Astley shifts his weight next to me and I turn my head to look at him instead of my father. It is just too hard to look at my father.
“What is it?” Astley asks. “What are you thinking?”
Another rainbow pops up in the mist, just behind Astley’s head, and I am suddenly filled with confidence, that this is exactly where we’re supposed to be. “He let my mother go,” I whisper. “When we trapped him, he saw her escaping and he let her go. And he tried to warn me about Frank. Even though he was weak, he kept trying to help me-the way a real dad would, you know?”
“It wasn’t enough,” my father says, his voice breaking slightly. Turning back to look at him, I see a tear forming in the corner of his eye. “We both know that.”
I don’t disagree. “And how do I know that you won’t betray me now? That you won’t just go to Valhalla and not bring Nick back, that this isn’t part of some devious plan?”
The skin by the corner of his eye twitches. “I swear to you, Zara, and you know I speak the truth. You can feel it in your skin.”
It’s true. I can feel it. The truth he speaks is a warmth, gold and light brushing against my cheeks.
“Let me rescue him for you. Let me do this for you,” he insists. His fingers brush against the fabric of my parka.
I suck my lips in toward my teeth. It feels like tears are collecting in my eyelids. I refuse to let them out. I refuse.
The water crashes down. The rainbows bend in the mist. I count to five in my head before I look up at Astley, who nods just the slightest of bits.
“Okay,” I say. “Okay, but make sure you get him, Dad, please.”
When I say “Dad,” he closes his eyes for just the smallest of moments, and then he says, “I will.”
Letting go of my shoulders, he kisses me quickly on the cheek. Then he says, “Thank you for letting me try to be the man, the father, that I have always wanted to be.”
The tears leave my eyes, and then my father turns to Astley. “If anything should happen-”
“We shall take care of each other,” Astley insists. “Good luck to you, sir.”
My father’s shoulders lift just a tiny bit as he nods. Then he says to me, “You are a beautiful, strong queen, Zara, stronger than I could ever be. You make me proud. I’ll be back soon with your wolf.”
Just as the instructions told us to, my father turns toward the waterfall. What if I’ve made a mistake trusting him? What if he’s tricking me, planning to hold Nick hostage for my mother? He treads easily despite the slippery surfaces, and once he is at the edge he hauls in the stone. Then he lifts up his arms and yells in a voice that’s almost as loud as the thundering water, “Bring me to the gods.”
The ground’s shaking increases. It’s as if the entire world is breaking apart. Astley rushes to my side just as I step toward my father. His arm holds me back as a giant wolf leaps from the falls. Gasping, I stagger back. The wolf is easily twenty feet tall. A broken chain dangles from a collar on its neck. Water darkens its fur. The mouth opens. Long canines spike into huge, monstrous spears.
“ No! ” I scream as my father jumps sideways, trying to get away. There is no chance of escape. The beast’s mouth hinges open even wider and swallows my father whole. Gone. He is just gone.
The wolf lands flat on the ground. Its head swings toward us. Huge, evil eyes widen with malice.
Shock freezes me in place.
“A-a w-w-wolf,” I stutter. “A gi-giant wolf.”
“Fenrir,” Astley murmurs. He clutches me around the waist, dodging up and backward, entering the sky of rainbows and mist, flying us away. I struggle against him for a second, screaming, and then I give in. My father is gone. Another father… gone.
The wolf leaps after us, snapping its jaws.
“Astley!” I scream.
“Hold on!” he hollers as I try to climb up his back. The frozen air streaks against us. Ice forms on our skin, but still Astley spirals toward the heavens, up and away from the wolf’s claws, away from another loss, another death.
I cling to Astley. The wolf howls below us. Finally it turns away as we hover a hundred feet in the air, and then it smashes toward the car.
“Oh no!” I yell just as it lands on the hood of the car, flattening it. It howls once more, triumphant, and runs away.
It’s so insane, so unreal…
“My father…,” I whisper into Astley’s ear.
“Died a hero,” he says. “He died on the side of good.”
There is nothing else for me to do except clutch Astley’s back, hide my face in the cloth of his parka, and cry.
He lands us near the car. Luckily, the driver is still alive and on his cell phone calling for a tow truck. He and Astley talk about how they will explain things, but I don’t listen. Astley whispers instructions about finding Vander. I stop paying any attention at all, just keep scanning the horizon for that giant wolf. My body won’t stop shaking. My father died. The monster we’d been so afraid of died for me. It makes no sense and breaks my heart all at once.
“Do you know what that was?” the driver asks. The fear in his voice breaks through my shock and I really look at him. His pants are wet all down the front.
“Fenrir,” Astley says. He puts his cell back in his pocket and stands with perfect posture, scanning the mist, the falls, the rainbows. “But more importantly, it was a trap. It meant to kill us. The king sensed it. He saved us.”
We were set up. Why would someone do that? Someone fed the Vander guy the wrong information? It makes no sense. I moan and plop myself down on the cold snow. Giant wolf tracks mar its perfection.
Astley comes to my side. “Are you well?”
“No,” I tell him, voice hoarse. “I am not well. I am broken inside. I am broken almost all-the-way deep, and I don’t know… I don’t know if I can ever be unbroken, let alone well again.”
He swallows so hard I can see it. He grabs my hand, places it on his heart. It thumps beneath my palm, a steady rhythm going on and on despite everything. Then he places my hand over my own heart. It beats the same rhythm, a traitorous beating. A sob erupts out of my chest and he clutches me to him, shushing me, whispering nothing words into my hair.
“Who will die next?” I whisper-sob into his parka. “Who?”
“Not one more.” He rubs my back in little circles. “But especially not you.”
I pull away, look up at him. “Or you?”
He cringes.
I grab his shoulders. “Promise me.”
After a second he nods. “I promise, but there is no shame in dying bravely, Zara, no shame in dying for good.”
“And there is no shame in living for it either,” I announce. The rainbows grow and shrink before my eyes, their colors shimmering against the gray mist, bright and hopeful somehow despite all the dark, all the thundering water, all the death… somehow still bright.
Things are SO
Things are SO crazy here. Seriously. Half the people in town are heading to Florida for sudden vacations, but it’s just to get away from whatever crazy person it is who is killing people. And that thing with the Sumner bus? Too weird. One of the girls in my Spanish class didn’t get home after school today and now everyone’s looking for her. I’m totally freaking out.
– MYSTIC EMBRY BLOG
Night arrives terribly early. The long hours of darkness and sorrow have melted into the outside world, with only the lights of cars and offices posting any reassurance that the world is not utterly, totally a pit of hell.
The air in my hotel room smells of lemons now that Astley has left. When he is with me, all I can smell is him. We spent hours rehashing everything, using his cell to call Amelie (who refrained from saying “I told you so”) and Betty (who did not refrain) and Issie and Devyn and Cassidy (who mostly groaned and exclaimed). We tried to figure out why someone would want to attack us specifically. Was it just for control of Bedford and the region? Was it for bigger power issues? Was Vander in on it or had he been used? We don’t know. We just know that it was a deceit created on purpose to trap us and have us killed. According to Devyn, the wolf Fenrir is a sign of a great war. It was originally tethered by the gods, but now it runs free.