Here’s an excerpt from the second, or middle, book of Sean’s Saga. To finish off this year and get a start on the next, I’ll follow with an excerpt from book 3. Hopefully those will be available in their entirety soon, they’re both finished except for some typo fixes (you never catch them all) and wording changes. Last, I plan to post a sample of the story (working title: The Blackthorn Legacy) that I’m writing now.

In this scene, Sean, Fiona, Parvati and Arturo have gone back in time to try to head off an alternate reality created by a traitor Bard who stole the magic mead of the gods. The giants have stolen Thor’s hammer, but in this timeline, with Loki imprisoned, they’ve managed to hold onto it. This bit is from the chapter titled We Crash the World’s Most Evil Wedding Party.

***********************************************************************

There was a lot of noise coming from inside, yelling and laughter and the sound of things breaking. Either there was a battle going on inside, or the jotuns were having a party.

About the time I was wondering if they ever would, the giants at the door finally noticed us. I guess they were the bouncers, because the one on the left, who looked a little less bright, boomed at us, “Show your invitations! Nobody allowed in without an invitation!”

“An invitation to what?” Parvati asked.

“The wedding feast of Thrym and Freya, of course,” the left-hand giant said, looking at us like we had two heads—or maybe more like ten, because for a giant to have more than one isn’t actually that strange.

The right-hand giant cuffed the left-hand one’s single head. “Idiot! The invitations got eaten, remember? Somebody let the cat get to them. That’s why we have this list.”

He had a scroll under one arm. He held it up and let it unroll. It hit the floor with a meaty sounding smack.

“Wow,” I said, “a pretty long list.”

“Are those all the people who’re invited?” Fiona wanted to know.

The second giant shook his head. “These are the ones who aren’t invited. It’s easier that way. Then we know that if your name is on the list, we should kill you.”

I guessed that probably made sense, to jotuns. He looked us up and down and then switched to the list. “Let’s see…none of you are Beowulf, are you?”

We shook our heads. “Svipdag? No? Sigurd? No…hey, what about Thor?”

Okay, so the second giant didn’t have much on the ball, either. It struck me that checking every name on the list would take quite a while.

“Why don’t we just save time and tell you who we are?” I suggested.

The first giant gaped at us. “Hey, that’s smart! Isn’t that smart, Headsmasher?”

Headsmasher frowned. “Could work, Leg­breaker. Could work. All right, what are your names then?”

“Arturo, son of Rodrigo!” Arturo said proudly, beating the rest of us to the punch.

Fiona elbowed him—not something I would ever try—and shot me an Are-you-nuts? look. “We’re going to tell them our real names?” she hissed. “What if there are smarter ones inside? Who know magic?”

“Relax,” I told her. “Remember, we don’t even exist in this world. There’s no way we’re on that list. And these two will forget about us as soon as we’re inside.”

She gave me a grudging nod. Meanwhile the giant had been scanning his list, getting it all tangled up in the process. “All right, seems like you’re not on here anyway,” he told Arturo. “What about the rest of you?”

“Parvati daughter of Abhay!” Parvati’s voice was firm, though I saw her give just the tiniest little shudder.

“Fiona daughter of Brian!”

“Sean son of Brian!”

Both the giants were now scrolling through the list (not bad, huh?) and grumbling. Legbreaker muttered something about “could have put it in order”, and Headsmasher said something I didn’t catch, but it sounded like “index”. At last they rolled up the scroll, sort of—it looked like the cat who ate all the invitations had been playing with it—Legbreaker heaved open the door, and they waved us in.

We walked into a thick fog of smoke and the smell of mead, and the noise was outrageous. Still, as the door swung shut behind us, I heard one of the giant bouncers—Legbreaker, I think—asking the other one, “Wait, weren’t we supposed to kill any Midgardians that showed up?”

Wow, I thought, that was close. They didn’t follow us in, though. Still, we all felt like keeping a low profile for the moment, so we sidled into the nearest quiet corner and took a minute to just look around.

Well, it was a jotun party, so what would you expect? Giants slamming into each other—dancing, maybe?—and skidding around in pools of spilled mead? Check. Burly thurses arm-wrestling while others stood around roaring with laughter? Check. A table full of enormous etins yelling out toast after toast in their rocky, grinding language, then hurling their mugs at each other’s foreheads, leaving the table covered with broken shards (of mugs, not giant heads)? Oh yeah.

“I don’t see Freya,” Arturo said after peering around.

“She wouldn’t be caught dead here,” Fiona said, with feeling.

“That checks with what Odin and Thor told us,” Parvati pointed out.

“Yeah,” I said. “It was only a little while ago we saw them, and they said Freya umm…hadn’t gone along with the idea. But then why are these guys celebrating already? Seems like jumping the gun.”

Just then, something that looked like the so-far-missing-in-action sabertooth bounded at us, tail held high, and we heard a thunderous—meow?

“So that’s the gatita that ate the invitations?” Arturo said, a few hairs sprouting from his face.

“I totally believe it,” I said, not daring to take my eyes off the giant orange cat—big as a horse—as it sniffed at us with a baleful green light in its eyes, looking like it was wondering if we were some new kind of super-sized mice, and if so, what had happened to our tails.

It had just lifted a tentative paw to bat at us when a pair of giant hands picked it up and threw it across the room, leaving a Doppler-effect yowl in its wake. “Fluffy!” the jotun who had, sort of, saved us, called after it. “Mind your manners! No eating the guests!”

Then the jotun leaned down and stretched out his hand. “Welcome! I am Thrym. Welcome to my wedding feast!”

I guess we were supposed to shake his hand, but only Arturo reached out his hand to grasp the giant’s. Thrym was shaking his fingers as he drew his hand back, and frowned thoughtfully for a second. One of the smarter giants, I noted.

“Didn’t think any heroes or Valkyries would show up here,” he said, then brightened up. “But after all, now that I have Thor’s hammer, I will be ruler of both Midgard and Jotunheim. So you’re just the first to offer me your homage. Smart move, I must say.”

I heard a growl close by, but when I turned to Arturo, I realized that it had come from Fiona. “Cool it,” I whispered. “We want to keep him in a good mood.”

“So he won’t know what hit him,” Arturo added.

Fiona didn’t look happy, but she nodded and squeezed his hand.

“—and a drink to seal our friendship,” Thrym was saying.

That’s how we found ourselves ambling over to the jotuns’ high table to bend an elbow with the enemies of mankind. Did I mention it’s a major gaffe to turn down an offer of hospitality?

On the way, we had to keep an eye out to avoid getting knocked over, or fallen on, by any of the giants who were reeling around. Even the mead spills were a bit of a hazard—they were ankle-deep to us and made the floor really slippery. Also Fluffy came back over and started to stalk alongside of us, his tail lashing.

“Nice cat,” Parvati said nervously.

“He won’t bother you anymore,” Thrym told her. “He’s a good cat, really. Excellent mouser. Got him from my cousin, Utgard-Loki.”

“Oh. So he’s the cat that Thor couldn’t lift off the floor?” I eyed Fluffy dubiously. He could have finished me off in a few mouthfuls, for sure, but he didn’t look tough enough to stymy Thor.

Thrym chuckled. “Good for you, you know your jotun history—thurstory, we like to call it. Yes, Utgard-Loki told me something about Fluffy getting quantum entangled with the Midgard Serpent, temporarily. Just a freak accident. He’s fine now.”

Well, that sure took a load off our minds. Meanwhile we’d finally made it to the table—it felt like we’d walked half a mile or so. The other jotuns who’d been there had gone off to dance, or beat each other up, or whatever it was that they were doing, so it was just us and Thrym.