Heimdall led the group through the forest as a steady rain filtered down through the canopy of tall evergreens. He loved the smell of ozone in the air, and with Laika by his side, he felt energized by the cool, crisp air and the satisfying crunch of pine needles under his boots.
Heimdall, Freya, Freyr, and Saga moved swiftly among the trees thanks to their still decent night vision, one of the few strengths they retained as the rest of their divine powers slowly ebbed. A natural hunter, Laika enjoyed the brisk pace and danced excited circles around Heimdall as they proceeded deeper into the woods.
Rod, however, kept falling behind.
As he’d done every few yards since they started, Freyr reached back, grabbed Rod by the front of his jacket and yanked him forward.
Catapulted ahead into the darkness, Rod narrowly avoided smacking face-first into a tree trunk.
“All right already!” Rod pushed the nature god’s hands away and straightened his outerwear. “I’m doing the best I can, okay? You could have at least let me bring a flashlight.”
“Mmm.” Freyr patted him on the back and disappeared again into the darkness ahead, following Heimdall’s lead until the trees opened into a clearing.
“This is as far as I got last night.” Heimdall stepped into the center of the clearing as the others fanned out around him. He looked for the tiny sliver of moon overhead but found only clouds and the gentle drizzle of autumn rain falling on his face. Laika leapt around the small grove and nosed under the low shrubs, looking for another chipmunk or maybe a rabbit.
“I was standing here when I felt that chill move through me.” He looked at Freya. “You think someone’s working magick?”
Freya stepped across the grass and moss to stand beside Heimdall. She turned slowly in a circle, and Heimdall watched with envy as she took in the energies beyond the sights, scents, and sounds of the forest. Even with her slipping divinity, Freya was a skilled shaman. Where others could see only trees, Freya felt the pulsing vitality of the forest itself.
“Owls.” She gestured toward one of the trees that ringed the small glade, then closed her eyes. “A particularly lazy possum, about a hundred yards to my right.” She frowned slightly and waved her hand to her left. “A lone coyote, stalking a young rabbit, not quite a mile to the south.”
Coming to the end of her rotation, Freya stopped and sniffed the air. “Other than that, we’ve got the obvious—rain falling on pine needles, absorbing into the soil. And, of course . . .”
Freya gestured toward the path they had followed into the clearing, just as Rod came stumbling out of the woods into the circle.
“. . . Our friend, Rod, crashing through the forest like a drunken rhinoceros.”
Rod caught his balance before he fell on his face on the wet ground. He blinked at the others, barely able to make them out against the dark trees that surrounded them.
“Everybody here?” Rod cleared his throat and shoved his hands into his jacket pockets.
“Yeah. Thanks for checking in on us.” Heimdall knew Rod couldn’t see the smirk on his face in the dark, but there was no way to keep it out of his voice.
“Okay, then,” Rod announced loudly, overcompensating for his poor night vision. “What do we do now?”
Freyr laid a firm hand on Rod’s shoulder, instantly silencing him.
Heimdall leaned close to Freya. “Anything else?”
“We’ve not been tracked.” Freya gazed up into the conifers and studied the needle-laced branches of pine, cedar, and spruce that looked jet black against the indigo sky. “Can you still feel it, standing here now?”
Heimdall frowned. “The magick that knocked me on my ass?” He looked into her unamused eyes. “Sorry. You mean the Tree.”
Heimdall knelt and laid his palm flat against the ground. He closed his eyes and took in a deep breath, then homed in on the steady cacophony of vibrations beneath the soil’s surface. Filtering out the familiar chatter of domestic trees and the sharp static from the power station and cell towers several miles away, Heimdall tuned into the tender, hopeful pulse of the young sapling.
The Yggdrasil is calling.
He opened his eyes. “It’s close.” He stood and wiped his hand on the front of his jacket. “But I don’t know how close. I can’t even tell what species of tree it is this time.”
Freya rested a hand on his shoulder. “Your hunt brought you closer to the Yggdrasil than mine did, cousin.”
Heimdall shrugged. A cool trickle of condensed rain slid beneath his jacket collar, and he shivered. “It’s just never been an emergency before.”
Freya looked over her shoulder to nod at Saga, then sat down cross-legged on the ground. Taking her cue, Saga gestured to the others to form a circle around Freya, facing outward to form a protective ring around her.
Rod watched the others take their positions at the cardinal points on the circle—Freyr in the West, Heimdall in the North, and Saga in the East. “Okay. What are we doing?”
Saga stepped out of place and took him gently by the hand, careful not to disturb Freya as she moved Rod into position. “We’re acting as sentinels of the Four Quarters. You’ll be South.”
“South. Okay.” Rod stood facing the trees, then whispered hoarsely over his shoulder to Saga as she resumed her place in the East. “What does South mean? What am I supposed to do?”
Saga shrugged. “Concentrate on the color red. Try to think of yourself as the summer sun. Imagine that if anyone or anything even thought about approaching our circle, you’d lash out with blazing fire. Okay?”
Rod nodded. “Yeah, blazing fire. Okay.”
Laika darted into the circle and sniffed at Freya’s face. Freya smiled and patted the wolf-dog’s head. With a wag of the tail, Laika settled down behind her, pressing her spine against Freya’s back and keeping eyes and ears alert to any intrusion. Freya closed her eyes and rested her hands in her lap.
Heimdall stared straight ahead into the dark forest. It had been a long time since he’d stood at the Quarters in any kind of ritual. He shuffled his feet, trying to remember if he was supposed to chant or perform any kind of invocation.
“Hey!” Rod called quietly to Freyr, standing vigil in the West. “Hey, what’s she doing?”
Even in the dark, Rod could feel the exasperation on Freyr’s face as he turned toward him. “She’s entering a shamanic trance state to delve into the Earth and locate the Tree.”
Rod frowned. “She’s doing what now?”
Freyr sighed and stepped over to Rod. “It’s a kind of meditation,” he whispered. “She’s directing her awareness down into the ground to scout out the Yggdrasil from below.”
“Okay.”
Freyr started back to his position.
“But why didn’t she do that before now?”
Freyr stepped back over to Rod. “We had to find the Yggdrasil’s signal first.” Freyr saw the question on the human’s face and answered it before Rod could open his mouth. “It’s a kind of a song that’s unique to the Tree. Heimdall located it last night, so now Freya has a beacon to follow.”
Freyr strode back across the moss to take up his position in the West.
“But what happens if—”
“Just be the freaking fire to the South, already!” Freyr hissed. “And do it quietly.”
“We’re just here to keep out the stray squirrel or dragon, Rod,” Heimdall whispered across the clearing from the North. “Leave the rest to Freya.”
Freyr snorted. “Dragons. You’d better watch out, Rod . . .”
Saga shushed them both. “Boys.”
North, Heimdall whispered to himself, trying to clear his mind of everything but earth and winter. He closed his eyes and breathed in a vague hint of frosted fire. He felt a faint trickle of the power that had once flowed steadily through him. It wasn’t enough. He might still be a formidable force among mortals, stronger even than Odin, but he felt like a pathetic weakling compared to what he had once been.
Maybe Thor had it rig
ht. Heimdall thought about roaming Berserkers . . . Find the Tree, sure, but don’t just keep an eye on it. Harness the Yggdrasil’s power to resurrect the Old Ways—and restore themselves.
A flutter of wings and swish of evergreen branches announced the arrival of a Great Horned Owl, come to get a better look at what was going on in the grove. Laika lifted her head and whined as the owl hooted and paced up and down on a tree branch above Heimdall’s head.
On instinct, Heimdall pivoted to face Freya, turning his back on the North. The owl would hold the Quarter for him. He crouched low and pressed both palms flat against the damp earth. With a deep exhalation, he sent what divine strength he had left into the ground, trying to open the way for Freya’s journey.
Heimdall watched her facial muscles relax and then felt a tingling rise of energy along his spine as he connected to her through the earth. He saw the corners of her mouth tick up into a smile, and his envy of her abilities flared.
While the others struggled with the decline of godhood, Freya was quite enjoying herself. Without the pressures of the pantheon—or her duty to promote love and fertility among her divine kinsmen or mortal Norse tribes—she was free to study and explore. She’d traveled the world these last centuries, learning from masters of every religion and mystical tradition. Freya had studied with wise men and women who revered one god, many gods, trees, rocks, space aliens, or nothing at all. She’d become a true mystic.
Heimdall felt a flash of power pass through the soil beneath his hands, and watched a vibrating luminescence build around Freya as she sat in deep meditation. Wisps of light snaked around her, coiling upward out of the earth to encompass her body and then spiral up into the overcast sky. Freya was glowing from her fingertips to the roots of her hair.
Freya rested her palms flat against the ground by her sides. An explosion of color danced into the flickering coils of light that surrounded her.
“Whoa!”
Heimdall looked across the circle and saw Rod staring at Freya. “Rod . . .”
Instead of turning back around to face southward, Rod pointed at Freya and gaped.
Heimdall decided to humor him. “Each of those colored sparks is a trace of all who walk, swim, fly over, or make their home within the planet.”
“No way . . .”
“Every tree is connected to every other,” Heimdall said, barely above a whisper. “The oldest, deepest historical archive on the planet.”
“So you’re going to talk to the trees?” Rod stared at the delicate fireworks show centered on Freya.
Heimdall smelled the static charge building on the air—a combination of ozone from the weather and the energies now coalescing around Freya. He glanced around the circle and saw the others, even the open-mouthed Rod, bristle at the power amassing in the center of the glade. The owl over his head flapped its wings in agitated excitement, and Laika whimpered at the raised energy.
“Best mind the South now, Rod,” Heimdall suggested.
Rod nodded dumbly and turned around.
Eyes closed, Freya lifted her face to the sky and breathed in sharply. The tingling tickle against Heimdall’s palms shifted. He felt his cousin send tendrils of consciousness down into the ground and out along the network of roots.
Heimdall closed his eyes, pressed his hands hard against the damp earth, and followed her.
Shamanic journeying was not Heimdall’s strong suit. As soon as he forced his awareness out of his body and into the ground below, he was lost among the tangle of roots, earthworm tunnels, and rabbit warrens, and his consciousness started to retreat in a bewildered panic. But then Freya’s spark whisked past him as she homed in on the quiet, empty roots of the dead husk of the old Sitka Spruce. Heimdall fought his way through disorientation and took off after her.
Freya’s shimmering, translucent astral form looked exactly like her physical body. Racing along the elegantly intricate network of tree roots, Heimdall followed Freya down a trail of cold, dark brown veins. He stopped short as she tried to force her consciousness up out of the soil to commune with the stump of the old Tree, but the way was sluggish and heavy. Death and decay had taken hold, blocking her path.
Freya backtracked. She retreated past Heimdall along the dark lines of dead root to a junction where the glowing, amber roots of a nearby evergreen hadn’t yet recoiled completely from the old Tree.
Freya launched her astral body along this new, living root system. Heimdall fell in behind her, refreshed by the vitality and springy energy of the younger tree, which he guessed was only about six decades old.
Heimdall hung back as Freya zipped up the tree’s roots toward the trunk. But the tree pushed her back. Heimdall could smell the acrid scent of the evergreen’s trepidation, and Freya backed off and tried to reassure the tree, asking how she might be of service. The evergreen relaxed, but not enough to let her in.
Freya was about to try coaxing the tree again when Heimdall was knocked backward by a torrent of sense memory from the tree. He felt his physical body—miles away, back in the grove with his kin—shake with every remembered touch of the loggers’ chain saws, every crack of wood from intense wind storms and forest fires, even the loss of each bit of bark children had peeled away from the evergreen’s trunk.
Then Heimdall saw a vision of the deserted parking lot where the young evergreen stood. Through the downpour of rain, the corpse of the Sitka Spruce loomed on the other side of the pavement. Heimdall also spotted the beat-up truck, and the figure who slid out from behind the wheel, carrying a hacksaw as he made his way to the old Tree.
Managarm.
Heimdall flashed hot with anger. He tasted bile in his mouth. Managarm desecrated the old Tree? One of the Old Ones had wrought this sacrilege? Heimdall balled his luminous hands into fists and only barely kept from screaming.
His throat tightened as he watched the slab of the old Yggdrasil being sawn off. He convulsed with every stroke of the saw. Then the image of Managarm swaggered back to his truck with his prize.
Freya reached for Heimdall and tried to hold him in place, but his mounting rage yanked him backward. He lost sight of Freya, the Sitka Spruce, and the young evergreen as he sped back to his physical body. Grasping at the roots all around him, Heimdall strained to push forward again to rejoin Freya at the base of the young evergreen, but his astral fingers slipped along the network of underground tendrils.
Whole stands of trees flashed past with dizzying speed. He just needed to relax, then he could regain focus and control. But the vision of Managarm and his saw loomed large in his mind, and Heimdall came to a sudden stop in his physical body. He pitched forward, landing face-first in the dirt. Coughing, he rolled over on his back and blinked up at the overcast sky. Cool rain on his face mingled with hot, angry tears running down his cheeks, and Heimdall beat on the wet ground and screamed through clenched teeth.
Saga turned sharply from her position in the East. “Are you okay?”
She started to leave her post to assist him, but Heimdall waved her off and sat up. “Freya’s still on the hunt.”
Cursed, bloody Moon Dog! Heimdall dug his soil-covered hands into his hair and hung his head. If Managarm dared to steal from the old Tree, what would keep him from harming or even destroying the still vulnerable new Yggdrasil?
Freya sighed loudly in the center of the circle. Heimdall climbed to his feet and faced the outer forest. He had to stay focused and calm for Freya—she still had ground to cover. The owl on the branch over his headed hooted softly. Heimdall uncurled his fingers and wiped tears from his cheeks with the back of his hand.
But then the vision returned. He tried to fight off the mix of confidence and desperation that had poured off Managarm, but the young evergreen was still pushing impressions to him from miles away. Then he saw the Fenris Wolf, released from his prison. Heimdall broke into a cold sweat as the vision of the Randulfr howled up at a moonless sky and towered over the bloody corpse of Odin.
Heimdall lurched forward
and retched.
“No more,” he whispered to the faraway evergreen. “Please. I can’t take any more.”
His body jerked backward as the tree loosened its connection. Moaning softly, Heimdall pressed his palms to the ground and closed his eyes.
Thank you for being a witness, Heimdall communicated to the young evergreen.
Freya inhaled sharply behind him. Heimdall turned around and found her blinking up at him from the center of the circle.
“Freya?” Heimdall stumbled forward. Laika sat up and yawned loudly.
“That was unexpected,” Freya groaned as she climbed to her feet.
Startled off of their protection duty, Saga, Freyr, and Rod turned around. Freyr took a few steps toward his sister. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah,” Freya sighed. “I’ve got a bearing on the Yggdrasil.”
Rod’s face brightened. “That’s great!” He looked at Heimdall’s and Freya’s solemn faces and frowned. “I mean, that’s good, right? That’s what we wanted?”
Freyr rested a hand on his sister’s shoulder. “What happened?”
Freya clutched at her chest. “I think I’m going to be sick.”
Heimdall chuckled darkly. “I think I’ve already done enough heaving for both of us.”
Rod narrowed his eyes and glanced between Heimdall and Freya. “Is that reaction normal?”
“Hardly.” Heimdall looked into the low ceiling of clouds overhead and snarled. “Managarm.”
Saga grabbed Heimdall by the elbow. “Are you sure?”
Heimdall nodded coldly. “It’s the barbarous Moon Dog, all right. He’s after the Tree. He’s the cause of all of this.”
Leaning over and trying not to be sick, Freya raised a cautionary hand. “Maybe not all of it . . .” She took a deep breath and started retching again.
Saga’s grip tightened on Heimdall. “With the Black Moon coming . . .”
“Should’ve known it would be one of the Wolves.” Freyr crossed his arms over his chest and kicked at the moss beneath his feet.
Rod raised his hand like a school boy. “So, don’t everybody jump down my throat at once, but who or what exactly is Managarm? Is he a bad guy? A wolf?”
Freyr sighed. “No ordinary wolf. Managarm is the Moon Dog, cousin to the Warg Wolves and to the Randulfr, Fenrir.” He turned sharply to Heimdall. “I never liked those Wargs. Suspicious lot, always hanging out on the periphery, scheming and laughing among themselves, then grumbling about their responsibilities and about not being rewarded enough. They should never have been allowed into the New World.”
Rod raised his hand again. “What’s a Warg?”
Heimdall brushed past him, ignoring his question. “Not much we can do about that now.” He paced slowly in the center of the glade, every step deliberate. “We brought Fenrir and Managarm with us. They’re here.”
He stopped dead in his tracks as the image of the Fenris Wolf baying in victory over Odin’s body flashed again in his mind. “Ragnarok,” he whispered.
Freya swallowed hard and nodded. “Managarm seeks the Tree’s magick to release the Fenris Wolf. He means to destroy us all.”
“No! You have to be mistaken.” Saga clutched the front of Heimdall’s jacket. “Why would one of our own do such a thing? He has to know what the stakes are.”
“One of our own,” Freya sighed. “A disgruntled Old One who thinks he knows better than the rest of us.”
“Okay.” Rod cleared his throat, trying to participate in the conversation. “So, Wargs are bad. Right?”
Heimdall looked across the clearing at Rod and spent a long moment considering how much trouble he’d be in with his mother if he punched the handyman in the mouth. Before he could make up his mind, Freya spoke up.
“The young Yggdrasil isn’t far.” With one hand outstretched, Freya glanced around the grove, trying to feel her way to the World Tree. “Maybe a couple of miles.” She turned to Heimdall, and her face brightened. “And I can tell you this: It’s an Oregon White Oak.”
Freyr smiled and hugged his sister tight. “That’s good work. That makes the Tree easier to find.”
Saga frowned. “Assuming we get to it before Managarm does.”
Rod tightened his arms across his chest and shifted his weight between his feet. “So if Managarm finds the Tree first, it’s the end of the world? Literally?”
“The Universe,” Saga corrected.
Rod shivered against the cold. “But didn’t you say someone was working some sort of magick? Would Managarm have that kind of power? The rest of you don’t.”
“I don’t have all the answers.” Freya shook her head.
“Magick or not, doesn’t matter.” Freyr sighed loudly. “If Managarm finds the Tree, while it’s still defenseless . . .”
“And if he were to get close enough to his goal but fail, things could still be pretty bad.” Saga’s angry eyes filled with tears.
Heimdall cleared his throat. “Fenris Wolf running loose, Berserkers rampaging unchecked, the veils between worlds thinning or collapsing altogether. Did I miss anything?”
Freya tilted her face toward him. “Be grateful for this news. Now we have a better idea of what we’re up against. And we can find the Tree.”
Laika danced nervously around Heimdall as he gazed toward the northwest. He shoved his hands deep into his pockets. “There’s a stand of young Oregon White Oaks, about four-and-a-half miles from here.”
Freya’s face brightened. “That’s it then. The Yggdrasil is there.”
“You don’t understand.” He rested his hands on his hips. “There are about 600 trees in that stand. All Oregon White Oaks. All about the right age. The Yggdrasil could be any one of them.”
A grim smile froze on Freyr’s face. “Well, we’d better get moving then.”
~ nine ~
Valhalla Page 17