate with them. The philosopher Jung postulated that these archetypes were really just explained deep currents within our own subconsciousness or mental architecture and in the days when myths were merely myths that explanation seemed plausible. Once the Old Gods had awoken from their millennia of slumber we found out how and why those archetypes were drilled so deeply into our racial memory.

  One of those reoccurring themes was the Fates; those three women, usually crones, that watch and even govern our lives and futures weaving the threads of our lives together into a tapestry and then cutting the thread at our death. There are variations between cultures on this, running from the Morai of the Greeks to the Sudice of the Slavs to the Norns of the Scandinavians.

  All of them came back with the return of magic with a suit of powers that matched the myths that turned out to be all too real. There did at least appear to be limits to that power or at least limits as to how the Fates were willing to apply it. Theoretically, they had the power to end the lives of anyone and everyone on the planet and predict our actions to the point the any resistance to Resurgent Gods would have been futile. Yet, that didn’t happen.

  As with many things related to the Resurgence the theories for this are varied and contradictory. It was common thinking in the CIA that the reason we haven’t seen the Fates (standard term for this type of deity no matter their cultural origin) manifest their full powers was that their supposed powers were either fully of myth or could not full manifest in the post-Surge world. There was no real evidence for or against this theory but I suppose it was comforting to an organization of spies to think that their every move wasn’t being watched by their enemies.

  I was standing over potential proof that common CIA thinking was bullshit.

  Frau Wyrd was the Teutonic version of the Fates, though unlike the others there appeared to be only one of her instead of three. Nevertheless, she was presumed to have a similar suit of abilities as the rest of the Fate classed entities. And it looked like she had used her power to end the lives of my pursuers with ease of… cutting a handful of threads.

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  That was terrifying for a metric shit ton of reasons (and a metric shit-ton is 200 shit-pounds heavier than an Imperial standard shit-ton).

  It was not just that Frau Wyrd had demonstrated that she, and presumably the other Fates, did indeed have the power to snuff out lives from a distance. That little tidbit of information was bad enough. That the Teutonic goddess has decided to use this power to save me… while I was in another god’s territory took that knowledge into the realm of the truly terrifying. Frau Wyrd not only knew of me but also willingly risked wat with Wotan for me. I had no idea why she would do this and every reason I could think of was even more ball shriveling scary than the last.

  “First Eulenspiegel and now the Frau,” said Kris into my ear. She had drawn the exact same conclusions that I had, and from the quaver in her voice she was just as frightened by them. “What do we do now?”

  That was a good question. My entire plan had relied on Frau Wyrd not knowing or at least not caring about us. I tried to think of a way that we could avoid her territory, but every way to do that was also very dangerous. We would have to stay in Wotan’s territory longer and then pass through the territories of Donner or Tiwaz or Ermine and all of those places were universally terrible.

  “We could head south,” I suggested, “stay in the Big W’s domain until we can cut west towards Munich?”

  “That would be stupid.”

  “I know, he is still looking for me but his closest team just got annihilated. By the time he gets more of his thugs on our trail it would have gone way cold.”

  “It’s not that. Do you know is directly south of here?”

  “What used to be the Czech Republic.”

  “That and the Erzebirge Mountains.”

  I looked south towards the gentle, forest clad mountains that had been to our left for the last several days. “They don’t look that nasty. A little bit of hiking…”

  “It’s not the mountains that are ‘nasty’ it is what lives in them.”

  “Of course.” I sighed and pinched the bridge of my nose. “What are we talking about? Trolls? Lich? Forest Guardian?”

  “No one knows for sure. No one who has ever encountered it lives to tell. Even One Eye’s elves only go into the Erzebirge in force. The only way safe way south without crossing out of his lands is to go back to Dresden and take the main road to Prague.”

  “Crap.” I should have figured it wouldn’t be that easy. Dead Zones, places so dangerous that only the dead knew what truly lay within them, were scattered across the world. Even the United States had more than a few. It was just my luck that I had one right where I needed to go.

  “Perhaps, we should just go in and risk the Frau?”

  “But she already knows we are coming,” I said. Every instinct was telling me to run as far and fast as I could. Yet, every other possible route appeared blocked. I felt like a cornered rat.

  “Yes, and obviously if she meant us harm we would already be dead.” Kris’s tiny arm gestured at the dead around us. “She might even kill us if we start moving away. We do not have many options now.”

  I bitched and moaned for a couple minutes more but eventually Kris convinced me that our other options were literally nonexistent. We ether continued into Frau Wyrd’s territory or we died. I didn’t argue because I thought she was wrong. I argued because I knew we were walking into a trap.

  The boundaries between the territory of one old god and another are often anomalous things, especially if those gods share a pantheon. It’s not like a snappily dressed man in a little booth is there to welcome newcomers into his native land and ask us for passports. Nor are there usually walls or demilitarized zones. The frontier between where the direct influence of one god ends and another begins is usually something that mere humans can’t even perceive, until they get a lightning bolt of their ass anyway.

  The boundary between Wotan and Wyrd lay somewhere within a couple mile wide strip of woods and ruins that everyone avoided on the principle that it could become the battle zone between two pissed off deities at any moment. At some point within that strip of frontier we crossed from being under the authority of Wotan to that of Frau Wyrd.

  I expected some relief at leaving behind that one-eyed mad diety and his squads of homicidal elves but instead I got a funny feeling between my shoulder blades. An odd crawling sensation as if my skin and muscles there knew that they were being looked at through the scope of a rifle or over the sights of a bow.

  Despite my feelings we had crossed almost all of the way through the frontier without any incident beyond scaring a raccoon out of its den. (They actually call those Waschbar in Germany; as in a bear that washes, the German language is very linear that way.) I happened as I told myself to relax. A slight rustle in the vegetation ahead of me, a rustle just a little too noisy to have been caused by a small animal or the wind.

  My sawed-off shotgun leapt up to track the motion before my brain even fully processed what I had seen. An instinct acquired from my time in the military that had probably kept me alive more than once. My finger tightened on the trigger and my forebrain wondered if I was about to blow away an unlucky bunny when someone jerked my gun out of my grip. A large hand with a grip like iron wrapped around my throat and hoisted me into the air where I struggled with the impotency of a hooked fish. I tried to pull the Glock out of my pocket only to have it pulled from my grip with contemptuous ease.

  The only thing I could do was crank my head around just enough to make out the disdainful visage of an elf below me.

  It was then that I was certain that I was about to die.