He picked his way over the debris toward the great room, and he stumbled across a collection of plastic dinosaurs in the rubble of plaster and linoleum. This was where the kitchen counter had been, he thought. He picked up the plastic toys and used the bottom of his shirt to make a hammock to hold them.
He picked his way over broken furniture and skirted an overturned motorcycle as he tried to get to the the remains of the sliding door that led to the elevated back deck. He tried not to stare at the crispy body that sizzled and popped in the hearth flames. Pebbles of shattered glass crunched under his sneakers. Laika stepped carefully as she followed him, and Baron leapt from one jagged surface to another to avoid the mess on the floor.
Massive cracks of thunder ripped across the sky outside. Brilliant bolts of electricity reached up from the ground and lightning poured down from the sky to meet in the middle.
Maksim stepped through the shattered threshold onto the wooden deck, and he barely contained his cry when he spotted Vesha lying on the weathered boards. He worried that he was the only one left unhurt. What if he had to walk out onto the battlefield alone? Maksim called Vesha’s name and shook her, but she wasn’t moving. Blood trickled from the corners of her eyes and mouth, and she clutched a blackened, partially melted doll in her hands. Vesha’s chest rose and fell in steady rhythm.
He didn’t know if he felt relieved that she was still alive or angry and afraid that she couldn’t stand with him. Laika nudged his shoulder with her nose and Baron rubbed against his shin, and Maksim stood up tall and made his way down the deck stairs and into the lightning storm.
Some flashes looked to be centered on the massive Tree, but he wasn’t sure if the lightning was striking the Tree or maybe coming from its trunk instead. A lot of the lightning seemed to be focused on Sally, too. At least she was still standing. A big branch lay on the ground and there was a smoking wound in the Tree from where it had split off. Thousands of points of color danced over the Tree’s trunk and branches, and Sally the witch was shouting at them.
With each crack of lightning came a sharp tingle in Maksim’s bones. He felt a tickle running under his skin. Every time the sky flashed he felt stronger and less afraid. His magick was building, but it also felt wrong.
His mother had wanted him to hide his magick, while his father tried to teach him to tame it. He understood now that his magick was nothing to be ashamed of. It made him special, but it also brought danger to anyone who tried to help him.
These strange and kind people had worked so hard to protect him, and now everyone inside the house was unconscious and hurt, maybe dying. There was no one left to help him. But there was no one left to stop him, either.
Maksim twisted the fabric of his shirt in his fingers to keep the plastic dinosaurs from falling out as he ran across the snow toward Sally. Laika yipped as she kept pace with him. He didn’t know if the dog was excited or nervous, just like he was. Another big branch made a terrible screeching sound as it broke off of the Tree and crashed to the ground. Running beside him, Baron growled and swatted away a gyrating thing that looked like a snake. Maksim thought the cat sounded like murder.
Sally raised her arms to the sky and shouted at the lightning. Maksim slowed his pace when he saw the bodies in the snow all around her. He recognized Maggie and Saga lying still. Others he didn’t know. Heimdall was on the ground sobbing beside Maggie, and Freya was dragging herself through the snow toward the Tree. Sally’s face was streaked with soot as she tried to draw all of the lightning into herself, and she shrieked and twisted her body every time she absorbed another strike.
“I can help!” Maksim shouted. He skidded in the snow and had to step around a dark, massive wolf with exposed fangs and claws. The wolf was dead, too.
“No, Maksim! Stay back!” Heimdall staggered to his feet and started toward him, but Maksim held up both hands as the plastic dinosaurs tumbled into the snow.
“Clear the area! Drag the injured and dead out of the way!” Maksim was surprised by how his voice carried over the shrieking dragons and the continued cracks of lightning and thunder. He knelt and started arranging the dinosaurs in a protective circle around Sally. He didn’t flinch when a thin bolt of lightning struck the ground inches from his fingers.
“What are you doing?” Sally sounded more confused than angry.
“I am protecting you!” Maksim kept moving the toys into place. Maksim imagined them to be fierce, mythical beasts as he made his ring around Sally. He also thought about the fossils he’d seen in photographs and in the museum that one time. Real dinosaurs had once roamed free and were now bones deep in the soil. He laid out the plastic toys and willed himself to see them as both legend and reality.
But there weren’t many of the plastic figures, and there were big gaps between the dinosaurs. He looked up at Sally as another bolt of lightning streaked down from the sky and hit her in the back of the neck. She screamed in pain as her body went rigid. Maksim felt sparks dance over his skin, and his scalp prickled as his hair stood up straight on his head.
Sally held her hands to her chest and panted, then threw her arms out wide again to take in more lightning. She was trying to save them all, but there was so much pandemonium everywhere around them. Another mighty branch peeled off the Tree. To Maksim’s left, a dusty corpse shuffled toward him, but Baron and Laika leapt onto it and wrestled it to the ground. Too many bolts of lightning went awry, hitting the ground or the Lodge instead of getting pulled in toward Sally. The magick was everywhere at once, and it was ripping the world apart.
Maksim touched each of the dinosaurs and tried to send his power into the plastic. He didn’t know if it was working. He pretended each toy was one of his father’s puzzles, and he imagined himself solving each one in rapid succession as he made his way around the tight circle. When he was done, he reached across the ring of dinosaurs and tapped Sally on the foot to get her attention.
“You have to do the rest.” He crawled backward over the snow and collided with Heimdall. If Sally could manage it and if the Tree didn’t fall, then maybe this man would be his new uncle. Maksim had done everything he could think to do. He clung to the fabric of Heimdall’s shirt and he sat in the snow and watched.
Think.
Sally tried to quiet her mind while the world went to hell around her. Each breath seemed to bring some new manifestation of chaos into her immediate environment. The maniacal butterflies were still hammering away at the Yggdrasil and now an army of spiky sand crabs marched up its trunk with serrated blades in their claws. Gusts of wind blasted her face with what felt like powdered glass, and across the field patches of snow melted away as hot petroleum bubbled up from below. The acid hail continued in sporadic dumps, and the same three dragons shrieked overhead and threw fire and smoking brimstone from the sky.
It was getting worse, not better. Killing Utra had only unleashed more untamed magick, and had meant the death of yet another member of the Lodge.
Sally’s own magick burned under her skin. It wanted to get out. It wanted to be free, to join the rest of the wild chaos in this unbridled rampage and to rip the world to pieces. The rest of her body was numb with cold. Her jeans were soaked through from so much sitting in the snow, and her jacket had long since stopped keeping her warm. Sweat layered her skin beneath her clothes and chilled her. She felt like an electric icicle, and she had no idea what to do.
Help! She pleaded silently. Loki! Tell me how to stop this. Tell me how to fix it. Just tell me, and I’ll do it. She closed her eyes and waited. But there was no sage voice from beyond the veil to guide or encourage her. Loki wasn’t Obi-Wan Kenobi. He wasn’t even Yoda, and the chaos that ripped and raged around her was so much bigger than a threatening Death Star.
She took a deep breath and tried harder to tune out the shrieks and cries and smells of smoke and boiling oil. But that only sharpened the electric prickling up and down her arms and legs and the cold gnawing at her toes.
Maksim was right. It was up to her
now.
She opened her eyes and spotted Opal, still unconscious but as much out of harm’s way as possible. Heimdall sat in the snow nearby, clutching Maksim as much for his own comfort as for the boy’s protection, and they both looked to her with hope so desperate that she couldn’t stand looking at them. Behind her, Freya had pressed herself up against the base of the Yggdrasil. It wasn’t clear if Freya was trying to offer the Tree her strength, or if she sought her own healing.
Sally dug into her jacket pocket and pulled out her bag of Yggdrasil runes. The circle of plastic dinosaurs thrummed with Maksim’s magick, but it wasn’t nearly enough.
“Hold fast!” Verdande and Urd clung to each other as they walked toward Sally. It was so strange to see just the two of them without their blue-clad sister. They separated and took up sentinel positions facing Sally—Urd in rose on the right and Verdande in sea green to the left. The two surviving Norns lifted their arms, their palms toward Sally.
“You have our blessing and our strength, Rune Witch.” Urd’s voice was sharp over the constant background moaning of the battlefield. “We foresaw this day, but not as clearly as we might have. I pass my—”
Her words were cut short as a flaming boulder shot down from the sky and struck her dead. Verdande sucked in a sharp cry as Urd fell to the ground in a swirl of rose-colored fabric soiled with soot and fresh blood. But Verdande held her position and turned her attention back to Sally.
“The last of the Nornir passes her mantle to you, young Rune Witch.” Verdande’s voice was soft and barely audible over the din, and tears sparkled in her eyes. Sally nodded her gratitude and respect. She didn’t feel any change in her body. The magick still bit at her and demanded release. Her feet and legs were still heavy as numbness crept up from her feet and over her calves. Whatever blessing or energy the Norns had sent her way, Sally couldn’t feel it.
She was unsteady as she knelt down to lay out her runes in the snow. She was still missing the one she’d offered to Freyr—Eihwaz—and there was no time to sort out their order as she placed one polished piece of wood after another to fill in the gaps between the plastic dinosaurs. This use of toys was some of the most ridiculous magick she’d seen, but each one was infused with Maksim’s spark. She laid down her last rune and took a breath. It still wasn’t enough, and she knew it.
Freyr’s image wavered before her, just outside the perimeter of her circle, and she remembered the ritual on top of Mt. Bachelor in the Three Sisters Wilderness. That ceremony to install Freyr as the new spirit of the mountain had required a sacrifice of flesh and blood.
Sally looked up into Freyr’s ghostly face. There was so little of him left. The next gust of wind would probably obliterate him altogether.
“Use me if you can,” he said. “What there is of me. You need fuel.”
She opened her palm and found Eihwaz in her hand. She dropped it at her own feet and swallowed hard. “I’m going to need more.”
A shadow fell over her as Heimdall stepped up beside Freyr. Behind them, Maksim stood with Verdande and clutched a fistful of her green sash.
Sally shook her head. “No. No, Heimdall, I can’t.”
“I don’t see that there’s much choice.” He gave her a grim smile as he forced himself through the barrier of Maksim’s magick, the toll visible on his face. The fact that he was able to get through at all confirmed Sally’s suspicion that the circle wasn’t strong enough, even with her runes in place. Magick was leaking out of every corner, and probably out of herself as well. She wasn’t sure how much time she had left.
Freyr winked out of the air on one side of the circle and then appeared again by Heimdall’s side. He looked slightly more corporeal inside the ring of runes and dinosaurs, but barely. The three of them were standing practically on top of each other inside the tight circle.
Sally pressed her hands together. “It’s just that I can’t guarantee . . . ?” What? Their safety? Their survival? Any magick she attempted now might not have any effect, and Ragnarok would continue unabated and all the worlds in all the realms might be destroyed in the process.
“There isn’t much magick in my blood,” Heimdall said, then jerked his chin at his ghost of a cousin. “Let him be your focus, and draw out of me what you can. I am a son of Odin, and I’ve walked this Earth for a long time. Perhaps longer than I had any right to.”
“We’ll be your magnet,” Freyr said.
Tears ran down Sally’s cheeks and stung her raw skin. She watched Verdande hurry with Maksim to the base of the Yggdrasil, where they huddled with Freya and dodged more falling branches.
“Do it, Sally!” Freya called over the distance. Her voice was rough, her face streaked with soot and blood. Verdande and Maksim crouched on either side of Freya, their arms linked together as they stared at Sally, sending their strength her way.
Baron ran into the circle and nuzzled his face into her calf. He’d been with her for so many magickal failures and even some triumphs, and he encouraged her now toward action. Sally rubbed her fingers against the pad of her right thumb and the Uruz symbol she’d accidentally branded herself with. Had she been the one to set all of this in motion, back in her bedroom at her parents’ house, when she was young and stupid and worked her fatally flawed spell of Odin’s Return to try to heal the planet? Another chunk of flaming sulfur landed just outside the protective circle, and the burning stink shocked her senses. She wasn’t much older now, and maybe she was a little less stupid. But whether she’d started this or not, she had to try to stop it. No matter what.
She pressed her right forefinger and thumb together and focused on the mark of Uruz in her flesh. Strength, power, and courage. Self-control and dominion, but also sudden changes. She almost laughed. Whatever change was about to happen, it was going to be a doozy.
Sally turned her back on Heimdall and Freyr. She felt hands on her shoulders as she aligned her feet with the runes Berkana and Hagalaz. Birth and loss. New beginnings and destruction. She thought about the Raido rune she wore around her neck, the symbol of journeys and destiny.
Here goes nothing. Sally raised her arms to the sky, and Baron lay down across the tops of her feet. She didn’t have the words for calling the chaos into herself. She didn’t know any incantations or rituals for establishing a new anchor of magick in the world. But she was the Rune Witch, and she was Loki’s designated heir.
Choose me. Choose me. Here I am. Choose me. She chanted silently to herself, over and over again as each new lightning bolt crackled down from the sky and up from the ground and out from the Yggdrasil itself. She was hit from every direction and she gritted her teeth and tried not to scream with each strike that electrified her body. Not a single bolt went astray. The energy grounded in her blood and her bones and her brain, and her nostrils filled with the smell of seared flesh and hair. And the piercing shocks of chaos magick kept coming.
Sally’s eyeballs burned in their sockets, and she squeezed her lids shut when she couldn’t stand it anymore. Every breath brought a new infusion of pain. Was she inhaling lightning? Bursts of pink and gold light flashed against the inside of her eyelids, and suddenly she was standing in hot sand. She stood high on a white dune and looked out over a mountain range of undulating sand as far as the eye could see. Dry air swirled around her, stinging her nostrils and burning her eyes and sinuses. What was this?
She had barely formed the question in her mind when the scene changed again and she was surrounded by the dark murkiness of an ancient swamp. She choked on heavy humidity and tried to make out the visual distinction between green, slime-covered bog trees and the darker green slime floating on the surface of the water she was standing in.
Another breath and she was sitting at the jagged mouth of a cave watching blazing symbols she didn’t recognize being burned into red-grey stone by an unseen hand.
What was she seeing? Were these memories, or visions of other realms?
She was thrust back into her own body, her feet frozen in the snow as sh
e returned to the screaming pain of being flayed from the inside out by the chaos and lightning pouring into her. She felt her skin blistering and cracking open as the chaos shattered her bones and then made them whole again, over and over. Her blood boiled in her veins. A deep, insensible groan rose up out of her in multiple octaves. The part of her brain that was still functioning remembered the voices of the volcano sisters in the wilderness. Roots dove deep into the ground and spread wide beneath her feet, and her outstretched arms started hardening into branches.
The Tree. She had seen Odin and Freya commune with the Yggdrasil, and she’d offered the Tree her own reverence, but she’d never formed a connection like this before. The Yggdrasil reached out to her through the ground and offered to take some of her burden. Is this what Loki had meant about laying her own anchors? She didn’t have any choice but to trust the Tree. She heard more screeches of breaking branches as more living wood sheered off the trunk and fell to the ground. But Sally relented. She exhaled and felt some of the chaos shoot outward into the roots at her feet, to be absorbed at least temporarily by the Yggdrasil.
The onslaught of chaos continued. She saw herself through another’s eyes when she was bloody and haggard and drained to within an inch of her mortal life, scrounging for more magick just before the Battle of the White Oak Yggdrasil on this same field. Another blazing flash of light, and she saw herself in the rented van on the ferry in Norway when she was trying to work out how to protect her friends as they prepared to go to war with the Køjer Devils.
These are Loki’s memories. She saw herself through Loki’s eyes as she faced off against Hel in Helheim. She saw herself struggling with another round of his frustrating and illogical magickal exercises. Her heart pounded in her chest and felt like it was about to burst. Loki had loved her. He had been proud of her, and he had felt desperate sorrow for the legacy he had no choice but to pass to her.
Twilight Magic (Rune Witch Book 6) Page 24