Val, son of Loki, kneels before a cage, and the beast inside stares back, eyes empty, sides heaving, tongue and teeth bared. Val’s smile stretches his face into a ghastly rictus. On a ledge high above the cage coils a snake, not a living serpent, but an effigy of that fanged adversary, rendered in stone. The steady drips rebounding off the walls are not water but venom. Draining from the snake’s sculpted mouth, poison rains like liquid fire, and the wolf burns...

...Waves break like clashing cymbals and recede in gritty whispers. Winds scream, raising strings of melodious curses as angry as sirens damning sailors to death. Footfalls from a concrete army boom, giving a pulse to the bass line of a fiendish march.

Salt and sand scourge and erode an arching metal building, industrial, utilitarian with corrugated ribs of rusting steel. Blackened veins of ice crisscross a pockmarked surface, churning asphalt rubble into scales and scabs that stretch the length of a narrow, cold, and hoary island.

A faded greeting on a corroding sign emblazoned with a grinning bear: Welcome to Amchitka...

...A windswept vista, high above a foggy gray ocean.

A rock-strewn beach.

A spear through the heart of a man’s body awash in sea foam and blood.

Chapter 14

Darkness spun in a silent tornado that gathered me up and dumped me out like Dorothy. But I hadn’t touched down in Oz. Instead, I had returned to the tiny living room of Gróa’s Winnebago, which was nearly as surreal as Munchkin Land. Gróa came into focus first, drawing my attention with her flouncy white hair and hot-pink T-shirt.

“Are you a good witch or a bad witch?” I said the first thing that came to mind.

Gróa and Skyla looked at each other, wearing matching expressions of bafflement. As reality solidified around me, I noticed two things: Thorin was missing from my little vision quest party, and I was drenched to the core.

“Where’s Thorin?” I asked.

At the same moment Skyla asked, “Why are you wet?”

I pointed at Skyla. “You first.”

Her nose crinkled. “Gróa made him go outside.”

“Why?”

Gróa’s gaze dropped to the floor, and her cheeks turned pink. “He was misbehaving.”

I rolled my lips together and bit, swallowing a maniacal giggle. I might have returned to the present, but things inside me still felt a little... unbalanced. “You put him in time-out?”

“He would have jeopardized the process.” The old seer looked up and met my eyes. “You appeared to be having a seizure at one point near the end. Admittedly, it looked pretty bad, but waking you would have been worse. You had to complete the path and overcome whatever obstacles came before you. He wanted to wake you up. There were some sharp words. If not for your Valkyrie friend here, I’m afraid the Aesir would have succeeded, but she has a way of getting through to him.”

“I may have punched him.” Skyla shrugged.

I slid my fur hat from my head and passed it to Gróa, who held it between pinched fingers like a soggy dishrag. “I can’t wait to hear what happened,” the seer said.

“What did you see?” Skyla asked.

I blinked at her, deciding whether to tell her everything or not. But what good would it have done to withhold information? She needed to know as much as I did. “Mani.”

She dropped my hand and stumbled against the kitchen counter. She pressed her hand over her mouth and stared at me, unblinking. “You saw him?”

“I did. And it was wonderful and terrible—wonderful to see him and terrible to have to walk away.”

“Is he okay?”

I nodded. “He is, actually. He told me to tell you he loved you.”

Skyla’s chin trembled. Her eyes sparkled. Her composure broke, and she turned away, shoulders shaking, wracked with sobs. I rose from my stool and shrugged off my dripping robe. I went to Skyla and slid my arms around her shoulders. She turned and buried her face in my neck, and I held her while she cried. The Winnebago’s door creaked open, and Thorin’s blond head poked in. Still holding Skyla, I motioned for him to come in.

“Mani’s okay.” I glanced over her head and caught Thorin’s gaze. He returned my stare as I talked. “He’s comfortable, not in pain, and in a place that keeps him contented.” I rehashed the story of my walk through the woods, my descent through the cave, my confrontation with Mani, and my acceptance of having to leave him again. “At least I got to say goodbye this time.”

Skyla raised her head and sniffed. She wiped her eyes and nose on her sleeve and pulled away from me. She masked her face, hiding away her distress. “You still haven’t explained why you’re dripping wet.”

“Blame that on the Norns’ well,” I said, and everyone shouted questions at me at once. I waved for silence, and my three companions fell silent. Then I explained my experience of walking beneath the roots of Yggdrasil and of plunging below the waters of fate and time. “Before I tell you what I saw, though, I want to know what it looked like from your end.”

Gróa looked at Skyla before shifting her attention to Thorin, who apparently had been made to leave before the final moments of my ritual. Gróa cleared her throat. “Well, the light kind of fractured the way it does beneath a pool or fountain at night. You sort of, uh, went all light and limp as if you were floating underwater. Then your eyes rolled back, and you went rigid and—”

“That’s when we had to kick Thorin out,” Skyla interjected.

Thorin’s nostrils flared. He rolled his eyes up and glared at the ceiling as he gritted his teeth.

“After a bit, things calmed down again,” Gróa said. “There was a splash, and then you were there”—she motioned to my former seat—“soaking wet and wide awake, sitting on the stool asking about good and bad witches.”

“That was more literal than I expected,” I said.

Skyla gave me a you-can-say-that-again look. “After all that, please tell me you saw something worth all this trouble.”

I swallowed and nodded. “I’ll tell you, but do you think I could have some more tea first? And some dry clothes or something? It’s a little chilly in here.”

“Of course.” Gróa jumped up. “Come with me. I’ll get you something to change into.”

A few minutes later, I returned to the living area wearing pink sweatpants and a T-shirt bearing the image of an extremely unhappy Siamese cat. Skyla didn’t laugh, although I could tell she was struggling not to. Thorin’s face remained an impassive mask, but something powerful seemed to brew beneath his exterior. He resembled a mountain, an ancient volcano building pressure.

I sat at the little table while Gróa set about refilling her teapot. “Maybe we should start with the strong stuff.” I glanced at the seer’s liquor cabinet. “No one’s going to like what I have to say.”

Thorin’s cool façade cracked, a hairline fracture. He shifted on his feet and balled his fists at his sides. I pointed at him. “Give him the first shot,” I said as Gróa opened her scotch bottle. “He looks like he’s going to need it.”

The seer dispensed her whisky. We tossed back our drinks, and I coughed and pounded my chest as the liquor burned its way down to my stomach. When I found my breath again, I looked up at Thorin and patted the seat beside me. His shoulders slumped like knots untying, and he slid in beside me. Skyla sat across from me, and Gróa puttered in the kitchen.

“I’ll start with the good news,” I said. “I think I found the golems. They’re somewhere called Amchitka.”

“Am-what-ka?” Skyla asked. Thorin tugged his phone from his pocket and thumbed the screen.

“Amchitka,” I said again. “Wherever it is, it looks windy and cold and deeply unpleasant.”

“It’s an old US Air Force base in the Aleutian Islands.” Thorin set his phone on the table where Skyla and I could see the map he’d brought up. “After World War Two, the American government used it for nuclear testing. Now it’s mostly abandoned and only accessible by aircraft or boat.”

“Great place for a modern Vigrid,” Skyla said.