Chapter 10
Later that evening, Charlie sat cross-legged on her bed, Henry stretched out on the comforter in front of her. Her schoolbooks were closed, her laptop shut off. She needed total concentration for what they were about to attempt.
After leaving the forest, Charlie had spent the rest of the afternoon driving aimlessly through the back streets of Silver Shores, worrying about her conversation with Elias and glaring suspiciously at every squirrel that ran across the road, praying she didn’t see a red swirl on its forehead.
The events of the day churned in her head like a smoothie on blend, a sickening one: a skewered vittra, two dead bodies with no fingers, Elias walking into the cafeteria, Mason smashing Elias’s face, Sophie flying in through the skylight, Elias in mare form, leaning in until he was so close that Charlie could feel his shadows …
On and on the memories churned. Eventually, their edges started to blur.
She spent so long trapped inside her own mind that, when she finally looked back down at the clock, she realized school was over.
Lou had swim team, Mason baseball practice, and Abigail whichever of the twenty-seven activities that occupied her afternoons, which meant no one needed a ride.
She turned the Bronco around and headed home, where she said a quick hello to her mother, grabbed granola bars for herself and Henry, and ran up to her bedroom.
She moved like a woman on a mission, because she was.
She was going to learn how to talk to her v?tte.
Just as she reached over to silence her phone, it buzzed on the comforter, lighting up with a message in her group chat with Lou and Abigail, which Lou had renamed: Bad Bitches of Asgard.
ABIGAIL: Did you guys know that the Valkyrie are the ones who get to choose which male heroes get to reside in Valhalla and which have to go to Hel?
LOU: We certainly do
LOU: That’s the whole reason Bjorn and Vidar helped us out with the Fenrir, remember? They thought Sophie might be able to regain them access to Valhalla.
ABIGAIL: It’s so badass. They get to choose which men are worthy of heaven and which deserve eternal suffering.
ABIGAIL: That’s my idea of a perfect job.
LOU: HAHAHA
LOU: Same tbh
LOU: There are a few choice men I would send straight to the deep fryer
ABIGAIL: Me, too. Starting with those assholes who commented on your boobs at the swim meet last year.
LOU: Idk they were pretty well cooked by your verbal assault immediately after
LOU: I still owe you a bottle of wine for that btw
ABIGAIL: You don’t owe me anything. I’d do it again in a heartbeat.
ABIGAIL: I’ve been reading a lot about the Valkyrie and their culture is fascinating. The accounts online differ widely, of course, since they’re all written by humans, but overall the Valkyrie really do seem like the best of the best.
LOU: Tell me u want to bang Linnea without telling me u want to bang Linnea
ABIGAIL: Louise!!!
ABIGAIL: This has nothing to do with her. I’m merely intrigued by them. Any culture that hypes up women is worthy of further study imho.
LOU: Whatever u say, horndog
LOU:
Charlie laughed, then switched her phone to airplane mode and set it back on the comforter. She could catch up on the group chat later.
She repositioned herself.
“Right,” she said, tearing off a piece of the granola bar at her side and handing it to Henry, who snatched it swiftly away. “How do we do this?”
After polishing off his chunk of granola bar, Henry waved his little arms, begging for more.
“Nuh-uh,” said Charlie. “Not until you teach me how to communicate with you.”
The v?tte sighed dramatically, his beard ruffling outward. Charlie stared down at him with folded arms until, at last, he waddled over and scaled her arm, coming to rest on her shoulder.
“Now what?” she asked. “You touch my ear and I hear your voice?”
He shook his head. With his tiny arms, he reached out toward her eyes, gesturing downward.
“Look down?”
He shook his head again. He pointed at her eyes, then lowered his arms slowly.
“Close my eyes?”
An eager nod.
“All right.” She did as he asked. “What now?”
A few seconds of silence passed before Henry poked her hard in the neck.
“Ow!” Her eyes flew open. “What was—” It took her a few seconds to understand the exasperation on his face. “Oh. Right. You can’t talk, and I can’t see what you’re doing.” She gestured forward with one hand. “Proceed, good sir.”
Henry nodded. He performed the gesture for closing her eyes once more, then held up a hand as if to say, Now, watch this. He slid down her arm, landing on the comforter with a soft poof. Then he plopped down onto his butt and mimed taking three big breaths.
“So…” Charlie scratched her head. “Close my eyes and … breathe?”
A relieved nod.
“Wait a minute.” She narrowed her eyes at the v?tte. “Are you trying to get me to meditate?”
Henry nodded vigorously, clapping his little hands together.
“Oh, come on.” Charlie rolled her eyes. “You know I don’t believe in that spiritual mumbo jumbo. Isn’t there some spell you can teach me, instead?”
Henry shook his head. He stood up, re-plopped himself on the bed, did the gesture for closing her eyes, and took a deep breath.
She groaned, letting her head fall backward. “Fiiiiiiine,” she said, dropping her chin down and giving Henry one last glare. “But if you suggest crystal therapy next, you’re sleeping on the lawn.”
Impatiently, he mimed the eye-closing gesture.
“Fine, fine, fine.”
Charlie squeezed her eyes shut and shifted around on the bed, getting comfortable. For good measure, she laid her palms face up on her knees, the way the yogis did in the movies. Then she took one big, deep breath, filling her lungs to the brim before exhaling it all back out.
The first breath felt good. So did the second.
It was on the third that the problems began.
With her eyes closed and her attention turned inward, Charlie couldn’t help but be aware of every sensation in her body.
The rhythm of her breath. The beating of her heart.
The whisper of a breeze from the open window or the tickle of an itch on her skin.
It was all so loud. So overwhelming. Her body was her entire world, and the world was too much, too loud, her racing heart, her trembling hands, her shallow breath, and was this because she was trying to meditate or did she always feel like this but was normally able to shut it all out, and wasn’t meditation supposed to help with panic in any case, not make it worse, gods almighty, she didn’t know, but another episode was coming, growing closer with every passing second …
Her eyes popped open.
“This is a waste of time,” she announced loudly, hoping her voice would drown out the thundering in her chest. “Meditating won’t magically make me telepathic.”
Henry squeaked once, placing his hands on his hips.
Narrowing her eyes, she said, “Don’t use that judgmental tone. This is a bunch of hogwash, and you know it.”
His shoulders slumped forward, the tip of his hat dipping along with them. His disappointment was obvious. He wanted to be able to communicate with her more, but Charlie just wasn’t willing to learn how if it was going to send her into a tailspin. She didn’t have time to come apart.
Coward, whispered a cruel voice at the back of her mind.
Cheeks burning, she spun around and bent over the side of her bed, grabbing the sticker-covered laptop on the floor. She opened and set it on the mattress. Behind her, she felt Henry waddle across the bed toward his favorite pillow. She kept her head angled away.
When the laptop screen came to life, it brought her right back to where she’d left it the night before: on a website titled Twelve Essential Tales from Norse Mythology.
It was a lengthy, low-res HTML site through which she’d been slowly scrolling the last few weeks.
When she first found it, the ugly pale-orange background and the text’s bizarre font were almost enough to send her away without reading a word.
But as she’d squinted at the screen, she’d found that every sentence was carefully crafted and accompanied by proof of source; the bibliography cited texts like The Wanderer’s Hávamál and The Prose Edda, books first published in Old Icelandic just after the time of the Vikings. It was a hidden jackpot.
So, she’d dived right in.
The single-page website was divided by story, each long enough to fill an entire chapter of a novel. By now, Charlie had worked her way through nine of the twelve stories. The tenth was titled “The Death of Balder.”
A jolt of excitement shot through her. Hadn’t Sophie mentioned the name Balder earlier?
She’d said that Balder’s murder was the reason Loki was banished to Helheim.
At the time, Charlie had been too overwhelmed to really let the information in.
Even if this was a version written by a human, likely filled with half-truths, there had to be something useful here.
She scrolled down and started to read.
Of all Odin’s children, the most beloved was Balder.
He embodied everything virtuous in the world: his face was light itself, his smile joy and goodness.
Balder was courageous, benevolent, skilled at healing, handsome beyond belief, and the favorite of gods and humans alike. He had no faults—save one.
Balder had terrible dreams. Nightmares. And in those nightmares, he saw his own demise. His body cold and rotting, the world weeping at his feet.
Distressed, the gods decided to go in search of an answer. After all, they couldn’t lose their favorite son! How dark the world would be without the sunshine of his presence. How bleak without the music of his laughter.
So his mother, Frigg, set off on a mission: she traveled the world, speaking to everything that could kill Balder and making them promise to cause him no harm.
She spoke to fire. She spoke to water. She spoke to every type of rock, every type of tree.
She spoke to metal and wind, to the lava flowing from volcanoes and the weeds on the bottom of the ocean.
And in every conversation, the elements swore they would do no harm to the great and beautiful Balder.
Frigg was thorough. She skipped over no object, animal, or element—save for mistletoe, the small, creeping plant that wound around trees. Mistletoe was so weak and insignificant that it couldn’t possibly harm someone as powerful as Balder.
When Frigg returned from her journey, she informed the others of her resounding success. Nothing could harm Balder! Nothing! See for yourselves!
So they did. Thor threw an axe at Balder; it bounced away without touching him. Frey threw a long sword; it, too, did not even reach his skin. The gods threw rocks and spears, arrows and shards of glass. Nothing could touch Balder.
Downstairs, the front door slammed, jolting Charlie out of the story.
“I’m home,” Mason yelled. She heard him drop his backpack and jog up the stairs. His footsteps were muffled on the carpet as he walked past her bedroom, headed for his.
Henry poked Charlie’s elbow. When she looked over, he gave her what she could only imagine was a pointed, expectant look.
“I know, I know,” she said, pushing herself off the bed. “I’m going.”