Endure (13 page)

“Yeah. Half zombie and incredibly tall,” Betty says.

“Tell them what she said to you, Zara,” Astley urges.

He reaches across the couch and touches my arm. I swear tension suddenly fills the entire room. I refuse to look at Nick as Astley quickly moves his hand away. My ice pack falls off, plopping into my lap. I fix it and tell them how the woman said that she didn’t want to kill me, that she was testing me, that she wanted to see what I was made of.

“Oh, you’re the chosen one!” Issie breathes out. “That’s so cool.”

“I am not any sort of chosen one,” I argue. “That’s a cliché anyway. ‘The chosen one.’ ”

I spit out the phrase pretty disdainfully. Cassidy rests her hand against my shoulder and perches on the couch. She’s so peaceful. It makes me feel a little better.

“She also said that I can’t let him out,” I add.

“Who?” asks Nick. It’s the first word he’s said.

I shrug, meet his eyes. “I don’t know.”

“Well, if it has to do with Ragnarok, it might mean Fenrir, the giant wolf you unleashed in Iceland, but that has already happened,” Betty says.

Astley rubs the back of his hand across his eyes like he’s either tired or trying to wipe the memory away. “Or it could mean Loki. The giant mentioned him too. He was—”

Cassidy interrupts. “I’ve been dreaming about him.”

The conversation in the room stops. Cassidy pulls in a big breath and explains that she’s been dreaming about a man tied up with serpent venom dripping into his mouth. His bindings are intestines that have turned to iron. He is pleading with her to help him get free.

Despite all my aches, I put an arm around Cassidy. “That’s horrible.”

She nods.

“That’s probably it,” Devyn agrees. “And look what I found. Is this the woman who attacked you?”

He passes his phone to me. There’s a picture on the screen of a half-zombie/half-human woman. She’s more skeleton than the one I saw and her flesh isn’t two different colors.

“It’s close,” I say as Betty points out the differences. “Who is it?”

“Hel.” Astley breathes out the word like it’s a curse. Even Betty stops talking.

“Hell is a place,” Nick says after a second of frozen silence.

Devyn directs all his professor-style attention at Nick. “In Norse mythology it is a place
and
a woman who rules that place. Hel is where people who die of old age and sickness go.”

“As opposed to Valhalla?” I ask, dizzy. “Where you get to go when you die in quote-unquote glorious battle.”

Cassidy blows out the match. “The Vikings thought that dying in battle was the way to go. It’s what they aspired to, but Valhalla versus Hel isn’t anything like heaven versus hell. It’s not a good versus bad thing.”

“Well, they weren’t a society that promoted peace.” Devyn walks across the room, shows the image on his phone to Nick, and says, “If you lived a long and peaceful life, you were destined to spend eternity with a zombie woman. If you killed people, then you were assigned to Valhalla, where you drank beer all day and trained with Valkyries.”

“I think I’d rather go to Hel,” Issie chirps from the computer screen.

“Me too,” says Cassidy, all quippy. “I hate beer.”

Astley looks at me and smiles super sweetly and I swear steam starts to come out of Nick’s corner of the living room. It’s frustrating, but I ignore his crankiness and try to get us all back on track by saying, “Then that is what we have to do.”

Everyone looks at me with mouths hanging open, which usually means that:

1. I have had a massive jump in logical thought that nobody else is following.

2. I’ve had a ridiculously bad idea.

I’ve decided that it’s the first option, so I shift my weight and explain.

“This Hel woman obviously knows what is going on.” I start it out slowly, trying to rationalize it to myself as well as everyone else. “So we need to find her. To find her, we need to find Hel.”

“Hel!” Issie whispers frantically. “We cannot go to Hel.”

“It doesn’t sound all that bad,” I say as Betty harrumphs in the kitchen, where she’s retreated to start making more tea.

“No . . . I just watched a History Channel special on hell,” Issie insists, leaning closer to her computer screen, so close that I can see the pores in her nose. “And you do
not
want to go there. It’s all tortured souls and screaming, nine layers of horrible horribleness.”

“That’s the Christian version,” Cassidy says.

“And the Greek!” Issie says. “And the Roman.”

“Issie, you’re yelling,” I tell her. “Your mom is going to hear you.”

She gets terrified eyes and slaps her hand over her mouth. Then she lets go and whispers, “The special said there were gates kind of like in
Buffy
—hell mouths between here and the underworld.”

“Like Dante,” Devyn says, and then recites:

Through me you pass into the city of woe:

Through me you pass into eternal pain:

Through me among the people lost for aye.

The words echo in the room, creepy and silent, and Nick is the one who breaks it. “There is no way in hell, uh—”

“Excuse the pun,” Cassidy interjects.

“—that I’m going to let you go to Hel, Zara. You’ve just been attacked by that monster woman, you’ve nearly died saving his life.” He glares at Astley. “You just got back from Valhalla. No, just no,” he finishes, standing up and glowing as if he’s on fire.

A whole bunch of emotions rush through me simultaneously and I can’t sort them out anywhere near quickly enough. He cares enough to be worried about me even though I’m a pixie. I’m grateful that he cares, but mad that he thinks he has power over me to “let me go.”

I shake my head, and I’m about to say something when Betty speaks instead. “We don’t even know how to get there. It’s like Valhalla all over again.”

“No,” I say. “We’re smarter now. Before, we didn’t know if Valhalla was real. We don’t even doubt this stuff anymore.”

“Smarter now? Smarter?” Nick sputters. “You want to go to
Hel,
Zara. You want to chase after some zombie-beast-woman thing that just beat you up. She could have killed you.”

“But she didn’t,” I argue, standing up. Astley grabs the ice pack as it topples off my head. I wobble a little bit but manage to stand okay.

“Right. She didn’t. Because she was playing with you the way cats play with their prey, the way
pixies
”—Nick spits out the word—“play with their prey.”

Astley drops the limp dishtowel on the coffee table. “Do not insult us.”

“Why?” Nick asks.

Astley’s eyes twitch. Without a word, he stands up next to me and then takes a step toward Nick. Nobody else answers either. The room is just a chamber of tension and worry. I close my eyes.

“It’s not up to you to decide if I go or not,” I say, opening my eyes again and staring at Nick.

He meets my gaze. “Why? Because it’s up to him?”

“No, because it’s up to me,” I say. “Or it’s a group vote.”

My head spins from the stress of it all and I sit back down. I try to figure out who would vote what way if we did have a group vote. I can’t predict anyone’s response except Nick’s. How can he be so bossy? He ignores me and then
boom!
he’s all protective again? Maybe this isn’t even about me. Maybe this is about him losing his place as alpha, as pack leader and protector.

“People are so complicated,” I groan into my hands.

“What?” Cassidy asks.

“Nothing,” I say, pulling my head back up to look at everyone.

As usual, Devyn has been pretty much blowing off all of the tension and says in a totally level way, “A ton of people have already postured that the gate to hell—and I am saying hell with two
l
’s, not the Viking Hel with one
l
—has been in numerous places. Some believe it’s in the Fengdu County in the Chongqing Municipality, some believe—”

“Where?” Betty asks.

“China,” I say. One good thing about writing all those Urgent Action letters for Amnesty International trying to protect people’s human rights is that it makes me good with geography.

“Then there are people who think it’s in Africa,” Devyn continues, pressing the screen on his phone. “Specifically Erta Ale in the Afar Region of Ethiopia. It’s a volcano. Locals call it ‘the gateway to hell.’ ”

“That sounds promising,” Astley says.

We all agree and Devyn tells us that some people think hell’s entrance is in Clifton, New Jersey, where there are Satanic sacrifices and a thousand-pound ax allegedly blocking the doors to hell. Once you get through the doors you have to battle a glowing skull.

“But the best option is Iceland,” Devyn finishes. “Iceland is where we’ve had activity before. They have an entire three-hundred-year period called the Viking Age in their history. There’s a connection there that doesn’t exist with Guatemala or Kansas.”

“Damn it, but no.” Betty puts her hand over her eyes and then recovers. She walks to the wood stove and opens the door, pokes the log into submission, and puts another one on top.

“Iceland,” Astley repeats, looking at me. We both remember what’s happened there, I bet. That’s where my biological father died, eaten by a giant wolf that was meant to kill us. That’s where Astley learned there was a traitor in our kingdom. We hadn’t realized then that it was Isla, his own crazy-ass mother.

“It’s a volcano again,” Devyn begins.

“Of course,” interrupts Nick. He throws up his hands like it’s all too ridiculous and frustrating for words.

“A volcano by a resort—Namaskaro is the volcano. Lake Myvatn is the resort. This is named after the lake, which is entropic,” Devyn continues, but Issie interrupts him and demands he speak in English, understandable third-grade English. Basically, there is a volcano in a remote area of Iceland that has some interesting geographical aspects to it.

“And people think it’s an entrance to Hel why?” I ask.

“Well, close by is a crater called ‘Viti,’ which means ‘hell’ in Icelandic.” Devyn’s eyes stay fixed to the screen as he paces back and forth in front of the fire.

“It does not seem definitive enough,” Astley says.

“True.” Devyn meets his eyes.

“It’s more than we usually have,” I say. “It’s been called an entrance to Hel. It’s got a Norse/Viking connection. We know there’s activity in Iceland from the last time we were there.”

Astley smiles at me, maybe because I’m being Optimistic Zara, I don’t know, but it distracts me and I’m completely unprepared for Nick’s freak-out.

“Don’t smile at her!” he snaps.

Astley’s eyebrows lift up toward his hairline. “What did you just say?”

“I said, ‘Don’t smile at her.’ ” Nick stands up again. “You keep smiling at her and touching her like she’s your possession.”

“Touching someone does not indicate ownership.” Astley stands up too. “Your logic fails you.”

The air ripples with male anger, all testosterone charged. Betty’s hand rests on my shoulder as I announce, “I’m nobody’s possession, Nick. People don’t possess each other. They care about and support each other, but they don’t—”

He stomps one step closer, finally making eye contact with me, and in those eyes is such pain and such anger that my heart breaks all the way down inside as he declares, “I want the pixie out of here.”

Astley answers before I can. “You do not get to make that decision, friend.”

“Don’t call me ‘friend.’ You aren’t my friend,” Nick spits back.

Dropping her hand, Betty arches up and you can see the tiger in the way she shifts her eyes into something serious and wild and deadly calm. “Nick Colt. You are acting like a brat.”

The clock on the wall chimes eleven. Cassidy breaks it with her singsong voice. Her braids sway, casting spells in the air. Her words soften the air just a bit. “You know, Nick, we are all working toward the same goal here. We all want the same thing.”

“I know what he wants. He wants her.” Nick points at me.

“This is ridiculous,” Devyn says, finally acknowledging the situation. He looks so bird thin standing in between them. Either could knock him over with a punch. “We are all on the same team.”

“Are we?” Nick huffs out as I close my eyes for a second, overwhelmed by the clichés and the tough-guy talk.

“I could ask the same,” Astley says. His hands go to his hips in such a man pose as he talks. “Since you have returned you have spent more time glowering and undermining Zara’s new power than you have supporting us in our efforts to eradicate Frank and determine what exactly the Ragnarok threat is.”

“Nick just died,” I start to explain. “He’s had a lot to adjust to.”

“Don’t make excuses for him,” Betty says.

Devyn gasps. On the computer screen Issie moans, “I can’t see anything! Someone turn me around.”

I reach over and pivot the laptop, although I don’t know why Issie would even
want
to see this. The refrigerator makes a creaking noise that is so loud it echoes in here. It doesn’t make them even pause.