Chapter
I
They had taken my sword from me. Galahad's sword. My sword. Mine.
Christopher and Jalil and April, they'd told me to give it up, hand it to April. Why? Because of Senna. Because they couldn't trust me, so they said, couldn't count on me as long as she was around.
How many times had I come through for them, for us all? How many times had I stood out front, not alone maybe but out on the line, out at the point where danger pressed closest?
How many times had I been ready to give my life, to do what I had to do, and this? To be casually pushed aside with a smirk and a leer?
David can't handle Senna. David wants it too bad, man. David is hers, all hers to control. Senna's boy. Senna's pawn.
Under her spell.
I was. I knew that, and knowing that, I could fight her, resist her, even when she reached for me and touched me and I felt the power that flowed from her, the power that was sometimes so cold and demanding and sometimes so warm, so right, so . . .
I resisted her. Yes, yes, she had power. Yes, she could reach me. But I was a free man, free to say yes or no, free to make the calls as I saw them.
She was beautiful. Senna was, but it was more than that. In the real world I'd have had a dozen names for it, more excuses than explanations really. I'd have said she was seductive, that she fascinated me, that we had some certain chemistry.
But here, in Everworld, in this universe where the rules were all different, where nothing was what it had always been and yet was so often what it should be, here I knew the name for her power.
Magic.
She had magic. Senna the witch had power, and yet I was a free man. I was still David Levin. Senna could not change that.
And now, now with death looking down at us, death so clear and unmistakable and irresistible, now my friends gave me back the sword.
I had it back. When Nidhoggr had raised his ten-times-Tyrannosaurus head up from the mountain of gold, April had handed it back without a word.
I held it now. Held the hilt that would burn some men's hands, held it tight, the blade down at an angle, pointing down toward more wealth than I could imagine.
I had tried to kill a dragon once and failed. Failed so completely that the dragon had barely noticed my presence.
The dragon that I could not kill might have been Nidhoggr's puppy.
The idea of attacking this blue-whale-sized, diamond-armored monster was a sick joke. I was a mosquito and Galahad's sword was my stinger. If Nidhoggr had chosen to lie there passively, immobile, allowing me all the time I needed, I might, might in a long day of backbreaking effort have managed to hack my way into one of his vital organs. If Nidhoggr were in a coma I might have managed to kill him. But alive, alert? No.
And yet, I had the sword again. And with the sword came the responsibility, the unspoken demand to "do something."
Here you go, David, we're screwed now, so be the hero again. You die first.
It made me mad. Resentful. Now, when there was not a single damned thing I or anyone else could do, now when the sword was as much use as a salad fork, now, suddenly, it was mine again.
Do something, David. We trust you again. Here: Take the sword and go kick Godzilla's butt.
But my resentment was tempered by several facts. First, the overwhelming fact that our lives were entirely in the claws of Nidhoggr. Second, the fact that we were standing atop a pile of
