Double Eclipse

  I looked at Molly. We had no choice: we had to let go of each other to get out of its way, and hope that we could rejoin our arms before the whale turned around and charged us. I nodded at her, hoping she understood. She nodded back, flashing me a grim smile.

  I slackened my arm and felt hers slide away. We kicked off the whale’s body, and it went speeding by us. It pivoted quickly, though, and swam back toward the shore to turn around.

  “It knows we’re trying to get to land!” I said as we broke the surface. “It’s pushing us back to sea!”

  “I can’t keep this up much longer,” Molly panted. “What are we going to do?”

  “We have to keep fighting,” I said. “Just a little longer. I think help is on the way.” I could feel it.

  “What do you mean?” Molly asked frantically, but there was no time to explain. We could see the whale’s dorsal fin straightening out and beginning its charge. We linked arms and dove under to meet it.

  But when we were up again, I pointed to the sky.

  “Look!” I said.

  “At what?” Molly said confusedly.

  “Clouds!” I yelled just before I grabbed Molly and pulled her under to face another attack.

  Molly’s face was still confused as we dove under, but then I saw comprehension come into her eyes. She understood.

  The sky had been crystal blue for the seven days we’d been here. But in the last ten minutes, it had begun to turn gray: thick dark clouds came rushing in, which seemed to form out of nothing. That wasn’t normal weather. That was magic.

  That was Thor.

  Or at least that’s what I told myself as, holding tight to Molly, my exhausted arms and legs fended off the twentieth or thirtieth lunge from our attacker. Because if it wasn’t, we were done for.

  “It’s Dad!” Molly screamed when we broke the surface.

  “It has to be!” I answered.

  “What’s he doing?” she said. “And why’s it taking him so long to do it?”

  I didn’t have time to respond before we had to dive under again. I had no idea what the answer to Molly’s first question was, but I was pretty sure the answer to her second had something to do with the huge distance involved. Dad was a thousand miles away. I’d never heard of anyone casting a spell from that distance. But Dad was the god of thunder. If anyone could do it, he could.

  The whale came at us and I readied myself to fight it off. My legs felt like jelly. My free arm was numb, my palm scraped raw. One more time, I told myself. I can do this one more time.

  The mouth was there, gaping open. I pushed at the side of the head weakly, barely keeping myself out of its jaws as I glimpsed one of Molly’s kicking legs. It actually struck the whale right in the lip. The jaws snapped shut, missing her foot by a fraction of an inch. The whale snapped its head up, almost ripping Molly from my grasp. We rolled down the length of its back until our arms caught the dorsal fin, which we wrapped around like a piece of ribbon. The whale rolled, pulling us lower in the water, then jerked the other way. I felt Molly’s hand slip down my arm, then pull free. I clutched futilely at her writhing fingers. I even opened my mouth and called her name, my voice sounding like a zombie groan beneath ten feet of water. As I watched helplessly, the whale’s massive tail struck Molly full in the chest and stomach and sent her flying.

  “Molly!” I screamed again, then choked as water rushed into my mouth. I barely managed to keep one eye on Molly and the other on the whale’s dark form as it rocketed through the water. I clawed my way to the surface, whirling my head around, trying to find Molly. The glowering clouds cast dark shadows, and I could barely see anything.

  Then I saw a flat form about fifteen feet to my left. It was Molly! Floating facedown in the water!

  I began swimming toward her, screaming at my exhausted limbs to move, dammit, get me to my sister!

  But even as I was heading toward her, a dark fin shot up out of the water and began racing toward her. It was farther away from her than I was but moving ten times faster than me.

  “No!” I screamed. It was all I could think of. “No! No!” Like the whale was a bad dog I was trying to frighten away from a kitten.

  But it ignored me and raced onward, its dark form cutting the water like a torpedo. Forty feet. Thirty. Twenty.

  Suddenly, the sky exploded in light and everything disappeared. I heard a tremendous crash, but all I could see was pure whiteness, even behind my squeezed-together eyelids. And then: silence, as sudden and complete as the flash of light.

  I pried my eyelids open. Everything was blurry and suffused with a golden aura, but I could just make out Molly a few feet ahead of me, and another dark shape floating a few feet past her. It was far too small to be the whale, but I could smell the distinct aroma of charred flesh.

  I raced to Molly with the last of my strength. Even as I got to her, her head jerked up, and she began coughing and choking.

  “It’s okay, Molly. I’ve got you. It’s okay, it’s okay.”

  “What—what happened?” Molly said. “Where’s the whale?”

  “I think Dad zapped it with lightning,” I said. I smoothed her matted hair out of her face. “It’s okay. It’s gone.”

  “But what’s that?” She was looking toward the dark mass floating about ten feet away. It had the unmoving quality of a dead thing, and it was completely flat in the water, but even so, we could tell it was human. Or at least human-shaped.

  We pulled ourselves slowly toward it, but my eyes were still so singed from the lightning blast that it wasn’t until we were right next to it that I noticed the stripe of red at its midsection, the distinct cut of a Speedo on a muscular man’s body.

  It was Ivan, and he was dead.

  25

  LOVE IS A BATTLEFIELD

  From the Diary of Molly Overbrook

  It took all my powers of persuasion to convince Mardi to get on the plane back to North Hampton. At first, she told me that she didn’t want to go anywhere near a plane that Ivan had touched—she was convinced that he’d booby-trapped it or something. Mum told her that it was unlikely we’d be in the same plane on the way back, since the charter company had been using it throughout the week, and Mardi reluctantly agreed. Later, though, when we were in our bedroom packing, she confessed to me the real reason she didn’t want to get on the plane.

  “It’s not Ivan I’m worried about,” she told me. “It’s Mum.”

  It was about six in the evening. Seven hours had passed since Ivan had attacked us. Mum raced back from her interview as soon as I called her. The first thing she did was make sure we were both unhurt, but aside from a few scrapes and bruises and being generally exhausted, we were fine. Then she stripped down to her swimsuit, grabbed one of those lightweight plastic kayaks that the hotel had provided, and set out to find Ivan’s body. At that point, less than an hour had passed since the attack, but there was no sign of it. Still, neither Mardi nor I thought there was any chance he was still alive—not in that body, anyway. There had been a hole in his chest the size of a basketball. You could’ve put your head through it and looked out the other side.

  “Sharks probably got ’im,” Mum said, her accent coming out more strongly than ever with her anger. “And good riddance.”

  Mardi and I were still in too much shock to ask her the questions that were burning in our both our minds. Had Mum known Ivan was a shape-shifter? And if so, did she know if he was the one who had attacked our father’s plane?

  “When I think of the trust I placed in him,” Mum growled. “My daughters’ lives! I want to resurrect him just so I can kill him myself!”

  We’d been due to fly out the next morning, but Mum called the charter company and told them she wanted to leave that day. There wasn’t a plane on the island, which was why we had to wait till the evening. Mum told us that we should both lie down, and I reluctantly agreed. I was exhaus
ted, but I was also so keyed up that I wanted to go for a run or pick up an ax and chop down a tree. I could tell Mardi felt the same way I did, but it was equally clear that she didn’t want to be separated from me, and so when I trudged down the hall, she shuffled after me, and when I climbed into bed, she slipped in behind me and curled her arms around me.

  “I can’t believe how close I came to losing you today,” she whispered in my ear.

  I wrapped my arms around hers, interlacing our fingers together. “There was no chance of that happening,” I said with a bravery I tried hard to feel, even retroactively. “Not when we work together.”

  Mardi pulled me even closer.

  “Remember we used to sleep like this when we were little girls?”

  I nodded. “Why’d we ever stop?”

  “I dunno,” Mardi said, and I could feel her shrug. I heard her open her mouth to say something, but all that came out was a yawn. It was infectious: my jaw fell open and a long, achy yawn sighed from my mouth.

  “I’ve never felt this tired in my life,” I said.

  Mardi nodded but didn’t say anything, and a moment later, I felt her breath come softly and evenly against the back of my neck. I thought about asking her if she was sleeping, but before I could get the words out, my eyes dropped closed, and I was asleep too.

  • • •

  The next thing we knew, Mum was shaking us awake.

  “Come on, girls, let’s get you packed and get to the airport. The sooner we’re off this island, the better.”

  My body felt stiff as a board, as though I’d been in a fight—which I guess I had been. Mardi was stretching awkwardly, and I could tell she was sore too. She voiced her reservations about the plane, and Mum reassured her, then left us to go pack her own things. That’s when Mardi dropped her bombshell:

  “It’s not Ivan I’m worried about. It’s Mum.”

  I looked at her, first in confusion, then in disbelief.

  “You think . . .” I found it hard to say the words aloud. “You think Mum was behind this?”

  “Think about it, Mardi. Ivan was practically Mum’s slave. He would never do anything against her will, let alone something as drastic as try to kill her daughters.”

  “But, but,” I stuttered. “It’s Mum.”

  “What does that even mean? We barely know her. About the only thing we know about her is that she wants us to kill our own father. So why shouldn’t she want to kill her own children?”

  “But it’s Mum! Our mother!”

  Mardi just looked at me for a moment. Then she shrugged helplessly. “Have it your way. But I’m not getting on a plane with her.”

  She grabbed her phone and, while I watched in disbelief, pulled up a number and pressed call. She held the phone to her ear for a moment, then pulled it away. “Huh.”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “I’m trying to call Ingrid’s, but it’s not going through.”

  It hit me then: Dad! We’d never reached out to him, to thank or tell him we were still alive, or just find out if it was him who’d saved us. I pulled my phone from my pocket and immediately called Ingrid’s, but I got the same result as Mardi: nothing. No ringing, no busy signal, nothing. I tried her cell then, and Matt’s, and Freya’s, and the North Inn, and Mardi did the same. But none of the calls went through.

  “Weird,” I said.

  “Weird?” Mardi said. “Or magic?”

  “You think it’s part of the same thing that stopped all our text messages and phone calls from going to each other?”

  As an experiment, I called Mardi’s phone, just to make sure we weren’t in some kind of dead zone. The call went through immediately.

  She turned to the bedside table then and picked up the hotel phone. It took some doing, but she finally figured out how to call the US. Once again, the phone on the other end refused to respond.

  “If someone did cast a spell preventing us from communicating electronically,” she said as she hung up the phone, “it wasn’t just on our phones. It’s on us.”

  “Or on the East End,” I said. “Remember how all those old messages came through about a half hour after we took off? Maybe someone cast some kind of perimeter spell that keeps us from communicating electronically.”

  “That’s a very specific spell,” Mardi said. “I have no idea how you’d cast it, but I suspect it’s not easy. It’d take a seriously powerful magic-user to pull it off.”

  “That rules out Mum, then,” I couldn’t stop myself from saying. “As a mortal, there’s no way she could cast a spell that powerful.”

  “Yeah, but Ivan probably could have. He was an elf, remember. And as his shape-shifting shows, he had some serious power.”

  “Which makes it that much harder to believe that he was following Mum’s orders when he attacked us. If he had all the power, why would he demean himself by following a human’s commands?”

  “I don’t know,” Mardi said. “But he certainly didn’t seem to have a problem with washing her clothes and fetching her drinks and all that.”

  “Whatever,” I said. “We can talk about this more later. For now, let’s just get home.” Mardi opened her mouth to protest, but I spoke over her. “For the gods’ sakes, Mardi. Mum’s going to be on the plane with us. She couldn’t hurt us without hurting herself.”

  Mardi just grimaced at me for a long moment.

  “Fine,” she said finally. “But I am not going to be happy about it.”

  Angrily, she began stuffing things in her suitcases.

  • • •

  The trip to the airport and taking off all went smoothly. Mardi might have been angry still, but she didn’t seem to want to pick a fight, with me or with Mum. At least not yet.

  Mum opened a bottle of champagne even before the plane took off. By the time we were at cruising altitude, we were already on our second bottle. We were drinking quickly enough that Mardi and I were feeling the effects of the alcohol, which, frankly, was a relief, because even though I’d told Mardi I didn’t believe Mum was behind Ivan’s attacks, I was still nervous about being thirty thousand feet in the air so soon after someone had tried to kill us. Just because I didn’t think Mum was helping him didn’t mean that he didn’t have some other partner out there. At least this wasn’t a seaplane—there’d be no whale rising out of the waves to smash us to bits.

  As we were settling into the third bottle, Mum sighed heavily. “Well, I suppose I owe you girls an explanation.”

  My heart did a somersault in my chest. I looked over at Mardi to find her staring at me, looking equally startled.

  “An explanation,” I managed to spit out. “About what?”

  “Well, about Ivan, of course,” Mum said.

  This time I didn’t look at Mardi. I was afraid that she might flash me one of her I-told-you-so looks and I might short out the plane’s electrical system.

  “Well, I guess, sure,” I stammered, “if you think you have to, but, I mean, you could’ve hardly known he was going to do something like that. Right?” I added desperately.

  Mum laughed. “Believe me, girls, I’m as surprised as you at what happened. But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t have seen it coming. Ivan has always been jealous of my attention. He often professed to love me, not in a platonic way, but in a romantic way. It sometimes made our relationship . . . tense.”

  It took me a moment to get it.

  “He wanted you to be his wife!”

  Mum nodded, a modest smile on her face, but you could tell she also felt she deserved it.

  “But Ivan was an elf!” said Mardi.

  “Not just an elf, he was an elf prince,” Mum corrected.

  “And he still wanted to marry a human?” asked Mardi.

  “You make it sound so degrading, Magdi!” Mum laughed. “And lest you forget, I’m not any just any human??
?I’m the mother of the Mimir. Elves have long awaited the coming of the new gods and the opportunity to restore the balance of power between the nine worlds.”

  “But,” I cut in, “if being the mother of the Mimir made you so special, why would Ivan try to kill us?”

  “I don’t think he was trying to kill you, Mooi,” Mum said. Before I could protest that if he hadn’t been trying to kill me, he had a funny way of showing it, she continued: “He was trying to kill Magdi.”

  “What?” Mardi and I said at the same time, even as the lights in the cabin flickered on and off.

  “Girls, please,” Mum said calmly but firmly. “Control your emotions, or you’re going to do Ivan’s work for him.”

  I looked at Mardi and nodded. I took a couple of deep breaths and saw her do the same. I wasn’t sure which one of us was sending out the energy that was messing with the plane’s electrical system, but the lights stopped flickering, and we both breathed a sigh of relief.

  “Thank you,” Mum said. “I’d hate to go down in history as the woman who missed the Grand Slam because she died in a plane crash.”

  “You were saying that Ivan was trying to kill me, not Molly,” Mardi prompted.

  “He never told me this, but that’s my suspicion. We had talked about your obvious discomfort with the information I gave you, and that Mooi seemed a little more receptive. When you two made up, we hoped that Mooi would bring you around, but Ivan was afraid that you were actually going to persuade her to distance yourself from me and the prophecies about the Mimir.”

  “‘Bring her around’?” I repeated. “For the record, I don’t remember ever signing on to the whole ‘kill Dad’ plan.”

  “Speaking of killing Dad,” Mardi said coldly. “Was it Ivan who attacked Dad’s plane? And did you know about it?”

  Mum’s face stiffened at Mardi’s words. She turned slowly to her.

  “Yes, Magdi,” she said in a soft and somehow disappointed tone, “I knew Ivan attacked your father’s plane.”