Maksim imitated him, with a smaller piece of pancake soaked in butter and syrup.
Thor leaned forward to catch his eye. “You like pancakes, too, Maksim?”
Maksim’s smile widened and he nodded.
Thor leaned back in his chair. “Now, we don’t know a lot about you, Maksim.”
With those few words, Maksim felt the warmth drain out of the room. Maybe Bonnie and Thor were angry with him after all for showing Magnus his magick. Maksim put down his fork and rested his hands in his lap.
“You’re not in any kind of trouble.” Thor kept his voice soft. “Whatever happened before, you get to start over here. Okay?”
“Okay.” Maksim’s voice dragged downward. What if the bad men followed him to this house and hurt Thor and his family just like they’d hurt Maksim’s parents?
“We just need to know where you came from,” Bonnie said. “And what you were up to with the model ship this morning.”
Maksim pressed his lips together and tried not to cry. He’d cried too much when he was running away the day before, and now he had to be strong. He looked from one adult face to the next, then turned to Magnus as the older boy dug into his scrambled eggs.
“It’s okay.” Maksim slid sideways out of his chair. He tugged at his shirt and looked at the funny mouse drawn on it. “Can I keep this shirt? It’s nicer than mine.”
Saga rose and hurried around the table. She crouched at his side. “Of course you can keep it! It’s your shirt now.”
“Hey!” Magnus protested. “I like that one.”
“We’ll get you another one,” Thor replied.
Magnus went back to his eggs. “It won’t be the same.”
“And my blanket?” Maksim blinked at Saga. “It’s cold outside.”
Saga wrapped her arms around him and held him too tight. Didn’t she understand what he had to do?
“Are you cold?” she asked, pulling him closer. “Do you need a sweater?”
He felt reassurance in her embrace, but he shrugged away from Saga and went to stand beside Thor’s chair. He held out his hand. “Thank you.”
Thor wrapped his giant hand around Maksim’s fingers. “You’re quite welcome, Maksim, but I don’t understand.”
“You have been kind to me. I like your family.” Maksim swallowed. “But I have to go now.”
Thor pulled Maksim into his lap and held him against his chest.
“You’re not going anywhere you don’t want to go.” Heimdall stood up from the table and gripped the back of his chair. “Not as long as anyone around this table has anything to say about it.”
Maksim looked up at Heimdall and he started to cry. “My parents.”
Bonnie’s eyes were wet as she reached over to caress his shoulder. “Oh, honey. We’ll find them. I promise we will.”
Maksim sobbed against Thor’s shoulder. He was embarrassed and afraid, but he felt safe as the big man cradled him against his chest.
There were many voices raised in consoling concern, and Maksim felt himself lifted in the air as Thor stood up from the table and carried him into the living room. Maksim was deposited on the sofa while the adults closed the glass doors to the dining room and had a heated conversation.
Magnus wandered into the room with Maksim’s breakfast plate and a glass of water. Maksim sniffed hard to clear his nose and wiped his face on his sleeves. Then he smiled when he saw who had followed Magnus into the living room.
“Is that your dog?” Maksim hadn’t seen a dog at the house when he arrived the day before, but this one had friendly blue eyes and thick fur and a tail that curled upward, wagging slowly. The dog looked like a friendly wolf, and it was even smiling at him.
“That’s Laika. Heimdall’s dog.” Magnus put the plate and glass on the coffee table and pulled the table closer to the sofa, within Maksim’s easy reach. He sat on the sofa with Maksim, then patted the space between them. Laika leapt eagerly onto the cushions. “She’s part wolf.”
Maksim gasped. He was sitting next to a real wild creature, inside Thor and Bonnie’s house? He lifted a hand to pet the wolf-dog, but then he was afraid to touch her. Would she bite him?
Laika lowered her head and licked Maksim’s open hand. Her tongue was soft and wet on his fingers still sticky with syrup and when he laughed, she started licking his face and mouth, too. Maksim dug his fingers into her thick fur and pressed his face against her neck. She smelled like outside, like soil and trees and snow.
“She’s pretty cool.” Magnus reached for Maksim’s plate and grabbed a couple of strips of bacon.
“My neighbors had a dog.” Maksim stroked Laika’s ears, and she lay down beside him and rested her head in his lap. “A brown dog named Maro.”
“That’s a funny name for a dog.” Magnus waved the bacon in the air, and Laika watched the meat intently.
Maksim shrugged. He remembered climbing over the short fence that separated his family’s yard from the neighbors’ so he could play with Maro. He used to slip some of his bread from dinner into his pockets and then let Maro eat it out of his hands. Maksim pinched off a piece of pancake and fed it to Laika.
“Mnee, mnee, mnee.” Magnus pressed the strips of bacon against his forehead like insect antennae, and Maksim laughed. Then Magnus made a face like a tiger and shoved both strips of bacon into his mouth with a loud, “Rumph!”
Maksim fed Laika some more of his pancakes, and she rolled onto her back to show him her belly.
“She likes you.”
Maksim looked up to find Sally watching from the living room doorway. Like with Heimdall and Maggie, he’d been only briefly introduced to her when she came in and sat down at the breakfast table. Behind her, the doors to the dining room stood open, and the other adults were beginning to congregate in the hallway.
She smiled and stepped into the room. She pulled up a footstool so she was sitting near Maksim but was nearer to the floor than he was.
“Did they tell you who I am?” she asked.
Maksim blinked at her and felt a sudden chill. He remembered the bedtime stories from the night before about the Rune Witch. She didn’t look scary, but being so near to her sent a prickling feeling across his skin.
“You don’t have to be afraid.” Thor came through the doorway, followed by Heimdall, Bonnie, Saga, and Maggie. “Sally is a friend.”
Maksim nodded and swallowed. The adults looked so serious as they watched him. It was time for him to be tested. But this wasn’t like what the bad men in the tunnels had done. They made nightly demands for demonstrations of his tricks. They took away his food and blankets to make him show them. They threatened his parents and took his mother into another room where they made her scream. So many times Maksim wanted to just show them what he could do—it wasn’t very much—and then he and his parents would be safe and they would have food again and be warm. But Maksim’s father always told him that the men’s promises were lies.
Maksim didn’t think Thor would take away his breakfast plate or his new shirt, but his parents weren’t here to tell him what to do.
“You should show her what you can do!” Magnus exclaimed. “She thinks that kind of stuff is pretty cool.”
With her head still in Maksim’s lap, Laika sighed loudly and started licking his borrowed trousers.
“She likes you,” Sally said again. “And she’s an excellent judge of character.”
“I’m sure the maple syrup on his clothes helps,” Bonnie said, and the others laughed.
Maksim looked into the witch’s eyes. He was afraid at first about what he might see in her face, or what she would know about him just by looking. But his breath was easy in his chest. The prickling feeling across his skin felt warm and buzzy, like when he used to sit with his grandmother around her fire.
Sally rested her hands in her lap, just the way his mother did when she was getting ready to tell him something important. “Bonnie tells me you have some special skills you were showing to Magnus this morning?”
&nb
sp; “Yeah.” Maksim ran his fingers over Laika’s snout and smiled as she rubbed her nose on his knee to scratch an itch on her face.
“Do you think you could show me, too?” the witch asked.
Maksim looked down at the dog. “I’m not supposed to tell anybody.”
Magnus sat up straight beside him. “We were just playing a game.”
“Magnus,” Bonnie warned in a stern tone. “We do not lie in this house.”
“I know,” Magnus grumbled in a near perfect imitation of Thor. He reached over to rest his hand on Laika’s neck. “I just don’t want Maksim to get into trouble.”
“No one’s in trouble.” Sally’s face brightened. “You know, Maksim, I can do some pretty neat things, too.”
“Neat,” Maggie said with a snort. Sally gave her a sharp look, and Maggie looked away.
“United front, everyone,” Bonnie said.
Thor knelt beside Maksim and rested a hand on his knee. “We want to help. But we need you to talk to us, and to show us, so we can do that.”
“But I’m not supposed to,” Maksim said. “I’ll get everybody in trouble if I do. Please don’t make me. I don’t want anybody else to get hurt.”
He didn’t like the way his voice cracked, and he didn’t want to cry again in front of everybody.
“Please, little one,” Thor said. “Let us help you.”
Laika rubbed her face again on Maksim’s knee, and it looked like she was smiling at him. He looked up at Thor and the other adults standing around. Then he looked at Sally, and he understood. It felt like a familiar blanket over his shoulders. Sally the witch was like him. She had her own magick. She wasn’t trying to steal his magick away from him. Maybe the people in this room really could help his parents.
Maksim lifted his hands in front of him and worked hard to make his special light.
6
“It doesn’t look like anyone’s home,” Thor grumbled as he and Heimdall stood across the street from the Balkian Brothers Antiques storefront. The building took up most of a city block on the edge of the Portland’s eastside industrial district. It wasn’t an obvious locale for an antiques dealer—what Emilian and his cohorts were pretending to be, Thor thought—as the city was littered with tight clusters of antiques shops from Sellwood to Multnomah Village.
“It’s not even 9 in the morning,” Heimdall said. “You expected the shop to be open?”
Heimdall glanced up and down the snow-covered street, then jogged across the asphalt toward the glass storefront.
“What are you doing?” Thor hissed, then followed his brother across the street. “I thought we were trying to be subtle.”
“You’re about as subtle as a jazzercising hippo.”
Thor’s lips tightened as he tried to figure out precisely which of his buttons his brother was trying to push. All of them, apparently. Thor stomped his boots as he stepped onto the curb and cracked the aging sidewalk.
Heimdall frowned at him. “What?”
“You compared me to a large safari animal in a tutu,” Thor growled.
“No, I . . .” Heimdall bent nearly double with laughter, then patted Thor on the shoulder. “I simply meant that you’re large and strong and out of place most anywhere you go. Reconnaissance is not your strong suit. But if you want to try on some tutus, we can stop off somewhere on the way back.”
Thor pushed past Heimdall to peer through the large windows at the front of the Balkian Brothers store. The place looked like every other antiques shop Thor had visited, but on a larger scale. He spied dining sets in highly polished wood, upholstered arm chairs which may or may not have dated back to the French Revolution, large mirrors framed in elaborate twists of gold and silver, even some impressive sculptures in flawless marble. If these guys were human traffickers, Thor wasn’t seeing any evidence here. But there was still the connection to the construction site to figure out.
Sally had done her own fruitless stakeout at the back of the building the night before, but she was acting cagey about sharing what little information she’d gleaned. She was withholding, just like Loki, but Thor didn’t think she’d deliberately send him or anyone else into danger. Besides, magick had its limits. Sometimes boots on the ground yielded more immediate results.
Heimdall shielded his eyes and pressed his face closer to the glass. He pointed at something inside. “Look there.”
Thor squinted through the glass toward the back of the store. “The Mickey Mouse gum-ball machine?”
Heimdall sighed. Thor looked again.
“The roller derby jukebox? Or the old movie theater pipe organ?” Thor turned to Heimdall. “Clearly I have no idea what you’re pointing at.”
“Clearly.” Heimdall tapped at the glass. “Halfway toward the back. There’s an entire shelf of replica ceramics and glassware labeled as antiques, when they’re obviously new.”
Thor shielded his own eyes against the early morning light, even as the sun hid behind thick cloud cover. He had to alternate blinking and squinting before the area came into focus. He saw what looked like old pottery, a few chipped vases, and some dusty books. How Heimdall could tell a fake antique from the real thing at any distance was beyond him.
“So? Most antique stores I’ve been inside are total junk shops.” Thor remembered the time Bonnie dragged him out on an expedition to the Oregon Coast and how she’d nearly convinced him to spend the better part of his monthly earnings on an old Army trunk full of moth-eaten quilts. He’d quickly learned that antiquing had little to do with artifacts or actual archaeology—no saving children from an evil religious cult, outwitting Nazis, or kissing Karen Allen.
“And who cares?” Thor continued. “It’s not like we’re here on the fourth installment in the Indiana Jones franchise.”
“You mean the fifth.”
“Fourth. Crystal Skull doesn’t count.” Thor had tried to get Sally to cast a spell to wipe that movie out of existence—to create a world in which it had never been conceived much less created—or at least to wipe the memory of it from his own mind. But she refused.
Just like Loki, Thor grumbled to himself.
Heimdall pointed back toward the glass. “All right, but those items—“
“We already know these guys are shady characters. I don’t see what difference it makes whether they’ve got a warehouse full of fake pots.”
“Ammunition,” Heimdall replied. “If we have to call in the authorities. If they’re selling fake antiques, and that’s a front . . .”
“No.”
“He’s someone else’s child, Thor. We may be out of our depth here.”
“No,” Thor said again. “I mean, yes, of course he is. But Maksim is under my protection. I will see this through.”
They’d had this same argument twice this morning—once around the breakfast table while the boys played with Laika, and once on the drive to the antiques store. Heimdall had long been the more cautious brother, pausing to weigh the options and think through possible repercussions while Thor preferred to charge in straight away. Heimdall had a point about the Lodge being potentially overmatched—a concern that was only deepening over time. And Maggie had soundly reasoned that human trafficking was a human problem, when the houses of the Lodge had more pressing priorities—like the newly budding trees in the apple grove, how long it might be before the first fruit appeared, and whether the Lodge should share the immortality-granting apples with their mortal allies to grow their numbers.
But Maksim had appeared on his doorstep for a reason, and Thor had no intention of passing this responsibility along to someone else who might have little understanding of the boy’s supernatural gifts. The apples could wait.
Thor raised his fist and gritted his teeth against the coming pain. He began his swing at the window, but Heimdall caught his fist a few inches shy of the glass and deflected his force in an awkward pivot that landed both brothers on their butts on the frozen sidewalk. Thor’s hip smarted with a fresh bruise.
“Wha
t in the Nine Realms do you think you’re doing?!” Heimdall panted and rested back against the building’s concrete exterior.
“The direct route,” Thor replied. “You might try it sometime.”
Heimdall coughed and shook out the hand that had taken the force of Thor’s blow. “And did you happen to note the alarm system while we were gazing through the glass at all the pretty, shiny things?”
Thor lumbered to his feet and peered again into the shop. On closer inspection, he spotted the wiring running the perimeter of the glass and the cameras mounted in the ceiling. “Like that could have stopped me.”
Heimdall shook his head. “And the authorities you’re so reluctant to deal with would have been on us before we’d scarcely had time to look around.”
He stood, brushed the ice and snow off his backside, and then headed down the sidewalk.
“Where are you going now?”
“Around the back, James Bond.” Heimdall disappeared around the corner along the side of the building.
Thor grimaced and followed. His hip gave a sharp complaint with every step. “It was Indiana Jones, numbskull!”
By the time Thor caught up with his brother, Heimdall had rounded a second corner and was standing behind the building. The large, roll-up warehouse door stood open and inside a trio of rough-looking men sat at a folding table playing cards. They seemed oblivious to the cold. Near the open door, the same dark colored van with the business name painted on the side was parked on a concrete slab.
Heimdall and Thor stood in plain view. The men looked up briefly from their game, then went back to their cards.
“I’m guessing we don’t appear to be much of a threat.” Thor almost laughed. The men with the cards had no idea who stood before them, nor the hurt that the sons of Odin could rain down on their heads. He was more annoyed than amused. He wanted to be recognized for who he was, or what he had been, and these card-playing gomers weren’t cooperating.
Thor puffed up his chest. Heimdall glanced sideways at him with a look of resigned exasperation.
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