Chapter 27
“If you’re going to learn to dredge,” Elias said the following morning, pacing in front of Charlie’s rock, “you must first learn to conjure.”
It was a cool, gray morning. Hazy clouds plugged up the sky, and low-hanging mist floated over the dewy grass outside the old house.
Charlie had dressed warm, in a thick black turtleneck and corduroy jacket, but the mist’s chill still managed to creep underneath, whispering along her skin and causing her to shiver.
A part of her couldn’t believe the school was still going through with the camping trip.
Six kids were dead, four still missing, and the town-wide curfew was very much in place.
From what Charlie had heard, however, the parents were actually begging the school to take their kids far away, to maybe even stay an extra night.
They seemed to think that they’d be safer outside of Silver Shores than in their own houses.
Maybe they were right.
Two days had passed without a single killing.
She should be relieved, seeing as avoiding more death was the whole reason she’d ditched school and stayed up too late reading about Asgard.
All to learn how to dredge. Her progress was painfully slow, even if she was finally starting to get a handle on levitation.
Given how slowly she was learning, she should be overjoyed that Rattatosk hadn’t struck since the attack in front of the garage.
Instead, his silence only unsettled her further. What was he waiting for?
“Conjuring is just a fancy way of saying making things appear that weren’t there before,” Elias went on.
“Loki does it almost every day. Holds out his hand, and suddenly he’s snatching a goblet of mead out of thin air.
Or a dagger. Or a fully cooked rotisserie chicken, if he’s hungry. You get the idea.”
Charlie shifted on the rock. “And he just creates these items from nothing?”
“Not quite. Loki can only conjure things that already exist elsewhere. The rotisserie chicken is already in the palace’s kitchen, the dagger in his bedside table, et cetera. He just uses the currents to bring them to his side.”
“So…” She scratched her head. “The current picks up whatever he wants and … floats it to him?”
“No, no, no.” Elias stopped pacing, turning to face her.
“Don’t think of the currents so literally.
They aren’t like wind, which can only move objects through physical space.
The currents can move things through both space and time.
It can fold two points in space together, bringing an object from the first point to the second.
And it doesn’t matter if the points are two feet or two hundred miles apart.
It only matters that the conjurer and the item they seek are within the same realm—and that the conjurer has a clear idea of where the item is. ”
Charlie’s face fell into her hands. “Folding space and time. You’ve got to be kidding me.” She rubbed her eyelids with the heels of her hands. “I’ve always been shit at physics.”
“I’m making it sound more difficult than it is. All you have to do is home in on a specific object and use the currents to bring it to you.”
“All you have to do,” grumbled Charlie, dropping her hands and glaring at Elias. “As if you didn’t just tell me to perform teleportation.”
“It’s not teleportation,” said Elias. “It’s conjuring. Teleportation is way harder. You have to move an entire living thing through space and time, rather than just an inanimate object.” He winked. “Don’t worry—we’ll make our way there eventually.”
She groaned. “One thing at a time, Coach,” she said. “One thing at a time.”
The morning didn’t go as Charlie planned. Two hours into training, and not only did she not have the joturri’s location, she could barely conjure up a pair of socks.
“This is useless,” she said after failing her fourteenth attempt to summon the fuzzy green socks that she knew were hanging from her headboard.
She’d seen them there that morning, could picture them so clearly, but she couldn’t get the currents to bring them to her.
Thus far, the closest she’d come was conjuring a completely different pair of socks—frilly yellow ones that didn’t even belong to her—that ended up on the roof of the old house, not in her hands.
She really hoped they were her mom’s. Otherwise, one of her neighbors was going to think their laundry machine ate their favorite pair of socks.
“You need a break,” said Elias, nodding over to the stairs where they had eaten lunch the day before. “Come on. I’ll get us some coffee from inside.”
As he jogged into the house, Charlie trudged over to the steps and collapsed onto them.
Was she an idiot for thinking she could do this?
Twenty-four hours ago, she didn’t even think she could perform magic.
Now, she was trying to learn something so advanced that even Thrym had sounded doubtful that she could do it—and he’d believed she already had “a solid magical foundation.”
Ha.
She reached into her back pocket and pulled out her phone.
All morning, Bad Bitches of Asgard had been blowing up with texts from Lou and Abigail.
The three of them had stayed up far too late, pulling the second riddle apart line by line, trying to figure out what it meant and if it might finally lead them to the Seal’s location.
This morning, while Charlie trained, her friends had continued the search.
A quick scan of their messages revealed that they were no closer to finding the answer now than they had been when they’d finally gone to sleep the night before.
When Charlie tucked her phone back into her pocket, Elias reemerged from the house with two steaming mugs of coffee. He crossed the porch and sat down next to Charlie, passing her one of the mugs.
“You know,” he said, taking a small sip, “I’m surprised you haven’t asked me yet.”
“Asked you what?”
“For the other part of our deal. The information I have on Loki and your mom.”
She stared down into her mug, watching steam rise from dark liquid, curling around itself before dissipating entirely. “Yeah. I’m just … trying to focus on finding the joturri first. I can’t afford any distractions.”
“Is that really it?” Elias asked. “Or are you scared of what you might hear?”
Charlie looked up at him sharply. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Well, if I were in your position,” he said, shifting to face her more directly, “I would be hesitant to hear the story of how my father left me. Maybe you wanted to know at first, but now you’re having second thoughts.”
It was eerie how accurately Elias outlined the worries that had percolated at the back of her mind ever since he agreed to tell her what he knew.
Maybe he understood her better than she thought.
“For what it’s worth,” he went on, “it’s not an unhappy story. At least, not the parts that I saw, anyway.”
“How can a father leaving behind his children not be an unhappy story?” she asked. “Unless, of course, he walked away from us whistling a merry tune because he never gave a shit about us in the first place.”
“There was no whistling,” he said in a way that seemed suspiciously gentle. “Trust me.”
Charlie picked at a chip in the old coffee mug. Did she want to have this conversation now? It would likely be a mistake, leaving her distracted at a time when she needed to put all of her focus on the goal at hand.
But it was tempting. Gods was it ever tempting.
“No,” she said at last. “Don’t tell me anything. Not until after we’ve put an end to this whole Rattatosk business.”
Elias nodded, taking another sip of coffee. “You’re stronger than I am. If it were me, I’d want every detail right away. I wouldn’t be able to wait.”
“That’s because you’re an impatient ass who only ever thinks about himself.”
He gasped, laying a hand on his chest. “What have I ever done to make you think such a thing, Charlotte?”
For a moment, she could only stare incredulously at him.
Then she saw his bottom lip twitch. He was holding back laughter.
She elbowed him in the side, unable to help the laugh bubbling up her throat. “You are such a piece of work, Elias.”
“I know,” he said, grinning. A real smile, not a smirk or a leer. The kind that lit up his whole face. “Don’t pretend you don’t love it.”
That’s the problem, she thought, watching him take another sip of coffee. I worry that it’s not pretend. Not anymore.