American Gods

“Laura. She doesn’t want to be dead. She told me. After she got me away from the guys on the train.”

“The action of a fine wife. Freeing you from durance vile and murdering those who would have harmed you. You should treasure her, Nephew Ainsel.”

“She wants to be really alive. Not one of the walking dead, or whatever she is. She wants to live again. Can we do that? Is that possible?”

Wednesday said nothing for long enough that Shadow started to wonder if he had heard the question, or if he had, possibly, fallen asleep with his eyes open. Then he said, staring ahead of him as he talked, “I know a charm that can cure pain and sickness, and lift the grief from the heart of the grieving.

“I know a charm that will heal with a touch.

“I know a charm that will turn aside the weapons of an enemy.

“I know another charm to free myself from all bonds and locks.

“A fifth charm: I can catch a bullet in flight and take no harm from it.”

His words were quiet, urgent. Gone was the hectoring tone, gone was the grin. Wednesday spoke as if he were reciting the words of a religious ritual, as if he were speaking something dark and painful.

“A sixth: spells sent to hurt me will hurt only the sender.

“A seventh charm I know: I can quench a fire simply by looking at it.

“An eighth: if any man hates me, I can win his friendship.

“A ninth: I can sing the wind to sleep and calm a storm for long enough to bring a ship to shore.

“Those were the first nine charms I learned. Nine nights I hung on the bare tree, my side pierced with a spear’s point. I swayed and blew in the cold winds and the hot winds, without food, without water, a sacrifice of myself to myself, and the worlds opened to me.

“For a tenth charm, I learned to dispel witches, to spin them around in the skies so that they will never find their way back to their own doors again.

“An eleventh: if I sing it when a battle rages it can take warriors through the tumult unscathed and unhurt, and bring them safely back to their hearth and their home.

“A twelfth charm I know: if I see a hanged man I can bring him down from the gallows to whisper to us all he remembers.

“A thirteenth: if I sprinkle water on a child’s head, that child will not fall in battle.

“A fourteenth: I know the names of all the gods. Every damned one of them.

“A fifteenth: I have a dream of power, of glory, and of wisdom, and I can make people believe my dreams.”

His voice was so low now that Shadow had to strain to hear it over the plane’s engine noise.

“A sixteenth charm I know: if I need love I can turn the mind and heart of any woman.

“A seventeenth, that no woman I want will ever want another.

“And I know an eighteenth charm, and that charm is the greatest of all, and that charm I can tell to no man, for a secret that no one knows but you is the most powerful secret there can ever be.”

He sighed, and then stopped talking.

Shadow could feel his skin crawl. It was as if he had just seen a door open to another place, somewhere worlds away where hanged men blew in the wind at every crossroads, where witches shrieked overhead in the night.

“Laura,” was all he said.

Wednesday turned his head, stared into Shadow’s pale gray eyes with his own. “I can’t make her live again,” he said. “I don’t even know why she isn’t as dead as she ought to be.”

“I think I did it,” said Shadow. “It was my fault.”

Wednesday raised a bushy eyebrow.

“Mad Sweeney gave me a golden coin, back when he showed me how to do that trick. From what he said, he gave me the wrong coin. What he gave me was something more powerful than what he thought he was giving me. I passed it on to Laura.”

Wednesday grunted, lowered his chin to his chest, frowned. Then he sat back. “That could do it,” he said. “And no, I can’t help you. What you do in your own time is your own affair, of course.”

“What,” asked Shadow, “is that supposed to mean?”

“It means that I can’t stop you from hunting eagle stones or thunderbirds. But I would infinitely prefer that you spend your days quietly sequestered in Lakeside, out of sight, and, I hope, out of mind. When things get hairy we’ll need all hands to the wheel.”

He looked very old as he said this, and fragile, and his skin seemed almost transparent, and the flesh beneath was gray.

Shadow wanted, wanted very much, to reach out and put his hand over Wednesday’s gray hand. He wanted to tell him that everything would be okay—something that Shadow did not feel, but that he knew had to be said. There were men in black trains out there. There was a fat kid in a stretch limo and there were people in the television who did not mean them well.

He did not touch Wednesday. He did not say anything.

Later, he wondered if he could have changed things, if that gesture would have done any good, if it could have averted any of the harm that was to come. He told himself it wouldn’t. He knew it wouldn’t. But still, afterward, he wished that, just for a moment on that slow flight home, he had touched Wednesday’s hand.