Chapter 22
“Remind me,” Charlie said, eyes shut against the early morning light, feet aching from standing on the rock for too long. “When does the fun part start, again?”
“Shhh.” Elias shushed her for the dozenth time in as many minutes. “Concentrate. You won’t be able to access your magic until you can feel it.”
“Feel it?” she asked. “What, is magic like the rug samples at Home Depot? Run your fingers over all the options and then choose the one your dog is most likely to shit on?”
“You don’t even have a dog.”
“No, but I have Henry,” she said. “And I still don’t know where or even if he pees and poops, a fact that disturbs me every single day.”
“No more talking about pee and poop, Charlotte.” A smack sounded, presumably Elias clapping his hands together. “Focus. Find the current of magic within you.”
The current, she thought. Like a river. Or like the blood running through my veins.
Except I can’t feel my blood moving, so that analogy is useless.
Never mind. A river. Okay. Yes. There’s the time Lou, Abigail, and I drove over to the Manistee to go tubing.
I could feel the current then. Granted, it was a current outside my body, not inside, and we only lasted ten minutes in the water before Abigail spotted a leech and screamed so loudly that some park rangers came running over.
“Charlotte,” Elias said. “Focus.”
Damn. Maybe he could read her mind.
Okay. She recentered her thoughts. Focus. Yes. Inhale. Exhale. Sink down into yourself. Inhale. Exhale. Be calm. Be steady. Be—
Oranges and yellows appeared suddenly behind her eyelids, blooming wide like a sunrise. Charlie gasped, eyes flying open. She blinked several times, but the colors remained, dancing and swirling against the fabric of her mind.
She hadn’t conjured those colors. Hadn’t willed them to appear. They had just arrived, like a package left on her doorstep filled with a slice of the evening sky.
And there was something more to them, outside of their beauty. There was almost … a feeling behind them. An emotion. It felt warm and soothing, like comfort or happiness.
“What’s happening?” Elias asked. “What’s going on?”
“Am I … Are the colors part of doing magic?”
“Colors? What colors?”
“The colors,” Charlie said. “The oranges and yellows in my head. I can see them so clearly. They’re like … like…”
As she scrambled to find the right words, a different, bold-faced, all-caps word appeared in her mind, set against the background of orange and yellow and happiness:
HELLO
Charlie nearly screamed.
“What the Hel was that?” she asked, rounding on Elias. “Is this some sort of practical joke?”
“I have no idea what you’re even talking about!” he yelled. “What practical joke?”
“You’re putting words into my head!” she yelled back. “I don’t know how, but—”
Two more words flashed to life:
NOT ELIAS
“Not Elias?” Charlie said aloud as the words faded away.
“What’s not me?” Elias asked. “You’re making literally no sense.”
Then, three messages in a row:
NOT ELIAS
IT ME
HENRY
Charlie’s heart leapt up into her throat. She spun around on the rock. When her eyes landed on the v?tte, she found that he was no longer asleep. He was sitting up, beard wiggling, red hat pointed toward the sky. He raised his hands, waving them frantically.
“Henry?” She stepped off the rock. “Is that … is that really you?”
The v?tte bobbed his little head. At the same time, a word appeared in her head:
YES
Charlie laughed so loudly that some nearby robins scattered. “We did it!” she said, clapping and bouncing up and down. “We made the connection!”
Henry hopped happily on his rock. A new mix of colors appeared in her mind: light blue and brilliant gold, a swirl that Charlie instinctually knew represented relief and joy. She could feel the colors, as if they’d been painted by her own heart.
WE DID IT
WE DID IT
WE DID IT
The two of them bounced around the clearing, laughing and doing silly little victory dances. Henry sent color after color to her, each one representing the emotions he was experiencing: delight, wonder, glee, excitement …
“I’m not entirely sure what’s happening here,” said Elias, the amusement clear in his voice. “But I’m going to guess that you and Henry finally figured out how to communicate with each other.”
Charlie halted her dance, chest heaving as she beamed at Elias. It was a full-force smile, the kind that made her eyes crinkle and her cheeks ache. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt one on her face. “We did.”
Elias’s grin slipped from his face. He blinked several times, looking as if he had seen a ghost.
“What?” Charlie glanced over her shoulder but saw nothing. “What happened?”
He blinked twice more and looked away, clearing his throat. “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing. We need to … to get back to training.”
“Uh.” She glanced over at Henry, who only shrugged and sent her the murky gray of confusion. “Okay…”
What the Hel was that about? she wondered as she climbed back up onto her rock platform. Is he afraid of Henry and I being able to communicate?
Elias clapped once. “All right,” he said, voice a little too loud, too sure of itself. “Eyes shut. Focus. Find that current.”
Sighing, Charlie did as she was told. She let her eyes drift shut and took in a deep breath.
Where had she left off?
Ah, yes. The Manistee.
The Manistee’s current wasn’t strong, more of a gentle tug that led us lazily around bends and under footbridges.
I remember tilting my head back and closing my eyes, feeling the sun.
My arms and legs dangled off the tube, sunk to my wrists and ankles in the cold water.
The current was so gentle that I almost couldn’t feel it, but it was always just there, like delicate ghost hands brushing against my skin, pushing me along, pushing, pushing …
A push.
Charlie knew about pushing. She knew about living with a push within oneself.
Something that always urged her to do more, to do better, to try new things and never say no to a new opportunity.
To never settle for being an “okay” circus performer.
To want desperately to be the best, and to do so alongside her twin sister.
When she lost Sophie, she wouldn’t let herself sit around in her misery. She pushed herself to find a new distraction. And it wasn’t enough just to get into card magic and sleight of hand; she had to know every trick, every trap, every way to fool an audience into awe.
And when she shifted her focus to revenge, it hadn’t been enough to hurt Elias; she had thought she wanted to kill him.
She couldn’t do anything halfway. As Lou said, she had an obsessive personality. She was either all the way out, or all the way in. She pushed herself. She always had. She lived with a push inside that she had always viewed as a given, as the only possible way to live.
But it wasn’t the only way, was it? So many people allowed themselves to just go with the flow. To feel their emotions as they came, rather than shoving them aside for the sake of completing the next task.
A push.
It wasn’t the same as a current, but it was the closest Charlie could find within herself. Maybe if she focused in on that push … if she tried to visualize it, to give it shape and color and texture, as if it were its own creature, one without a face or limbs but a living being all the same …
“Holy Helheim,” said Elias, interrupting her flow.
Charlie groaned. “Come on, Elias. I was really getting somewhere there.” She opened her eyes to glare at him. “I think I almost—”
Her voice shut off like a hose with a knot at its center.
She wasn’t looking at Elias; she was looking at the second floor of the old house, directly in front of her.
“Great Mimir,” came Vidar’s voice from down on the porch. “It worked.”
Charlie sucked in a breath of air. She was fifteen feet off the ground.
It was true.
It was all true.
She hadn’t really believed it until that moment. Hadn’t wanted to believe it. But here it was, undeniable proof: she was the daughter of Loki. The blood of a god ran in her veins.
The blood of a god runs in my veins.
The realization was like the sudden drop of a roller coaster. It was thrilling. It was horrific. It was terrifying, it was incredible, it was …
She was floating in the air.
Odin’s skidmarks, she was floating in the air.
With that, she let out a bloodcurdling scream, shutting her eyes tight as she started to fall.
She braced herself for a hard landing, for unforgiving earth, for bruising or even broken bones.
(With her luck, she would have inherited Loki’s ability to levitate but not his ability to heal quickly.) But none of it ever came.
Instead, she landed on a pair of strong, overly warm arms. Far too warm to be human.
She popped one eye open. Sure enough, she was cradled in Elias’s arms, which somehow managed to snag her out of the air before she hit the ground. She popped the other eye open and peered up—straight into Elias’s smoldering gaze.
Butterflies lifted off in her stomach, flying wildly about.
“Oh,” she whispered.
A strange expression crossed his face at the sound of her breathless voice.
Maybe it was just being held in his too-warm arms, but her whole body suddenly felt overheated.
She and Elias looked away at the exact same time, his eyes going up to the sky and hers darting down to the grass.
After a few silent seconds spent in that awkward position, Elias seemed to finally remember himself and set her gently onto the ground.
“Well,” he said, clearing his throat and swinging his arms back and forth. “I suppose that answers the question of who your father is.”
She kept her eyes on the grass. “I suppose it does.”
Another uncomfortable silence descended upon them.
Charlie scanned her head for something to say.
She had just levitated, for Odin’s sake; she should have a million things to say!
But she didn’t. All she could think about were the butterflies whose wings were still beating against her insides—wild and frantic, as if they were running from something.
When she finally opened her mouth—to say what, she wasn’t sure, but she was doing it anyway—two cheers erupted into the silence.
Charlie and Elias jumped and spun around. They found Bjorn and Vidar on their feet in front of the rocking chairs, yelling and clapping their massive hands over their heads. Bjorn lowered his hands to his mouth, sticking two fingers between his lips and whistling loudly.
“Well done,” said Vidar, still pounding his hands together. “Well done, girl.”
JOB GOOD, said Henry in her head.
“Very well done,” agreed Bjorn when he finished whistling. He bent over and scooped his mug up from the porch, collapsing back into his rocking chair. “Now.” He raised his mead to the sky. “Let’s see what else you can do.”