by A. R. Kahler
Freezing water.
The pressure instantaneous, the cold to my bones. But I was sinking. Struggling. Swimming. Toward him.
Chris was below me, his pale face barely illuminated by the light.
I swam farther. My lungs burned.
How long had I been down here?
How long to get back up?
I kicked. Wished I had Freyja’s magic or strength, but I only had me. And I was shutting down.
Our fingers touched. His arm held out in offering. His eyes wide. Seeking.
Growing wide.
Losing light.
Fingers touched.
Latched.
Fingers touch.
Cold
presses. And she
is angelic, weightless, the light
around her body a halo. Her lips
whisper bubbles, whisper my name. And I feel
the stirrings, the rightness, to reach
out, to ascend.
I reach.
Until
I see him. Behind her
wrapped within
her halo
a ghost within her glow.
Heru.
Reaching beside her. His smile
a dagger, his hands blood.
I will never leave you.
He says.
She says.
No.
We’ve come so far.
She’s come so far. For me.
But I can’t. I see the blood
in his eyes. The promise
in his hands.
My lips part, water
floods in. Her hand clutches
mine, as Heru’s light
slides down my throat
as darkness folds
and here, in the depths, I
am not alone.
I will never be
alone.
There was darkness. And then there was light.
It slammed against me, harsh and hard and cold. I coughed, and the last dregs of lake water spilled from my lungs. I turned over in the snow, tried to blink in my surroundings.
Sky.
Snow.
Ice.
Blood.
Kaira.
Kaira. She lay in the snow beside me, facedown, her hand still clutching my wrist, and somewhere out there people were screaming, people yelling and running toward us, but here—right here—there was only the silence. Kaira wasn’t moving. Kaira wasn’t moving. And when I put a hand on her temple, she was colder than the snow beneath my bleeding hand.
She was cold. So cold.
She wasn’t moving.
Everything else was moving, but she was not.
I didn’t know what I was doing, and yet, I did.
I reached through my blood that pooled around us, turning the slush pink. I reached into the power and pulled.
Heat flared under my palm. Light like sunshine poured from my fingers. The power. The heat. I wrapped it around her, heard snow hiss and pop as her skin steamed, as her thin pajamas dried.
The power wanted to consume her. Wanted to ignite the cotton of her shirt, crisp the carbon of her hair. But I shuddered and wrestled the power down. My power was blood. My power was blood.
And blood was what gave us life.
She groaned. Tightened her grip on my fingers. Opened her eyes.
Her violet eyes.
“Chris,” she whispered.
I felt the flicker of a smile on my lips.
Then I heard another voice.
“Burn her.”
I let go of the power. Let go of her hand. Behind us, the dark water churned. I could hear it calling me. To end it. To end it. I should have ended it.
Heru was still there. Waiting. He’d been waiting all along. And I knew then that I couldn’t escape him. Not even in death.
Kaira sat up. Her eyes—were they violet? Or was that my imagination?—darted from me to the hole in the ice. She didn’t ask how it had gotten there. Didn’t ask how I had warmed her. I watched her watch me. Waited for her to break into crows. Waited for blood to stream from her eyes. But she only reached out and took my hand. Her skin was still cold. Far too cold. Or perhaps mine was simply too hot.
“We did it,” she whispered. Her finger traced the healed scar on my wrist. And in that moment, Heru’s voice disappeared. I could feel him, at the very edge of my awareness. But he stood outside the circle. So long as Kaira was here, with me, he would always stand outside the circle.
I wanted to open my mouth to thank her. I wanted to apologize.
I wanted to forget what I’d seen—I remembered running out here, running from the visions. I remembered drowning. I remembered what lay beneath.
And I remembered what I had given up to return.
The words for everything knotted in my throat. She didn’t seem to mind.
Instead, as the fishermen from their huts surrounded us, she leaned forward and placed her fingers on my cheek. On my temple. On the back of my head. She pulled me closer.
“We did it,” she said again.
Then her lips touched mine, and even though they were cold, even though every inch of her was snow, I felt my chest blaze. Felt her pulse quicken. Felt my blood mirror hers.
Even though we’d both trudged through death, I’d never felt more alive.
It should have felt like the happy ending.
It should have felt like everything was going back to normal.
The scary part was, it all did. It all seemed like it was going to be okay. And that scared me more than anything else.
The fishermen came and wrapped us in blankets and took us back to the school. Nurse Bettie saw to Chris and me, but ultimately decided that we didn’t need to go to the ER. Despite having been drenched in the lake—for what had, apparently, been only a few seconds—neither Chris nor I showed any signs of hypothermia. She said it was a miracle. Especially since my cold had broken in a heartbeat. Despite being a little too cold to the touch, I was as right as rain.
We were still told to stay in the nurse’s office overnight.
Separate rooms. Of course.
As for the cover story, well, that was harder to figure out. Mainly because she didn’t remember Chris coming into my room, just as she didn’t remember me chasing after him. No one did. So, once we figured out what everyone didn’t know, we threw together the stupidest lie we could. We had gone out for a walk because I needed fresh air. The ice cracked, we fell in. And that was that. It shouldn’t have been that easy. But it was.
“I still think you’re insane,” Ethan said. He sprinkled more red pepper on his pizza before taking a huge bite. The five of us were in the lobby of the nurse’s office—Ethan, Chris, Elisa, Oliver, and me. Chris sat on the bench beside me, his thigh resting against mine. Oliver and Ethan were cross-legged on the floor. Elisa sat a little bit apart. Watching us. I couldn’t tell if she was skeptical or approving of the fact that I was willingly sitting so close to a boy. And that I was, on occasion, nudging him with my shoulder.
There was something in Chris’s look, though. Something wary. He knew something. He was hiding something. But I hadn’t had a chance to ask him what.
“What?” Oliver continued. “You never break the rules?”
Amazingly, Ethan actually blushed.
“Of course I do,” he said. “Just not the ones that keep me alive. It’s the fun ones I break.”
“Like no sleepovers with significant others?” I ventured.
Again, his ears reddened, but he nodded anyway. It was easy to think everything else had been a bad dream, that this was reality. The whole of reality. But even now, trying to feign normal, I knew that wasn’t the case.
“Let’s be honest,” Ethan said, staring me right in the eyes, again with that wary, albeit impish, expression. “I’m not the only one who will be breaking the sleepover rule.”
I nearly choked on the slice of margherita pizza I was chewing on. It felt like I hadn’t eaten in days.
Apparent
ly, I hadn’t.
Gods, there was a lot I needed to catch up on.
Chris didn’t say anything. He hadn’t said anything the entire night, beyond a few short answers to all the obligatory questions: How are you feeling? Okay. Are you hungry? Sure. Do you want to postpone your thesis? Maybe.
He looked older. Haunted. And even though he seemed to light up when I was near, the moment others were around, he closed back in on himself. It scared me. I’d sacrificed so much to bring him back. What if I hadn’t succeeded? What if I’d just brought back an impression of him, and left the spark of the boy I loved behind?
But it wasn’t just the way Chris acted around me that threw me off. It was the way he studiously ignored Ethan. There was definitely something between the two of them. Something that made them dance around each other like they shared a horrible secret neither could express.
Earlier, I’d tried asking Chris about what had happened while I was “sick,” once Nurse Bettie had left and I’d snuck into his room. (Sneaking around seemed ridiculously easy now. For some reason, I had no doubt that if I didn’t want to be seen, I wouldn’t be. This was proven when I walked right by Bettie without her saying a word.)
Chris’s answer had chilled me to the bone. Which was an omen in and of itself, since I didn’t seem to feel cold anymore either.
“It was worse than you could imagine,” he’d said, looking me straight in the eyes like he always did. Then he’d looked away. And he wouldn’t say anything else.
Not even when I asked if he’d felt Heru since we’d returned.
Especially not then.
That told me more than an answer. Maybe things weren’t back to normal. Maybe that was just another lie.
In any case, I didn’t think there would be any rule-breaking tonight. At least, not the kind Ethan expected. I didn’t want to jump Chris’s bones.
I wanted answers.
As did Freyja.
She was the other member of our dinner party. But she didn’t speak. She sat in the shadows, invisible to everyone but me. And maybe not to Chris, from the way he kept looking to the corner of the room when he thought no one was watching. Freyja watched us all in silence, and I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. Did she feel vindicated, for helping me save Chris when she couldn’t save Bragi? Or were the visions from the River Styx more prophetic than I wanted to believe?
I refused to think she was sitting there, plotting.
I refused to think that everything had been in vain.
“It won’t matter much longer,” Elisa said. It took me a moment to realize she was talking about breaking rules.
It felt like a curtain dropping—the mood in the room immediately suffocated.
“What do you mean?” I asked. Ethan and Oliver looked down. Elisa kept staring at her uneaten pizza. “Elisa. What do you mean?”
My hackles rose. I’d had too much prophecy lately. This couldn’t be another one. This couldn’t.
“They’re closing the school next week,” she said.
Instantly, my appetite vanished. I dropped my pizza to the plate and stared around. None of them would meet my eyes. Not even Chris, who now seemed worlds away. Had he known? Or was this new to him as well?
“That’s not possible,” I said.
“Apparently it is,” Elisa replied. “Enough parents were calling in, trying to get their kids out. The authorities started getting involved. . . .” She sighed, poked at her pizza. “This place is no longer safe.”
How could I have expected anything else?
People had died. And even though I wanted to tell everyone that it was safe now, no one would believe me. I had a handle on the goddess in my brain. We’d banished Heru, at least for now—Chris seemed to have it under control. We weren’t going to fight each other. No one could force us.
The worst was over. The great war would never come.
So why, when I thought that, did I remember what I’d seen in the River Styx? The visions of Islington, and all my friends slain? The figure in a cloak of owl feathers, promising a battle I couldn’t foresee or stop?
They had just been visions. Just visions.
Just some awful torture thrown up by the Underworld.
We had fended off the end.
I wished I was naive enough to believe it.
“So what happens next?” I whispered.
Ethan shrugged.
“We transfer back to school at home,” he said.
I looked to him. To Chris. To Oliver and Elisa.
They were my family. They were my home.
This was supposed to be the happy ending. I looked to the shadows, to Freyja. And I remembered my sacrifice. I had given up my art to come back. But giving up Islington wasn’t what I’d meant. I thought of going back home—of graduating not with my best friends, but with people who hadn’t been there for me, false friends who turned their backs when I needed them the most. I thought of dropping in on classes I didn’t give a shit about. The art classes wouldn’t hold a candle to what I’d experienced. I wouldn’t have “Islington Arts Academy” on my diploma.
And I wouldn’t have these guys around. I would have to be there on my own.
“I can’t go back.” I hadn’t even realized the words had left my mouth until Chris put a hand on my thigh.
“It will be okay,” he replied. It was the first time he’d sounded like himself.
Except it wouldn’t. And we both knew it.
Nothing was going to be okay. And not for the reasons my friends expected.
• • •
The blank page stayed as clear and virginal as snow.
I stared at the sketchbook, a piece of charcoal in one hand, a mug of cooled tea in the other. It was midnight. Past midnight. I had the girl’s room of the nurse’s office to myself. I didn’t want to have it to myself. But I didn’t want to sneak over and find Chris, either. Not yet. Not right now. Because he would just remind me of what I’d given up.
Now that Islington was closing, even sacrificing my art seemed pointless. Chris and I would be going to different states.
I would probably never see him again.
It was all for nothing. I’d saved the boy, and I couldn’t even keep him.
I wanted to scream. I wanted to rip the page to shreds. I wanted to run outside and yell at the top of my lungs, because this couldn’t be happening, shouldn’t be happening.
Mostly, though, I wanted to draw something. Anything. Because that was the one time I felt like myself. The one time I felt like I had some control over the mess of my life.
My hand hovered over the sketchbook page.
Inspiration never came.
“What did he give up?” I asked the shadows.
As expected, Freyja stepped forward. We had barely spoken since coming back up here. There were so many things left unsaid. I didn’t want to puncture that dam. Right now, ignorance was mostly bliss.
At the very least, ignorance was numb.
“That is not mine to tell,” she replied.
Anger flared. I crumpled the coal in my hand and flung it at the wall. The coal—brittle and as light as a feather—disintegrated into dust. Not nearly as cathartic as I’d wanted it to be. I growled in the back of my throat as I stood and turned to face her.
“Was it worth it? Any of it?” I asked her. “I brought him back so we could be together. I gave up my art so we could be together. And now I have nothing. Nothing!”
The last word came out as a yell, but fuck it. If Chris or the nurse on duty wanted to come in and tell me to shut up, they could damn well try.
Freyja just stared at me, her arms crossed at her chest. She was in the same leather as she’d worn while traversing the Underworld. But now she looked less like some fierce deity. She looked oddly mortal. Save for the eyes.
“We have much to discuss,” she said. Her voice was calm, but there was a note to it that kept me on edge. “Your lover’s deity . . . The Aesir survived the Underworld. I have felt him.”
>
“So what?” I asked. “Chris isn’t going to hurt me. Just like I’m not going to hurt him. You’re not going to make us.”
She stepped forward. I fully expected her to chastise me, to tell me I had to do my duty. The owl god had said she had a plan, one that would destroy everything I loved. She may have helped me through the Underworld, but I know she only did it because she needed me.
I’d told Chris I trusted her.
It hadn’t been the first lie I’d ever told.
I just needed him to trust me. Because there wasn’t anyone else to trust.
“I sacrificed my lover to find you,” Freyja said. Another step closer. “I held him as he died, all so I could come here. So I could fulfill their prophecy. My destiny. Our destiny.” She reached out, took both of my arms. “I swore, when he breathed his last, that I would do everything in my power to avenge him.”
When she leaned in, I expected the anger. The rage. I did not expect the sadness.
“The greatest vengeance I could enact would be to help you live,” she said. “With Chris. You have been given the chance I would have given anything for. He lives. In this world, with you. I will fight to protect that.”
I thought of the river. This didn’t line up with what the strange figure had said.
“But what about the Tree?” I asked. “What about the war?”
She shook her head.
“There will be other wars and others to fight in them. The Tree can last until the next godchildren are born. And I could care less for the fate of the Vanir. The battle is always coming. Let someone else fight it.”
I wanted to feel relief, but I didn’t think that was possible anymore. Everything seemed to have a hook. Every light, a shadow.
“What will you do?” I asked.
She let go of my arms and stood tall. “The Aesir will still try to use the boy. His god is not as understanding as I. You will need me when that time comes. We will keep him from hurting anyone else.”
“Thank you,” I said. It sounded stupid. I wasn’t even certain I meant it. Did she expect me to just follow Chris to his hometown, or vice versa? And what would happen with college? I couldn’t just be his shadow for the rest of his life, hoping the god that wanted to screw with him wouldn’t rise up. I almost laughed. There were so many physical logistics to work out, so many mundane impossibilities . . . All of the divine shit just seemed like fantasy.