Chapter 38
They found the helhest right away. There were six of them, lashed to the cacti a stone’s throw from the exit, and they looked about as close to horses as one might expect to find in the underworld.
Like the garmur, the helhest were half-dead, all graying skin, glowing eyes, bony ribs, and clumps of patchy black fur.
They had only three legs but no issues with balance.
They huffed and snorted, tossing their heads up and pawing impatiently at the dirt.
“Have you ever ridden a horse before?” Mason asked as they made their way slowly toward the steeds. There was an unspoken agreement between them to move as carefully as possible, given that they were currently flanked by a dozen hungry, undead hounds.
Charlie shook her head.
“Me neither,” said Mason. “And I’m not thrilled that my first time will be on one dreamt up by Stephen King back when he was too young to know how many legs horses have.”
One of the garmur growled, causing Mason to whimper and stumble sideways into Charlie. “Looks like Lassie speaks English,” he whispered, “and doesn’t like it when we talk shit about her creepy friends.”
Charlie would have laughed if she weren’t so terrified.
When they reached the horses, the garmur formed a large half circle around the helhest, sitting on their haunches and staring with unsettling intensity at Charlie and Mason. Their glowing blue eyes were made even creepier by the hazy orange sky behind them.
“Right.” Mason put his hands on his hips. “No saddles. Of course not.”
“Let me try and set Elias on one of the helhest with magic,” Charlie said. “If that works, I can do the same with you, then—”
Wet coughing rattled behind her.
Charlie and Mason spun around. Elias’s eyes were half-open, his neck dangling awkwardly to the side.
“Wh—” He coughed. “Where—”
“Elias?” Charlie hurried over to his side, placing a hand on his shoulder. His body was still suspended in the air, but he either didn’t care or wasn’t cognizant enough to realize. “Elias, can you hear me?”
“Hurts,” he mumbled, eyes closing again. His lips were horribly chapped; a small cut had opened at the corner of his mouth. “Like … like fire in my…”
“It’s okay,” she said, trying to speak in a soothing tone even as panic mounted inside her. “We’re almost there. We’ll have you fixed up in no time.”
His eyelids fluttered open, and he turned his neck until he was looking up at her. Recognition flashed through his gaze, and for a moment, Charlie felt a rush of relief.
“Ol—Olive?” he whispered.
And then it was gone as soon as it had appeared.
“Olive.” Elias coughed, trying to reach for Charlie but achieving little more than raising a few of his fingers. “You’re not … you’re not supposed to be here. You’ve got to get out … You’ve got to…”
Charlie’s heart sank. “He’s hallucinating,” she whispered. “He thinks I’m his little sister.”
“Olive,” Elias mumbled, closing his eyes. “I’m so sorry. I … I love…”
As she watched his lips move wordlessly, feverish drive roared to life within her. Elias was fading. Every second that passed without getting Loki’s blood into his system was another tick of the clock’s hand toward death. She needed to get him to that palace, and she needed to get him there now.
When she looked up at Mason, she made her eyes as hard as diamonds. “Time to go.”
The helhest tore across the desert landscape, Charlie and Mason clinging to their bony necks for dear life, Henry clinging to Charlie’s neck for dear life.
The road to Loki’s palace was no road at all. It was a flat, unremarkable stretch of land littered with boulders and cacti. In the distance was a low hill blocking their view of whatever lay beyond. The garmur were headed directly for it.
Elias was on Mason’s helhest. He’d passed out just before they’d taken off, limbs flopping heavily to either side of the beast’s neck. Mason sat behind Elias, essentially lying on top of him, using his body weight and sheer strength to keep them from flying off.
The garmur had obviously run this course many times.
They had their route memorized, weaving in perfect sync around every obstacle, like trains on a set of ready-laid tracks.
Charlie kept her body low, arms wrapped so tightly around her helhest’s neck she was surprised it didn’t try to throw her off.
Several times, she feared the beast had veered too close to a cactus.
She would squeeze her eyes shut and brace herself for the sharp pain of a needle driving into her calf.
But always, right at the last moment, the helhest angled itself just so, ensuring she wouldn’t get scratched.
After a few minutes, Charlie steadied herself enough to glance over her shoulder. Already, the cacti maze they’d arrived in had become little more than a dark blur on the horizon.
After a few minutes of breakneck racing, they reached the short hill.
The helhest didn’t slow, hooves pounding up the hill as if it were no more tiring than a stretch of flat, freshly cut grass.
When they reached the top, Charlie braced herself, expecting to find Loki and his entire army on the other side.
Instead, she found an ocean.
Her gasp was swallowed by the wind rushing past. As her helhest barreled down the opposite side of the hill, dust flying in their wake, Charlie could do nothing but stare at the scene before her.
At the bottom, the ground flattened to grainy orange sand and jagged black rock.
The rocks spilled over each other, tumbling outward like bony fingers reaching for the horizon.
And just beyond—land met sea in a spectacular clash of color.
Midnight-blue water. Frothy white foam. Waves tossing and churning like someone had accidentally incurred the wrath of Aegir and Ran, the gods of the sea.
Water smashed the rocky coast, sending ten-foot-high spray into the hazy orange sky.
Charlie was so stunned that it took her several moments to realize what was waiting for them in the distance, built right into the shoreline.
A castle.
A real, genuine, actual castle, just like the ones she and Sophie had scrawled in blurry lines of crayon as children.
Except this building was larger and far more terrifying than the two-story, two-tower structures they had dreamt up, sketching out in hues of purple and gray on tiny white sheets of paper.
This building was mammoth. This building was a city.
This building was a set of mountain peaks stacked above the ocean, stone foundation blending seamlessly into the rocky shoreline.
Its towers and turrets reached so high that their tops disappeared into the hazy sky.
Polished stone shone gray white, a stark contrast to the midnight-blue sea.
Waves tickled the structure’s feet, like a dragon perched right on the edge of the world.
Castle on the sea,
towers in the mist …
Charlie inhaled sharply.
Burnt-orange sand,
burnt-orange sky …
All the pieces clicked into place at once.
The riddle. The second riddle that Abigail had found by deciphering the first.
Burnt-orange sand,
burnt-orange sky,
bodies transparent
with years gone by.
Castle on the sea,
towers in the mist.
Try as they might,
no creature can resist.
Bodies transparent. Ghosts
Try as they might, no creature can resist. Death.
The Seal was on Helheim.
The realization hit Charlie like a helhest running full speed. The Seal was here. It was here. It had to be. The words fit too perfectly. The riddle said that the Seal was on Helheim, and Elias and Loki lived on Helheim, which meant …
Which meant …
Which meant they might have known where the Seal was all along.
It was too much. Too much world-shifting information at a time when she could barely think straight. If she let herself dwell on it too much, she’d just give up and let panic overtake her. But she couldn’t do that. Not now. Not when she was Elias’s only hope of survival.
So she did the only thing she could. She pushed the realization as far back in her mind as she could and zeroed in on the mission at hand.
She chanced a look over at Mason’s horse. Blessedly, both he and Elias were still in place.
Only a little farther, she thought, hoping the words would somehow reach Elias’s unconscious mind. Don’t give up. We’re almost there.
The helhest carried them along the shoreline at a dead sprint.
At some point, palace guards must have spotted their approach, because the gates began to chug open.
Up close, Charlie could see they were three-story-high works of wrought-iron art yawning wide like the mouth of a sleeping beast. She probably would have found them beautiful if she weren’t so focused on getting to Loki.
The horses tore through the mouth of the beast, slowing only once they were inside the castle courtyard. The gates groaned shut behind them.
Courtyard was perhaps too simple a word, Charlie thought, as her helhest trotted along the cobblestone street.
To her, courtyard implied a small, walled-in outdoor area—not a vast open-air market with stalls selling every color and variety of food and handmade goods she could possibly imagine, along with thousands that she couldn’t have imagined. But that’s where they were.
The helhest veered left, taking them around the market to a set of long stone steps that rose to a sweeping doorway. At the base of the stairs were a battalion of mare. At least fifteen of them, all holding huge weapons of shadow. Palace guards, presumably.
“By Freyja’s brassiere,” Mason said, staring around in wonder. “This place is—”
“No time for sightseeing.” Charlie pushed herself off the helhest, landing awkwardly on the cobblestones. Henry let out a soft oof as he jolted on her shoulder. “We need to get to Loki.” She looked coldly at the mare guards. “Where is he?”
One of the guards—from his hair and voice, the same one she’d spoken to inside the maze, Charlie realized—stepped forward. “No living being enters the Palace of Hel without being searched first. We need to ensure—”
“There’s no time for that,” Charlie yelled, surprising even herself with the ferocity in her voice. “Take us to Loki. Elias needs his help now.”
He exchanged a look with a few of the other guards, then looked back and nodded.
“Good.” With a rough swipe of her hand, Charlie lifted Elias’s body into the air. In her state of heightened urgency, however, she must have summoned a little too much magic, because she accidentally picked up Mason and the helhest, too.
“Holy—” Mason dove forward, grabbing the horse’s neck. “Charlie, what the Hel are you doing?”
From Charlie’s shoulder, Henry made a noise that sounded a bit like an evil giggle.
Charlie ignored her brother, stalking past the guards and up the stone steps, Elias, Mason, and the helhest in elevated tow.
“You should know before you enter the palace,” said the mare guard, who was hurrying up the stairs behind her and her floating companions, “Loki doesn’t…”
“I don’t care,” she said flatly.
At the top, the gigantic double doors were wide open. Charlie walked through them without asking permission. She wasn’t even holding up a hand to ensure that she could feel a current carrying her companions; she could just feel that they were there behind her, still safe and suspended in the air.
Charlie took in nothing about the grand lobby other than the five possible directions one could take once inside: the double doors directly in front of her—impossibly huge and shut tight against intruders—the two corridors leading off to either side, or the twin spiral staircases that wound up toward the ceiling.
“Which way?” she asked.
The guard nodded toward the double doors.
Without a word, Charlie stalked across the lobby. Her footsteps echoed on the marble floor. When she reached the double doors, she shoved out with a burst of magic, and the doors swung inward.