Raven Quest (Valhalla Book 4)

by Jennifer Willis

  Fenrir stepped out of the shadows and crept to the edge of the clearing.

  At the sight of him, Opal swallowed hard and took a few stumbling steps backward. “Y-, you’re the Fenris Wolf.” She gestured frantically at the Randulfr and turned to Heimdall in panic. “That’s Fenrir!”

  On instinctive response to distress, Laika placed herself squarely between Opal and Fenrir. She pressed her ears back and growled.

  “Laika,” Heimdall said. “You’re not helping.”

  Laika stopped growling, but she didn’t move from her protective position in front of Opal. She sat down, and Opal crouched low behind her, almost hiding behind Laika and digging her fingers into her fur.

  “Did he eat Sally?” Opal squeaked.

  “What? No. Look, no one ate anybody,” Heimdall said. Then he looked back at Fenrir and wondered what it might take for Fenrir to discard his debt to Sally and decide that she might taste good with sriracha. “You didn’t, right? You didn’t eat Sally?”

  Fenrir wore a startled expression as he shook his head. “I would sooner slice off and consume my own testicles than cause harm to the Moon Witch.”

  Heimdall’s face tightened. “You didn’t have to be quite so graphic, but good to know.”

  Opal peeked out from behind Laika. “So where is she? Where’s Moon?” She cast a fearful glance at Fenrir. “Why is he even here?”

  Heimdall moved closer to Opal and crouched down beside her. He explained what he knew about Moon being a fake guide. He was careful not to mention anything about Thor in Fenrir’s presence, and Opal seemed to understand the omission.

  “So the guides—I mean, Moon,” Opal corrected herself. “You don’t know who she is or what she wants?”

  Heimdall shook his head. “I was hoping you could tell me.”

  Laika rose and started sniffing around the clearing. Glancing up frequently to keep tabs on Fenrir, she lowered her snout and snuffled one scent after another as she covered the campsite and its perimeter. She paused over one spot marked by some messy footprints. Then Laika sneezed loudly and woo’ed at Heimdall.

  “You got something?” Heimdall asked. Laika stamped her feet next to the dirt that still held the impressions of Sally’s naked toes.

  Heimdall nodded. “Good girl. Keep at it.”

  Laika lowered her nose to the ground again. Fenrir sank onto his hands and knees and started sniffing around, too. Laika bristled at his movement and froze in place. Hackles up, she issued a warning growl. Fenrir ignored her.

  Heimdall rose to his feet. “Laika.”

  She looked at him with a perplexed expression, her eyes shifting to Fenrir whose short nose twitched as he crawled around on the ground. Heimdall noticed that in his bipedal form, Fenrir had a tiny stub of a tail at the base of his spine. Heimdall grimaced. It was something he simply couldn’t un-see.

  Laika whined.

  “It’s okay, girl.” Heimdall turned to Fenrir. “You think your nose is better than a wolf’s?”

  Fenrir cut his eyes sideways at Heimdall with an expression of poisonous disdain and kept looking for scent clues. He paused over one spot and took a deep breath in, then pushed himself up and stared deep into the forest, his ears twitching.

  Giving Fenrir a wide berth, Laika moved in the direction of his gaze and lowered her nose to pick up the scent trail. When she got to the edge of the clearing, she looked back at Heimdall and barked.

  “Yes,” Fenrir agreed. “The Moon Witch went that way.”

  Opal started stuffing her sleeping bag into her backpack. “I’m coming with you.”

  “We don’t know what we’re up against,” Heimdall said.

  Opal threw her hands in the air. “I’m just supposed to sit here in the forest all by myself? Wait for some fake guide to maybe come back and use me as part of her devious designs while Sally might be in trouble? Not even an option. I’ll bet you don’t even know where we are.”

  Opal dug into her pack and pulled out her GPS unit. With a smug smile, she held up the device for Heimdall to see. “Of course, it’s not working right now, but once we’re back in range . . . Or something. I’m not really sure what’s wrong with it. I swear I put in fresh batteries, but it wouldn’t—“

  “Fine.” Heimdall sighed. “Grab your gear. Be quick about it.”

  Opal took a minute to duck behind a tree and change into proper hiking clothes. She zipped up everything inside her backpack and pulled it onto her shoulders. She looked over at Fenrir, who stood beside Laika and seemed anxious to get moving.

  Opal gestured toward him. “Umm, before we take off, do you maybe want some pants?”

  “WAKE UP!” a familiar voice shouted in Thor’s ear.

  Thor grumbled and waved a meaty hand in the air, trying to bat away whatever pest was buzzing around his head. Within seconds, he was snoring again.

  “I said, wake up right now, you overgrown gnome!” the voice shouted again. “You look like a drunken porcupine in a prom dress, and you smell like fermented goat ass.”

  Thor cracked his eyes open and squinted against the sunlight shining directly in his face. “Some would consider fermented goat ass a delicacy,” Thor growled as he sat up.

  “If you say so.”

  Thor shaded his eyes with one hand and grimaced when he saw Freyr squatting a few feet away.

  “Go away,” Thor grumbled. “You’re not here.”

  “I thought we already had this conversation,” Freyr replied with a frustrated sigh.

  Thor gritted his teeth. “And apparently we’re still having it.” He reached into his back pocket for the plastic baggie, scooped out the last of the dried-twig snacks, and shoved them into his mouth. “Whether you’re here or not, you’re interfering with my vision quest.” Thor chewed on the snacks and swallowed them down.

  “You’re making good progress with that, then?” Freyr asked. “Because all I see is you sitting on your butt and napping.”

  Thor rolled toward the stream and splashed cool water on his face before taking long sips directly from the running brook. “I’m not listening to you,” he said between gulps.

  “But you need to listen to me now,” Freyr said. Thor didn’t reply. “I’m not kidding around here. This is important.”

  Thor pretended he couldn’t hear his dead cousin. This must be the delayed onset of true grief, he decided. These last long months without Freyr’s verbal sparring had finally caught up to him.

  “Thor!” Freyr shouted with remarkable volume for a ghost. “I’m talking to you, you thick-headed lug nut!”

  Thor sat up and squeezed the water out of his beard. Settling into an awkward cross-legged position, he adopted an expression of forced serenity and turned his face to the sky. “I am in the woods, sitting by a clear-running stream. I am fasting and awaiting my vision,” Thor hummed to himself.

  “Yeah? Have you met your butterfly power insect? Been invited to join the spider monkey clan?”

  Thor closed his eyes and squared his shoulders. If he ignored the hallucination, it would go away.

  “And if you’re fasting, just what have you been snacking on?”

  “Twigs or dried berries, or something. Could be muskrat leather for all I care.” Thor sniffed. “What’s it to you?”

  “I suspect you’ve been munching on hallucinogenic mushrooms, my slow-witted friend. It’s a wonder you’re not doing a naked hula right now.”

  Thor’s eyes flared open with rage. “That happened one time, and I was drunk on pomegranate mead that you laced with pollinazed black honey!”

  Freyr sat back on his haunches and smirked. “I remember it well. And by the way, pollinazed isn’t a word.”

  Thor huffed. Was a vision quest hallucination supposed to be this irritating?

  “If you don’t mind, I’m trying to commune with the spirit of the forest, or whatever. I don’t appreciate the distraction.” Thor closed his eyes again and concentrated on releasing the tension from his body. He started by relaxing his toes, then his
ankles and calves . . .

  “Not right now, you’re not!” Freyr’s voice was loud in his ear. Thor opened his eyes and was startled to find Freyr standing practically on top of him. Thor hadn’t heard a single footstep.

  “I don’t mean to be rude, of course,” Freyr took a half-step back and spread his hands wide. “But you’re being inordinately stubborn and obtuse when there’s real danger afoot.”

  “What are you doing here, then, if not to vex me and prevent me from fulfilling my promise to Bonnie and her grandmother?”

  Freyr nearly laughed. “You really are more stupid without food, you know that?”

  Thor blinked up at Freyr, who was looking more solid than he thought a specter should. Still, Freyr’s form wavered. Actually, when Thor looked around, he noticed that everything had a glowing, dreamy quality he hadn’t registered before.

  “Whoa . . .” Thor leaned back on his elbows, and the world started to spin lazily around him. He wasn’t sure that was a good thing. “Umm, what did you say about mushrooms, before?”

  Freyr made frantic gestures toward the stream. “Drink more water! Do it now!”

  Thor stared up at his cousin for a long moment, his mouth hanging wide open. “What?” he asked after a protracted, rainbow-colored pause.

  “Get to the brook!” Freyr stomped the ground in impatience, but his foot made neither mark nor sound. “It should help push the chemicals out of your system faster.”

  Thor shook his slack jaw. He ran his tongue along the edges of his teeth and wondered if a human-sized dinosaur really ought to be an electric-raspberry shade of purple.

  “But I’m out here for, to have . . . a vision.” Thor’s head lolled back and he stared wide-eyed at the blue sky. He swore he could see stars in the middle of the morning, and birds of every wavelength of the light spectrum—visible and not—streaked back and forth across his field of vision.

  “Oh, wow. Dúfa,” Thor said in long, slow syllables. He had never seen ultraviolet or radio-wave birds before. They left sparkling trails of gold and copper in their wake. “You really should see this.” Thor collapsed backward on the ground, his arms and legs akimbo. “Pretty, pretty birds,” he sighed to the sky as fat tears rolled down his cheeks. “Sing to me, little birdies. Sing, sing.”

  Freyr rested his hands on his hips and sighed loudly. He leaned over his tripping cousin. “Thor! Get up and drink, you oaf!”

  Thor smiled up at Freyr. He’d missed the funny, skinny Vanir. Freyr’s skin had been kind of green the last time he’d seen him, and he’d had pointy ears, too. But he looked okay now. Everything looked very okay now. Thor laughed. His cousin was trying to tell him something, but his voice sounded like a familiar melody traveling underwater. It was a fairy whale song. Thor lifted his arms and waved his hands in time with the music.

  “Roll yourself toward the stream, fatso!” Freyr sang as the birds in the sky swooped and danced. Their tail feathers left gliding, opalescent after-images as they painted watercolors across the bright blue canvas of the open sky. “You need to drink an awful lot of water.”

  Thor chuckled and kept waving his arms. He was conducting nature’s orchestra, with Freyr as a special guest soloist. The trees on either side of the stream crowded in close and leaned over him to better appreciate the music. Their branches swayed in applause for Thor’s symphony.

  “I command thunder from the moon!” Thor giggled, his legs now swaying in the air with his arms. “Lightning as percussion! Hail storms for drama!” He watched the sky turn dark as night in the space of a single breath. Lightning bolts crackled across the blackness and electrified the skeletons of the birds as they continued their aerial dance maneuvers.

  “Mirra!” Thor exclaimed. “Mirra kaka!”

  “You’re being completely ridiculous and unhelpful,” Freyr’s song continued, dipping now into minor chords.

  Thor frowned at this sudden turn in the music. It brought bitter tears to his eyes, and his voice caught in his throat. “No! It’s too sad!” Thor sobbed. “Where is the sunlight?”

  He saw the menace of the trees, now angry and dark, marching behind Freyr. Undulating branches reached out to snag Freyr and carry him away into the forest forever.

  “You have to stay!” Thor tried to grab his cousin, but his hands clutched at air where the Vanir’s ankles should have been. “You can’t let them take you! The trees are coming!”

  “What are you talking about?!” Freyr’s song progressed into the most melancholy music Thor had ever heard, every note a cold, sharp nail to the sides of his head. The thunder god rolled on the ground in misery. His stomach twisted in dark despair.

  “It can’t be like this!” Great rolls of booming thunder crashed over Thor’s head. Birds shrieked as they caught fire and fell from the sky, and Thor clamped his hands over his ears against their excruciating cries. He shut his eyes. He tried to turn away from the raging nightmare, but he couldn’t make it stop. Dying birds pecked through the flesh of his fingers to stab flaming beaks at his eyes. “I don’t want it! This isn’t how it’s supposed to be!”

  And then the trees were upon him, too. Pine-needle claws tore at his shirt and dug into his skin. Thick branches pierced his skull and brain, shattered his ribs, and sliced through his vital organs. Thor curled into a ball and screamed.

  “Will you get a grip!” Freyr’s voice broke through the chaos. The nature god’s words echoed across the sky, and suddenly everything was still.

  Thor opened his eyes. He blinked at the regular, everyday sunlight glinting off the water in the stream. The world seemed so quiet, and normal. Thor rolled cautiously onto his back. Freyr was there, not a captive of the dark forest but still looking a bit frantic. Freyr stood over him, mouthing words Thor couldn’t quite understand.

  “What?!” Thor shouted, then removed his own hands from his ears.

  “I said, you just need to hold on and get into the water!” Freyr yelled, his face turning red. “It will help to snap you out of this!”

  Thor winced. “Yeah, okay. You don’t have to shout, you know.” Thor pushed himself onto his hands and knees. He crept toward the fresh water, but he’d scarcely moved a foot when his stomach churned painfully. He started retching into the dirt. Spongy pieces of partially digested mushroom spilled out of him on a river of burning stomach acid. The smell was not helping him feel any better.

  “There you go,” Freyr said behind him.

  Thor coughed up what he hoped was the last of it and moved to the stream. He dunked his face in the water and scrubbed at his beard with his hands. He honestly couldn’t remember the last time he’d vomited, but it was fair to assume Freyr had been involved then, too. He lifted his head and spat into the stream.

  “I could have done without all of that.” Thor coughed and lowered his face to the water again to drink.

  “Good thing hallucinogens work a bit differently on an immortal’s system, I guess.” Freyr stepped up beside him. “Looks like you had a pretty bad trip, even if it was mercifully short.”

  Thor glanced up. The sky was blue again, and clear. A few birds fluttered overhead, and the surrounding evergreens swayed gently in a light breeze. He rested on his knees and ran his hands over his face. “There’s something to those ‘Just Say No’ advertisements.”

  “Think you’re ready to listen now?”

  Thor winced. None of this was conforming to his expectations of a vision quest. His guide had some kind of personality disorder, switching at will from a likable fellow to a cruel taskmaster with a sharp stick, and now it looked like Hugh had tried to poison him.

  “Is it still Thursday?” Thor wasn’t sure he could endure another two and a half days of this. “I am having the strangest time in the woods.”

  “You’re not the only one.” Freyr sat down beside him on the creek bank.

  “You’re a ghost. What do you know?”

  Freyr cracked a smile, and they laughed together. Thor patted the front of his wet shirt. His stomach was still
knotted in cramps, but he felt good. Better, at least. For the moment, he didn’t care if Freyr was just a figment of his imagination.

  Freyr stared into the water. “I don’t know how I got here, or if I really am here. Maybe this is a dream?” He looked sideways at Thor. “Maybe your dream. Maybe mine. Maybe someone else’s.”

  “You’re making my head hurt.” Thor held up his hands in surrender. Arguing philosophy with a nature god was always a losing proposition. “But you said there’s danger?”

  Freyr nodded. “I can feel it in the Earth, a disturbance. There’s been a shift.” Freyr shrugged. “I know how it sounds—very New Age. Very Star Wars. But I seem to be tied to the Earth, so closely, in a way that’s not familiar.”

  “That doesn’t—” Thor’s stomach lurched, and he leaned away, ready to retch again. After a few uncomfortable moments of breathing through his mouth, Thor figured he was in the clear and he sat back up again.

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” Thor said. “You’re a nature god. You’re already connected to the planet.”

  “This isn’t the same. I don’t know how to explain it.” Freyr spread his fingers wide and pressed his hands through the dirt as if it were air. “I’ve always been connected to nature, you know?”

  Thor didn’t know, not really. But he nodded and waited for Freyr to continue.

  “But now it’s like I’m a part of this place.” Freyr lifted his fingers from the dry soil. “Whatever it is, I can tell you that something’s moving, and it’s not good. The volcanoes . . .” Freyr shook his head. “Something is very wrong. I just don’t know what.”

  Thor looked upstream. He saw the outline of South Sister, the biggest of the three sibling volcanoes that stood in what passed for a tight cluster on a geological scale. He couldn’t remember what they were called. Faith? Purity? Chastity? Bonnie’s grandmother would probably call them something else. The wedge of the peak he could see was covered in its usual, year-round snow. It didn’t look any more threatening than usual, so he wasn’t sure what Freyr was talking about.

  He turned downstream toward Mt. Bachelor, most of it obscured by the trees. Bonnie liked to go skiing there. He smiled at the memory of a cozy weekend in a rented cabin the previous winter and their long, chilly detour through the Painted Hills before heading back to Portland.