Endure (28 page)

There’s no arguing with that, but anger still stiffens my muscles, and pity—pity for Frank because he is so evil, pity for Loki, who is naked and tortured for centuries, and pity for Astley for giving up.

“Fine,” I say.

Frank makes a motion and the pixies set me down. He starts to say something, but I ignore him and all the pixies and instead walk toward the god. The water sizzles where my boots touch it, ripples showing the displacement caused by mere forward motion. Nobody stops me.

“Loki.” I whisper his name and he looks at me, turning his head and revealing eyes as blue as my biological father’s. There is so much sorrow and pain in there. His mouth opens but no sound comes out. Above him the serpent’s fang drips one more drop of venom. It clangs into the bowl and the sound of it makes Loki cringe. What must it be like to have to listen to that for so long?

I ask Frank, because Astley is such a waste. “He’s here because he killed someone good?”

“Yes. And for mouthing off,” he answers.

“But the gods are always killing each other,” I say, remembering all those stories Devyn told us. The names run into each other and muddle up in my head now, but I do remember that there is a lot of death. “Why punish him like this for so long? Why single him out?”

“Does it matter?” Frank snaps. “Free him and let’s begin the end of it all.”

“Why can’t you?” I ask. “Why do I have to do it?”

“Because only someone who knows what he has done and still feels pity can let him go.” Frank groans as if I’m far too dumb to deal with anymore.

“And after I let him go, you’ll take care of Nick, help him?”

“Well, we’ll stop torturing him, although it is so much fun. Wolves are fun to abuse. And Astley hasn’t had his turn yet.”

I ignore him and step close to Loki. Despite his torture, he still has the form of a god, all powerful, chiseled muscle. I reach out and touch his arm, ignoring the jealous and/or protective hiss of the woman above him. Her arms quiver from holding the bowl. She must truly love him to hold that bowl for so very long. There must be something inside of him that is worthy of that kindness.

It’s so sad and so wrong. Should one being suffer against his will just so the rest of us can survive? Who are the gods to condemn one man forever? What kind of existence is this if my survival depends on his staying here, suffering forever, wrapped in the intestines of his very own son? What does it make us that we can allow such pain? Is survival worth that?

He cringes. I’m not sure if he’s cringing from pain or because his wife is hissing or because I’ve touched him, poor thing.

“Why can’t you just shift?” I ask. “If you’re a shape shifter, why don’t you turn into a fly and escape?”

He blinks at me and I move my hand away.

Everyone else just starts laughing. The horrible gales of it echo around the cave. Even the snake looks as if it wants to laugh at me somehow. My hands ball into fists, but then Loki’s eyes twitch and a horrible realization/sadness fills them and he roars. The primal fierceness of it vibrates against the walls.

I think I must swear a little under my breath, and I remind myself that I am doing this to save Nick, to free tortured Loki, and there’s this other weird feeling like a sense of destiny. But then what about the world? What about the end of it? What about Issie and Devyn and Cassidy and Grandma Betty and my mom? What about trees and birds and flowers and puppies and— What if my need to save kills everyone else, including Nick? What if I can’t stop the apocalypse once it starts?

But it’s not just Nick or Loki and his wife. Deep inside, I know I need to do this. Maybe I always have.

Reeling away from Frank, I push my fingers into my eyelids, trying to think, to understand. It’s hard because there’s an annoying house fly buzzing near my ear. I do not want all of us to die. I do not want—

Fingers touch my shoulder, firm but not aggressive, flatly planting against my sweater. Whirling around, I make fists, even though I know I can’t fight them well, not as a human anyway.

Loki looms above me. His face aches with joy. His eyes light up from within. His much smaller wife is clutching his side as if she’s afraid to let go. He’s so different than what he was just a minute ago.

“Y-you’re free,” I stutter. “Did I free you? I— I— What did I do?”

“I am free, thanks to your kindness and intellect.” He shakes his head. He exudes so much power now. “Centuries I have dwelled here and never saw the logic of escape. It humiliates me. To think I could just shape shift into a fly.”

“Oh . . .” I try to think of something to say, some nice platitude or cliché about not seeing what’s right before our eyes, but I can’t. All I can think about is the future, so I blurt, “Can you please not cause the apocalypse?”

For a second he just stares at me. Then he throws his head back and laughs. The booms of it shake the floor. Frank laughs too, but I’m not sure he actually knows what he’s laughing about. His pixie minions smile. Astley’s eyes are closed, like it is all too much to deal with.

When the laughter ends, Loki puts a hand on his wife’s head, strokes her hair, but keeps his eyes on me and addresses me directly. “It was inspired of them to say that I would be the inciting force for Ragnarok, but, alas, that is untrue, little human. I do not incite.”

“Zara,” I tell him, unclenching my fists. “My name is Zara.”

“Zara . . . princess.” He takes in this new information.

I need to understand. “So, you aren’t going to fight against Odin when the apocalypse comes?”

“Oh, that I shall, I don’t doubt. But I do not cause the apocalypse.”

“You don’t?” I ask. “Everything I’ve read says that you do.”

“No. It is wrong.”

“Then who does?”

He points at Astley and Frank. “They do. The pixies.”

NCIC TELETYPE

Attention All Bedford County Area Agencies: Please contact the Emergency Management Services immediately about sending all available personnel to assist in an event currently occurring in Bedford. See below for details.

Finding out that he is responsible for the beginning of the apocalypse seems to absolutely make Frank’s day. He and Astley pretty much prance around the cavern, smacking each other on the back and bowing to their pixie minion types, who appropriately salute them and wipe the sweat off of their brows. It’s really ridiculously hot in here, too hot to be cavorting, and there is a battle going on, and Nick is still injured in the outer cavern, and . . . I need to get out of here.

I am terrified of Loki, but I touch his arm. “Can you help my friend? Can you get us out of here?”

He looks at me, expressionless.

There’s probably a protocol for asking this sort of thing of a Norse god, but I honestly don’t have the time or means to google it at the moment, so instead I try to give him the pleading-eye look that always used to work on Nick.

“She can’t leave!” Frank hisses.

Loki puts out his arm, but doesn’t even look at them.

“Inconsequential little slugs,” he murmurs, and then they freeze—all of them—Frank, Astley, their little groupies. Loki cocks his head a tiny bit and says, “I am still weak. You should hurry.”

“Nick?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “I do not have the power to heal.”

“Okay.” I start to rush across the thin sheet of hot water toward the cavern opening but then think better of it. “Are you going to be okay?”

His eyebrows raise almost all the way up to his hairline. “You truly are a compassionate one, princess. Perhaps that aspect of the prophecy was true.”

He hasn’t answered my question, I notice. I hesitate one more time and then beg, “Please don’t go on a killing spree. At least not with humans. Please . . . I don’t want to be responsible.”

Slowly he nods, and his wife moves to hug him fully again. He hugs her back and whispers, “I promise. I hold no ill will toward your kind. Hurry.”

I have no idea if I should trust him, but right now I have no choice. So I run. Nick’s on the floor, a wolf, barely breathing. Two pixies stand over him, frozen, but with lit cigarettes in their hands. They’ve tied up his limbs. There are burn marks in his fur and it smells of pain, burned flesh. I swear at them, and bend down and start yanking Nick backward, dragging him across the floor, but he’s heavy . . . so heavy, and I am just human. It’s just like when he died, I couldn’t move him quickly enough, couldn’t save him.

“Not this time,” I mutter. The ground shudders beneath me. I turn and there is Loki and his wife. He’s a wolf now, giant and huge. With one swipe he knocks down the wall. His wife rides on his back.

She reaches down. “Hand up your wolf. We will get him to safety.”

“Promise me?” I say, struggling to lift Nick. I can’t do it.

“I promise you. It is the least we can do for you.” She reaches lower, but I still can’t raise him up.

“I’m too weak,” I complain.

Loki growls and turns. He reaches down and takes Nick in his mouth, gently, carrying him by the scruff of Nick’s neck, as if Nick were a puppy.

“You are strong, Zara White. So strong. You should know that now.” She shakes her head at me. “
Af kvöl er friðr.
From suffering, peace.”

And then they are gone, leaping out of the room and down the hall. I text Issie and hope she has time to read it:
Do not kill giant wolf. Good guy.

And then I have two choices. I can rush after Loki and his wife while Frank and Astley and the rest are still frozen or I can go back and try to stop them for good.

There is no choice, really.

I grab a sword off one of the frozen cigarette-holding pixies and head back down the tunnel and into the second cavern room. Astley and Frank stand where I left them. Astley’s eyes reveal a near panic, and his back is hunched a little bit. I should kill him right now, drive the sword right through his heart, and then do the same to Frank. Raising the sword, my hand starts to shake. I believed in him. I believed in him so much.

The air smells like sulfur. It shimmers. It’s like the entire world twitches, and I panic, scoot backward, and hide behind a giant rock formation. I don’t have time to do any more because the world just starts again. Loki’s power wasn’t strong enough to keep the bad guys still. Frank laughs with joy.

He hugs Astley to him. “We did it! We did it!”

“There is no mouth to Hel,” Astley says, deadpan. “I hardly see what you have achieved.”

I flatten myself against the wall, hide partially behind an outcropping.

“I achieve it now,” Frank says, raising up a sword and chanting something fast and crazy sounding. His eyes flash red and then glow a pretty sort of silver color that spreads around him like a ball of magic. A silver aura emanates from Frank and then spreads throughout the entire room, sounding with a pop. Black ooze creeps around his feet.

“Nice,” I mutter, thinking this must be the worst thing that has ever happened in the history of the world and it’s my fault. I was too slow. I should have killed him at least.

As I’m thinking this, Astley lunges for Frank, knocking him down. “No! You cannot! You cannot! Fool! Do not do this!”

“It is already done.” Frank laughs as the earth shakes around us, and that’s when I do the only thing I can think of doing.

“Astley!” I step out and throw him my sword. He catches it by the hilt and plunges it into Frank’s chest. Frank gasps as blood splurts out and then begins to trickle away more slowly.

“It is too late,” he whispers. His arm grabs Astley by the cloth of his shirt. “It has begun.”

“No!” Astley shakes his head, yanks out the sword, and with one smooth movement he slashes the blade across Frank’s neck, silencing him forever. I turn away as he whispers, “It is never too late.”

The ground continues to shake as one moment passes and then another. Astley comes up beside me. “I am so sorry.”

I whirl around, stare into his grimy, grief-stricken face. His face is beautiful and so good. How could I have believed he’d betray us? Relief floods into me, pushing tears to my eyes. I rub against them with the heel of my hand. “You should have told me what you were doing. I thought—I thought—”

“That I had betrayed you all. I know. But Nick and I—”

“Nick knew!” I interrupt as the floor cracks.

“It was his idea. We thought it was the only way we could get all the information we needed. I learned how to stop the apocalypse, Zara. I learned about this room, about Loki. That’s why we didn’t fight him more on the stage. We let him take us here.”

I swallow hard as the floor dips beneath us and slants. “I am so mad at you.”

He grasps me by the waist as we start to lose our footing. “I know.”

His eyes are so honest and upset. The color of them changes, but the truth of him doesn’t. He is always Astley, and sometimes he does stupid reckless things, but so do I. Forgiving him, and Nick too, is easy. If we survive, I can yell at them later.

Clutching each other, we scramble toward the hole in the wall that Loki escaped through. Pixies, the bad pixies, are screaming and trying to run too. Looking behind me, I see what Frank did. There’s a pit, a hole into the earth. Icy blue flames leap out of it. It’s what Hel showed me before. It isn’t getting bigger, but there are cracks radiating out from it. Something explodes and I stop moving, my heartbeat fast.