“Just because it’s not stressful doesn’t mean I’m going stale. I’ve got projects.”
“Projects?” I turned to him, to memorize his face, to ingrain that smile a little deeper in my memory. Mani stood at the edge of the well, not close enough to touch the water, but almost. What if I pulled him in with me, pulled him back into reality? But that probably wouldn’t have worked. Would it?
“I’m not alone here, Solina. There are generations of Mundys in this place. I’m helping one of our great-great-great-uncles on a mapping and exploration project.”
I gaped at him. “Are you serious?”
He swiped a lock of dark hair from his eyes and grinned in his charming way. Girls across the world, and more than a few guys, had gone weak kneed at the sight of that smile. “This place has more secrets than Victoria’s underwear drawer. We’re trying to catalogue everything. There are no records or atlases, and it’s nearly an impossible task because this place grows and changes constantly. Don’t worry.” His grin broadened. “The last thing I am here is bored.”
I backed further into the well, and the water soaked me to my belly button. “Are you telling me the truth or just what you think I want to hear?”
He shook his head, one quick twist. “Nope. I’m being dead honest.”
“Ba-dum-ching,” I said, playing a rimshot and rolling my eyes. But my heartstrings twanged. No one could make me laugh like my brother.
He chuckled. “Go and be happy, Solina. Live your life. Try things and succeed. Try things and fail. Fall in love while you’re at it. I’ll be here for you when the time is right.”
“I didn’t get to say goodbye to you before. It sucked really, really bad.”
“And now you’ll get that chance. We’re luckier than a lot of people.”
I raised my hands from the water, and my fingers dripped as I waved a soggy goodbye. Tears burned in my eyes again, but I blinked them away. “I love you.”
“And I love you.” Mani waved, and despite his grin, he looked like a sad puppy, all big eyed and droopy eared.
I squared my shoulders and backed away, even as the seams in my heart tugged and wrenched, straining as though they might rip apart. But scar tissue is thick and hard to tear, and my heart held together. After inhaling a deep breath, I threw my arms out at my sides—a little dramatic flair—and fell back.
In the moment before the water took me under, Mani’s final words reached me. “Tell Skyla I love her, too.”
Heavy panting of a restless beast, like rhythmic rasps of sandpaper smoothing a rough surface. Sharp squeals of claws raking iron or steel, as shrill as fingernails on slate.
Plip, plip, plip, drips echo in a cavernous interior.
A howl, sung in one long note—cold and trembling it resonates—vibrates the hollows of a tormented heart.
A wolf hunkers, ears tight against his skull, tail tucked. Whimpers underscore each breath.
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?”
