Loe raamatut: «Foretold»

Chapter One

Three days after the end of the world began I had two choices—drive into a river or hit a deer. The light of the full moon reflected off the snow; the white stuff falling from the sky came in thick, noisy sheets that slammed the roof of my Honda Civic and coated the windshield.

Snow, in my experience, had always been soft. This version was pissed, spitting at the world with a vengeance. It made clear vision impossible.

Didn’t do much for traction, either.

I had to go so slowly. Exhaustion burned my eyes, dragged at my lungs. I’d lost hope of finding a cheap hotel. The last one had been so full; people had actually been sharing rooms with strangers. I’d had two offers while scurrying back to my car in the parking lot. Hadn’t taken them. If I’d learned one thing on this long trip, it was that people turned into complete freaks when they were scared and a sudden Earth-wide snowstorm made for one wicked fear catalyst. I’d seen fights in grocery stores, fights in snowdrifts on the sides of highways and had even watched one lady jump into a car and drive off while the owner stood holding the gas pump nozzle.

And the directions I’d printed sucked.

It had taken me three days longer than expected to get here from Florida. I’d always wanted to come to this supposed place of great magic nestled on the edge of the Ouachita Mountains in eastern Oklahoma, but Mom freaked every time I brought it up. Too much magic, she said. Plus, the rumors of a real gloaming meadow upset her. As far as the Norse knew, there were only a couple in the United States. My two sisters and I had been conceived in the one up north. Nothing like knowing exactly where your mother had sex with a stranger.

The snow let up slightly and I leaned forward like that would help me see well. I slowed even more, the car going barely faster than a crawl. I’d known what this snow was all about the second it had started.

When my sisters and I were kids, my mother’s idea of a bedtime story had been a creepy Norse rendition of the end of the world. Ragnarok. Three years of winter, a great tidal wave and then fire burning across the land. And during all this, there would be battles between warriors who carried the souls of the old gods. Blood and death—my mother’s idea of a nurturing bedtime story.

Kat, Coral and I hadn’t believed her until the souls of the norns inside us made themselves known. I was nine the first time I felt mine. Triplets like us, the norns had been goddess sisters, similar to the Greek fates, but they hadn’t woven threads of prophecy as some stories told; they’d carved runes into wood. The Norse called them the Wyrd Sisters. Kat, Coral and I preferred to think of them as the sisters of fate because the whole damned situation was weird enough.

The car swerved, causing my hands to sweat as my hold on the steering wheel turned to a death grip. My cell phone buzzed in the front pocket of my jeans but I ignored it, too scared to reach for it because I was pretty sure I’d left actual road at some point.

Plus, every time the thing rang lately it was bad news. Especially three days before.

“You need to come home. Now.” My sister Kat’s voice barked out flat and hard.

Scurrying into the short hall by the diner’s restrooms, I growled into the phone. “You know I’m not supposed to have my cell out at work!” I peeked around the corner at my boss, Daddy Mac, still transfixed on the television.

“Have you been outside? Coral thinks it’s happening. She’s pretty freaked out.”

So was I. Like all the people stuffed into booths in the diner, I’d been watching that approaching storm blob on the news, my stomach in knots. “I thought you didn’t believe in it.”

“You gotta come home. Dru’s worse today. She took an iron skillet into her room and spelled the door closed. We can’t get in.”

I didn’t know as much about regular magic as Mom and my sister Coral but even I knew that iron was used in hexing spells. My magic came with the norn inside me.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath of oily air. “Do you smell lavender?”

Kat snorted. “House reeks of it.”

A woman passed me on the way to the restroom. I clasped the phone closer and turned toward the corner to whisper. “Then she’s doing spells. Has Coral tried a counter for the door?”

“Yeah. The backlash gave her a headache.”

“Look, I’ll try to get off work. Turn on the news and see if all the channels are using the same storm image. Maybe this is only a freak snowstorm.”

“Raven, it’s Florida. It’s August. And we turn nineteen in three months.” Her voice held a thread of fear I’d never heard from Kat, who thought all the prophecies were a load of bunk. She sighed in that loud I’m-totally-put-out way of hers—the one that never failed to get my back up. “I hope the rest of what our crazy progenitor has said is wrong,” she continued. “But it looks like she got this part right.”

“Gods, Kat.” I shut my eyes again, and rubbed them until they hurt.

“Just come home.” Her voice had lost the attitude. “Sometimes our mother listens to you.”

More like she relied on me. As the oldest of the triplets, I guess she thought I would be the most responsible. Like a few extra minutes on my time line gave me a maturity my sisters lacked. Unfortunately, it kind of had. Not that I’d had much of a choice.

Thinking about my mom made me sick because of the last time I’d seen her. The cruel curl of her lip after she’d shoved me. Shoved me. The past few years had been bad, but she’d never hurt me before. She used to be a pretty cool mother but our bond had cracked over the years, and something in her eyes before she disappeared had ripped my heart to shreds. She’d looked right through me—like the loving mother who’d sacrificed a regular life to keep us safe had finally been swallowed by years of fear.

And madness.

“Where did she go?” Kat had placed her palm against the window of Mom’s empty room. Mom had always been off but the past month or so things had been worse than usual. She’d lost her job—which had made me extra glad I’d taken a second one.

“Who knows? But look at this!” I crouched next to the papers scattered all over the floor. No wonder we ran out of printer supplies so often. The winter mix outside sent a cold draft along the carpet, like frigid fingers burrowing past skin and muscle and into bone. I tried not to think about the snow. Of the ramifications.

I sifted through the papers, my stomach aching. Something caught my attention, and I started stacking the papers, glancing at each one. Mom had been printing online newspapers from...everywhere. It didn’t take long for the pattern to become clear. “Oh, gods, oh, man, Kat. She’s looking for him.”

“Who?”

I shoved one of Mom’s graphs toward her. It had names, ages...towns. “The young warrior.”

The sheet crinkled noisily as Kat snatched it. Her ponytail slid around her shoulder to brush the paper as she stared at it.

I ran my hands through my hair, absently scrunched the short spikes on top. Kat and Coral would probably never cut their hair but I’d grown sick of messing with it and chopped mine off. Mom said it made me look like a fairy sprite.

The black color came more from our Native American Arapaho ancestors—Iñunaina—than from our Norse ones. We looked Indian, but our Scandinavian heritage raged strong. As if aware of my thoughts, that presence in me, that thing, shifted and stretched like a sharp-clawed cat waking from a nap.

It creeped me the hell out each and every time since it first happened. Nothing like growing up knowing that one of the three norn goddesses lived in your body. That she was there for one reason.

It hit me then. The terror. Something more than the usual fear and the constant anxiety that the norn could take over. That she could just wipe off my personality like words on a whiteboard.

Could this really be it? The end of the world?

Horror curled through my insides, thick and rolling like waves of sticky, oozing oil. It flowed into my limbs and made them sting. I fisted my hands and sat back as the room swirled around me. Terrified the norn’s seidr magic would kick in, I squeezed my eyes closed and held my breath.

I came out of it to find Kat stroking my shoulder, holding my hand. “It’s okay,” she whispered over and over. “Come on. You’re the one who never loses it. Don’t wig out on me now, Raven.”

My fear was reflected in her eyes. “Kat, it’s true. All of it. Ragnarok.” I whispered the last word.

“I know.” She closed her eyes. “I’ve spent my entire life ignoring Dru’s stupid stories and here I am scared to death, too. But we can’t let her do whatever it is she’s planning for those boys. We just can’t.”

Kat never called her Mom. Her resentment for the woman raged like a never-ending storm. She hated her for dragging us from town to town, from one campsite to another. Out of the three of us, the most forgiving of Mom was Coral, who padded into the room pulling on a fat, purple sweater.

“Where’s Mom?” Her loose hair was longer than her black skirt, which ended halfway down her thighs, above a pair of thick, trendy, hot-pink socks that stretched over her knees. They went well with the pajama top...and the pink feather she’d clipped into her hair. Her style was definitely her own. Kind of funky, fashion-conscious hippie.

“You didn’t see her outside?” Mom would have passed Coral on the front porch when she left.

“No. I was talking to Mr. Bennings next door.” She tried to smile. “He’s going to his sister’s in South Carolina. Not sure why he thinks that will help. It’s snowing there, too.”

“Mom couldn’t have gone through the backyard.” I frowned, bit my lip. The fence panels were tall, the gate had rusted shut and we’d had an exterminator out less than a week before to deal with a huge, creepy nest of snakes. “Coral, is there some spell she could have used to travel? Like disappear or transport?”

Kat snorted. “Beam Dru up.”

I glared at her. She hated the old Star Trek: The Next Generation reruns I loved and she never missed a chance to pick on me.

Coral shook her head. “Mom’s getting pretty good, but not that good. I don’t know anyone who can travel outside the bounds of reality.”

Faint heat filled my cheeks. Yeah, it was a dumb question. “She must have crawled through the window.”

She pointed to the white petals. “I want to know what she did with the datura. It’s poison.” Coral used a tissue to wrap the flowers and toss them in the trash. “Don’t know why I’m surprised. Yesterday, she hacked away all my solstice orange snapdragons.”

My mouth dropped open. They were Coral’s favorite flower. She’d worked her butt off to grow those and we’d carted the pots around for years. “Oh, Coral, I’m so sorry. Why would she do that?”

“They detect spells,” Kat murmured. She only made that pinched-mouth, evasive-eye expression when she was hiding information.

“Kat, did you know?”

“Know what?”

I lifted one eyebrow. We both jumped when Coral smacked Kat’s shoulder.

“Hey!” Kat yelled, eyes narrowing, hand balling into a fist.

I scrambled to my feet to stop Kat from hitting her back. “We don’t have time for this.” I turned Kat toward me, feeling the frailness of her shoulders. We were all built small, but she felt thinner, like she’d been stressing more than usual lately. “Do you know something or not?”

Fury built in my stomach when she stared at the floor. “You got something, didn’t you?” I whispered.

Kat jerked from my hands and stomped from the room. She came back with her favorite yellow chenille throw bunched under her arm. She snapped it open and laid it on the floor. We all squatted around it, but I winced when I saw the perfect rune-shaped holes—obviously cut with scissors. When the norn’s magic hit during sleep, our subconscious found any way to get the messages across.

We’d been carving, writing and even burning these symbols in seidr magical trances since our ninth birthdays.

“‘Mother berserker,’” I translated. “Yeah, I see why you didn’t say anything. Stupid, cryptic shit.”

“Dru was already certifiable.” Kat lifted her eyebrows, shrugged. “I didn’t think the runes meant all that much different. But then she fell off that ladder and I figured the snakes had startled her.”

“The ones from the backyard?” Coral asked.

A few weeks ago, our mother had fallen off a ladder painting the outside of the house. She was unconscious for three days. I’d found her. Also found some snakeskins in a sort of circle at the base of the ladder. I’d trashed them before Coral could see them and think they were a sign. “Yeah, that exterminator sucks. The ‘berserker’ thing could have meant that. It would be nice if this dumb magic came with instructions.”

We had tons of books and countless Xeroxed copies of old writings—we’d collected everything we could find on our heritage, trying to figure out what was truth and what wasn’t. We had some kind of trance magic, a version of the Norse seidr magic inherited from our father’s side, but none of us had any control over it or even understood it.

Our mother’s abilities were different. She was an earth witch. Eyeing the iron skillet, I shuddered. If she was doing something with dark magic, this could be bad. Really bad.

I picked up the stack of papers and handed a section to each sister. “We have to figure out which boy she went after.” I stared from one to the other. If I’d been wrong all this time, the warrior was important—so, so much more important than we were. Gods, we’d spent our lives snickering over the idea of the young warrior killing one of us...but now, I didn’t know. Maybe it was real. Maybe one of us would change the prophecies and save one of the warriors carrying the gods’ souls. Maybe we could help stop the end of the world, crazy as that sounded.

All I knew was that I wasn’t willing for any of us to die. Mom running off to interfere probably altered all of it—even the prophecy we’d grown up fearing.

A tear slid down Coral’s cheek. I felt her pain in that strange way twins and triplets have of knowing when a sibling is hurting. She lifted her gaze to me, gray eyes shiny. “I can’t believe this is happening.”

Neither could I, but my tongue felt thick and the words stuck in my throat. I pulled my gaze from her and shuffled through the pages, finding story after story about boys with strange abilities or affinities with animals. Mom must have hardly slept recently, must have spent night after night searching the Net. Looking for the boy who would kill one of her daughters.

Going silently mad.

What did she plan to do to him?

I knew when I found the one I was supposed to because the norn inside me shifted again. She was getting more potent. This time she scraped and clawed.

Holding my breath, I worked hard to ignore her and stared at the grainy black-and-white photo of a boy, his longish, light hair in midswing, covering one eye. The photographer had obviously been more interested in the two wolves staring from the forest, half-hidden by the trees. The boy was pointing them back into the woods.

Light of hair. Wolves.

Odin, the Allfather God, had two wolves.

My hands started sweating and I rubbed them on my shorts, noticing that the temperature in the room had dropped enough to make my toes numb. I blew out air, watched it mist. Scrambling to my feet, I shot to the window.

The snow fell in sheets now. White smothered the still-blooming trees and flowers. Would be killing them fast at this rate.

I turned to find both sisters behind me, knew they’d found potential warriors, which could mean the norns wanted us to stop this.

Coral handed me her page and I stared at the picture of a tall guy with crazy-short hair so pale it looked gray in the black-and-white photo. Temper blazed in his eyes, but the hammer in the corner of the piece stilled my heart.

Kat’s boy looked a lot friendlier with an easy smile stretching his lips. This picture was in color. Sunlight sparkled on his light hair—the article was from one of those stupid tabloids and said something about a boy who called rain and made crops grow.

A shiver crawled up my spine when I looked back at the one I’d found. The story was several years old—about a boy and the wolf pups that had followed him home after the accident that killed his parents. I could see they were creatures of magic and that the boy held something powerful. It was there, in the eye not covered by his hair. Vanir McConnell, it said. Norse and Irish.

“Born of two magical clans,” I whispered, thinking of the swirled symbol shared by both.

“That share life’s spiral,” followed Kat.

Coral took her paper back, stared at it as her bottom lip quivered. “Light of head, dark of eyes.”

We didn’t say the rest aloud. We’d always thought it was so stupid.

The young warrior will herald the beginning of Ragnarok. His hand to the death of a norn.

The resulting silence was broken by the sudden violence of the snowstorm. It battered the windows and roof, causing me to clench my teeth.

“We don’t have much time,” I said. “It’ll be hard to travel soon.” I met Kat’s eyes. “We’ll have to use the college money.” They’d been saving, too. None of us wanted to believe our mother’s stories about one of us dying.

Kat crossed her arms, bit her lip. “Probably won’t need it, anyway.”

“We’ll need it,” I insisted. “I won’t accept that. We’ve worked too hard for it—a better life. We’ll just have to replace the money when we can. We’ll still go to college. If this really is Ragnarok and we’re in for three years of winter, it’ll just be cold. Life goes on.”

None of us said what we were probably all thinking. Yes, life would go on, but it was going to be different. Even if the prophecy was wrong and none of us died, the world would be very unlike what it had been. According to the writings on Ragnarok, there would only be one short summer break in those three years of winter. After that? I couldn’t form images in my mind. They all froze my blood. Tidal waves and earth-consuming fire. Even with the magic in my veins, I’d never, ever taken the stories of warring gods seriously. It was too big.

Too scary.

I looked down at the boy in the picture, at his one eye staring at me in an absurd parody of Odin and his one eye. “I’m pretty sure our mother went to find the guy who’s supposed to kill us. But which one?”

Kat voiced my biggest question. “You don’t think she’d actually hurt them, do you?”

Hot tears burned the corners of my eyes but I held them back. “You guys know we can’t let her. If they live to fight and we play our part, one of them could survive and there will be no end of the world.”

Coral sniffed. Tears streaked her cheeks. “We have to stop her. No matter what it could mean.”

We stared silently at one another, each of us knowing what the others were thinking.

I couldn’t worry about dying or losing one of my sisters. We’d never been apart. We fought, sure—all sisters do—but we shared a deeper bond, one forged through years of only having one another in the weirdest of living situations. Out of the three of us, only Coral had braved a date. It was hard to date when your mother thought every potential boyfriend could be a killer. Other than that, only our jobs separated us.

Pathetic? Maybe.

But our purpose had been drilled into us from birth. We carried the norns’ souls, making us the new sisters of fate. We carved the old words in seidr trances and revealed secrets, lies and hopes. And now, we had to find all three potential world-saving warriors because we didn’t know which one Mom had gone after first.

Or what she’d do once she found him.

I risked one hand off the wheel long enough to rub my temple. This anxiety was eating me alive. I’d been driving too long and my head had ached the past twenty-four hours. I missed my sisters. We’d never been apart this long before.

So when the flash of brown stepped in front of my car, I panicked and swerved. The car hit a patch of ice, glanced off a tree and sailed with a groaning, metallic cry right over a ravine and into fast-moving, icy water.

The jarring crash rattled every bone in my body.

Shock froze me for a second or two. Then the terror hit. I screamed as the car floated down the river, slamming into boulders and tree limbs like some tricked-out carnival water slide. My suitcase flew between the bucket seats and hit my shoulder, knocking me into the steering wheel.

Blinking, I wrapped my cold fingers around the wheel until they cramped. I couldn’t see crap! Ride it out or abandon ship? The decision was ripped from me when everything came to a jarring stop.

The car had lodged into...a fallen tree. I took a deep breath. But then the vehicle tilted and my head slammed into the driver’s side window. Metal groaned again. The weight of the car pushed into limbs, causing shrill, screeching noises as they scraped the door.

Freezing water soaked into my jeans and through my T-shirt, ribbed turtleneck and my favorite jean jacket.

Fear, pain and panic create a mess of stupid.

I chucked my ego into the river and started scrambling. Everything was slippery and cold. I shivered, slid and gasped as I tried to right myself in the tilted front seat without standing on the driver’s side window. With teeth chattering and water dripping into my eyes, I searched out a dry spot on my jacket sleeve to wipe them. Water dribbled into my mouth. I caught the metallic taste of blood.

I climbed over the side of the driver’s seat and into the back, trying to brace my feet on anything.

Wrapping my fingers around the metal casing of the broken rear side window, I held on, dangling. Dizziness swept over me and I closed my eyes, trying to wrestle my panic into submission.

I held my eyes tightly closed. Took several deep breaths. When it felt as if the world would stay still again, I opened one eye and pulled myself partly up through the window. The snow pounded, feeling more like ice pellets. They stung my cold cheeks. My breath caught on a sob as the car suddenly lurched, slid a foot or two, then settled into another tree.

That’s when I saw him. Crouch-crawling along that tree. A man. A really big man in a black parka with the hood pulled over his face.