I attempt to calm my shivering and say, “I honestly don’t think it would be that bad to be here, except for the cold.”
She squats down in front of me. “Do you know why that is?”
I don’t answer. She whistles. A carriage, deep red and pulled by giant frost-covered elephants, trundles toward us through the trees of ice. Icicles hang from the reins that connect the elephants to the sled.
“It is warm within the mansions of Hel.” She reaches out her hand for me to take. And she must see my hesitation because she chuckles. “Do not worry. It is not the flaming hellfire your culture speaks of. You will see.”
I take her hand even though it’s the decaying one and try not to vomit from the way her naked bone feels beneath my fingers. Instead, I focus on the side of her face that is whole.
“See?” she says as she helps me into the sled. “This is why you are chosen. Not because of who your father is, not because you turned pixie queen. It is because you choose to look beyond the ugly. You choose to see the good even in monsters, Zara White. That is why you are different. That is why you are important.”
She puts more blankets over my legs and tucks them in beneath me before stepping in. “Bring us to Hel,” she tells the driver, a woman with black, frost-covered hair. The elephants snort and then move forward through the snow and ice. Hel turns to me, brings my face close, and breathes upon my skin to warm it up, the way a mother would.
“Sometimes the monsters are not monsters,” she says.
“I know.” I nod. “And sometimes the monsters are within us all, even in those we think are the most good.”
“You are shivering too much. Do not talk until we get to Hel and you are warmed.”
And so I don’t. We rush through the fog. It slaps at my cheeks like tiny pellets of ice, stinging the skin. I don’t see any animals other than the elephants. I don’t see any life, including any sign of giant worms. Thinking about Astley and the others, I say a tiny, silent prayer that Hel was not lying and that they are indeed safe.
She touches my arm through the blankets. “What is wrong?”
“My friends.”
She doesn’t say anything for a moment and we crest a hill, revealing huge, amazing mansions that gleam almost golden, dotting the landscape, shining with the suggestion of warmth. They remind me of French chateaus that kings used to visit, bringing their entire retinue.
“Hel is beautiful,” I gasp.
She smiles, revealing gums and teeth. “I will send for your friends, Zara. But if they become threats to my people, I will freeze them again. Understand?”
My heart beats a bit warmer even though the temperature hasn’t changed. “I understand.”
Hel has many mansions, each beautiful and elaborate and full of beings, but not so full that they are crowded. Tigers and bears stroll alongside each other, apparently peaceful. Old men lounge by fireplaces reading. Young women smoke cigars by the stairs. People wear modern clothes, ancient clothes. Some are missing flesh, like they were bitten by something. Some have marks from their illnesses upon their cheeks. But their eyes are lively and they seem content. I could stare and stare at them, I think.
“Not what you were expecting?” Hel ushers me through the front hall and into a long room full of mirrors. Gold trim glistens along the edges of the ceiling. A fire roars in a white marble hearth.
As I settle into a leather chair I say, “Not at all.”
The flames in the fireplace flare and give off the most beautiful heat in the entire universe. For a second, I let myself close my eyes and just breathe in the warmth.
“So, why did you come to Hel, Zara White?” Her question and voice are suddenly formal. When I open my eyes, I can tell that her posture is more rigid as well. She stands by the fire, waiting.
“We wanted—We wanted to know how to stop the apocalypse.” It sounds stupid when I say it like that.
“And you thought I would just tell you?”
I smile. “Um … yeah. We were hoping.”
She laughs. A slow-walking woman with hair like straw shuffles into the room carrying a tray of what looks like hot cider. I take one and thank her. One sip and I’m instantly warmed. Standing up, I investigate the room. We’re alone, but the mirrors show dozens of us. My hair is dripping onto my coat. It must have been frozen and it’s thawing now.
“I shall give you a choice,” Hel says, placing her own porcelain cup onto a silver tray.
I wait.
“You may either know how to stop the end or you may see your father again.”
My heart stops.
“My father or my stepfather?” I clarify because I have a biological father who died in the jaws of Fenrir, and I have a real father—the one who raised me. He died of a heart attack on our kitchen floor.
“Your stepfather.”
In the mirrors my face has paled. My eyes widen with shock and want. I want to yell that’s not a fair choice, stomp my feet, and demand both, but instead I say, “That is cruel.”
“I can only give one. I want you to have the choice.”
“Another test?” I ask.
She shrugs slightly. That’s all the answer she’ll give me, I know.
“Pick one. Your father or the world.”
There are little gold figurines on a side table. They shine in the light and I can’t resist the urge to pick one up. It’s the form of a deer lying down, legs tucked under her body. The weight of it in my hand is soothing and I stare at it so I don’t have to look at a mirror, don’t have to look at Hel.
In the past year, I’ve lost two people that I’ve loved so totally. The first was my dad. The second was Nick. And when you lose someone like that, it’s hard to describe, but it’s like something gets ripped out of your chest and you’d do anything—even turn pixie—to fix that hole in the center of you, to get them back, to see them, to talk to them. Before all this happened, I believed in God in the Judeo-Christian or Muslim sense but I still felt that incredible loss when they both died, and Mrs. Nix too. And there was doubt. There was this big doubt inside of me even though I believed in God. I was worried that they had just stopped existing. Not so much with Nick because I saw the Valkyrie take him away, but with my dad and Mrs. Nix nobody came. They were just gone, forever gone, and now—now I have the chance to speak to my dad, to see him again because he’s here, right here.
“I thought he’d be in heaven,” I mutter, examining the underside of the deer like it has all the answers. “Is there even a heaven? Or are you gods it? The ultimate?”
Hel gently takes the deer from my hand and places it back on the table. She sighs and her hands move to the sides of my face. “We are not all there is. Even Odin, who knows more than the rest of us, does not know everything, despite all the myths that say he does. There is power above us, yes.”
I cock my head a little, moving my cheek closer to her rotten hand. “Promise?”
She smiles, and even though there is jaw bone and teeth revealed in half that smile, it’s still beautiful. “I promise.”
A moment passes and then she drops her hands from my face and she turns away, giving me room.
I love my dad. He was the one who taught me to think, to write about human-rights violations, to care about people’s feelings, to memorize Booker T. Washington quotes. There would be nothing better than seeing him, hugging him one more time, smelling his dad smell and feeling his bristly skin where his beard grows in too fast.
But he wouldn’t want me to do this.
Not if it meant the world could end, although let’s face it, the world has issues. Big issues like sex slaves and genocide, racism, poverty, homophobia and wars, religious conflicts and environmental disasters—but the world is also worth saving because it has writers like Foucault and people like Issie and Grandma Betty. I know it’s not all cuddly puppies and rainbows and ice-cream sundaes, but it needs a chance, as many chances as it can get to survive.
“Tell me what I need to do,” I say.
The moment the words leave my mouth, the loss of not seeing my dad again hiccups through my chest, knives my heart into two. I bend forward from the pain of it.
Hel’s hand touches my shoulder. “Are you sure?”
I nod because I can’t trust my voice not to break. It’s hard for the words to come out of my throat. It’s like they have to push past something big and solid to make themselves heard. “I want to know how to stop the end.”
That’s what he’d want me to do, because it’s the right thing to do. Still, it feels so wrong. My legs crumple beneath me, and I sit down on the ornate couch without really realizing it. Hel reaches out a hand and gently touches my arm, and that’s when I realize that gods don’t work like people do. They barely speak our language. And they rarely make decisions out of empathy. Instead, they force choices upon us, always testing our character, always seeing what we are made of. Gods know that you can’t stop hurt. Gods know that you can’t stop endings and choices and pain, but people keep trying to do exactly those things.
I hide my face in my hands so she won’t be able to look into my eyes, won’t be able to see how much this decision hurts me, but I am sure she already knows.
She seems to understand and becomes brusque, no-nonsense, as if intuiting that any extra kindness will break my will, change my mind.
“I am sorry,” she says, and in those three words I can tell that maybe she doesn’t have a choice either. Maybe the rules are older than either of us, and stronger than I can ever imagine. Or maybe not, but I don’t think she can change the rules she must play by.
I grab her hand, the rotting one, and squeeze a little bit. “Tell me what I need to know, please.”
I tack on the “please” because I figure it’s best to be polite to Viking gods. My dad taught me to be polite to everyone. Have I forgotten that? My dad …
“Are you sure you are ready?” she asks.
“Yes.” The word just slips out.
She walks over to a mirror, not let going of my hand, and all I can think of is the mirror in the Harry Potter books where you get to see whatever you desire. But when we stand in front of it, the mirror doesn’t show us a vision of me saving the world. It just shows us, standing together.
“You are amazingly tall,” I mutter, and my voice sounds astonished, even to me. “You must be seven feet.”
She smiles but doesn’t say anything. She waves her free hand at the mirror and it opens on a hinge like a door. The air behind it smells of fire, rotten eggs, death. But the light isn’t red like you’d expect. It’s an icy blue like the inside of an iceberg.
“Step forward and look,” she says. “But do not let go of my hand.”
Her fingers tighten around mine and her arm extends to give me enough room to really see. The moment I step away from her, I can feel the tug of it—a gigantic pull, like gravity times a hundred. It’s a pit, an icy blue pit, that belches out a heat like an oven but worse, much worse. The pit or hole or whatever seems to go down forever and ever.
“What is this?”
She hauls me back to her. “The mouth of Hel.”
“Your mouth?”
“The Hel of this place, this land.”
I try to digest that. Issie had said there was a hell mouth in Buffy shows. I should have paid more attention. Why do I never pay attention to pop-culture references? Probably because that one involved Issie going on and on about cute British vampires.
“This is what will swallow up the world,” Hel’s voice breaks into my thoughts, “if you fail.”
“And I succeed by not doing what exactly …?” I try to get her to just come out with it.
“There is a prophecy that not many are aware of. It says that the fall of one who is half of the stars, half of the White, half of the fae, half of the willow, can stop this.”
“And you and Frank and Isla believe this is me?” I say. “But not anymore. I am not a pixie anymore. Not any of me.” The hopelessness of it gets to me. “I can’t stop this. It’s already too late. Isla turned me back—I wish she’d just killed me! Why didn’t she just kill me?”
“That I do not know, but you still have power, Zara of the White. And some might want that power.”
“I am human.” I sputter it out almost like being human is a fate worse than death.
“Do not devalue humans.”
“I’m not! It’s just that the prophecy says ‘half fae.’ I’m not even that anymore. I’m all human now. So, honestly, how can I do this? Astley says I could die if I turn pixie again. I can’t save anyone if I’m dead.” I let go of her hand as the mirror door slams shut. “And you haven’t told me how I fall. Do I fall in the pit? Do I fall down on the ice? Why must prophecies be so freaking obscure? Why can’t they just state things nice and easy, like, ‘Zara White must be in full pixie form and fall down outside her high school at precisely two a.m. on December 23 for the apocalypse to be averted.’ Why can’t it be like that?”
She sort of chuckles. There is nothing worse than gods chuckling.
“It’s not funny!”
“Are you speaking back to me?” she asks, laughing even harder.
I cross my arms over my chest. “I guess.”
“Only gods do that.”
I apologize.
“I found your ranting amusing,” she says, composing her face into something slightly more serious. It looks like it takes her some effort, because her eyes are still twinkling.
I make a harrumphing noise, which I figure is a nice cross between politeness and showing my disapproval. “I just wish I knew exactly what to do.”
She places both her hands on my shoulders and I tilt my head up so that I can meet her eyes. Her voice is serious again as she says, “Let me give you a warning.”
I wait.
“Zara, others may still try to trap you, even turn you back into a pixie, to make your power their own,” she says.
I feel like that little glittering deer figurine, unable to move by myself, trapped by everybody else’s wishes and needs, trapped by destiny.
“You mean Frank?” I spit out his name, then realize she might not recognize him by that one. “Belial?”
Nodding, she drops her hands from my shoulders, moves back to the wall of mirrors, and rests her forehead against one. “When you are turned, your king’s needs become your own. His darkness or his light begin to infect your soul. With the star king, it was light. His goodness and your goodness combined to make you and all your pixies stronger. Even though you are no longer a pixie, you still have that goodness and you are still the key to stopping the apocalypse. However, that also means you may still be the key to starting it.”
“So even though I’m not a pixie, they need me to start it all.”
“No matter what your enemies might think, starting the apocalypse has nothing to do with being pixie. It has everything to do with being human. However”—she pauses—“the pixies who want to end all things human believe that if they kill you immediately after the apocalypse begins, there will be no entity capable of stopping it.”
“Oh,” I say.
“Yes,” she echoes me. “Oh.”
FROM AGENT WILLIS’S PERSONAL LOG
I think I’m going to have to request more manpower in this case. I honestly feel like I’m in a sci-fi episode playing the clueless federal agent, but I have never seen such a lack of evidence or pieces that just do not go together. Sometimes I think we are dealing with one killer. Sometimes I think we are dealing with dozens. Possibly a Satanic cult? The town is on the edge of all-out panic. People are leaving on extended vacations, and those who have stayed behind have a look of intense anxiety. I am failing these people. I know it.
Hel gives me a second to compose myself, which is kind of her. She moves out of the room and issues orders in a language I don’t understand. The air trembles with the first sounds of a flute. It trills into a beautiful song that lilts with the promise of spring and kittens and flowers poking from the earth. There is music
in Hel. Who knew?
The chandeliers jingle lightly, almost as if they are reacting to the flute song. I walk past the mirrors and giant windows that look out upon the snowy landscape. I move past the gilded moldings and the seven-foot gold candelabras that burn with crystal flames. Each step on the marble floor pushes a little more strength into me. Each step convinces me that I’ve done the right thing. Each step makes me harden up a little more, because if I don’t make myself harder, I will just fall down and cry over losing the chance to see my dad.
Hel waits for me at the end of the hall. She envelops my hand with hers and ushers me onto an interior balcony that wraps around a large courtyard-type room full of people who are both lounging and busy. The flute music comes from a little girl who sits on top of a gilded piano in the center of the room.
“She’s so young,” I whisper.
“Many of us are young when we die.” Hel states this like it is nothing, and maybe to her it is nothing, but to me? It’s a whole lot of something.
As we walk, I get a better angle at the room below us. There are about two hundred statues, spouting water. They are bronze and gold and crystal, and most seem to have something to do with Norse mythology. Giant wolves snap at the moon. Horses paw at the air. Giant tree sculptures reach up to the ceiling and embrace it.
“So,” I say again, hoping for more information, “how do we stop this Ragnarok thing?”
“You can’t wait for it to happen. You have to go to it. What is the word you use in your country, in your time? You have to be proactive, not reactive?” Her hand flutters up into the air like she’s trying to find the right way to tell me.
“Strike first?” I can’t believe a god is telling me to be proactive.
“In a way.”
“Everything we’ve read says that freeing Loki is the big signal that starts the apocalypse rolling. It’s in all the books, the ancient texts, the Internet sites. Because I can refuse to do that. I will never do that.” My voice comes out so hard and so tough that it surprises me.