Odin's Murder (23 page)

My head fits into the frame, but not my shoulders. I stare at the dust that covers the floor of the room, wait for my eyes to adjust, but I see no footprints. No crescent sweep of the door disturbs the layer of gray, either. “Dammit,” I mutter, and then again, louder, when I rap my head on the window frame.

I know she’s inside. I saw the door open, I know I did. I raise my camera again, but no matter how I focus, I still see the door in the stone wall in front of me. Nothing. It’s like Cherry isn’t even in this plane of existence anymore.

Heart slamming hard, I circle the building to the next door, where the earth has eroded away from the wall. The vines have recently been pushed away from the top, revealing a rune in the wood. This one matches Julian’s profile on Memory’s wall. Huginn.

The rusty knob is chest high, and doesn’t turn. I wrench it hard, drive my shoulder into the door as I do, but the lock holds fast. The next has no symbol, the door worn smooth by time or weather, and is also locked, but at the fifth I stop. The marking is familiar. I don’t have to examine the pendant I lifted from Sonja’s bracelet to know that the rune matches, but I look anyway. They both are arrows, pointing up, the way the drawing on the wall pointed at me.  The others were Thought, Memory, Wisdom, and Magic. The only one left is War. No way I’m a match to any of the others. I grab the knob and twist—

—and I’m pulled into darkness and cool, stale air.

24

Mythology

I’m in a cavern. Dark, silvery light from a tunnel on the opposite side bounces off the mica in the rocks. I look behind me, place my hand on cool stone. The wood door is gone. There are no hard benches, no early American rafters, and no whitewashed walls. The sweltering June heat is still on my skin, warm on my jeans, but not here. Here the air cool and dusty dry.

“Julian?” I whisper, and when my ears pop, anxiety settles in, sharp in my belly.

I’m underground. Like my dream, the walls are high on all sides, and I want to pinch myself, to see if I’m still dreaming, but I know I’m not. My dreams don’t have
smells
in them; the mineral scent of the rocks, a faint whiff of kerosene. I raise my hand to my nose and sniff the artificial rose in the industrial soap from the dispenser in the girls’ dormitory.

“Julian!” My voice is swallowed, carried upward into to the dark. I know if I look up I won’t see a ceiling, so I don’t, because I don’t want to remember it.

I grab my cell phone from my little bag; there’s No Service Available. I look at the time, and count backward, calculating the minutes it took to get from my dorm room to the chapel; there’s no elapsed time, but I mentally scan back anyway, looking for gaps in my memory, the black holes of unconsciousness from passing out or being put under, like when I got my wisdom teeth out last year.

I slide my feet on the ground as if I’m blindfolded, watching each step by the dim light of my phone, toward the tunnel on the opposite wall. Shoe prints make a path in the dirt, modern soles leading to the rough arch. None lead away. The tunnel slopes downward, shallow stairs cut into a limestone hallway, the light brighter with every turn in the jagged rocks. I move forward, trailing my hand on the dirty walls. Some stones are dry, some damp with mineral sweat. I round a sharp corner, and throw my arm up against the glare from the room that opens beyond the tunnel. As my eyes adjust to the contrast of bright and dark, I force myself to take a long, deep breath.

I’m in an antechamber of another cavern, a small “room” with natural thrusts of rock, opening up to a vast cave that rises above and below, with a waterfall trickling from the unseen ceiling and disappearing through the hole it has carved through the floor. The room is lit by a single white light, a Coleman lantern, painful against the black shadows thrown around the cave.

“Memory!” Julian shouts.

I spin around. My brother is bound by modern handcuffs around his wrists and ankles, locking him to heavy iron chains set into the wall and floor. Macabre shadows mask his face, making his bones stand out, sharp and skeletal.

“Julian! Oh, my God. I knew it, I knew you weren’t at the hospital!” I run to him and wipe his hair from his forehead where it lays limp over his eyes. There’s a gash over his eyebrow that has dried, crusty with blood and grime.

“Hospital? I’ve been down here for—how long has it been?” He looks to his left. A girl with black hair unraveling from braids huddles on the ground, staring up at me with dull eyes. She’s thin as a rail but I recognize her under the dirt caked on her face and hands. Her clothes hang loose over her shoulders as she claps her chained wrists around her knees.

“Sonja!” I tug at the chains around my brother’s wrists. Blood smears my hands where he’s struggled against the metal shackles. “Jules, you’ve been gone for two days. Anders told me you got stung by a bee.”

The chains are attached to the stone, where massive rings have been bolted into the rock. I dig at the rust until my fingernails tear, but the iron doesn’t give. I bend down to Sonja, tug on her handcuffs, but she shakes her head at me, grabs my fingers in hers. I squeeze back.

“Anders brought me here,” Julian says. “Well, I guess he did. I don’t know how. One minute I was sitting in his office and then next I was down here, and the bastard’s cuffing me up in these chains.” His fury makes his body rigid, eyes narrow and predatory, dangerous, a wild raptor caged against its will. “Sonja was already here.” He looks me up and down. “How did you find us? Did Anders bring you?”

“I went through the chapel door. It opened up here.”

“What? The chapel on campus? That Ethan took pictures of?”

Sonja nods.

“Your dream,” I say. “I knew something was wrong. I came as soon as I puzzled it out.”

“That makes no sense.” He shakes his head, twists against the shackles. “You need to get out of here. Anders has lost it. Like, completely. He’s insane.”

“I’m not leaving you here like this!” I look around for something to pry at the chains. “He’s psychotic! He’s willing to do this to us because he’s afraid of getting his dissertation discredited?”

“He won’t hurt us. He wants us for something. Something beyond the book.” Jules nods to the floor where a plastic jug of water sits by a white and red cardboard bucket, chicken bones, picked clean, in the bottom. A blanket is wadded next to it and a metal bucket with a lid sits not far off. “Go. Get help, but find Ethan and Faye. Don’t let them come down here.”

“Ethan’s probably been arrested by now, and Faye is gone, too. Since yesterday.” At my words, Julian’s face flashes with something I’ve not seen before, a dark despair that tells me Ethan is right; my brother is love with her.

Sonja tugs my hand. “Aunt Connie,” she says, voice hoarse. “Go find Constance, in the kitchen. Tell her to find my mother. She’ll know what to do.”

“I’m not leaving you down here. Either of you.” I repeat. I don’t tell them why, that I don’t see any way to get
back
, the only exit in the cavern led here, and the opening at the other end of this cave slopes further down, widening into blackness. “We’ll all get out of here together.”

Sonja groans, lets go of my hand, and buries her face in her palms.

“Memory, get out of here,” Julian repeats. “If Ethan is in jail then we have more time. Find Faye, and don’t come back down here!”

“Why? I thought you said he wasn’t going to harm you!”

“Not until we’re all together. All of us. He’s crazy, Memory. This is all some kind of ritual he’s reenacting, a ceremony to Odin, and we represent the crows.”

“No one worships the Norse gods anymore! This is unbelievable. That died off long before this area was settled—” I close my mouth, stare down at Sonja. My voice catches in my throat. “The chapel. With the five doors. One for each of Odin’s crows. What is he trying to do?”

“Open the portal,” she says.

“What portal? To Asgard? This is ridiculous. We’re not birds.” I stare at her face. There’s a scrape on her chin, half healed. She stares back at me, wipes away a tear with her wrist. The chain rattles. “You can’t believe that!” I yell. The echoes bounce off the stones, and out into the dark.

“It doesn’t matter.
He
believes it.” Julian says.

“It’s the truth.” More tears track down Sonja’s face. “Why do you think you remember everything? And Julian can’t satisfy his need for information? Faye and her runes. Ethan and his oppositional disorder.”

“What are you talking about?” I shout at her. “You’re delirious. And you don’t know anything about me, or us. You’ve never even met Ethan, or Faye!”

“Yvengvr has been waiting for his vengeance for eons. The day I was born, he started plotting how to bring us together. And now here we are.”

Julian is watching me, waiting for my reaction, which is total disbelief. “Seriously?” I ask him. “
You
believe this?! What the hell is wrong with you?”

He doesn’t back down, and I look over my shoulder, where he is staring, to a tangle of metal wires sitting in the shadow of a rock outcropping. I’ve seen something like it before, the color and weight, but not in that shape.

“I don’t know what to believe, Memory, and it doesn’t matter. But if you don’t get out of here, and quick, we’re going to end part of whatever sick fantasy he’s concocted in his mind. I think he really does believe he’s carrying out the will of Yvengvr. Odin’s son who was cast out of Asgard in the legends.” He nods his head to the other three sets of irons bolted to the tone wall. “Don’t let him test his theory.”

“Jules, I can’t!”

“Go. Now,” he pleads. “He needs to have all of us. Without everyone, he’s stalled, he can’t perform his rites or sacrament or whatever the hell he is planning to do.”

Sonja nods again.

“But it’s just a crazy story! There is no witch and no crow people and no portals into the earth—” I stop talking before Julian catches my thought. He doesn’t, but Sonja does.

She stares at me, eyes ebony black. “How did you get here?” she asks.

I glare at her, then turn away from them both, staring at the tangles of wire and their crumpled metal locks. Not wires. Bars. Images flick through my mind, open to Dr. Anders’ office, sunlight streaming in the window, glancing off the thin bar of a birdcage, illuminating a decorative latch.

“He sacrifices the crows?” I whisper. My throat is closing, and a chill slides over my skin, like molesting fingers.

“Mems, don’t you get it? We
are
the crows!”

“No,” I whisper as all the images in my brain fade to icy white.
This
is what fear feels like. I’d forgotten. “No.”

“Yes,” a voice says from the shadows. “And separate, you are useless, precocious children with no understanding of the powers you’ve inherited.”

Anders steps from the tunnel, disheveled as always, carrying another cage like a lantern. A woman breaks free from his other hand and rushes to Sonja, kneeling on the floor. She’s got dark, shiny skin and close-cropped hair. I recognize her from last summer, at the closing ceremony, and from pictures on Sonja’s Facebook page; Miriam, her mother.

“What do you want?” I ask him. “You’re insane! What powers? Are we supposed to give you our minds, our ability to dream?”

“Ah, but this is not about cognitive ability, you oblivious child.” He speaks like he lectures in class, with that same half smirk. “This is about blood.”

“No,” Julian says, flailing in the chains.

“Your brother understands, or he is beginning to.” Dr. Anders smiles at him, turns back to me. “I was quite impressed, actually. No one has ever drawn the connection to Johann Vangarde before, though it was quite amusing to be accused of plagiarizing my own book.”

“You’re trying to tell us you’re over a century old?” I say. If I weren’t so terrified, I’d laugh.

“Oh, I’m much older than that, Muninn, my dear. A millennium of centuries.”

“You’re bonkers,” I tell him. “You’re fucking nuts.” I turn to Julian. He’s white as a wraith, staring at the birdcage.

“I am a god, actually. Born in Asgard.” Anders’ face doesn’t change. “A little respect from you would make things much easier for both of us. Now, before I fetch the fifth member of our little family, we have some business to take care of.” Anders sets the cage down, and opens the little latch.

The bird inside dodges his hand in a flurry of feathers, a dark explosion of hissing and claws straight for his face. Dr. Anders grunts as the claws rake his cheek, but the bird’s tiny talons tangle in his beard, and he grabs its feet in his fist, holds it at arm’s length, upside down. The little crow twists, curling up to peck at his fingers, and his knuckles whiten as he grips harder. It stills.

“Don’t hurt it,” I whisper.

“Now why would I do that, Miss Erikssen? There’s no need for anyone to be hurt, as long as we all cooperate.” He wipes the blood from his face with the back of the empty hand, looks at Sonja’s mother. “Mimir trusts me.”

Miriam is whispering into her daughter’s ear, ignoring him, but when the bird cries in pain, she looks up. The professor is gripping the struggling bird by its wings, pulling them away from its body.

“Don’t look,” Sonja tells us, and hides her face in her hands. Her mother cradles her closer, shielding her with her body.

Anders wrenches the crow’s wings, tearing outward, jerking its bones straight, and the bird screeches louder than I do, a vicious scream that rips through the cave, echoing back in with another voice, higher, a female shriek of pain, as the crow’s wings stretch impossibly long and thin, black feathers folding into sable wool, sweater sleeves covering the arms of a petite girl.

Faye writhes in his grasp, kicking and twisting, trying to bite his forearm, until he yanks her wrist behind her back, and she quiets.

I still scream.

25

Exclusion

“Good afternoon, Mr. Tyrell. Or is it still morning?”

“Professor Anders,” I say, as though everything is normal. Like it’s not weird that I can still feel the warmth from the sunshine on my back and Memory’s kiss on my lips from twenty minutes ago. Or that I’m inside a chapel that’s turned itself into an underground cavern.