Chapter 36
As soon as the words were out of her mouth, the numbness vanished. Evaporated, like water droplets flicked onto a searing-hot cast-iron pan.
In its place?
Panic.
He’s dying.
Elias is dying.
Once those words entered her head, they were all she could hear. She thought Mason might be talking to her, but she couldn’t hear him. Not right now. Not when Elias was dying.
Panic. That same sinkhole of darkness from which Elias had only just pulled her returned to devour her yet again.
A world without Elias Everhart.
She couldn’t imagine it. Couldn’t bear it.
The words alone made her stomach churn. And she knew how preposterous that was.
She’d hoped for this moment. Prayed for it.
Asked each of the Asgardian gods in turn, Please, please, bring me vengeance.
Let me find a way to destroy him. His death was all she’d wanted.
It was the shovel she’d grabbed when she thought the fear would bury her alive.
But now that she was about to get it, she didn’t feel at all satisfied. In fact, she felt like she was going to die, too.
“—not possible,” Mason was saying, his voice drifting to her through the fog of her panic. “He’s a mare. Isn’t he supposed to be practically invincible?”
“His healing powers won’t work,” she whispered. “Not with Rattatosk’s venom.”
HAS PULSE
The words from Henry flashed through her mind, and she looked down to see one of his tiny arms pressed to Elias’s neck.
NOT DEAD
“No, he’s not dead,” she whispered, swallowing thickly. “Not yet.”
“Shit.” Mason ran a hand through his hair. “What do we do? There must be an antidote, right? Everything has an antidote.”
An antidote.
The words were like a siren blaring through the fog of her mind, jolting her awake. Making her remember.
You could always drink the blood of a god. That cures just about anything.
Charlie gasped, looked down at her hand.
What was the first thing she’d thought the day she realized she had magic? That she really was Loki’s child?
The blood of a god runs in my veins.
“What?” Mason asked, crouching beside her. “What is it?”
She turned suddenly to her brother. “Give me your Valkyrie blade.”
“Why—”
“Just do it.”
He eyed her skeptically but reached into his pants and pulled out the knife that looked just like hers—but with one crucial difference: it could cut her skin.
She took the knife from him and drew it across her palm, slicing open a thin line of blood.
“Sweet Freyja, what the Hel are you doing?” Mason yelled.
“The blood of a god heals any disease,” Charlie said, looking at her brother, “and you and I both have it running through our veins.”
“That’s…” Mason shook his head. “Char, even if that’s true, we’re only half-god at best. I don’t know if that’ll work.”
“I have to try,” she said.
She pressed her bloodied palm to Elias’s mouth.
Elias’s eyes were half-shut, his lips hanging slightly open. Her blood had definitely made it into his mouth, but he wasn’t reacting at all. He lay beneath the moonlight, face growing paler with every passing second.
It didn’t work.
It didn’t work.
“No,” Charlie whispered. “No, no, no, no…”
Henry crawled up her arm, nuzzling into her neck.
“Maybe we should take him to the Vikings,” Mason suggested. “Or the askafroa. They might know of something we can do.”
“They’re too far away. Plus, we’ve both been drinking. Even if we somehow managed to steal one of the buses, we couldn’t make it safely back to Silver Shores. We couldn’t make it anywhere. Not even…”
Her voice trailed off.
“Charlie?” Mason waved a hand in front of her face. “Hello? What’s going on?”
“I know what we have to do,” she said suddenly, sitting up taller. She stuck her hands under Elias’s armpits and lifted him gently up from her lap, setting him down on the ground instead. “Or, rather, where we have to go.”
“But you just said we can’t drive anywhere.”
“We aren’t driving anywhere.”
For a long moment, Charlie stared at Elias’s pale face.
His jaw slack, curly hair flopped over one eye.
Breath pulled in and out of his lips, but it was dangerously shallow.
She needed to get the cure for him, and she needed to get it now.
She didn’t care that what she was doing would likely place her in mortal danger.
That it might even get her killed. Abigail had said that Charlie “obsessed” when she was panicked, and she knew that her friend had been right.
Partially, anyway. What Charlie felt right then didn’t feel like obsession; it felt like possession, like her body had been completely taken over by a drive to complete one goal: save Elias Everhart’s life.
Somewhere far above, the universe was laughing at her.
At last, she tore her eyes from Elias’s face, looking up to meet Mason’s eyes. “It’s time I pay our father a visit.”
“Teleportation?” Mason practically yelled. “What do you mean, teleportation?”
“I mean exactly what I said.” Charlie was digging through Elias’s various pockets.
“You can teleport?”
“We can teleport,” she corrected him. “And technically, I’m not sure if that’s one of our powers or not. Elias and I didn’t try to do it.” She stuck her hand into Elias’s back left pocket, her fingers closing around something cold and hard.
Bingo.
When her hand reemerged, it was clutching the shimmering green dodssten—the key to unlocking the entrance to Helheim.
“Whoa,” said Mason. “How did you know that would be there?”
“I didn’t. I just really, really hoped it would be.”
“Right. And if you didn’t train in teleportation, is hope how you’re going to do that, too?”
“Nope. For that, I’ll use confidence.”
Mason blinked. “That,” he said, “is a horrible plan. Imagine if you got onto an airplane and the pilot told you he was going to fly you from Detroit to LaGuardia with no training but confidence.”
Charlie took Elias’s right hand. “Good thing we aren’t flying an airplane.”
“No. We’re just traveling through the fabric of space and time. That’s much simpler.”
“Exactly.”
Keeping Elias’s hand clutched tightly in hers, Charlie closed her eyes.
They had decided to leave without telling Lou and Abigail what they were doing.
Her friends would be pissed, no doubt, but Charlie and Mason couldn’t afford to waste time searching the forest for them.
Charlie had no idea how quickly Rattatosk’s venom reached its victim’s heart, or how long they would have after that before Elias was dead.
It could be days. It could be minutes. She didn’t want to stick around to find out.
Not to mention the danger she would face once she reached the underworld. She had no interest in risking her friends’ lives, too.
To be frank, she’d prefer to be doing this entirely alone. Last time she’d enlisted Mason’s help in a task, she’d almost gotten him killed. So, when he’d told her he was coming with her, she’d fought it as hard as she could.
“Charlie,” he’d finally said. “No more secrets. No more working by yourself.” He’d reached out and squeezed her hand. “I’m coming with you.”
At last, she’d relented.
Now Mason whispered, “What are you doing?”
“Shush,” said Charlie, keeping her eyes closed. “I’m reaching out to the magical current inside me.”
“Do you have any idea how ridiculous that sounds?”
“You’re just jealous that you can’t do it.”
Mason grumbled something unintelligible.
Exhaling, Charlie focused inward. Her brother might be right about her chances of success.
It was over 150 miles to Silver Shores, and she’d never even transported herself 150 feet.
Not to mention that she wouldn’t just be transporting herself, but three other bodies as well: Mason, Elias, and Henry.
Maybe she was insane for believing she could do this. Maybe they’d accidentally end up in Hong Kong or on a deserted island in the middle of the Atlantic or as a pair of severed torsos because she’d only managed to transport half of them. But she had to try.
So, she did exactly what Elias had taught her to do: she blocked out all the doubt, all the insecurity, all of the ways that she might fail … and listened only to her magic.
It was there as always, rushing through her like a directionless wind.
One with no beginning or end. A push in every direction, all at once.
She had used these currents to lift herself into the air.
She’d used them to bring her objects that weren’t there before.
She’d flung the currents forward like stones and stacked them up like shields and even turned them into a river of energy so strong that it sent a monster soaring fifty feet through the air.
Of those skills, instinct told Charlie that conjuring objects was the most applicable to what she wanted to do. After all, what was teleportation if not conjuring a human body? Instead of bringing an object to herself, she’d be pushing herself to a different location.
Herself plus three others.
Charlie pressed the hand not holding the dodssten on Elias’s chest—which, to her immense relief, was still rising and falling with shallow, steady breaths.
Alive. Still alive.
She was going to keep it that way.
“Okay,” she said. “Henry, up onto my shoulder. Mason, grab on to my arm with both hands. You both need to be touching me if this is going to work.”
They did as she instructed, Henry skittering up her body and wrapping his short arms around her neck while Mason closed his hands tightly around her forearm.
“Good. Now, whatever you do, do not let go. Okay? No matter how freaky things get. I am your anchor. Understand?”
“Yes,” said Mason.
Henry sent a YES set on a backdrop of magenta nervousness.
“Okay.” She blew out a long breath of air. “Here we go.”