Part 4: Chap. 6: A Kiss Is Just a Kiss
Chapter 6: A Kiss Is Just a Kiss
“That’s great,” I said. “It shouldn’t be hard to kill him now.”
Loki didn’t say a thing, so I tramped toward Stephen as if I thought I actually could burn him here. It took me only a few seconds to reach him, and when I did I reached up and held him still by his shoulders and looked straight into his eyes.
I couldn’t, of course. Layers of ice clouded them. Ice coated his eyelashes and made his brows into white caterpillars. Ice misted his breath and turned his hair into snaky strands. As I gazed at him, he blinked too slowly, the way a Jotun might blink. But his cheeks were red, and he was breathing. He was still warm somewhere underneath.
He was pushing against me, too, trying to walk. I let him go. He walked straight on past me, like a zombie in a movie.
“I know there’s a way in,” I said.
I turned back to Loki, but he was gone. Mr. Blanding stood in the snow, wearing his glasses and one of his nice gray suits, peering at me nervously. He hugged himself as if he were cold. “What did you say?” he asked.
I took a step closer. When Mr. Blanding widened his eyes in confusion, I looked into them and saw a tiny flame twisting, first orange and then violet, like when you click a lighter.
“Stop playing around, Loki,” I said. “Stop it. Stop everything.”
Mr. Blanding frowned. But he answered me in Loki’s voice: “I thought you’d like this better. You liked him.”
“I did like Mr. Blanding, but he’s dead. And you’re taking his form, and it’s wrong. It’s disrespectful.” I turned on my heel and went after Stephen.
While we were talking, he’d almost disappeared from sight. I caught up in a few bounds, tearing through the billowing curtains of snow, and found him marching steadily, head down and hands at his sides. I was starting to feel like a bird or bee might in our world, flitting here and there while vast, heavy beings plodded around me.
Loki was fast, too. He came up behind me, still looking like Mr. Blanding.
“You’re using him like a Halloween costume,” I said. “Stop it, Loki. It’s annoying.”
“Costume?” said Loki. He walked briskly along beside me now, both of us following Stephen. “I hope you’re joking. I runed myself into the poor man’s memories, you know, when his ashes were still warm. I found his spirit-spark and blew it into a flame. Sometimes when I take this shape, I forget I’m not him.”
“You put him in a rune.” I remembered the glowing shape Loki had drawn in the air, there in the classroom; the one that glued itself to his throat. “And my parents,” I said. “You drew runes on their bones to bring them back. Not all of them, because you can’t resurrect people. But their spirits. Their sparks. The part Jotuns can’t touch.”
“Correct,” said Loki. “Aslaug, listen. Your friend Imogen, she’s defenseless. She can’t see Jotuns like you or I can. While we stand here talking, she’s there in that cave. You’re going to have to decide what to do.”
“Kill him, right?” I made a gesture toward Stephen. “That’s the only way to pass my test. Though I guess since I know it’s a test now, I’ll still be failing. Or cheating. Listen, though. What about my mother? What about Brynhild? She was Jotun touched when she died.”
Mr. Blanding stood stock still. Just for a moment, the expression on his face was all Loki’s. “How did you know?”
“It was all in that book, the saga.” I remembered the description of Brynhild ordering her husband to kill the man she loved. When it was done, she laughed and then she cried. She had stepped outside the world of normal people. In her own way, and maybe by her own choice, Brynhild had gone into the Big Freeze.
“There is a way to bring people back,” I said.
“’Scuse me?”
“There is a way to get their spark back. You did it to Mr. Blanding when you pretended to be him. He was different after that - he kissed Fiona. You did it to Brynhild. You unfroze her spirit, and then she wasn’t crazy suicidal.”
“She’s still pretty intense,” said Loki.
“You found the part that’s still really them. Show me how.”
Ahead of us, Stephen was on the point of vanishing again, and I made big strides to catch up. Loki followed me. He was wearing his own face and hair now with Mr. Blanding’s clothes, and his face reminded me of Till’s when Mom and Pike tell him he’s too young for something. “You don’t really want to know this,” he said.
“I do.”
“There is a rune of power. But it’s not user friendly. And it won’t help them unless they want it to. Some do. Some don’t.”
“You’re talking riddles,” I said. “Give me this rune, and I’ll use it on Stephen. I know that’s not what I’m supposed to do. It’s what I will do.”
“For a kiss,” said Loki. He stepped in front of me, blocking my path.
I tried to weave around him, but he stopped me, smiling his most charming smile. “That’s all I really want.”
“Oh, really?”
I should have been mad at him for the “test” business, and madder at him for not telling me he knew a rune to un-Jotunize people. I knew later on, if there was a later on outside the Big Freeze, I would be mad. Right now, though, I saw Loki for what he was: part god, part Jotun, all tricks and restless curiosity and selfishness. He didn’t want his boring relatives to take over the Earth, but he didn’t care that much. He liked to do things that were forbidden. He didn’t like to follow my father’s orders. He was very curious about how it would feel to kiss me.
“Promise I get the rune.”
His eyes widened, and I could tell his surprise was genuine. “Of course.”
I went to him and pulled his head down to mine and kissed him.
Now, I know there’s a way you’re supposed to do this. In soap operas, when a girl has to kiss a bad man who’s holding her grandma hostage or whatever, she plants one quickly on his lips and backs away, glaring like a lynx. Maybe she bites him or kicks him where it hurts. And sometimes he just pulls her closer and acts like he’s trying to eat her mouth, all wet and sloppy, and she lets him.
None of those things happened. Loki kissed me back gently, almost carefully, as if he were scared I would bite him. His arms were warm and strong as steel, and I could tell he was holding back when he could easily have pulled me closer.
And I went to that place again.
Fire roared and raged around me, rising everywhere like a thick grove of pines, eating the sky. Beneath me I felt bare, scorched rock. Wind groaned; sparks fizzled. I lay on my back looking up at the ring of flames that hid all but a shred of gray sky.
This was Brynhild’s mountain. This was where she hid after her true love left her. Here in the flames she nursed her broken heart, her still-glowing heart, before it went cold.
I felt her near me. She did not feel like my mother, but she felt familiar nonetheless. She was every angry, passionate, scorned woman whose story had ever made me cry.
I asked her silently, What is the rune that brought you back from the dead?
And Brynhild answered, Are you sure you want to know? If I tell you, it will change nothing. All good and evil in your life have already been measured out.
I do want to know.
This is a mind-rune, said Brynhild. Odin brought it. It wakes sleepers and causes strife in the world. It disturbs peace. If you want to know it, look at every eagle’s beak, every wolf’s claw. Look at the dance of every fire.
I understood, and I looked up at the ragged flames. They were flickering crazily, too rapidly for me to see any pattern, like flames do. But as I watched, everything slowed down. In the random play of the fire I saw a simple repeated figure, one you could draw with no more than five strokes of a pen. I recognized it, too.
My eyes snapped open on the white world of the Big Freeze, and I pushed Loki away so quickly I almost fell.
He lurched, too, though maybe he was only faking. “OK, OK,” he said, moping his brow with the back of his hand, as if I’d burned him. “I’ll tell you now. I-”
But I was already past him, once again speeding toward Stephen.
Everything had gone whiter, thicker, and at first I thought I’d lost him. But I must have got turned around in the storm, because suddenly my friend was coming straight toward me, his sightless eyes on the ground.
“I know what to do,” I said, more for my benefit than his. I could still see that burning shape, but it was like the image that sticks in your mind as you wake from a dream. In a second it might be gone. I grabbed Stephen by the shoulders and faced him. “I know what to do.”
“Do you?” asked Loki, right at my shoulder.
“Something sharp, now.” I held out my hand.
It came back with something cold. A pen-knife with a bare steel blade.
“Listen,” Loki said, all in a rush. “This rune’s one of the oldest and deepest. Odin suffered a lot just to learn it, and he’s a god. If you use it on someone that doesn’t really want it, and everything that comes with it, they’ll die. You understand?”
“Absolutely.” With my left hand tangled in Stephen’s hair, holding him fast, I raised the knife and carved my rune into the ice covering his right eye.
I remembered the strokes. The blade was almost as fine as a pen tip. It went no deeper than the top layer of ice, but that didn’t matter. The rune was there. I saw it catch the light reflected from my own eyes and turn the color of flame.
There was a flash and a wet whoosh sound. I blinked. Stephen was gone.
Where he had stood, at my feet, a pool of antifreeze-colored slush had opened on the snow. I could hear something dripping.
I was shaking so hard I almost dropped the knife. “Is he …?”
“Who knows?” said Loki. “You’ll have to go back into time if you want to find out.”
“Either way, he’s free.”
Loki shrugged. “You could say that.”
“I didn’t do that to pass your test. Your test can screw itself.”
“Tests are for idiots,” said Loki. “Personally, I always cheat if I can.”
“That’s great,” I said. “It shouldn’t be hard to kill him now.”
Loki didn’t say a thing, so I tramped toward Stephen as if I thought I actually could burn him here. It took me only a few seconds to reach him, and when I did I reached up and held him still by his shoulders and looked straight into his eyes.
I couldn’t, of course. Layers of ice clouded them. Ice coated his eyelashes and made his brows into white caterpillars. Ice misted his breath and turned his hair into snaky strands. As I gazed at him, he blinked too slowly, the way a Jotun might blink. But his cheeks were red, and he was breathing. He was still warm somewhere underneath.
He was pushing against me, too, trying to walk. I let him go. He walked straight on past me, like a zombie in a movie.
“I know there’s a way in,” I said.
I turned back to Loki, but he was gone. Mr. Blanding stood in the snow, wearing his glasses and one of his nice gray suits, peering at me nervously. He hugged himself as if he were cold. “What did you say?” he asked.
I took a step closer. When Mr. Blanding widened his eyes in confusion, I looked into them and saw a tiny flame twisting, first orange and then violet, like when you click a lighter.
“Stop playing around, Loki,” I said. “Stop it. Stop everything.”
Mr. Blanding frowned. But he answered me in Loki’s voice: “I thought you’d like this better. You liked him.”
“I did like Mr. Blanding, but he’s dead. And you’re taking his form, and it’s wrong. It’s disrespectful.” I turned on my heel and went after Stephen.
While we were talking, he’d almost disappeared from sight. I caught up in a few bounds, tearing through the billowing curtains of snow, and found him marching steadily, head down and hands at his sides. I was starting to feel like a bird or bee might in our world, flitting here and there while vast, heavy beings plodded around me.
Loki was fast, too. He came up behind me, still looking like Mr. Blanding.
“You’re using him like a Halloween costume,” I said. “Stop it, Loki. It’s annoying.”
“Costume?” said Loki. He walked briskly along beside me now, both of us following Stephen. “I hope you’re joking. I runed myself into the poor man’s memories, you know, when his ashes were still warm. I found his spirit-spark and blew it into a flame. Sometimes when I take this shape, I forget I’m not him.”
“You put him in a rune.” I remembered the glowing shape Loki had drawn in the air, there in the classroom; the one that glued itself to his throat. “And my parents,” I said. “You drew runes on their bones to bring them back. Not all of them, because you can’t resurrect people. But their spirits. Their sparks. The part Jotuns can’t touch.”
“Correct,” said Loki. “Aslaug, listen. Your friend Imogen, she’s defenseless. She can’t see Jotuns like you or I can. While we stand here talking, she’s there in that cave. You’re going to have to decide what to do.”
“Kill him, right?” I made a gesture toward Stephen. “That’s the only way to pass my test. Though I guess since I know it’s a test now, I’ll still be failing. Or cheating. Listen, though. What about my mother? What about Brynhild? She was Jotun touched when she died.”
Mr. Blanding stood stock still. Just for a moment, the expression on his face was all Loki’s. “How did you know?”
“It was all in that book, the saga.” I remembered the description of Brynhild ordering her husband to kill the man she loved. When it was done, she laughed and then she cried. She had stepped outside the world of normal people. In her own way, and maybe by her own choice, Brynhild had gone into the Big Freeze.
“There is a way to bring people back,” I said.
“’Scuse me?”
“There is a way to get their spark back. You did it to Mr. Blanding when you pretended to be him. He was different after that - he kissed Fiona. You did it to Brynhild. You unfroze her spirit, and then she wasn’t crazy suicidal.”
“She’s still pretty intense,” said Loki.
“You found the part that’s still really them. Show me how.”
Ahead of us, Stephen was on the point of vanishing again, and I made big strides to catch up. Loki followed me. He was wearing his own face and hair now with Mr. Blanding’s clothes, and his face reminded me of Till’s when Mom and Pike tell him he’s too young for something. “You don’t really want to know this,” he said.
“I do.”
“There is a rune of power. But it’s not user friendly. And it won’t help them unless they want it to. Some do. Some don’t.”
“You’re talking riddles,” I said. “Give me this rune, and I’ll use it on Stephen. I know that’s not what I’m supposed to do. It’s what I will do.”
“For a kiss,” said Loki. He stepped in front of me, blocking my path.
I tried to weave around him, but he stopped me, smiling his most charming smile. “That’s all I really want.”
“Oh, really?”
I should have been mad at him for the “test” business, and madder at him for not telling me he knew a rune to un-Jotunize people. I knew later on, if there was a later on outside the Big Freeze, I would be mad. Right now, though, I saw Loki for what he was: part god, part Jotun, all tricks and restless curiosity and selfishness. He didn’t want his boring relatives to take over the Earth, but he didn’t care that much. He liked to do things that were forbidden. He didn’t like to follow my father’s orders. He was very curious about how it would feel to kiss me.
“Promise I get the rune.”
His eyes widened, and I could tell his surprise was genuine. “Of course.”
I went to him and pulled his head down to mine and kissed him.
Now, I know there’s a way you’re supposed to do this. In soap operas, when a girl has to kiss a bad man who’s holding her grandma hostage or whatever, she plants one quickly on his lips and backs away, glaring like a lynx. Maybe she bites him or kicks him where it hurts. And sometimes he just pulls her closer and acts like he’s trying to eat her mouth, all wet and sloppy, and she lets him.
None of those things happened. Loki kissed me back gently, almost carefully, as if he were scared I would bite him. His arms were warm and strong as steel, and I could tell he was holding back when he could easily have pulled me closer.
And I went to that place again.
Fire roared and raged around me, rising everywhere like a thick grove of pines, eating the sky. Beneath me I felt bare, scorched rock. Wind groaned; sparks fizzled. I lay on my back looking up at the ring of flames that hid all but a shred of gray sky.
This was Brynhild’s mountain. This was where she hid after her true love left her. Here in the flames she nursed her broken heart, her still-glowing heart, before it went cold.
I felt her near me. She did not feel like my mother, but she felt familiar nonetheless. She was every angry, passionate, scorned woman whose story had ever made me cry.
I asked her silently, What is the rune that brought you back from the dead?
And Brynhild answered, Are you sure you want to know? If I tell you, it will change nothing. All good and evil in your life have already been measured out.
I do want to know.
This is a mind-rune, said Brynhild. Odin brought it. It wakes sleepers and causes strife in the world. It disturbs peace. If you want to know it, look at every eagle’s beak, every wolf’s claw. Look at the dance of every fire.
I understood, and I looked up at the ragged flames. They were flickering crazily, too rapidly for me to see any pattern, like flames do. But as I watched, everything slowed down. In the random play of the fire I saw a simple repeated figure, one you could draw with no more than five strokes of a pen. I recognized it, too.
My eyes snapped open on the white world of the Big Freeze, and I pushed Loki away so quickly I almost fell.
He lurched, too, though maybe he was only faking. “OK, OK,” he said, moping his brow with the back of his hand, as if I’d burned him. “I’ll tell you now. I-”
But I was already past him, once again speeding toward Stephen.
Everything had gone whiter, thicker, and at first I thought I’d lost him. But I must have got turned around in the storm, because suddenly my friend was coming straight toward me, his sightless eyes on the ground.
“I know what to do,” I said, more for my benefit than his. I could still see that burning shape, but it was like the image that sticks in your mind as you wake from a dream. In a second it might be gone. I grabbed Stephen by the shoulders and faced him. “I know what to do.”
“Do you?” asked Loki, right at my shoulder.
“Something sharp, now.” I held out my hand.
It came back with something cold. A pen-knife with a bare steel blade.
“Listen,” Loki said, all in a rush. “This rune’s one of the oldest and deepest. Odin suffered a lot just to learn it, and he’s a god. If you use it on someone that doesn’t really want it, and everything that comes with it, they’ll die. You understand?”
“Absolutely.” With my left hand tangled in Stephen’s hair, holding him fast, I raised the knife and carved my rune into the ice covering his right eye.
I remembered the strokes. The blade was almost as fine as a pen tip. It went no deeper than the top layer of ice, but that didn’t matter. The rune was there. I saw it catch the light reflected from my own eyes and turn the color of flame.
There was a flash and a wet whoosh sound. I blinked. Stephen was gone.
Where he had stood, at my feet, a pool of antifreeze-colored slush had opened on the snow. I could hear something dripping.
I was shaking so hard I almost dropped the knife. “Is he …?”
“Who knows?” said Loki. “You’ll have to go back into time if you want to find out.”
“Either way, he’s free.”
Loki shrugged. “You could say that.”
“I didn’t do that to pass your test. Your test can screw itself.”
“Tests are for idiots,” said Loki. “Personally, I always cheat if I can.”