Part 4, Chap. 2: Angstathon continues

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Chapter 2: Your Cold, Cold Heart

I didn’t feel much at first. Imogen tried to make me sit on one of the senior benches in the main hallway, which currently had no seniors on them. “Let’s just wait for the last bell here,” she said. “Mr. Blanding won’t care if you come back to class. I barely had to ask him for a hall pass - he just waved and let me go.”

“Because he’s Loki,” I said.

Of course, Principal Jack had to choose that moment to stroll down the hall with his springy military stride. “Got some kind of confessional going on here, ladies?” he asked, shooting us his broad smile that seemed to say, I may be strict, but I’m still one of the good guys. “Or shouldn’t you be in class?”

“I have a pass to take her to the nurse,” said Imogen.

“We’re going back to class right now,” I said at the same time.

Then we had to go back to class, with Principal Jack’s narrowed eyes following us the whole way. When we got to the door, Imogen wanted to open it a crack and peek in first, to assure me the coast was clear of Stephen.

Suddenly she wanted to quarantine me, as if I were a menace. “That makes a lot of sense,” I said. “We already know Kristen’s in there. And Jeremy and Karin. I could kill them, too.”

“It’s different with Stephen.”

“It is not,” I said and swung the door and went in.

Stephen wasn’t there. Class was almost over. Mr. Blanding - or Loki, I should probably start calling him - was sitting on the edge of his desk without his glasses, mumbling about communists and fascists in the Spanish civil war. It might have been interesting, but you couldn’t tell from his way of describing it, as if he were reading off notes someone had scrawled in horrible handwriting.

He barely looked up when I slid into the first open desk I saw, in the third row. Imogen found a seat somewhere farther back, but I didn’t turn to find out where.

A girl behind me was giggling, but I couldn’t tell who she was or whether she was giggling at me. I sat back and closed my eyes, not bothering to lower my head. I didn’t feel like looking at anything.

“And this guy Banquo - er, Franco - would continue to rule for years and years, making Spanish people bored and miserable,” said Mr. Blanding. The bell rang.

No one waited to be dismissed; they surged out of their chairs. Snow was on people’s minds: I overheard three separate excited conversations about slopes, trails, and chair-lifts.

“Chapter Ten for Friday, then, assuming the snow stops,” said Mr. Blanding, not bothering to raise his voice over the clamor. He slid off his desk, turned his back and started gathering his papers.

“It won’t stop!” said one of the boys who’d been talking about grabbing his snowboard and driving straight up Cray Peak this afternoon.

“Snow strike!” yelled someone else who sounded like Billy Corcoran.

I went and stood by Mr. Blanding’s desk. Imogen stayed at her own desk in the now-empty room, waiting for me. She made some gestures at Mr. Blanding and some funny faces, but I ignored them.

Mr. Blanding was acting very busy organizing papers in his binder. “Loki,” I said.

“Hmm?” He didn’t look at me.

“I need to ask you about something.”

“Sort of in a rush . . . Principal Beaulieu . . . coffee . . . lounge . . . waiting for me,” said Mr. Blanding. He seized his jacket from the back of his chair, tossed it over his shoulder, picked up his briefcase, and glanced at me in a furtive, sidelong way. “Another time. Of course. When you aren’t busy cutting class, Aslaug. So sorry.”

He was almost at the door, but I followed him. “You can’t just leave us here. Not now. You know what happened.”

“I’m sure it can wait till tomorrow.” He turned on his heel and was gone.

“What on earth was that?” asked Imogen, picking her way between the desks that people had jostled every which way in their eagerness to get out.

My theory was that sometimes Loki put Mr. Blanding on autopilot. This Mr. Blanding was a kind of dummy, an illusion. Much as I wanted to believe there was something inside him besides memories of the life he had left and Loki, I didn’t anymore. Mr. Blanding was dead. Loki had simply stolen parts of him.

I’d killed him.

“You should ask Loki that next time you see him,” I told Imogen. Then I followed Mr. Blanding out the door.

We got on the bus late, after all the full seats had been taken. I wedged myself in beside a freshman who was plugged to his iPod and bent my legs at a right angle with my knees pressed against the green vinyl seat in front and my feet dangling. I didn’t bother to notice where Imogen went.

For the first time, I wondered why Imogen didn’t have her license and her own car, with all that Cray money. I wondered if she couldn’t pass her driving test. Then I wondered why Loki had come to her and not me, to tell her about Stephen.

If he had.

The door closed. The bus’s engine coughed to life along with our driver’s favorite station, 101.3 FM (“Totally Eighties”). Some guy was singing about how everybody was working on the weekend, and everybody was going off the deep end. The bus lurched, jamming my knees harder into the seat. I closed my eyes.

I saw that look on Stephen’s face again - the narrowed eyes, the curled lip. Disgust. But could I really have seen his face so clearly without meeting his eyes? If I had met his eyes, wasn’t he safe?

Maybe he was safe, his heart still warm. Maybe he just hated me, the way Sigurd hated Brynhild when he was married to another woman and she started lamenting her fate and raising a stink about their past. I felt for Brynhild. Knowing how much she annoyed Sigurd, she must have yearned to return to her bed on the lonely mountain, surrounded by flames.

Why would Stephen hate me?

I opened my eyes. They felt sticky, as if I’d been sleeping. The boy next to me twitched, humming along to the song on his headphones.

For a second I felt like I was dreaming, seeing the tall firs beside the highway covered in snow for the first time since last winter, and the maples white even though they still had half their yellow and red leaves. Then I looked front, over the driver’s shoulder, and got my bearings. We were bumping and clumping down the hill into the center of Cray’s, and I could see the two mountains rising above us with their steep black slopes blurred by a fog of snow.

The bus stopped on the edge of the town green, skidding an inch or so on the gray slush. People filed past me. Imogen stopped beside me in the aisle, holding up the line, and said, “C’mon.”

I shook my head. “It’s a shorter walk when I get off on French Hill.”

The big senior behind Imogen cleared his throat loudly, but she ignored him. “You can come over. We’ll make tea. There are still cupcakes left over, if you can believe that.”

I wanted to explain that some things can’t be solved by tea or even cupcakes, but the senior was starting to seethe. “Move it,” he spat softly in Imogen’s ear.

I slid my butt off the seat and went in front of Imogen. The freshman saw his chance and scrambled out after me. The senior sighed.

I skipped the bottom step and almost sat down in the slush, but then I got my balance and leaped the curb and walked, as fast as I could. I could hear Imogen behind me, stumbling and panting. She had such short legs.

She followed me up Main Street and along Pollywog Street, where Evie Carlsson’s little brothers were hitting each other with snowballs in the yard. Grownups were home early, shoveling their driveways, yelling to each other with open coats and pink cheeks. “It’s some kinda record!” I heard Karin Lind’s mom say.

“You want some hot cider before you shovel that walk, kiddo?” said Leo Mull’s mom to Leo.

Then we were heading straight up the hill, leaving their voices behind. As I crossed the tracks, Imogen dashed in front of me and said, “Aslaug, listen.”

She stood in my way. I was tired, so I stopped, though I didn’t look beyond her shoes. “What?”

“Please tell me what happened,” said Imogen, though she sounded more like someone ordering than someone pleading. “I can’t do a single thing unless I know.”

“What things do you want to do?” I started walking again, right around her and up the embankment, placing my feet carefully. My sneakers had just barely dried, and now they were soaking again. She skipped beside me, keeping up, but didn’t answer. “According to you, we can’t,” I said. “We can’t do anything.”

“You don’t believe me? Didn’t you see his tattoo?”

Not see it, she meant. Imogen must have been very upset, because she wasn’t thinking about using exactly the right words.

“He wanted me to look at him,” I said. “He was trying to make me.” It occurred to me now that all Stephen’s unusual behavior did suggest this - not just the kiss, but the Schnapps and the smoking and that grotesque look of disgust on his face. He wanted to startle me so I would look straight into his eyes.

“What do you mean by that?” asked Imogen, breathing hard.

“I don’t know.”

“Do you think that Jotun in the cave last night maybe touched him? When you weren’t looking?”

“No,” I said. The stones in the cemetery appeared to have a coating of fine white fur.

“How can you be sure?”

“I told you already. Last night, after that happened, I looked straight at him.”

We were in front of the Cray house now. I kept walking, and she didn’t slow her pace, either. I said, “You should go home. You’re going to get a cold walking around in the snow.”

“My coat’s thicker than yours.”

“I told you I can’t do anything,” I said. “If he is one, he is one. I can’t bring them back. All I can do is kill them.”

Imogen latched on to my arm and yanked me around to face her. She was surprisingly strong. “Just stand still for a sec, OK? I’m kind of dying here.”

“It’s cold. I feel like going home.” I couldn’t say I felt like pulling the covers over my head and sleeping for several centuries.

“I know, but listen. Maybe we can do something. Do you know how to find Loki?”

That reminded me why I was angry with her, and I said, “You’re the one who saw him this morning. According to you. And didn’t tell me about it. Even though, if you’re right about everything, Stephen could have - ”

“He could be ashes,” said Imogen in an especially deep voice, as if she were concentrating on not crying. “I’m sorry, OK? It was bad. It was weird. But I didn’t know where Stephen was, and I wanted to see him myself first, before I told you. Also, I didn’t believe Loki, not really.”

“Right,” I said. “Because Stephen told you not to.”

She shook her head violently, and I could see the snowflakes melting in her black hair. “Doesn’t matter now. He’s the only one who could maybe potentially help. Did you ever ask him if there’s a way to turn somebody back?”

“No.”

“No you didn’t, or no there isn’t?”

“No,” I said. “Both. If there was a way to un-Jotun somebody, Loki would have told me.”

“How do you know? Maybe you didn’t ask the right questions.”

Somehow, just now, that sounded like the stupidest sentence I had ever heard. I wanted to shout, “Why are you so lame? Can’t you see Loki’s helping me as much as he possibly can?” Instead, I started marching up the hill.

This time I couldn’t feel her beside me, and when I turned to look back, I saw she was standing right where she’d stopped, about fifty feet away. “Stephen’s fine!” I called to her.

Imogen crossed her arms on the breast of her black coat. From this far away, I couldn’t look directly into her eyes, but I could see them glittering. Imogen was crying.

She was worried about Stephen. She thought I might somehow get careless and send him up in flames, even though I hadn’t burned Kristen, who’d been mean to me most of my life, and I’d also managed not to kill Monique and Jerry from KYAX, whom I could care less about. I could see in her eyes that she thought Stephen was her only real friend. That was why she worried, even though it didn’t make sense. People worry about the things that matter.

Then I felt mean. I yelled, “If I see him, I’ll tell him you want him to come over and make you into a Jotun, too! You can not care together!”

But my words were lost in the snow and wind.

When I did see Stephen, later that night, I didn’t tell him anything like that.

It was nearly midnight when the noise woke me. I’d been dozing ever since I got home, ignoring knocks on the door and calls of “Dinner!” till my mom gave up and went away. By eleven, I’d slept soundly for several hours, almost as long as I do in an average night. It didn’t take much to make me sit up in bed, heart pounding.

I glanced at the clock, with that awful feeling you get when you don’t know what woke you. Was it Loki, rifling in my closet again? Had he decided to try on some of my clothes? Or was it a nightmare I couldn’t remember?

But then a clatter came from my window on the mountain side. The glass rattled with the impact of tiny, hard things, like hail driven by a gust of wind.

Hail? I rocked forward in bed and looked down into the yard. But the storm had stopped. I could see big flakes drifting in the floodlight, the way they had yesterday morning, as if they had all the time in the world.

Outside the floodlight, I saw the dark shape of a person raising its arm, and the white flash of its wrist as it threw something. A second later, the gravel grated against my window, making me spring back into bed.

Then I knelt below the window and unlocked it and hauled it open. We hadn’t put in the storms yet. Through the mosquito screen, I could see him standing there with his hair shining like the snow. When I realized who it was, I squinched my eyes like a kid at a horror movie. I hugged the window frame and peeked around it, just to be safe.

I knew there was no point in telling him to go away. “Door. Come to the door!” I hissed.

When I looked again, he was gone. I left my room and tiptoed down the stairs. Pike had turned in early, and everything was dark and silent except for the plick plick of the ice maker in the fridge. In the mudroom, I grabbed my plaid wool jacket from the hook and pulled it over my sweats. I couldn’t find my snow boots, so I took my hard-soled slippers. The outer door’s latch glided back for me, nice and quiet.

I kept my eyes closed now. Why take chances? The porch was still an obstacle course, and I scraped my shin against something hard, but in the end I found the screen door by feel. Knowing it didn’t bang hard, I let it fall shut.

Strong hands grabbed me, holding me upright. He was very close all of a sudden, and I could smell cigarettes again. I didn’t know how to defend myself blind. “Stop it,” I said. “Someone might see us.”

He released me, and I sat down on the lowest concrete step. “Why’d you come? I was asleep.”

“We need to go to the cave,” said Stephen.

“We do?”

“You saw how many there were last night.” He sounded impatient, the way he usually did. As if nothing had changed. “What if there are twice as many tonight, Aslaug? What if they come down into the valley? An army of them?”

“They won’t,” I said, wondering if Imogen could be wrong about Stephen. Maybe she hadn’t understood Loki. “The moon’s bigger tonight.”

“Not big enough.”

I drew a breath. “What happened to your rune?”

“Which rune?”

“The rune on your hand. The protecting one.”

“It’s gone.” I could feel him shrug where he stood above me, and there was a new, flinty tone in his voice. “I still want the same things, Aslaug.”

“What’s that?”

“For you to kill Jotuns. And the other ones.”

“The touched,” I said. I stood up, swaying a little. Not seeing was making me feel weightless and dizzy.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Stephen.” I reached out, reached up, and used his shoulders to hold myself steady. He felt so warm and strong still, and I couldn’t ask him point blank, Are you one? I couldn’t. “What makes you care about killing Jotuns so much?”

Under my hands, his shoulders rippled in a shrug. “You don’t know anything about me.”

“Then tell me.”

“Most of what I told you was a lie. I didn’t meet your father in the woods, after the fire. I wasn’t even in the fire. Or in Alaska.”

“You weren’t?”

Air moved on my face; he was shaking his head. I imagined his mouth tightening in contempt again. “Do you think any kid nowadays believes in Loki, Aslaug? Do you think people from Alaska still have the old beliefs, the ones you call superstitions? They don’t. I knew Loki because I come from another place. There was a Stephen, but I think he died in the fire. With his folks. I was your father’s servant.”

My mind was whirling, trying to imagine what he meant by another place. “I thought you said my father died two thousand years ago.”

“He did,” said Stephen. “And I think I died . . . seven hundred years ago, give or take. So you see, it doesn’t really matter if you look at me.”

I shook my head, though I kept my eyes squeezed shut. I felt his hands reaching out to touch me where I was touching him, gently massaging the knobs of my shoulders. I said, “You don’t seem like somebody who’s been . . . touched.”

“That’s only because of the runes,” said Stephen, in the most matter-of-fact way. “The ones that are left, I mean. They’ve been driving me all along, and they still are, which means I don’t need much drive of my own. There’s one last part of my task I need to perform, and after that they may let me be. Well, they will. Because I won’t.”

He was riddling now. “What do you mean?” I said.

“What do you think I mean?” His finger traced the curve of my chin. And then he said in a very soft voice, like a mother soothing her child and at the same time like someone saying goodbye to a lover before a long trip, “Aslaug, open your eyes.”

“No.”

He tapped my chin. “Yes.”

The porchlight glared on us - I saw it through my lids - and the front door banged open. “What’s happenin’, kids?” drawled Pike.

Pike is younger than my mom, and smallish but sturdily built. He lifts wet hay bales as if they were empty cardboard boxes. I could feel Stephen stiffen beside me, sensing a threat.

“He came to ask me about Euro History homework, because he cut class,” I said. It was such a lame lie that I couldn’t help giggling, and then clamped my hand over my mouth.

“Oh yeah?” said Pike.

I turned to face Pike, took a deep breath, and opened my eyes. Pike had his head cocked to one side like he was sizing up the situation, maybe wondering if he was looking at my first boyfriend and whether that was a good or a bad thing.

“This is my friend Stephen Wildasin from down the hill,” I said. “He was just going.”

“Aslaug, let’s stop playing,” said Stephen, and he took hold of my shoulder again.

Things happened very fast. Pike pushed past me to get at Stephen, and by the time I dared look that way again, he was standing in the middle of the yard with one hand on Stephen’s shoulder, talking rapidly in a voice so low I could hear only a few words. Stephen held one hand to his cheek, as if Pike had hit him - though I hadn’t heard a blow - and he wasn’t looking at me anymore.

“You got the message, boy? You absorbed it?” said Pike. He clapped Stephen on the back, too hard, and released him. “Now get,” he said over his shoulder, as he strode back to the porch and me.

Pike ushered me ahead of him, and I had to go. But I could see Stephen’s dark shape against the floodlight, where the snowflakes were still drifting like autumn leaves.

“Aslaug, you can’t stay away from the mountain,” he said. “You know what’ll happen if you do. You know-”

Pike slammed the screen door behind us. Then he stuck his head out once more to call, “You don’t vacate this yard in the next minute, I call Sheriff Yeardley.”

Inside, I took off my jacket and sat at the table, while Pike stood surveying our yard from the window. “Took off,” he said at last, with satisfaction.

I didn’t answer, so he came to me and patted my shoulder in his awkward way. “You want some Swiss Miss?”

I shook my head. “I don’t feel well. Going back to bed.”

“The nerve of that frickin’ kid,” said Pike, with a sidelong glare toward the curtained window. “Listen to me, Az. Did he ever lay hands on you before?”

“No.”

“Hey. Remember, I’m not your mom. I know there’s a good and a bad way.”

What Pike meant to say was that if I told him I’d kissed a boy, or that a boy had laid his hands on me in the good, non-hurting way, he wouldn’t freak out and start asking questions. Normally I loved him for that. But tonight I didn’t care whether he freaked out or not. If he did, it would make two of us.

“It’s not like that. We’re friends. He’s basically Imogen Cray’s boyfriend,” I said, trying to pretend I wasn’t still feeling Stephen’s hands and his breath on my cheek, and knowing what would have happened if I’d opened my eyes.

“Wasn’t acting very much like Imogen Cray’s boyfriend.”

“He doesn’t like me that way.” I blushed as I remembered what Stephen had said about runes driving him. Maybe it was true he didn’t like me, had never liked me. The way he talked about my father, just now, had been full of that same disgust.

“I’m not sure he likes anybody,” I said. “He’s kind of a geek - totally into Norse myths and old-time weapons. He’s mad at me because I was supposed to meet up with him and Imogen and play video games tonight, and I didn’t.”

“Play video games, huh?”

I could feel the skepticism coming off him in waves, but it didn’t matter. I scraped my chair back and stood up. “I’m sorry we woke you up, Pike.”

“No problemo. OK, then. G’night, Az,” said Pike.

But as I reached the stairs, he added something that made me freeze in my tracks, just for an instant, before I kept walking. “Aslaug. Be careful. That boy’s got zero in his voice, like you hear in some of the soldiers after they come back from the war.”