Odin's Murder (25 page)

“Memory has them,” I tell Mary. Memory glares at me. “Give them to her,” I say.

“Ethan, I don’t…”

“Give them to her.” My voice resonates with the command. My stomach wrenches with the accusation in her eyes, but I stand my ground and reluctantly, Memory pulls the charm bracelet from her pocket. She places it in Mary’s palm, a coil of silver glinting in the firelight.

“Bring them,” Mary says over her shoulder as she walks to the well. “Bind their hands together.”  She skirts the edge, walking between the lip and the line of flame to the gap at the other side, where a dais rises from the stone.

“Why are you doing this?” Memory hisses at me.

I don’t answer, but Anders does, as he unlocks the shackles at Sonja’s feet. “Why, Muninn? Because I want my birthright back. I have walked this prison long enough, serving a sentence I did not deserve. I want my freedom, that is why. I doubt your life of privilege would let you understand this, but Mr. Tyrell does.” He holds out a handcuff key, and gestures me toward Faye. “Watch her teeth.”

Faye doesn’t fight me when I release her, she just grabs at Julian’s hand. I lock them together with the single cuff that had bound him to the stones. Her tiny wrist takes hardly any extra room at all. Julian curses me with words that would impress a gang yard. I unlock Faye’s boots, support her as she stands, and lock her other wrist with Sonja’s. “I’m Ethan,” I tell Mary’s—or Miriam’s—daughter, then cringe at how stupid I must sound.

“We’ve met.” She’s a foot shorter, but still manages to look down her nose at me. She reaches in the pocket of her shorts, tugging Faye’s hand with her, and drops a silvery marble in my hand. It has a blue stripe winding through the glass. I look at her again, but she’s staring at a broken cage cast off to the side. I don’t even try to understand what is real.

“Tyr,” Anders says. He points to Memory’s wrist.

“Don’t touch me,” she whispers, to me, not him.

The anger surges under my skin, hardening my muscles, my resolve. I hurl the marble across the cave. It smashes against the stones with the crack of a bullet, exploding into shards of glass. “That’s not what you said last night, is it?” I say, words hissing between clenched teeth. Ten-nine-eight-seven-six-five, five, five--I step behind Memory, and unlock the cuffs without touching her skin, shaking with fury. She spins, fist raised, but she’s off balance, her feet still bound.

“Women are fickle, are they not?” Anders says, catching the loose cuff and snapping it to her brother’s wrist. He unlocks her feet, and I move out of range.

“Are we ready, Mimir?” he calls.

“Yes, Yvengvr. Bring them in.”

Sonja moves forward, obedient, and Faye takes a step, but Julian holds her back, pulling the first girl to a halt.

Memory grabs at the iron ring cemented into the wall with her free hand. “Do you think I’m stupid? There is no way I’m standing around a well so a psycho can push me in!”

Anders narrows his eyes and raises his hand back, but before he can slap her, I wrap my fingers around her wrist. I blink, and my sight is filled with my own face, jaw hard, and eyes cold. Another image, overlaid, Anders, pulling a bird apart by the wings with his bare hands. I blink again, to clear her out of my head.

She’s staring at me, and for the first time since I met her, her eyes are dulled with fear. My chest feels like I’ve been punched in the sternum, but I tug her hand from the ring, and pull her into the larger room, toward the well.

Five-four-three-two-one.

Like prisoners of war, they follow behind.

26.

Mimir

Ethan’s hand is warm on my wrist, and I want to shake it off, but he’s anchoring me, and I’m afraid I’ll fall down if he lets go.

His mind is a mess of images. Anders, smiling in the dark, showing too many teeth; Miriam in a business suit, standing before a judge in robes, wearing a bracelet I’ve seen before; my face drawn in profile in pencil on plaster; my mouth now, lips thin with anger. Through all the chaos in his head, a symbol flies though his thoughts with an arrow’s speed.

He has the rune charm; it was missing from the bracelet before he got here. Ethan is a thief, a good one, pocketing his shiny things before anyone sees his hands have moved. I want to trust him. He didn’t let Anders hit me, and his touch is still gentle on my skin but I’m chained to the others and he’s not, he’s obeying the commands of this crazy man and this, this
witch
, and I can’t see which side he’s on.

He pulls me, leading us all between the fire and the hole that the water pours through, not looking back. Julian follows, the chain lax between our cuffs, tugging Faye by the hand. Sonja circles around the other way, obedient and resolute.

The others step forward, take their place at the edge of the well, but I haven’t moved farther. Since when do I let anyone make my choices for me? No one, not even my twin brother, and especially not some madman. I twist my wrist against Ethan’s thumb, and he lets go, face darkening with something I can’t read, since we’re not touching anymore.

“Mem?” Julian asks. His eyes are dead. He’s pretending this is a dream, a hallucination, counting on me to sketch it when we wake up, so we can say ‘How strange!’. He reaches to me, palm up, chains dragging my hand up, too.

“Don’t you think someone will notice all five of us missing, if none of us show up for class or dinner?” I ask, in my best bored tone. “They’re already looking for us.”

“Zoe will assure everyone you are fine. She’s quite good with the texting.” Anders smiles at me, and then Julian. “As I think you have suspected? And Jeremy’s police report will divert attention for a while.”

“They’re in on all this?” My voice cracks up an octave.

“A student’s blind devotion to a teacher is quite useful.” He touches the scratch Faye cut on his cheek. “If only all my pupils were so agreeable.”

“Were you?” I ask Ethan. “In on all this from the beginning?” He glares at me. I’ve managed to hurt him. Good.

Dr. Anders motions me forward. I shake my head. “Your spirit is to be commended, Memory, and I’m sure my father would appreciate your loyalty, but you really have no choice.”

I don’t move. “I’m not doing this.”

“Make her,” Anders commands.

Ethan turns to me and I see a flash in his eyes, of feather wings and the reflection of light off a sharp beak. He wants me to join them—but to what end? His jaw is clenched hard, like he’s fighting for control. “Don’t fight,” he begs.

“Since when am I not going to fight?”

He steps close to me, his hand out. His eyes are intense, icy blue like the fire that encircles us, blazing bright. The instant his skin touches mine, we plunge into darkness of the well, and my stomach rises to my chest, my hair lifting upward like a cloud.  I open my mouth to scream, but Ethan squeezes my hand and I open my eyes. We’re still in the cavern.

“What was that?” I whisper.

“What was what?” His eyes betray nothing.

“What are you doing?”

“Choosing a side.”

“Easier to do when you’re not in chains,” I tell him, as I take my place in the circle, staring down at the never-ending pit below.

*

Anders moves up to the dais, several steps below Miriam and the stone table she stands behind. Sonja’s mother murmurs, hands working around a small iron pot that holds a normal orange flame. She throws a handful of something into it, and pungent smoke roils out, swirls into the cascading water, and disappears.

“What is that?” Julian whispers.

“It’s a recels-pot, with thyme, and maybe birchwood. It’s used for cleansing a sacred place.” Faye’s eyes are stark black in the blue light, darker than the blood that has dried on her face. “She knows her stuff.”

“Of course she does, you little fool,” Anders snaps at Faye. “She invented this magic.”

The woman walks around our circle, close to the flames that reach out to her, waving her little cauldron on silver chains like a bishop with a sensor. She mutters words I don’t understand. “It’s rue, actually.” Miriam says to Faye, as she ascends back to her altar.

“But that’s for
anti
mag—”

“Hush, child,” the witch says, with a long look and my roommate closes her mouth, biting her bottom lip, hard. Miriam recites in measured guttural syllables, pausing to translate each line.

“We come through the appointed doors to make the required sacrifice.
The bloodline is assembled, the power of Odin to be restored.
The just reward to come to the god Yvengvr Earth-walker,

Once bound, never to separate, the gifts of the All-Father.

Prepare for the awakening, the might and main of these harbingers,
And let the door to Asgard open for Odin’s murder.”

Anders shouts his approval.

Miriam leaves her burning pot, walking back with a bundle of twine in her fist. She stops behind me to lay a rune at my throat, now free from its bracelet and hanging from rough thread. Her long nails are sharp against the skin of my neck as she ties the knot.

“
Mannaz
,” she intones. “Muninn. Memory, who the All-Father kept so dear.” Despite myself, I wait for a flash of something, the same white light that shocked into my brain when Ethan kissed me that first time, but nothing comes. I’m still myself, a freaked-out girl chained to my brother at the edge of a pit, while my deranged teacher watches like the grand poobah at some extinct secret society’s pagan ritual.

“
Ansuz
,” Miriam says, “Thought. Huginn, who flew so high and far.” Julian pulls our chained hands up to touch the pendant hanging at his neck. I itch to pull it off and fling it into the hole, but he shrugs, and shoots me a glance to say, “Isn’t this silly?” I reach out to him, and he takes the hand already chained to his, thumbs locked in the other’s palm, like always, since we were children.

“
Perth.
Magic, of the runes he mastered.” Faye is still as bone, watching Miriam.

“
Kaunan
. Wisdom. Born of love and sacrifice.” Sonja’s mother touches her daughter’s cheek, a tender and maternal gesture so out of place with this insanity that I want to laugh, except that the blood on Faye’s face isn’t funny, at all.

“
Tyr
,” she says. “War.” She slips the thread around his neck, and it drops inside his shirt, the pendant hidden.

“Take hands, my children,” Anders says with a smile. “Become the flock you once were.” He closes his eyes, and flings his arms out, palms up.

Ethan takes Sonja’s hand, and I fight the flare of jealousy that surfaces in my chest, but his face shows no shock of awareness, no other vision through her eyes. He holds his hand out to me, the broken link in this chain.

I stare at it, rough with callouses. He’d touched my skin and my sex last night, and betrayed me the next day. I clasp his hand.

*

Lightning tears through my skull.

My thoughts ricochet around the voices of the others. One is as familiar as my own dreams, the twin of mine, but linear, with the drive to know, to understand, to absorb. Another, a cannonball of force, kinetic conflict and potential damage held in barely in check, exciting, dangerous. A pretty consciousness, lighter than my mine and feisty, dances with hidden meanings, oddly calm in this chaos. The last is the least known, waiting, tense with fear and sadness.

You are, I am, he is, she is—

Throughout all our thoughts is the image of black wings.

Us. We are. We. Us.

We are a cacophony, a chorus, a collective.

*

Ethan jerks his hands away, and the voices quiet. The flash of feathers burns behind my eyelids when I look up. He is gasping, looking at me like I’ve burned him.

Behind him, Dr. Anders still stands with arms outstretched, and his eyes closed. “Mimir,” he shouts up to the non-existent ceiling, “
Now!
”

“I have not been paid, godling,” Miriam says. “There is a cost to my magic.”

“Ah.” He drops his arms. “The sacrifice for your services. Of course.”

“The fee for my knowledge is an eye, Yvengvr. Greater gods than you have paid that tribute.”

Anders smiles. “Tyr, my warrior, I believe you have a blade on your person?”

Ethan reaches into his pocket with as much reluctance as I had when he forced me to produce the bracelet. I hear a clink of metal against metal, and he pulls out a small dagger. He hands it to the professor, handle out.

“This is crazy,” I tell Anders. “You can’t do this. You’re not going to cut out your own—”

He turns, faster than I can draw a breath, and wrenches Sonja’s head back by her braids. With a flash of silver and a spray of blood, he rips her eye from her face.

“Your fee, witch.” He holds the eye up by the viscera clinging to the base.

Sonja’s wail is drowned by her hands clutching at her head, and her mother’s shriek, echoing down the well and back. My vision blurs and I stagger, seeing spots of light, and Julian, still holding my thumb, retches, chains rattling as his body jerks with each dry heave.

The chains won’t let me reach the screaming girl who still stands upright. Blood drips from between her fingers, running down her arm and over Faye’s bound wrist.

“My revenge for your first betrayal, Mimir!” Anders shouts. “And your price. By your own words, I’ve paid the tribute. You are bound to honor the bargain!”

Miriam screams again, so loud the water sprays with her fury, and then the shriek is formed into a single word, carried forward with her hand, pointing to her daughter, and with a snarl of smoke and feathers, a crow takes Sonja’s place on the ground.

Its claws scrape for purchase on the rock, wings beating at the air, the only sound in the cavern besides the water, the flames and a high-pitched keening that stops when I cover my mouth with my hand. The empty handcuff swings, catching in my hair, bruising my ear.