Thor had heard stories of Helheim, ghost tales told by his father around the campfire when Odin took his growing sons on extended hunting trips into the untamed wilderness. The animated bones of mythical beasts would rise up to swallow an impure man whole, Odin said, and the dark sorceress who sat on Helheim’s throne would grind cowardly warriors into dust to sprinkle in her afternoon tea.
But as far as Thor knew, those stories came straight out of Odin’s imagination. None of his living kin had been to Helheim and returned.
Except Loki had visited several times over just the past few days.
Now Thor stood in Hel’s throne room. It was a gloomy and forbidding place and not anywhere Thor wanted to linger. He turned slowly in a circle to assess the space. It smelled like Frigga’s old compost piles. There were no exits he could see other than the archway they’d come through, and he didn’t like that he couldn’t see the ceiling overhead. He tried not to flinch at every hiss from the wriggling mass of minions assembled at the base of Hel’s throne.
“Nice place you got here.” Thor sounded surprisingly relaxed to his own ears, but he hunched his shoulders and held his fists at the ready. “Does the pizza guy have trouble finding your neighborhood?”
Loki stifled a laugh. On her throne, Hel was visibly impatient and displeased, and Thor’s feeble attempts at humor seemed to be riling her further. He wanted her off-balance, but he didn’t want to risk her ire.
Thor had been very young when he’d last seen Hel. He remembered her as a beautiful woman, older than he was and with a laugh that set his soul to flying. He didn’t recognize her now, all bone and ash and surliness.
Her once lovely smile was now a rictus grin. She gazed down on him, her yellow eyes studying him from head to toe. He tried not to squirm as a rattling chuckle sounded in her throat. She winked at him.
Thor had fought for her on the eve of her exile, arguing with Odin behind closed doors about the justice of banishing someone who had committed no crime. It was nothing more than the Norns and their future-telling nonsense that painted her as a threat. They’d started screeching about Loki’s children, all of them, and the treachery they would wreak.
To Thor it had been only so much noise. But Heimdall turned up some evidence that Hel had been stockpiling poisons.
Hel claimed she was working on medicines. She wanted to study the toxins so she could understand their nature and create their perfect antidotes. But a family of sylphs was discovered working darker magick on Hel’s behalf, and that was enough to seal her fate.
One by one, Loki’s offspring were rounded up and dispatched—Fenrir trapped in a wolf’s clothing in Midgard, Narfi cast into the eternal darkness from which no one returned, and Hel shunted to the underworld. At least they’d renamed the realm and given her a throne.
That had been many lifetimes ago, and Thor had long since stopped wondering if Loki’s children were justly—albeit preemptively—punished to safeguard Odin and Frigga’s place and forestall Ragnarok, or if they were merely scapegoats for their father.
“I was a silly girl when you knew me.” Hel’s voice was like rasping metal, and her smile widened at the shock on Thor’s face. Had she read his mind? ”You would be wise not to mistake me for such now.”
“No one is challenging your position, or your prowess,” Loki said as he stepped forward.
The old trickster looked even more frail than he had just hours earlier. Thor thought it was his imagination that Loki was walking with more of a stoop as they came through the dank passage from Midgard. Loki was standing straighter now, but he looked skinny and weak.
Hel’s face distorted into a smirk and she gestured toward Thor. “Perhaps not, but this one was party to my banishment, and my memory is long and undiluted.”
Thor loosened his fingers but clenched his jaw tight. He would not defend himself. He wouldn’t speak out of turn to set the record straight about who had said what when Hel’s fate was being decided. She was baiting him. She was trying to trick him into seeking her favor, or maybe her forgiveness. She sought to remind him of the mischievous, free-spirited young woman she’d once been, so that he would see past the living corpse she had become. She was a trickster’s daughter.
He let his arms hang at his sides even as he itched to grab the hammer from his belt. Every instinct in his body screamed of the danger and deceit of the creature on the throne. Let her think he was comfortable in her presence—or, if not comfortable, at least not under threat. When she laid her menace bare, he would be ready.
“But you have not brought the young witch with you.” Hel adopted an air of distracted disapproval, but her mouth was hard. “Did you think you would succeed in breaking another bargain with me?”
Thor stepped forward, but Loki held him back. Loki wore a casually disinterested frown that topped his daughter’s playacting.
“If you wish to delve into technicalities, the first bargain was made under false pretenses,” Loki said.
Hel leaned forward with a predator’s grace. “Your pretense, or mine?”
Loki shrugged. “That’s a choice between Huginn and Muninn, when the two cannot be separated.”
Hel chuckled and her minions hissed. Thor’s skin crawled. Ever so subtly, he shuffled sideways behind Loki so he had a buffer between himself and Hel.
“And the second bargain?” Hel asked.
“There has been no second bargain,” Loki replied. “You hold three hostages and make demands for their return.”
“Three hostages?” Hel asked.
Loki hesitated, so Thor opened his mouth. “Frigga, Odin, and the innocent mortal you abducted.”
The writhing mass of rotting flesh on the floor spat and sneered at him, and Thor felt hot bile rising in his throat.
“Ah, yes. Of course.” Hel looked away. She was trying to mask something, but Thor didn’t know what it was. Were Odin and Frigga nearby, incapacitated, able to watch or listen in on these proceedings? Thor and Loki had arrived without Sally, but Hel hadn’t produced her hostages, either.
Loki glanced back, and Thor read the dark concern in his eyes. That alone sent a chill down Thor’s spine. He rested his hand on the head of his hammer.
Loki turned back to Hel. “This is more of a negotiation.”
Thor eased his way out from behind Loki.
Hel pursed her black lips. “Call it what you will. But as you have come to my hall without the witch, it matters not one way or the other.”
She was distracted, glancing toward the living walls of her throne room and then allowing her gaze to rest on the slithering pile of minions at her feet. Despite his instincts to scream and flee this place of judgment and lingering death, Thor used the cover of her preoccupation to inch closer.
Hel lifted her eyes, and Thor stopped in his tracks. She stared down at Loki.
“The price is the same,” she said. “The longer you deny me, the more damage is inflicted on those souls you hold dear. Are you willing to risk your precious friends? Perhaps I will return them to you regardless, but only after I’ve sucked the very marrow of their being from their useless shells.”
If Loki had a secret plan, Thor was done waiting for its execution. He drew his hammer and charged forward. He smashed the soft skulls of the half-rotted henchmen who drew up from the floor to challenge him. There was no thunder or lightning as he struck. In this place, his hammer was a simple carpenter’s tool and he cursed Loki’s warning about magick in Helheim. The hammer’s blunt end stuck in the oozing rot of one servant’s decomposing brain, and Thor wedged his foot against the wretch’s brittle chest to wrench it back out again.
Hel threw her head back and shrieked a toneless dirge that nearly turned Thor’s guts to liquid. He could barely make out Loki shouting at him to stand down, but he was quickly surrounded by the slime-dripping flesh of Hel’s creatures. They pressed in on him and grabbed at his limbs, their cold fingers digging into the meat on his bones and threatening to tear it away.
Thor
struggled and shouted as Hel’s creatures wrested the hammer from his grasp and drove him to the ground. He couldn’t push them off. How could barely animate corpses with no muscle-tone be so infernally strong? Thor growled through clenched teeth and called out for Odin and Frigga to break their bonds and rush into the fray, but the creatures piled on top of him and dealt one body blow after another. They hissed foul-smelling curses in his face.
Thor peered between their shuffling, skeletal feet to see Loki being held down and assaulted by another scrum of Hel’s servants. The ruler herself had fallen silent. When Thor at last glimpsed the dais through the wriggling scrum of rotting flesh, he saw that Hel’s throne was empty.
16
Sally sat on the floor and wiped away her chalk marks with a wet cloth. She’d set up four additional and apparently successful spells in other spots across the floor, all aimed at protecting the house and everyone within.
The draugar had yet to make an appearance, and Sally was worried about what that might mean. Were they rampaging across Portland? As far as she knew, there was nothing in the news about zombies or even costumed rowdies wreaking havoc anywhere nearby. Had they followed Loki and Thor to Helheim? What would happen to Zach then? She couldn’t think of anything else to do other than keep working her magick in Bonnie’s house and trying to lure the draugar there.
But there was a cracked dent in the wall where Saga had hit it, and the dark scar in the hardwood floor. So much for Sally’s expertise in winging it with magick. She couldn’t feel good about the four effective spells when that one had given her friend a concussion.
Sally cleared the last of the chalk marks and dried the floor with her sleeve. “Saga, I’m really sorry.”
Saga lay on the sofa against the wall and concentrated on her phone. She was still trying to reach Heimdall, with no luck. Opal was upstairs, setting wards around Magnus’s bedroom while the boy pitched a loud fit about not being able to parade around the house in his Halloween costume. It was hours yet to sunset, but other kids on the block were outside playing tag in their capes and tiaras, racing up and down the sidewalk as they squealed and shouted and got their costumes dirty.
Kyle Mackey, his partner in mischief Trevor Chase, and a few other Einherjar warriors had trickled into the house. Bonnie was keeping them entertained and well-fed in the dining room—and out of the way of Sally’s work.
Saga gave a distracted wave and kept her focus on the screen. “It’s really okay, Sally. No lasting harm done.”
Sally wasn’t so sure. She’d hurt Loki, too, with her shenanigans in Helheim. He’d brushed off her concern with greater nonchalance, but she’d seen the pain on his face when he thought no one was looking.
Maybe Maggie was right to keep Sally away from the Lodge. She was growing stronger and more skilled, but sometimes that simply meant her mistakes were that much worse. What if she permanently maimed someone? What if she killed somebody? Would it matter that it was an accident?
Sally picked up a fresh piece of chalk and drew more symbols on the floor. She tried to push her failures out of her mind as she concentrated on her friends in Helheim.
“Thor and Loki and Zach,” she muttered as she traced sigils of protection and boosted them with the Ansuz rune to cover both the physical and metaphysical distance between Bonnie’s living room and Hel’s hall. She added a ring of Raido and Ehwaz for an easy return journey. She set a single white candle in the center of her design and sprinkled dried juniper around its base to break any dark bonds or hexes that might hold her friends back.
Sally opened a borrowed pocket knife and pricked the pad of her right thumb, at the center of the faint symbol of Uruz that was branded there. Sally put pressure beneath the wound, encouraging the blood to well up. She let three drops of her blood fall on the candle and trickle down the sides before she sucked on her thumb to stop the bleeding.
“You didn’t flinch,” Saga said.
“I’ve gotten used to it.” Sally folded the knife and placed it on the mantle. Her magick was more powerful when she made such a sacrifice, but combining her blood with the wrong spell was sometimes worse than no spell at all.
She knelt on the floor and struck a match. Before she touched the flame to the new wick, she held an image of her friends in her mind. She focused particularly on Zach, who could use all the help he could get. She tried to remember the exact color of his eyes, the shape of his mouth, the sound of his voice. Then she murmured a few words of beckoning and safe-keeping.
Sally lit the candle and held her breath. When nothing explosive happened, she let her shoulders relax and felt a determined calm settled over her. It was the first sensation of near-peace she’d had in days. She was hungry and tired, and she needed a break.
She turned to Saga with a hopeful smile. “They’re safe. I have a good feeling about that. How’s your head? Want some juice or something?”
A loud, whirling whoosh arose in the room, heralding a mini-cyclone of flame. Sally scooted out of the way as a funnel of fire and smoke churned upward through the floor, but then it was gone as suddenly as it appeared and left Zach standing in its place.
Wide-eyed, Saga looked from Zach to Sally and back again. “How did you do that?”
Sally crouched by the fireplace. She had focused on breaking Hel’s bonds, but she hadn’t expected results like this. “I’m not sure that was me. I mean, maybe?”
Zach blinked at Sally. His face was an animated mix of astonishment and fear. There were black scorch marks across the floor at his feet. Bonnie was going to need to have her floors refinished. “Sally? Where are we? What happened? Did you put something in my tea?”
Sally scrambled to her feet and pulled him away from the blackened flooring, in case the cyclone returned. She guided him past two other rings of candles to settle him on the sofa next to Saga. She and Saga immediately patted him down, looking for injuries.
“What’s going on?” Zach looked around the room, his bewildered gaze lingering on the burning candles and chalk sigils and all the semi-precious stones, feathers, and dried herbs laid out in mini-ritual spaces across the floor. “What is this place?”
Saga held his lids open and peered into his eyes. “He’s in shock. Do you know where you’ve been? Do you remember what happened?”
Zach looked at Saga like she was from another planet. He then gave Sally the same horrified look. “Did you drug me?”
“What?” Sally exclaimed. “No! Zach, I would never.”
“Yeah, definitely in shock.” Saga offered him her water bottle. “I promise you, no one has drugged anybody.”
After a moment’s hesitation, Zach took a deep swig of water and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth.
“We were having tea.” He gestured toward Sally. “And then, I don’t know. Maybe I fell asleep? Or, was there a haunted house? Someplace with a lot of howling and hissing and creepy-looking corpse people? And a cold mist that stuck to my skin.”
He rubbed his hands over his arms and legs, checking for dampness or maybe reassuring himself that he was all in one piece. “And now I’m here.”
Sally knelt on the floor by the sofa, her heart beating fast. Zach was guilty of nothing more than going on a coffee date with the Rune Witch, and he’d won a trip to Helheim as a result. For all she knew, he’d barely escaped with his life.
“But you’re okay?” she asked.
Saga got up, pulled Sally to her feet, and practically dragged her into the hallway.
“You don’t have time for this,” Saga said.
“But we don’t know what happened. How did he even get here?” Sally watched Zach as he leaned back into the sofa. He closed his eyes and rubbed his temples like he had a bad headache. She didn’t want to think about what he might have been through in Helheim. Maybe a bit of hazy amnesia was a blessing.
Sally’s heart was pounding and she was starting to feel dizzy.
Saga shook Sally to get her attention. “Exactly. He’s here. Thor and Loki aren
’t. What does that tell you?”
Sally leaned against the wall as a wave of nausea hit her. She blinked hard, rested a hand on her stomach, and willed herself to connect with the pendulum she’d entrusted to Thor. Loki had used the same stone to locate her in the Three Sisters Wilderness.
She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and felt a dark coldness close in around her. Danger. She also felt anger, frustration, and a violent flare of bluster. Definitely Thor. But when she sought threads to Loki who should have been close by, she felt nothing.
A bellowing moan of a dozen voices rose up outside the house a second before the front door rattled in its frame. Heavy blows shook the front of the house and quickly spread to all sides.
The draugar. Finally. The Einherjar warriors in the dining room shouted in excitement, but Zach shot to his feet and cried out in alarm as a projectile hit the living room window and glanced off the glass with a thud. Sally’s protective spells were holding, but she had more work to do.
“Shore up the door to the back deck!” Heimdall shouted over his shoulder as he wedged another length of two-by-four lumber against the inside of the front doors of the Lodge. The booming thuds of the draugar’s assault from outside continued without stop.
Rod was on the move toward the back of the house, lugging his toolbox and dragging several pieces of lumber behind him. Laika ducked under the trailing beams to lift them onto her back and help Rod carry them. Rod laughed and praised the wolf-dog.
Heimdall watched the massive front doors rattle in their frame. He was fairly confident the entrance would hold. Thor had built the Lodge to withstand enemy attacks, but there was no telling what magickal or mundane weaponry the draugar might be using. Maggie had tried to gauge their arsenal by spying out an upstairs window but it was too dark to see much, and then the draugar had started hurling rocks through the glass.
Chaos Magic (Rune Witch Book 5) Page 19