Chapter 3
An unusual hush had fallen over the Silver Shores High cafeteria.
Normally, crinkling paper bags, loud greetings, and buzzing gossip formed a cheery symphony to which Charlie and her friends ate their ham-and-cheeses or PB their family had moved from Detroit four years earlier.
Charlie remembered the Morrises’ first day so clearly. She was in seventh grade. Sophie and Lou were at her side. Nothing bad had ever happened to them. Nothing bad had ever happened in Silver Shores, period. Life was easy. Life was good.
Maddie was in Charlie’s grade, Milo in Mason’s.
They were quiet, and at lunch, they chose a table at the back of the cafeteria and sat together, trading chips and Fruit Roll-Ups as if their food hadn’t come from the same house.
Even as the weeks went on and they made their own friends, people to spend their weekends or the hours after school with, they never left that little table, choosing each other above everyone else.
Charlie had always found that remarkable. Enviable. After Sophie died, she used to look at the Morris siblings and feel bright-green jealousy. They would never drift apart if they lost one of their family members, she thought. They would never lose each other.
Even then, she’d known Mason was slipping away.
When Charlie saw their bodies lying on the forest floor, it was as if the ground had turned to ice and split beneath her feet.
Her body plunged into freezing-cold water.
Her muscles seized tight. The air rushed from her lungs.
Though she was standing on solid ground, suddenly it felt like she was frozen under the waves of Lake Michigan in January.
This is it, a voice had whispered in her ear. You knew this was coming. You knew things had been too calm, too safe.
Danger will follow you for the rest of your life.
“—a good idea. Right, Charlie?” Abigail asked.
Charlie blinked, looking over at her friends. “What was that?”
“Keep up, Charles.” Lou shot her a stern look. “Abigail was reminding the group that you agreed to buy me lunch today. And every day this week.”
Charlie frowned. “No, I didn’t.”
“Right, my bad,” Lou said. “You just said that you would buy me a cookie every day.”
At the sound of cookie, Henry popped his head out of Charlie’s backpack and squeaked excitedly.
Charlie swatted at his red hat. “Get down,” she hissed. “We have to be careful.”
If any of the other students in the cafeteria were to look over, they would hopefully only see a girl swatting at a fly, not an adorable, bearded creature. Theoretically, the Seal was still in place, which meant that Henry remained invisible to everyone but Charlie and her friends.
But nothing was impenetrable. She’d seen it herself when a draugar had chased her through the school parking lot and was spotted by a little girl who couldn’t possibly have eaten an eyaerberry.
So, she couldn’t be sure if Henry was still invisible to the rest of the school; she didn’t know when the Seal might suddenly falter, giving everyone else a glimpse of the gnome in her backpack.
Speaking of Henry—
Charlie reached into her lunch bag and pulled out the v?tte’s lunch: a tiny ham-and-cheese between saltines. She lowered it to the bottom of her bag, where Henry could gnaw at it without onlookers wondering how a cracker sandwich was disappearing into thin air.
Seeing his lunch, Henry squeaked with disdain, trying to cross his arms over his chest but failing because they were too short to even reach each other.
“No,” Charlie said into her backpack. “We are not doing chocolate chip cookies for lunch again. You’ll die of high cholesterol before you make it to thirty.”
“You know he’s probably, like, a thousand years old, right?” Lou asked. “Or more?”
“Still.” Charlie reached back into her lunch bag and pulled out the extra turkey sandwich she’d brought, pushing it over to Lou. “For you, my parsimonious princess.”
“I haven’t a clue what that means,” Lou said, clapping giddily and starting to remove the sandwich’s cling wrap, “so I’m just going to go ahead and assume you’re complimenting my uncanny ability to insert the most applicable Silence of the Lambs quote into any given situation.”
“Oh gods. No Hannibal Lecter at lunch, please.” Abigail pulled out a Tupperware filled with apple slices. “And it most certainly does not mean that. Parsimonious: unwilling to spend money; stingy or frugal.” She winked at Charlie. “A classic SAT word. Well done, Char.”
Charlie grinned back.
Abigail’s face became serious again. “Can we go back to the discussion at hand?” she asked. “The real discussion? About”—she lowered her voice—“you know what.”
“I’m so glad we booked it after you called the police,” Lou said, glancing over her shoulder to make sure no one in the cafeteria was within hearing distance. “My mom still thinks that we were volunteering at the nursing home this morning. Not scoping out dead bodies in the woods.”
“We weren’t scoping anything out,” Abigail said. “We happened across a tragedy. It was only right that I make an anonymous call.”
“I can’t stop seeing them,” Lou went on. “The pale skin. The blue lips. And those hands…” She shuddered. “Gods almighty.”
Charlie knew exactly what Lou meant. She hadn’t been able to wipe the image of the Morrises from her mind.
They followed her everywhere she went, popping up whenever she shut her eyes or stared too long at a blank worksheet or zoned out on the toilet.
Maddie’s dark hair splayed out on the leaves.
Milo’s jaw hanging open. Their eyes blank, staring toward the sky. And their hands …
Lou was right. The hands were the worst part, because they weren’t really hands at all. They were just round stubs of flesh.
All their fingers had been sawed clean off.
Charlie’s stomach turned over. She hadn’t taken a single bite of her sandwich, and she didn’t know if she was going to be able to.
“My question is, who did it?” Lou asked for the fourth time since they sat down. “I mean, the Fenrir is the obvious first suspect, but he’s supposed to be locked up in the underworld, right? We saw him get taken there ourselves.”
“We don’t know that he’s still in Helheim,” Abigail said. “Or that he was ever locked up at all. Maybe Loki took him down there for show, just to set him free again.”
“But he’s missing half his teeth now,” Lou argued. “Unless Loki somehow grew them back. Which I guess is a possibility, since he’s a god and all, but—”
“It’s not the Fenrir,” Charlie interrupted.
The girls turned to look at her. Charlie was as surprised by her interruption as they were; moments ago, she’d been dizzy, off-balance, virtually incapable of speech. But the more she’d thought about Maddie and Milo, the more certain she’d become that it wasn’t the wolf who killed them.
“It wasn’t the Fenrir,” she repeated, flicking the edge of her paper lunch bag. “It can’t be. It doesn’t fit his pattern.”
“What do you mean?” Lou asked.
“That type of murder—killing two bodies and leaving them on the forest floor—makes no sense when you think about what the Fenrir’s goal was. He wanted to send bodies to Surtur, right? To strengthen him?” She shrugged. “Do those bodies look like they made it anywhere near Muspelheim?”
“Odin’s underpants,” Lou said, blinking. “You’re right.”
If the situation weren’t so dire, Charlie might have laughed; her best friend had taken to replacing curse words with various references to the Allfather’s undergarments, generally inserted at the most inappropriate times possible.
“So, what?” Abigail asked. “You think these were random murders? No connection to Asgard?”
“Oooh!” Lou’s eyes lit up. “A serial killer on the loose, perhaps?”
Abigail rolled her eyes. “Oh gods. Here we go.”
“What?” Lou asked, offended. “You know that serial killers are a passion of mine.”
“I’m not deigning that with a response,” Abigail said, turning back to Charlie. “It could just be a random, messed-up coincidence. But…”
“But,” Charlie supplied, “the odds of a non-Asgard-related event occurring in Silver Shores seem … unlikely, at best.”
Abigail nodded.
Charlie sighed, running a hand through her hair.
If not the Fenrir, then who? There were the draugar, of course.
But there were countless others, too. Creatures she’d learned about from listening to the Vikings’ stories and poring obsessively over dusty old books.
Creatures that frequently appeared in her dreams, if she managed to fall asleep.
Every night since homecoming, she had been plagued with nightmares.
With her fears and memories chopped up, distorted, and gnarled at the edges: the Fenrir’s eyes glowing at the bottom of a dark pit; vittra descending upon her before she could make it to the lake, clawing at her arms and legs and drowning her screams; draugar skulking about in the forest, bones clicking and breath heavy, as Charlie hid behind a tree and prayed to every god of Asgard that the beasts wouldn’t find her.
The gods never listened, and she always woke up smothering her own screams.
The nightmares were awful. So awful that she sometimes wondered if Elias wasn’t sneaking up from the underworld to give them to her personally.
She knew it was a preposterous idea. If he were torturing her in her sleep, he would stick around afterward to gloat about it, and he was never there when she woke up.
She always woke in a cold sweat, heart pounding furiously, like it had after homecoming when she’d been so certain it was about to stop entirely. The only way to fight it off was with one of her three defenses—most often recitation:
You will make yourself strong.
You will find Elias.
You will kill Elias.
You will never trust a boy with your heart again.