“You guys will not believe this,” Peyton said, plopping down beside Finn.
We all pulled back at once. I was so flustered I couldn’t meet any of their eyes. I’d heard of raging hormones, I just didn’t think they would happen to me. And here I was, not even sure which guy I wanted them to rage at. Every time a guy walked into my life, my need grew stronger.
“I was telling everyone about that freaking tsunami wave, and they wouldn’t believe me,” Peyton said.
“You told someone about that?” Zeke asked, frowning.
I was just relieved that she’d interrupted, although somehow, I was simultaneously disappointed.
“Well, yeah,” she said. “Alejandra’s my girlfriend. I tell her everything. But she said her mom takes the dogs for a run on the beach every day, and she didn’t see anything.”
“Maybe it was just that beach,” Finn said, not looking up from the fries.
“A tsunami would hit every beach,” Eliot said. “That wasn’t a tsunami. It was just a really big wave.”
“Yeah, I know, a real tsunami would have washed all the houses off the Cape, but still,” Peyton insisted. She reached in for a fry, and a spark darted between her finger and mine like a static shock. For a minute, we all ate in silence, our fingers bumping and slipping against each other. Something built inside me like my own tsunami. That energy, that charge that left me breathless and wanting. Every time my fingers touched theirs, a spring inside me coiled a little tighter. My insides felt hot and liquid, and I wanted more, and more, and more.
Suddenly, I realized how fast we were all eating, licking ketchup and oil and salt off our fingers, reaching in together so our hands would touch again and again. I didn’t taste the food at all, only waited for the next hand to go in so I could push mine in next to it. My breath came faster, my body electric with a need I’d never felt before. I’d gone from never having a crush on a single person in my life to being inexplicably drawn to every single one of my stepbrothers.
“Exactly what is going on here?” demanded a high, grating voice. A surge of anger drove up my chest like a fist. How dare an outsider interrupt this? Couldn’t she see we were sharing something special?
“Go away, Barb,” Eliot said, barely glancing at her.
Barb. That’s how she felt. A thorn needling her way into this sacred ritual.
“Go away?” she asked, thrusting out one hip and planting her hand on it. She swung her long brunette hair behind her shoulder, and I recognized her as the girl who had been leaning across the table in front of Eliot, sharing her earbuds. “You can’t tell me to go away, Eliot. I’m not a dog.”
“I don’t have time for this right now.”
She pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes, glaring at me. “And who is this?”
“Gwen,” Eliot said, turning my name into something that sounded like a sigh of anguished longing. If Zeke had made my name sound like someone fun, Eliot made it sound like someone beautiful and ethereal, a girl who wore filmy white dresses and stood at the window looking up at the moon every night.
My chest throbbed when I met his eyes.
Barb must have noticed something in the look that passed between us. “Oh, really?” she asked. “And what’s so special about Gwen that she can get all the Keens together in one place?”
If Eliot had made my name sound beautiful, she’d made it sound like a squashed bug.
Three things happened simultaneously then. I realized we weren’t all together. Xander stepped through the door. And all the windows in the cafeteria shattered.
Chapter Twenty
Eliot
The cafeteria had erupted like a nuclear explosion, except instead of mutating my classmates’ DNA, it immediately turned them into hooting, cheering, shrieking maniacs.
One girl screamed, “I don’t want to die!”
All her friends laughed, but I wasn’t sure she’d been joking.
“Please exit the cafeteria in an orderly manner,” one of the lunchroom monitors said through a bullhorn.
No one paid him the slightest attention. Two lacrosse players jostled against the end of our table, pumping their fists in the air and high-fiving Zeke as they passed.
“School’s out…for-ever,” one of them sang at the top of his lungs.
“Our fine education system, ladies and gentlemen,” I muttered as a chorus of MOOs broke out at the back of the line.
“What the fuck is going on?” Xander demanded, ignoring the crowd and glowering at us. “Who called me?”
None of us had moved. While Zeke and Gwen looked at him blankly, I checked my phone. With all the weird stuff that had been going on lately, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see that my phone had started calling people at random. But I didn’t have any pocket dials.
Finn seemed to share my thought, but after checking his phone, he shook his head.
“Well? Somebody called me,” Xander said, snatching his phone from his pocket and thumbing it on.
“So? Which one of us was it?” Peyton asked.
Xander swore under his breath and shoved his phone back in his pocket, but he looked more subdued. “No missed calls,” he said quietly.
“Let’s go out to the field,” Zeke said, standing from the table. “It’s time to talk about what’s been going on.”
I nodded and stood with him. Zeke and I butted heads a lot, which didn’t really make sense because I was obviously the brains in the family while he was the brawn. We shouldn’t have been in competition, but we always seemed to be. This time, though, we were in full agreement.
The other students filed out, instructed by a couple increasingly-hysterical lunch monitors who obviously thought it was much more serious than the students. Not surprising. Most people in a town this small thought school was a joke, and nearly as many thought life was one. Just another reason I’d started applying to prep schools for next year. When I applied for Harvard, I wanted more on my resume than what Wellfleet could offer.
We all rose from the table and ducked out, waiting at the doors while Finn dumped our trash. When he joined us, we walked out the side doors without a word.
“You think they’ll dismiss us for the day?” Peyton asked as we walked across the back lot toward the football field. It wasn’t much, since Wellfleet’s team was about as small as you could get and still qualify to play.
“They’ll probably say it was something ridiculous, like a sudden change in air pressure,” I said.
“But we all know different,” Xander said, shooting Gwen an angry look, as if this were her fault. I was a little surprised he’d agreed to go to the football field at all, since he had an unhealthy hatred of sports in general and football in particular. If he ever came out here, it was to skip class and smoke cigarettes under the bleachers with his fellow truants. His self-destructive tendencies made no logical sense to me, since they went against human survival instincts.
“Up top,” Zeke said, and we all fell in behind him as he jogged up the bleachers, scaring off a raven that was perched on the railing. The rest of us arrived at the top approximately five seconds later, since we weren’t used to running bleachers. We all gathered around, Zeke on the top step with the girls on either side of him, me and Finn on the next step, and Xander standing at the railing with his elbows resting on it.
“Does this kind of stuff happen around here a lot?” Gwen asked.
“No,” Xander growled.
“Sometimes,” I said. “But not as...severe.”
My family glanced at me for explanation. “Little things,” I said. “The fuses blow in our house a lot, even though Dad’s had a bunch of electricians out to check the wiring and breaker boxes. Sometimes stuff happens at school, too. The auditorium lights go out during assemblies and stuff. But nothing like this.”
“Only since she showed up,” Xander said, glowering at Gwen again.
“I do feel like I’ve always known you,” Finn said, darting a look at Gwen. “But it’s more than that.”
<
br /> “I heard a voice in the bathroom the night you and your mom got here,” Zeke said.
“What did it say?” Gwen asked.
“I was looking in the mirror after I took a shower, and this voice said wake up.”
Peyton laughed. “Are you sure you weren’t getting ready for school and talking to yourself?”
“No, dude, it wasn’t me. And there was no one in the bathroom. It freaked me out, bro.”
“So you think I was standing outside the bathroom talking to you?” Gwen asked, crossing her arms. “You’re all blaming me?”
“I’m saying this shit didn’t start until you showed up,” Xander said.
“The windows blew out of the cafeteria when you showed up,” Gwen pointed out.
“Um, hello, what about the fact that when we first met, there was a mini earthquake?” Peyton said. “I think that qualifies as more important than anyone’s weird feelings. And you were all A-okay with Dad’s explanation of that.”
“Okay, so there’s a few little things,” Zeke said. “And then, yeah, there was the earthquake that was definitely not the heater going on. Sorry, Dad.” He added the last part while looking up, as if Dad were in the clouds, listening.
“And there was the monster wave and then the windows,” I said. “Anyone else notice the common denominator?”
“Yeah,” Xander said. “Her.”
“Stop being an asshole,” Zeke said. “What’s the numerator, Eliot?”
I shook my head. I’d been studying this problem from all angles and trying to find answers online. The cafeteria incident had confirmed my theory.
“Not her,” I said. “Us.”
“What do you mean?” Zeke asked.
“It’s not just Gwen. She’s part of it. But I have deduced that we’re all part of it. Those three things happened when we were all together, either in one room or standing close together at the beach.”
There was a short silence as everyone did their own theorizing.
“So what do we do about it?” Peyton said after thirty seconds. “Not eat dinner in the same room?”
“Fine by me,” Xander said. “Count me out.”
“For one, I don’t think we should tell anyone,” Finn said.
“Too late,” Peyton said. “I told Alejandra about the wave.”
“Your airhead girlfriend doesn’t have the capacity to comprehend whatever you told her,” Xander said.
“At least she’s not braindead from huffing glue like yours,” Peyton shot back.
“Okay, chill,” Zeke said, holding up a hand and turning to me. “Eliot. Any ideas?”
Before I could answer, Gwen shifted around on her seat and sandwiched her hands between her knees. “Something weird happened to me, too,” she said. “When I almost drowned.”
“Did you see a light at the end of a tunnel?” Xander asked.
“Shut up,” Peyton and Zeke said in unison. Sometimes, they seemed more in sync than me and Finn.
Gwen hunched her shoulders against the wind, a strand of hair sweeping across her face. Zeke put his arm around her, and the whole metal bleachers buzzed as if an electric current were running through them.
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” I said, nodding to his arm.
He scooted away from her, peeled off his hoodie, and handed it to Gwen. I wished I had a hoodie I could have given to her. I didn’t play lacrosse or football, and I usually thought the fangirls who wore the players’ hoodies or letterman jackets looked silly. But Gwen looked adorable huddling into his oversized hoodie.
“So what’d you see, Gwen?” he asked.
“I’m not sure,” she said, biting her lip.
“That’s helpful,” Xander said.
Zeke shot him a warning look, and he glowered down at the field like he wanted to blow up the whole thing. He probably did. Not that I blamed him. The guy had been through a lot in the past few years, and the football field was a bitter reminder of that.
“It was like a light,” Gwen said, then added quickly, “a person made of light. Or a form. I don’t know, maybe an angel. It said we were pieces of the same, um, thing. And now that we were joined as one, she was complete.”
“What does that mean?” Peyton asked.
“That’s not much to go on,” Zeke agreed. “You sure it didn’t say anything else?”
“She said something about another world,” Gwen said. “Midgard, I think?”
That word sounded familiar, like one I’d heard before, but my memory was having a failure of retrieval moment. I pulled out my phone and tapped it into the search bar. “No,” I said. “That’s this world, according to Norse mythology.”
Gwen went a little pale.
“What is it?” Finn asked before I could.
“I’m sure it’s nothing,” Gwen said, shaking her head.
“Tell us,” Peyton said as Finn reached up to take Gwen’s hand.
The vibration started again, but I left it alone.
“My mom,” Gwen said slowly. “She has nightmares about this giant wolf called Fenrir.”
“Like from the comic book?” I asked, and then it clicked. Like Thor, Fenrir was a comic book character based on Norse mythology.
“You know who’s an expert on Norse mythology,” Zeke said, standing and stretching, making a show of flexing his muscles.
I stood and reached out a hand for Gwen, but I reconsidered and pulled back. I hadn’t sufficiently reasoned through the possibilities of what would happen if I touched her at the same time as my brother.
“Who?” Gwen asked, looking from one of us to the next.
“I think it’s time we had a little talk with Daddy-O,” Xander said, starting down the bleachers.
There were too many variables to call this an equation, and talking to Dad did seem the next logical step to solving some of this. Still, we all looked to Zeke for confirmation before following Xander, who wasn’t known for being reliable or making wise decisions. When Zeke gave us the nod, we all got up and followed Xander off the field.
Chapter Twenty-One
Gwen
When we walked into the kitchen, Mom and Neil were both sitting at the table, as if waiting for us. At least someone had been expecting this. I sure hadn’t expected to skip half of my first day of school.
“You’re home early,” Neil said. “What happened?”
“The windows in the cafeteria blew out, that’s what happened,” Zeke said.
Neil nodded, a frown furrowing his brow. “I was afraid of something like that.”
“You could have given us a heads up,” Peyton said, crossing her arms and frowning for maybe the first time in her life.
“What the fuck is going on?” Xander demanded, pacing the kitchen like a caged animal about to go ballistic.
“Sit down,” Neil said, taking Mom’s hand. “Let’s talk.”
The twins sat, and a second later, Peyton joined them. Zeke put a reassuring hand on my back, but the buzz it sent through me did anything but settle my rattled nerves. I felt a little like Xander looked right now, like I was about to explode, too. I slipped in at the table next to Mom, and Zeke sat beside me.
Xander hovered in the doorway, glaring.
Neil sighed and leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms across his broad chest. “I guess I should start at the beginning,” he said, looking at my mom. “When we met.”
My eyes moved back and forth between them while I absorbed this information. “You knew each other?” I asked at last.
“No,” Mom said quickly. “We only met once.”
Neil cleared his throat and shifted in his seat. “At the hospital. The night you were born, which also happens to be the night both of your mothers went into labor,” he said, turning to the twins.
Zeke took my hand under the table. And even though I only had to watch this horrible truth sink in, I was glad for the support his grip offered.
The twins looked at each other, then turned to their father.
&n
bsp; “Our…mothers?” Eliot asked. “More than one?”
“You’re not twins,” Neil admitted. “You have the same birthday, that’s all. You’re not related by blood at all.”
While they studied each other, Xander took a turn around the kitchen, cursing under his breath. At last, he stopped and faced Neil. “Anything else we should know? Like maybe I’m adopted? You lied to all of them, so now it’s time for the truth. Let’s have it, Dad. I wouldn’t mind getting the fuck out of here if this isn’t my real family.”
“It’s your family,” Neil said quietly. “Blood isn’t what makes them your brothers.”
“Neither are you,” Xander shot back.
Neil nodded. “Maybe I should have told you earlier. But something happened that night at the hospital, something I didn’t fully understand, even though Olivia told me. I saw her have one of her visions that night.”
“Visions?” I asked Mom. “Is that what you told him they are?”
She nodded, her fingers worrying at the sleeve of her sweater.
“She told me what happened,” Neil said. “That something had ripped through from another world into this one. A fire giant, to be exact.”
“Other things followed,” Mom said. “Gods, monsters…”
“I thought she was…unstable,” Neil said. “I didn’t put much thought into it, but it put me on edge all night. When I went back to talk to her the next morning, she’d checked out and left against the hospital’s orders.”
“With Dad?” I asked Mom.
She nodded. “That’s right. I didn’t know they’d be coming for us. Your father…he died fighting a fire giant. Holding it off so that we could get away.”
I’d heard that before, so I only nodded. At least she hadn’t kept the kind of secrets from me that Neil had kept from his kids.
“I tried to find her, but she’s good at hiding,” Neil said, smiling at my mother in admiration.
“I noticed,” I said. “We’ve been on the run my whole life. I just didn’t know we were running from you.”
“Money could only get me so far,” Neil said. “And it was never far enough. Thankfully, one of my sons is a computer genius.”
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