The sun had just dipped below the horizon when Bragi, Frigga, Thor, and Loki arrived at Wolf Haven. They sat in Bragi’s old Subaru in a pull-off across the road from the long drive to the sanctuary entrance, waiting for the last of the staff to leave.
“I don’t understand why I’m not allowed out of this tin can even to stretch my legs,” Thor complained. The overnight drive to Loki’s place outside of Joseph had been bad enough, cramped as he was in the back of his brother’s Forester, but his body had scarcely had time to recover from that trip before they were piling back into the car for another long haul west to Tenino, Washington. And this time he’d had to share the back seat with his mother.
“It’s like I’m dying back here,” the god of thunder whined. He looked to his mother plaintively, but got no sympathy.
Frigga leaned over and patted his solid stomach. “Maybe lay off the candy bars a bit, then you’d be more comfortable.”
Behind the wheel, Bragi checked his watch as a tiny hatchback exited the sanctuary property. “I think that should be the last of them.” He turned the key in the ignition and shifted the car into gear.
“There will be someone on duty,” Loki said from the passenger seat. “Someone on watch overnight.”
Thor snorted in the back seat. “A guard to watch the wolves.” He shook his head and resisted the temptation to slam his fist against the inside of the rear passenger door. He’d already dented the interior of the car in seven different places, not to mention the indentation on the roof and the busted hubcap he’d tried—unsuccessfully—to hide from Bragi. Of course, his brother was keeping a log of Thor’s damage to his vehicle. At last tally, he estimated he was in for about $1500 in repairs.
Thor sat on his hands and tried to remember the breathing meditation Freya had taught him, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the road they followed into Wolf Haven. Fenrir is here.
Thor had trained Fenrir as a pup, and it had crushed him to see the Randulfr doubly imprisoned—behind bars and stuck in full wolf form. But it had been a blessing not to have to clean up after Fenrir anymore. Humans didn’t take kindly to raids on livestock, domesticated pets, and even young children.
He deliberately didn’t think about what must be going through Loki’s mind as they approached the sanctuary’s main gate. Fenrir was Loki’s son, his last surviving child.
Frigga rested a hand on his shoulder, and Thor shook off as much impatience as possible. “You’re going to give yourself a heart attack one of these days,” she chided.
One of these days. Thor glanced quickly in the rearview mirror at the graying hair and tired eyes of his reflection. Bragi caught his eye, and Thor immediately looked away, choosing to scowl out at the darkening sky instead. Generations passed for the mortals around them, but the gods still hadn’t faced the elephant in the room. They were aging.
Turning away from the window, Thor stared at the back of Loki’s head, noting the gray streaks in his historically jet black hair. How long until one of them grew sick? How long until one of them died?
Would the Halls of Valhalla open their doors to deceased gods?
Half-way up Wolf Haven’s long driveway, Bragi stopped the car in front of a gate that was chained shut. Thor bounded out of the car—after disentangling his large frame from the seat belt—and sliced through the chain with a pair of bolt cutters from the trunk. They drove forward along the wooded road and parked just out of sight of the main parking area.
Thor was the first out of the car, before Bragi even pulled the keys out of the ignition. Breathing in the fresh, clean air of the woods, he twirled the bolt cutters in his fingers like a baton and waited for the others.
Frigga reached into the trunk and started handing out a half-dozen cans of spray paint to deface the sanctuary buildings and even—though it pained her deeply—some of the trees. If they got the tags right, authorities surveying the scene come morning would assume the sanctuary had been hit by a notorious gang on the dog fighting circuit, rather than Norse gods breaking in to steal a wolf.
Who, as a matter of fact, wasn’t a wolf at all.
“You ready to do this?” Thor shook a can of bright orange paint and looked across the hood of the car at Loki, who held cans of white and yellow paint carefully away from his body. Thor couldn’t blame him. With his unstable powers, there was an even chance the paint would explode in his face.
Loki popped the caps off the cans, then caught Thor’s eye and nodded.
“Do you know which enclosure he’s in?”
“They keep moving him around.” Wincing, Loki sprayed a practice dot of white paint on a nearby tree. He next tried a couple of short yellow hash marks on the trunk. “Apparently he has trouble getting along with the others.”
Thor choked on his laughter, but Loki smiled weakly. “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”
“We’ll just check each pen ‘til we find Fenrir.”
Thor saw Frigga shudder involuntarily at the Randulfr’s name. If Loki noticed, he had the diplomacy not to let on.
Bragi started toward the wolf enclosures, and Loki and Thor fell into step behind him. Frigga took a quick detour toward the gift shop, where she streaked bright blue and hot pink paint across the front door and windows in the patterns of sharp, jagged teeth associated with the Crooked Talon gang that had been stealing family pets out of Seattle to put in the ring to train fighting dogs.
Frigga stepped back from the building to consider her graffiti, then hurried to catch up with the others. “I’ve never tagged before. Do you think this will work?”
Bragi looked back at the colored streaks of paint on the gift shop, then kept moving forward. “I’m sure it’s fine. Tagging the place and letting all the wolves out is the best thing I could think of. They’ll be too busy trying to track down the gang to focus on just the loss of Fenrir.”
“I’m not a big fan of this plan,” Frigga jogged forward again after tagging another tree in pink. “Dozens of wolves being freed into the woods, let loose on unsuspecting citizens. Think of the damage they’ll do before anyone realizes they’ve not actually been stolen.”
“You sure the wolves are just going to run along, then?” Thor swung his bolt cutters as he walked, grateful that his legs finally had something useful to do. “It’s not going to look like any theft if they’re still hanging around in the morning, waiting to be fed.”
“They’ll run,” Loki commented without taking his eyes off the trail.
Thor grunted. He’d only visited Wolf Haven once before, when Loki first brought Fenrir to the sanctuary. Despite the staff’s cheerful assurances that Fenrir would be well cared for, the place had filled Thor with dread. He didn’t like the captive look in the wolves’ eyes, and he’d silently cursed the humans who had tried to keep them as pets, cultivating creatures who were suited to neither well-appointed living rooms nor the wild.
Loki stepped in front of Bragi as they approached the chain link fence of the first enclosure. Thor and the others backed up, giving Loki some space as he called softly to his son, a plaintive song somewhere between a wolf’s whimper and a human murmur. Two heads peeked up from a pile of fur beneath a pine tree several yards away, predator eyes glinting in the faint light from the parking area as they studied the unexpected visitors.
Loki stepped back from the fence and shook his head. They walked on to the next enclosure. Loki again called out hopefully for Fenrir, and again came away disappointed. It was the same at the third enclosure, and the fourth.
As they approached the fence enclosing a fifth pair of wolves, a mournful cry erupted on the air before Loki could try calling again for his son.
“Was that—?” Bragi whispered, but Loki cut him off by raising his hand for silence. He stepped away from the fence and listened, but the cry had died away. Loki called out again. The low, half-animal howl made the hair on the back of Thor’s neck stand up as he realized just how close he was again to the Randulfr.
After a brief pause came the answer
ing cry, some distance away.
Thor felt Frigga shiver beside him. She had always been especially uncomfortable around Fenrir and the rest of the Wargs. The role Fenrir was fated to play in the ultimate demise of the gods was too much to overcome.
Thor placed a strong hand on his mother’s shoulder as they struck out farther into the darkness, following Loki. Loki and the wolf played call and response as the group approached an enclosure on the far side of the sanctuary, and the captive animal leapt up to rest massive front paws on the chain link fence when it caught sight of their approach.
The sound of a door opening nearby snapped the wolf’s head around, and the animal retreated a few paces from the fence. Catching sight and scent of the approaching night guard, the wolf looked back in Loki’s direction with a questioning tilt of the head. Loki held up his hand to halt the others following him, and moved the group silently into the surrounding woods.
Following the beam of his flashlight, a young man shuffled over to the enclosure and peered inside. The wolf pressed up against the fence and yipped excitedly at him.
“What’s going on there, pup?” The guard reached a few fingers through the chain link to scratch the wolf’s head. “Something got you upset?”
Holding the flashlight high, he shone the beam into the enclosure and scanned the perimeter. A few squirrels dashed through the beam, but nothing else moved. Satisfied, the night guard lowered the flashlight and crouched down by the fence, looking the wolf directly in the eye. “You don’t usually like to come up so close to the fence, do you?”
The wolf’s eyes glowed in the light from the guard’s flashlight as the animal studied him. The wolf’s pupils dilated and its mouth dropped open, exposing sharp white teeth. The young man shuddered.
“Whatever.” He stood up and scratched the back of his neck. “You just be quiet tonight, all right?”
The guard shone his flashlight back along the gravel path that led to his watch station some distance away.
Thor listened to the crunch of the guard’s retreating footsteps. He peeked his head out between the tree branches, making sure the guard was far out of sight before they ventured back out. At the sound of the guard’s door opening and closing, Thor emerged cautiously from the trees and motioned the others to follow.
Loki brushed past him and stepped up beside the chain link fence again. The wolf came bounding toward the fence, tail happily wagging and tongue lolling out of its mouth. Stowing the spray paint cans in his back pockets, Loki crouched down and reached his fingers through the fence to greet his child, then immediately pulled back as the animal came closer, dark gray fur mixed with gold shimmering in the ambient light.
Thor frowned. “What’s wrong?”
Loki sat back in the dirt. “This is not Fenrir.”
Frigga chanced a few steps forward. “Are you sure?”
Loki smoothed his shirt with his hands and sighed. “Yes. Fenrir is black and gray. Look at the markings on this one.”
Thor stepped to the fence to inspect the wolf’s coloring as the animal danced happily back and forth on the other side of the fence. Both behavior and appearance gave the animal away as a wolf-dog hybrid. “If this isn’t Fenrir, then how did it know to answer your call? The others didn’t.”
Loki stood up and peered deeper into the dark pen. “This must be his enclosure mate. Alice, I think her name is.”
At the sound of her name, Alice leapt up and did a half-turn in the air, then landed on all four feet with an excited “Yip!” Panting eagerly, she looked from Loki to Thor and back again, then dropped down on her front paws in a play bow.
Loki turned his back on the pen and strode several paces away. “She must have learned Fenrir’s call from living with him.”
Thor stared past Alice—no small feat, given that she was still leaping and prancing back and forth to attract more attention to herself—into the far corners of the enclosure. “He could still be here.”
Loki shook his head. “He would have answered.” He started back toward the car. “He’s gone.”
Thor caught up with him, grabbed his shoulder and spun him around. “For all I know, you planned this!”
Rushing forward, Frigga grabbed Thor’s elbow and tried to pull him off of Loki. “Keep your voice down!” she hissed. “There’s still a guard on duty.”
“Maybe instead of calling him out, you told Fenrir to keep his head down when we came looking,” Thor dropped his voice to an angry whisper. “Or maybe you already broke him out of here yourself.”
“Are you mad?” Loki tried to loosen the grip Thor had on his shoulder. He only came up to Thor’s chest and was trying to back far enough away from him to address Thor’s face rather than the buttons on his shirt.
Thor let go and smiled smugly when Loki stumbled backward. “Who’s to say you’re not in league with Managarm?”
“Thor!” Frigga practically screeched. “You know better than that!”
Thor turned to his mother and gestured at Loki. “He’s closer kin to them than he is to us.”
“Now, wait just a minute, young man!” Frigga rounded on Thor and pointed a scolding finger in the general direction of his face, which was out of her reach. “Don’t you for a second think of dragging up old scores. Odin has welcomed him into the Lodge as one of us. If that’s not good enough for you, then perhaps you’d better find another place to hang your hat.”
Thor puffed out his chest and crossed his arms angrily, but he was done. He knew better than to cross Frigga. Even without her divine abilities, she was still mistress of the Lodge—and his mother.
Frigga turned to Loki and laid a consoling hand on his elbow. “Loki . . .”
Loki shook her off. “It’s okay. I’d be worried if he didn’t suspect me.” He tried to laugh, but felt flat.
“Are you certain Fenrir isn’t here?”
Loki closed his eyes and inhaled deeply, trying to catch the scent of his son on the air. His mouth was a hard line when he opened his eyes again. “He was in the area recently, but not any longer.”
Thor threw his bolt cutters to the ground. “Great. So you’re telling me we have to hunt the freaking Randulfr through the woods?”
“I’d better alert Heimdall . . .” Bragi pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and hit the speed dial, then frowned at the display, which had suddenly gone dark. He tried shaking it and even smacking the side of it a few times before Loki spoke up.
“Yeah, that’s probably not going to work.”
Bragi looked up at him. “Hmm?”
Thor sighed and tilted his head at Loki. “God of chaos, remember?”
~ fifteen ~
Valhalla Page 30