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“Who?”
I shoved one of Mom’s graphs toward her. It had names, ages...towns. “The young warrior.”
The sheet crinkled noisily as Kat snatched it. Her ponytail slid around her shoulder to brush the paper as she stared at it.
I ran my hands through my hair, absently scrunched the short spikes on top. Kat and Coral would probably never cut their hair but I’d grown sick of messing with it and chopped mine off. Mom said it made me look like a fairy sprite.
The black color came more from our Native American Arapaho ancestors—Iñunaina—than from our Norse ones. We looked Indian, but our Scandinavian heritage raged strong. As if aware of my thoughts, that presence in me, that thing, shifted and stretched like a sharp-clawed cat waking from a nap.
It creeped me the hell out each and every time since it first happened. Nothing like growing up knowing that one of the three norn goddesses lived in your body. That she was there for one reason.
It hit me then. The terror. Something more than the usual fear and the constant anxiety that the norn could take over. That she could just wipe off my personality like words on a whiteboard.
Could this really be it? The end of the world?
Horror curled through my insides, thick and rolling like waves of sticky, oozing oil. It flowed into my limbs and made them sting. I fisted my hands and sat back as the room swirled around me. Terrified the norn’s seidr magic would kick in, I squeezed my eyes closed and held my breath.
I came out of it to find Kat stroking my shoulder, holding my hand. “It’s okay,” she whispered over and over. “Come on. You’re the one who never loses it. Don’t wig out on me now, Raven.”
My fear was reflected in her eyes. “Kat, it’s true. All of it. Ragnarok.” I whispered the last word.
“I know.” She closed her eyes. “I’ve spent my entire life ignoring Dru’s stupid stories and here I am scared to death, too. But we can’t let her do whatever it is she’s planning for those boys. We just can’t.”
Kat never called her Mom. Her resentment for the woman raged like a never-ending storm. She hated her for dragging us from town to town, from one campsite to another. Out of the three of us, the most forgiving of Mom was Coral, who padded into the room pulling on a fat, purple sweater.
“Where’s Mom?” Her loose hair was longer than her black skirt, which ended halfway down her thighs, above a pair of thick, trendy, hot-pink socks that stretched over her knees. They went well with the pajama top...and the pink feather she’d clipped into her hair. Her style was definitely her own. Kind of funky, fashion-conscious hippie.
“You didn’t see her outside?” Mom would have passed Coral on the front porch when she left.
“No. I was talking to Mr. Bennings next door.” She tried to smile. “He’s going to his sister’s in South Carolina. Not sure why he thinks that will help. It’s snowing there, too.”
“Mom couldn’t have gone through the backyard.” I frowned, bit my lip. The fence panels were tall, the gate had rusted shut and we’d had an exterminator out less than a week before to deal with a huge, creepy nest of snakes. “Coral, is there some spell she could have used to travel? Like disappear or transport?”
Kat snorted. “Beam Dru up.”
I glared at her. She hated the old Star Trek: The Next Generation reruns I loved and she never missed a chance to pick on me.
Coral shook her head. “Mom’s getting pretty good, but not that good. I don’t know anyone who can travel outside the bounds of reality.”
Faint heat filled my cheeks. Yeah, it was a dumb question. “She must have crawled through the window.”
She pointed to the white petals. “I want to know what she did with the datura. It’s poison.” Coral used a tissue to wrap the flowers and toss them in the trash. “Don’t know why I’m surprised. Yesterday, she hacked away all my solstice orange snapdragons.”
My mouth dropped open. They were Coral’s favorite flower. She’d worked her butt off to grow those and we’d carted the pots around for years. “Oh, Coral, I’m so sorry. Why would she do that?”
“They detect spells,” Kat murmured. She only made that pinched-mouth, evasive-eye expression when she was hiding information.
“Kat, did you know?”
“Know what?”
I lifted one eyebrow. We both jumped when Coral smacked Kat’s shoulder.
“Hey!” Kat yelled, eyes narrowing, hand balling into a fist.
I scrambled to my feet to stop Kat from hitting her back. “We don’t have time for this.” I turned Kat toward me, feeling the frailness of her shoulders. We were all built small, but she felt thinner, like she’d been stressing more than usual lately. “Do you know something or not?”
Fury built in my stomach when she stared at the floor. “You got something, didn’t you?” I whispered.
Kat jerked from my hands and stomped from the room. She came back with her favorite yellow chenille throw bunched under her arm. She snapped it open and laid it on the floor. We all squatted around it, but I winced when I saw the perfect rune-shaped holes—obviously cut with scissors. When the norn’s magic hit during sleep, our subconscious found any way to get the messages across.
We’d been carving, writing and even burning these symbols in seidr magical trances since our ninth birthdays.
“‘Mother berserker,’” I translated. “Yeah, I see why you didn’t say anything. Stupid, cryptic shit.”
“Dru was already certifiable.” Kat lifted her eyebrows, shrugged. “I didn’t think the runes meant all that much different. But then she fell off that ladder and I figured the snakes had startled her.”
“The ones from the backyard?” Coral asked.
A few weeks ago, our mother had fallen off a ladder painting the outside of the house. She was unconscious for three days. I’d found her. Also found some snakeskins in a sort of circle at the base of the ladder. I’d trashed them before Coral could see them and think they were a sign. “Yeah, that exterminator sucks. The ‘berserker’ thing could have meant that. It would be nice if this dumb magic came with instructions.”
We had tons of books and countless Xeroxed copies of old writings—we’d collected everything we could find on our heritage, trying to figure out what was truth and what wasn’t. We had some kind of trance magic, a version of the Norse seidr magic inherited from our father’s side, but none of us had any control over it or even understood it.
Our mother’s abilities were different. She was an earth witch. Eyeing the iron skillet, I shuddered. If she was doing something with dark magic, this could be bad. Really bad.
I picked up the stack of papers and handed a section to each sister. “We have to figure out which boy she went after.” I stared from one to the other. If I’d been wrong all this time, the warrior was important—so, so much more important than we were. Gods, we’d spent our lives snickering over the idea of the young warrior killing one of us...but now, I didn’t know. Maybe it was real. Maybe one of us would change the prophecies and save one of the warriors carrying the gods’ souls. Maybe we could help stop the end of the world, crazy as that sounded.
All I knew was that I wasn’t willing for any of us to die. Mom running off to interfere probably altered all of it—even the prophecy we’d grown up fearing.
A tear slid down Coral’s cheek. I felt her pain in that strange way twins and triplets have of knowing when a sibling is hurting. She lifted her gaze to me, gray eyes shiny. “I can’t believe this is happening.”
Neither could I, but my tongue felt thick and the words stuck in my throat. I pulled my gaze from her and shuffled through the pages, finding story after story about boys with strange abilities or affinities with animals. Mom must have hardly slept recently, must have spent night after night searching the Net. Looking for the boy who would kill one of her daughters.
Going silently mad.
What did she plan to do to him?
I knew when I found the one I was supposed to because the norn inside me shifted again. She was getting more potent. This time she scraped and clawed.
Holding my breath, I worked hard to ignore her and stared at the grainy black-and-white photo of a boy, his longish, light hair in midswing, covering one eye. The photographer had obviously been more interested in the two wolves staring from the forest, half-hidden by the trees. The boy was pointing them back into the woods.
Light of hair. Wolves.
Odin, the Allfather God, had two wolves.
My hands started sweating and I rubbed them on my shorts, noticing that the temperature in the room had dropped enough to make my toes numb. I blew out air, watched it mist. Scrambling to my feet, I shot to the window.
The snow fell in sheets now. White smothered the still-blooming trees and flowers. Would be killing them fast at this rate.
I turned to find both sisters behind me, knew they’d found potential warriors, which could mean the norns wanted us to stop this.
Coral handed me her page and I stared at the picture of a tall guy with crazy-short hair so pale it looked gray in the black-and-white photo. Temper blazed in his eyes, but the hammer in the corner of the piece stilled my heart.
Kat’s boy looked a lot friendlier with an easy smile stretching his lips. This picture was in color. Sunlight sparkled on his light hair—the article was from one of those stupid tabloids and said something about a boy who called rain and made crops grow.
A shiver crawled up my spine when I looked back at the one I’d found. The story was several years old—about a boy and the wolf pups that had followed him home after the accident that killed his parents. I could see they were creatures of magic and that the boy held something powerful. It was there, in the eye not covered by his hair. Vanir McConnell, it said. Norse and Irish.
“Born of two magical clans,” I whispered, thinking of the swirled symbol shared by both.
“That share life’s spiral,” followed Kat.
Coral took her paper back, stared at it as her bottom lip quivered. “Light of head, dark of eyes.”
We didn’t say the rest aloud. We’d always thought it was so stupid.
The young warrior will herald the beginning of Ragnarok. His hand to the death of a norn.
The resulting silence was broken by the sudden violence of the snowstorm. It battered the windows and roof, causing me to clench my teeth.
“We don’t have much time,” I said. “It’ll be hard to travel soon.” I met Kat’s eyes. “We’ll have to use the college money.” They’d been saving, too. None of us wanted to believe our mother’s stories about one of us dying.
Kat crossed her arms, bit her lip. “Probably won’t need it, anyway.”
“We’ll need it,” I insisted. “I won’t accept that. We’ve worked too hard for it—a better life. We’ll just have to replace the money when we can. We’ll still go to college. If this really is Ragnarok and we’re in for three years of winter, it’ll just be cold. Life goes on.”
None of us said what we were probably all thinking. Yes, life would go on, but it was going to be different. Even if the prophecy was wrong and none of us died, the world would be very unlike what it had been. According to the writings on Ragnarok, there would only be one short summer break in those three years of winter. After that? I couldn’t form images in my mind. They all froze my blood. Tidal waves and earth-consuming fire. Even with the magic in my veins, I’d never, ever taken the stories of warring gods seriously. It was too big.
Too scary.
I looked down at the boy in the picture, at his one eye staring at me in an absurd parody of Odin and his one eye. “I’m pretty sure our mother went to find the guy who’s supposed to kill us. But which one?”
Kat voiced my biggest question. “You don’t think she’d actually hurt them, do you?”
Hot tears burned the corners of my eyes but I held them back. “You guys know we can’t let her. If they live to fight and we play our part, one of them could survive and there will be no end of the world.”
Coral sniffed. Tears streaked her cheeks. “We have to stop her. No matter what it could mean.”
We stared silently at one another, each of us knowing what the others were thinking.
I couldn’t worry about dying or losing one of my sisters. We’d never been apart. We fought, sure—all sisters do—but we shared a deeper bond, one forged through years of only having one another in the weirdest of living situations. Out of the three of us, only Coral had braved a date. It was hard to date when your mother thought every potential boyfriend could be a killer. Other than that, only our jobs separated us.
Pathetic? Maybe.
But our purpose had been drilled into us from birth. We carried the norns’ souls, making us the new sisters of fate. We carved the old words in seidr trances and revealed secrets, lies and hopes. And now, we had to find all three potential world-saving warriors because we didn’t know which one Mom had gone after first.
Or what she’d do once she found him.
I risked one hand off the wheel long enough to rub my temple. This anxiety was eating me alive. I’d been driving too long and my head had ached the past twenty-four hours. I missed my sisters. We’d never been apart this long before.
So when the flash of brown stepped in front of my car, I panicked and swerved. The car hit a patch of ice, glanced off a tree and sailed with a groaning, metallic cry right over a ravine and into fast-moving, icy water.
The jarring crash rattled every bone in my body.
Shock froze me for a second or two. Then the terror hit. I screamed as the car floated down the river, slamming into boulders and tree limbs like some tricked-out carnival water slide. My suitcase flew between the bucket seats and hit my shoulder, knocking me into the steering wheel.
Blinking, I wrapped my cold fingers around the wheel until they cramped. I couldn’t see crap! Ride it out or abandon ship? The decision was ripped from me when everything came to a jarring stop.
The car had lodged into...a fallen tree. I took a deep breath. But then the vehicle tilted and my head slammed into the driver’s side window. Metal groaned again. The weight of the car pushed into limbs, causing shrill, screeching noises as they scraped the door.
Freezing water soaked into my jeans and through my T-shirt, ribbed turtleneck and my favorite jean jacket.
Fear, pain and panic create a mess of stupid.
I chucked my ego into the river and started scrambling. Everything was slippery and cold. I shivered, slid and gasped as I tried to right myself in the tilted front seat without standing on the driver’s side window. With teeth chattering and water dripping into my eyes, I searched out a dry spot on my jacket sleeve to wipe them. Water dribbled into my mouth. I caught the metallic taste of blood.
I climbed over the side of the driver’s seat and into the back, trying to brace my feet on anything.
Wrapping my fingers around the metal casing of the broken rear side window, I held on, dangling. Dizziness swept over me and I closed my eyes, trying to wrestle my panic into submission.
I held my eyes tightly closed. Took several deep breaths. When it felt as if the world would stay still again, I opened one eye and pulled myself partly up through the window. The snow pounded, feeling more like ice pellets. They stung my cold cheeks. My breath caught on a sob as the car suddenly lurched, slid a foot or two, then settled into another tree.
That’s when I saw him. Crouch-crawling along that tree. A man. A really big man in a black parka with the hood pulled over his face.
Chapter Two
My heart slammed against my rib cage.
It could have been the cold, or the terror, screwing with my head...or my penchant for scary B movies, but all I could think about were stories about girls who disappear when they’re alone out on the road.
Honestly, facing my death by drowning scared me, but being raped and murdered and left to freeze in the growing piles of snow wasn’t the way I wanted to go, either. My adrenaline spiked. I kept one eye on him and yanked the upper half of my body through the window.
Hell with the tree! I’d jump in the river and swim for it.
“Hang on,” he yelled. “I’ll pull you out!”
“No, thanks,” I shouted back. “I’m good!” I opened my mouth to repeat but choked as a surge of icy river water swept over the car and into my mouth. I spat it out, along with a twig and—oh, gross—something slippery that moved against my tongue. Gagging, I spat again and held on as the flood tried to push me back into the car.
“You’re bleeding a lot, so be still.” The deep voice was right by my head.
Gasping, I turned, swallowing the acid in my throat, not sure where to go. What to do. I was losing it. Hadn’t even realized he’d crawled that close.
“Hey, kid, if I can see the blood in this dark, with all this water, you’ve got a problem. Just stop wiggling so I can get ahold of you.”
“Who’s got ahold of you?” My words slurred and that scared me to death, even as the “kid” thing relieved me a bit. With my black hair cropped close to my head and wet, I probably looked like a twelve-year-old boy who’d stolen his parents’ car. With nasty river water choking me, I probably sounded like one, too.
“I’ve got my boots braced, don’t worry.”
Strong hands wrapped around my upper arms and he tugged me through the window opening. He slid one arm behind my knees. The other went around my shoulders. I stared into the darkness under the hood. It was creepy, like gazing into a black hollow where a face should be.
