“You okay?” I ask her, though she seems fine. My voice carries strangely over the terrain, echoing, but hollow. We’re in the center of a huge circle of standing stones that rise around like skyscrapers.
“Yeah,” she says. “You?”
“Yeah.” I flex my arm. The muscles are still intact, but working them makes the wound open again.
“You’re hurt!”
“I’m fine,” I lie. “It’s not deep. Just stings.”
She tears the sleeve the rest of the way off my shirt, wraps it around my arm. It soaks through immediately.
“That way,” Faye calls, pointing toward two stones that support another on top, like table legs. I don’t bother asking how she knows. The monoliths are etched with rune letters, deep cuts into the rock, jagged lines that run over the surface in ropes and spirals. A ring of fog edges the circle like a fence. She dashes off, dragging Julian by the hand. He reaches back for his sister, and she tugs me along, one line of people, like we’re still in Anders’ chains.
“This isn’t real,” Memory says, like she’s got a secret, like Faye. “This is a dream.”
At the base of every stone sits a dais, and over each, a huge window, or mirror, shimmering with the same water-but-not surface we broke through to get here. The nearest reflects a sea, waves churning with a storm. The one to the right shows some grassland, and a grazing animal with twisted horns.
“They?
??re portals,” Julian says. “Like the one we just came through.”
“How do you know?” I ask.
“I’ve been through them,” Memory whispers. “In my dreams.”
“You were a crow,” Julian says, like he has just solved the biggest riddle ever.
With a thousand lifetimes of memories, the bird on my shoulder mutters in my head. Memory stares at it, and Faye nods in agreement.
We come to the largest, where a throne sits, carved of solid black rock with blue striations, etched with runes. Two stone ravens perch on the back, and a marble wolf crouches on either side.
“Just like in the Hrafnafodr poem,” Faye says. “I wonder which one is Hungry and which is Greedy?”
“They both look pretty fierce.” Julian turns around, scans the clearing in the mist. “So where is he?”
Memory points at the mirror above the throne. “Look. Miriam is in there.”
We all turn as one and peer through the stone. The blood runs down my left wrist, across my palm and drips from my ring finger to the floor.
*
Mary’s mouth moves, her face contorted with an anger I’ve never seen. There is no sound—it’s like watching a silent movie, but with actors in real living color. Anders rushes at her, the letter opener in his hand. Before he reaches her she slaps fire across his eyes, but he runs forward, blind, slashing with the knife.
The crow whimpers on my shoulder, jabbing her claws into my arm.
In the glass, Mimir steps back, but she’s against the cave wall, with no room to retreat. The man lunges again, but as he nears, a thick fog rolls down the stones and up from the floor, coalescing into the figure of an armored man in a blue cloak. He is cut deep with muscle and age, like a gnarled oak, one eye socket an empty tree knot. I’ve seen him before.
He catches Anders by the neck, hurling him to ground, cracking the stone beneath him. Our professor blinks twice, and then his mouth splits open with a silent scream. The muscles of his neck become rigid and hard.
Odin bends over him, and with a heavy fist, reaches into Anders mouth and yanks, pulling away a lit shadow that resists, then separates from the body, to hang limp in the god’s hand, like an empty skin.
The cloaked man turns, and releases the husk of light into the waterfall at the center of the cave. He nods once to Mary, who kneels, and presses her hand over the corpse’s eyes, closing them.
I don’t realize I am holding my breath until I hear Julian inhale. Tears track through the dried blood on Faye’s face.
“It’s okay,” Memory whispers to me and the bird. “She’s okay.”
*