Odin's Murder

“Is that Sonja’s...?” I can’t finish. The others look as horrified as I feel.

“The bargain was struck, and I am bound to it, both then and now,” Miriam says. Her eyes, the same color, fill with tears, but they don’t spill over.

“She’ll be back,” Ethan says, but he doesn’t look at her.

“Time to go,” she says again.

Julian offers Ethan a hand. With a surprised glance, he takes it, letting my brother help him off the bed. Jules says, “Look, I wanted to thank you for all that...I mean, everything. For me and the girls...”

“Group effort. Don’t thank me.”

My brother shakes his head. “You were willing to risk everything for all of us.”

“You were the one who first figured out that something was weird with Anders. We should have listened.”

Miriam calls Ethan’s name from the front of the house.

“I’ll see you around,” my brother says, shoving his hands in his pockets.

Ethan grabs my brother’s arm and nods in my direction. “Take care of her.”

“Like she’ll let me,” Julian says and follows Faye out the door.

Ethan hugs me but stops short of actually leaving. He rubs his hands over his face. “This sucks.”

“Totally.”

“Quick,” he says and I run over for one more kiss, and boy, does he ever give it to me, urgent and hot, lips and teeth and tongue and searing light. I let him go and shut the door, pressing my back against the wooden surface, unable to watch him leave, breathless.

A dark image of wings is burned into my mind.

29.

Emancipation

The heavy metal door bangs behind me, trapping the rowdy voices on the other side. The guard nods and a buzzer sounds, shifting the locks, separating me from them for the last time. Goodbye block eight, hello world. It’s quieter than I remember.

“Got everything?” The corrections officer asks. He passes me a bag. “That’s all you had in your intake locker.”

I take the belt and the shoes, but push back the pants and the shirt. “These won’t fit anymore. Can you pass them on to one of the guys?”

According to the nurse’s release form, I’ve grown two more inches and gained 30 pounds since I got here. I’ll have to make do with my one allotted pair of dark blue work pants and single white T-shirt.

“Sure,” the guard says. He performs the obligatory search on the zip-lock bag of the few things I’ll take with me: a stack of forty-two letters, one for each week—though not these past three, because I told her to stop writing near my release date, not knowing if I would get them before I was out; the stone Faye slipped me under the table nearly a year ago; a couple books Julian sent with Mary, and the weird little Scandinavian comics that were mailed with no return address.

“Hope you got that picture of your girl in there. The guys were eyeing it pretty hard when it came in.”

“Shut up.” I have three pictures, though in her letters she says she sent more. I realize I haven’t officially been released and toss out a, “Sir,” to cover for my disrespect.

He ignores it and says, “She waiting for you?”

“Yeah.” At least I hope so. My stomach twists up with the anticipation I’ve spent the last year trying to suppress. Only a couple hours to go. I’m hoping Mary has her cell phone number. I don’t know it, told her not to write it in her letters, because I wouldn’t be the only one reading them.

The officer leads me outside, between the work out yard and the administration building. The sky is clear. The chill of spring is gone and humidity is already sticking to my skin. I scan the parking lot through the fence, looking for Mary’s Nissan.

We walk through the side door and to the intake room. “Let me get your paperwork,” he says.

I sit in the hard plastic chair at the metal table, feeling no different than I did a day ago. I’m still confined, two-way mirrors and automatic locking doors. I’ve waited a year, mostly patient, but these last few hours have been excruciating. Did she not write because I told her not to, or because she didn’t want to?