Witches of East End (21 page)

chapter forty-two

Götterdämmerung

F
or millennia, back when the earth was new, Asgard and Midgard were connected by the Bofrir bridge, made from the bones of the dragons who came before. One terrible day the bridge was destroyed. The damage to the bridge was permanent, and the cause of its destruction came as a surprise to all, for the culprits were revealed to be Fryr of the Vanir and his great friend Loki of the Aesir, two daring young gods whose childish prank brought a terrible consequence. The bridge was the root of the gods’ power, and Loki and Fryr were accused of trying to take the power for themselves.

As punishment for their actions Loki was banished to the frozen depths for five thousand years, while Fryr was consigned to limbo for an indefinite period since his crime had been the greater one. It was his trident that had sent the bridge to the abyss.

With the bridge destroyed, the gods were separated. The Vanir, the gods and goddesses of hearth and earth, were trapped in Midgard; while of the Aesir, the warrior gods of sky and light, only mighty Odin and his wife, Frigg, remained in Asgard, both of their sons lost to them for thousands of years. Their
sons
: Balder and Loki. Branford and Killian Gardiner.

Killian Gardiner. Loki. Killian. Loki.

Her lover. Freya knew what she had to do once Ingrid told her about the breach of
Yggdrasil
. The toxin was the sap from the poisoned tree, and there was only one man in the whole universe who would find it amusing to destroy the very foundation of their world and bring about
Ragnarok.
The end of times. The doom of the gods. Freya realized that the sand giants were Loki’s Snow Giants, his guards. They had come back and circled the house at Fair Haven, to be close to their master. She raced as fast as she could to Fair Haven and found Killian in his usual place, aboard his beloved boat.

She climbed on board and faced him. “I know, you know,” she said. “I know who you are and what you’ve been doing.” The realization had been slowly dawning. She’d denied it, never dared to admit it to herself, even privately, but now there was no way to ignore it.

Killian took her hand in his. “I’m so glad. I’ve been waiting so long . . . five thousand years, with just the memory of your kiss to sustain me . . .” He gathered her in his arms and kissed her forehead. “I missed you so much. More than you will ever know,” he said.

Even if she burned with hatred, she allowed him to kiss her and to lead her to the cabin below. She had to keep him there until Ingrid could figure out how to fix what he had broken; she had to keep him distracted and keep him company. There was the same urgency in his kisses that had been there the night of the woods, the same passionate intensity.

And then Freya noticed they were not alone.

“Madame said I would find you here, but I did not believe it at first.” Bran Gardiner stood in the doorway of the cabin holding a gun. His brown eyes shone with a deep despair. “So, you have what you wanted after all, brother.” Freya had forgotten: she was supposed to meet him at the North Inn an hour ago, and of course he had gone looking for her. This was supposed to be their big joyful reunion.

Bran Gardiner. Balder. The God of Joy and Peace, of Beauty and Light, who personified everything that was good and true in the world. The best of them all. Her kind and gentle mate. They were made to be together. His mother, the goddess Frigg, had decreed that nothing on earth could hurt him. Yet she had forgotten to shield him from the most dangerous thing of all. The mistletoe. Her kiss. Her love.

Once upon a time in Asgard, the goddess Freya had two suitors, two handsome brothers to claim her hand. She had chosen Balder as her immortal mate. Enraged and jealous, Loki vowed revenge; and on the eve of their wedding, his poison-tipped arrow met its mark. The arrow pierced Balder’s heart and sent him to the Kingdom of the Dead.

Freya lost herself to grief and madness until her sister, Erda (Ingrid), who could see the future, gave her a ray of hope. She comforted Freya, telling her that in her lifeline, she saw that one day, in a different universe, in a different time and place, she and Balder would find each other again.

Thousands of years later, she met Bran Gardiner and she knew he was the one she was waiting for. Her own dear Balder. They had found each other, only to be destroyed by Loki once again. This time, she had let the snake into her bed.

Freya stood up from the bed and started to speak, but Bran shook his head. “Don’t,” he said to Freya. “I can’t even look at you.”

“Bran, put down that gun, it’s over,” Killian said hoarsely, as he moved slowly away from the bed and toward his brother. The two men sized each other up, and Killian appeared larger than he had been just moments ago, looming over Bran with an unexpected strength.

Bran wavered, and the gun tilted from his hand. Killian took the opportunity and knocked the gun from his brother’s grip. The weapon twisted violently around, and Killian’s fingers wrapped the trigger and squeezed. The sound was thunderous, like a crack from the heavens. This was no ordinary gun. Freya screamed. The bullet flew just over Bran’s shoulder, nipping the edge of his neck and drawing blood. Thick red blood seeped from the cut, spreading outward in a crimson circle that quickly enveloped his shoulder.

Freya heard a snap then, like bones cracking, as the two men were pressed chest to chest; four hands wrapped the gun, both men pawing wildly at the weapon as they tried simultaneously to control the gun’s trigger and to point the barrel at the other. Killian yelled in pain and pushed back hard, heaving forward with both legs. The force of his blow sent both of them tumbling to the ground with Killian on top.

The weapon fired twice more and both shots cut through the drapes and burst the windowpane. She couldn’t tell whose finger had triggered the shot, as their bodies concealed the gun. Anyone could be in control. Bran freed his left hand from the weapon; drawing backward quickly, he caught Killian hard in the jaw with a punch. Without stopping he drew back twice more, delivering two hard punches to Killian’s face. Two more shots fired. A stream of plaster drifted down from the cabin ceiling.

Who had fired the gun? Freya wondered. Who was winning? She dove toward the men, her hands scrambling for the weapon, but she was too late. The barrel contained six bullets. The last shot rang out, but this time there were no broken windows or cratered ceiling. The bullet had found a home in one of the brothers.

With ferocious strength, Freya ripped Killian off Bran, who lay motionless on the ground, and Killian tumbled away, his leg covered in blood. A hole was torn through his pant leg and blood poured from the open wound. Without thinking, she pressed her hand to the wound, stopping the flow for a moment.

Killian groaned, and all the color drained from his face; but he would live, Freya thought contemptuously. She got up to tend to Bran, but with a shock, she saw that he had disappeared.

There was no one else in the room.

chapter forty-three

The Curse of
Freya and Balder

L
oki! What did you do! Where is he?!” she screamed. Where was her beloved? Had he left her forever?

Killian blinked his eyes open and looked at Freya. “Loki? He escaped? You have to catch him . . . follow him . . .” He coughed. “Before he . . .”

“Stop it! Stop lying. What do you mean Loki has escaped?” she said, feeling as if she were about to lose her mind, just when everything had begun to make sense.

Killian shook his head, and he looked so wounded that it was as if a light began to catch fire in her mind. Everything that had been hazy and confused and twisted before began to dissipate into the cold, clear light of the truth. When she said his name, it was as if she were waking up from the deepest sleep. “Balder, is it really you?”

“Yes. Yes, of course.” Killian’s face, bloodied and weary, broke into a beautiful smile. The smile of the boy who had won her heart in Asgard. The smile of her beloved. He looked the way he did when she had first seen him, a beautiful boy playing his lyre at the edge of the forest. With those gorgeous blue-green eyes, merry and playful and light.

Then Freya realized—she
had
recognized him, from the very beginning, at the engagement party. It was why she was drawn to him from the start, the minute she saw him, why her love for Bran had been conflicted and confusing, saddled with guilt and sadness. Now she understood why she had been so agitated that evening.

Bran Gardiner was Loki. The God of Mischief and Chaos. Trickster. Shapeshifter. The Sly One. Con man. Liar. Thief. Loki had spun a web of lies from the very beginning, had tricked her into falling in love, had woven a spell around her heart, a powerful glamour that had bound her to him. That first night when she had met him, when her dress had slipped, she realized now, was his doing, so that he had an excuse to touch her. Then those nights at the bar, seven in all, where he had stared at her; all the while he was hypnotizing her to make sure she was the one who made the first move, to complete the spell.

“There are no words . . .” Freya bowed her head in grief.

“I did not wait five thousand years for an apology,” he said softly.

“I am not worthy of you.”

“You do not understand. We belong together. Always,” Killian said. “I could not say anything. I was bound by the prophecy and could not reveal myself until you had recognized me for who I was. I could only hope, although I did try to warn you all about the danger in my own way.”

“The dead birds on the beach that Joanna found in the beginning of the summer. That was you, wasn’t it?”

Killian nodded.

“How did you know I was here? How did you find me?”

“Bran tracked me down and sent me an invitation to the engagement party. I think he could not help himself. He wanted me to see that he had won, that he had found you first. So that I would know that he had what I wanted more than anything in the world. He always blamed me for his imprisonment in Helheim.”

Freya realized that Bran’s plan would have worked if he had not been so sure of his victory. But his pride became his undoing; by tempting fate and inviting Killian to witness his triumph, the spell he had cast over her heart had begun to fade the moment she had seen Killian. She had even tried to wed him that night in the forest. She had known who he was, truly; part of her had always known.

“When I arrived he told me his sentence had ended, that he’d been freed by Helda. But I began to be suspicious. Here, open the closet door, there’s a bag on the floor.”

Freya did as told and brought out a brown paper bag. Inside was a wool hat, flecked and crusted with blood. “This is Bill Thatcher’s,” she said.

“I found it in the basement when I first arrived and I hid it away until I could find out whose it was and where it was from.”

“He was the one who killed Bill. Bill and Maura always walked that ridge, across from Fair Haven.”

Killian nodded. “Bran came to Fair Haven in the middle of January, on the eve of the full moon. He must have worried that they had seen him in his true form when he first came to the house, so he attacked them.”

Now she understood why she could not see who had murdered Bill; Loki’s magic had prevented her from doing so. “He disguised himself as my mother.” Freya told Killian what had happened—that Maura Thatcher had woken from her coma and fingered Joanna as Bill’s murderer.

“I stayed so that I could figure out what he was planning, and because I could not keep away from you, of course. I suspected he was lying, that he had not been released and instead had broken out of his prison, and in so doing let darkness into this world. I still do not know how he did it—he must have a powerful weapon at his disposal, something that has allowed him to travel between the realms.”

“His ring. He carries a ring on him,” Freya said.
It is my father’s
, Bran had told her.
It is dear to me; it is all I have left of him
. “Odin’s ring.” Made of dragon bone, it could take its bearer through the Nine Worlds, she told Killian.

“So that is how he broke out of his confinement. I thought it might have something to do with Fair Haven, where he was living, and on a hunch I sent Ingrid the plans, thinking she might be able to unlock the code.”

“She did. She knows what’s in Fair Haven. It holds a branch of
Yggdrasil.
”

“So that was his secret,” Killian said. “He had used the path through the tree to arrive in Fair Haven, for he knew the legend of the Guardians, and as one of us the house would accept him.”

“I told him that you had given the plans to Ingrid and that she was close to figuring it out—he must have stolen them back, and that was why he attacked her, using your form. Oh, Killian, I’ve been so—”

“Stop. He has always played us false. It is his way. He knew what he was doing when he breached the tree and released the poisoned sap into Midgard.”

“Then we are lost,” Freya whispered. Her happiness at finding her true love was tempered by knowledge of the darkness that Loki had unleashed upon the world.

Ingrid appeared at the door. “I’m sorry to interrupt. But, Freya . . .”

“What’s wrong?” Her sister looked fraught.

“It’s Tyler. He passed away a few minutes ago.”

chapter forty-four

The Labyrinth

T
hen we don’t have much time,” Killian said. “It’s the poison. It’s stronger now. The children are the most vulnerable, but there will be more victims, more deaths, if we do not stop this.”

“Ingrid . . . Killian is—”

“I know,” Ingrid said with a brief nod. “I figured it out as well. Remember what I told you about
Ragnarok
? First the oceans will die? And how the toxin that’s in North Hampton is similar to ones found near Sydney, Greenland, and Reykjavík? They just found one near Vietnam. Bran has been spreading it around the world since he arrived in Fair Haven in January.” She explained how at first she had attempted to trace it to Killian’s travels, but she could not find the Alaskan freighter where he was supposed to have served, nor the Sydney resort where he was supposed to have worked as a scuba instructor. As far as she could see, Killian had never been to any of those places, and with a start she’d realized that the person who had told them that Killian had traveled the world was Bran.

She began to investigate Bran’s background and travels, and she realized her mistake in identifying the brothers as soon as she put together the news clippings about the toxin’s locations with a copy of Bran’s itinerary from the Gardiner Foundation, which was published on their Web site. The dates and places matched exactly. Under the cover of charity work, Bran had traveled to each and every place on the map that the toxin had been found. The explosion in the middle of the summer meant the tree was beginning to collapse inwardly. Her suspicions confirmed, she had done a little more digging on the foundation and discovered that in contrast to all the hype, there was very little good it was actually doing; most of its work seemed to be tied up in endless bureaucratic meetings; the foundation had hardly given any money to any of the causes it supported. It was a tax front, a fraud, a way to hide the Gardiner fortune.

She told all this to Freya and Killian. Now she understood that Bran was Loki all along. Like her sister and mother, she had been fooled; due to the restriction, they had been rusty and blinded and lost without their magic, and had failed to sense his use of a powerful spell. She blushed to think of her dream of Killian the other night. Another of Loki’s tricks, of course, to throw them off his trail.

“I know where he’s headed,” Ingrid said. “Through the secret door in Fair Haven. In the ballroom. Come on.”

“Go,” Killian said to Freya. “He has Odin’s ring; he could be anywhere in the universe by now.”

“I can’t leave you here,” Freya said.

“My leg’s shattered, but I can control the bleeding; don’t worry about me. I’ll only slow you down.”

Freya kissed Killian once more and then joined her sister. “Let’s go. It’s time to end this.”

I
ngrid led the way to the ballroom. She cast a spell that shattered the plaster and revealed the ghost door she had found underneath.

“Okay, so how do you open it?” Freya asked.

“Watch.” Ingrid had read about the tree in her father’s book. The language she had been unable to decipher, she now understood, was the language of the dragons and the giants who had come before the gods. She placed her hands on the door and murmured a few words.

The door creaked open to reveal nothing but darkness. Ingrid took Freya’s hand and together they slipped through the portal. As her eyes slowly adjusted to the dark, she saw that a pale blue glow lit the coarse thicket that surrounded them. The space, if it could be called that, smelled of damp earth and wood. There was a path that led forward, deeper into the thicket.

However, before they could walk any farther, they came upon Lionel Horning. He was covered in blood, and they could see that he was rotting from inside out; half of his face was missing and he leered at them with his one good eye. “Stop,” he said in a hoarse voice, raising a hand that was missing two fingers. “You may not enter.” Their friend had been turned into a guard dog, an obstacle to block their way.

“Oh, Lionel . . .” Ingrid sighed. “The toxin. It must have been in his blood, in his system, when he swallowed all that ocean water, which is why the resurrection didn’t take.”

“So I was wrong. He’s not a demon,” Freya said.

“No, definitely zombie,” Ingrid said. “The river underneath their farm . . . it leads to the ocean. The toxin must have been strong there. He’s been breathing it. He swallowed the water and then he was living in a poisoned space. No wonder.”

“Lionel, I’m so sorry but I have to do this,” Ingrid said, raising her wand. White rope appeared from the end of her wand and wrapped tightly around Lionel, creating a straightjacket. “That will hold him. I don’t think we can bring him back, his body is too decayed. But if we stop Loki it will restore Lionel’s spirit and send him to Helda as he was.”

There was a cry from beyond, on the other side of the path that led away from the tree. “It’s Tyler. Ingrid—you get the boy. We’ve got twenty-four hours before the Dead claim him forever.”

“What about you?” Ingrid asked, already turning to the sound of the boy’s cries.

“I’ll take care of Loki,” Freya said, pushing farther into the darkness.