Last Shadow Warrior

by Sam Subity

  I let out a yell and launched myself at the car again, hitting the hatchback door like it was a football blocking sled and shoving for all I was worth. Gritting my teeth and grunting as I leaned into the unyielding steel frame. Finally, there was a small click. It was closed.

  Feeling a sudden rush of swagger from my little victory, I stepped back and stared defiantly into the night. “I’m not afraid. I’m not—”

  BANG!

  A small explosion came from inside the car, but I was through the front door of our house like a shot, not waiting to see what it was. Probably the bag of potato chips I’d stashed for a late-night snack.

  “All packed!” I announced, tossing the keys but missing the bowl on the coffee table in my hurry to cross the living room. Two mismatched chairs huddled around the scarred old table like a life preserver in a sea of shag carpet. Everything in the room was probably older than me.

  Dad looked up from the kitchen table. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to be outside alone right now, okay?”

  “Sorry … I guess I wasn’t thinking.”

  “It’s okay. I just want you to be safe.” His gaze dropped back to the road map spread out in front of him. I’d tried to get him to use Google Maps, but he was hopelessly old-school with most things. “And I want to get on the road ASAP.”

  I couldn’t help taking a peek over his shoulder at the map. The midwestern United States sprawled across the table, suggesting any of hundreds of potential destinations. Chicago? Cleveland? I shuddered. It was impossible to guess.

  My thawing fingers prickled as I tucked the wild wisps of my chronically frizzy red hair under the edge of my blue Tar Heels ball cap. Dad always said he didn’t know where I’d gotten the funky-hair gene but that he thought my hair was a reflection of my personality—unique, passionate, strong. Weird was more like it.

  “Abby?”

  I met Dad’s gaze in the mirror on the far wall. His eyes were dark, unreadable pools.

  I turned toward him, thinking maybe I’d finally get some information. “Yeah?”

  One corner of his mouth turned up. “You’re blocking the light.”

  I blinked, then straightened and turned away, deflated.

  “Do you need to use the bathroom before we go?”

  “Dad. Again. Twelve. Not two.”

  “Old habits …” He trailed off as the screen of his cell phone lit up. He snatched it off the table, but not before I read the first line of the message:

  Hurry. Events in motion.

  He typed a quick reply and then shoved the phone into the pocket of his pullover before turning back to me with a flicker of fear in his eyes. “Time to go.”

  Then we were on the road, disappearing into the night. I clutched one of Mom’s worn flannel shirts that I now wore tighter around me, hoping to draw some of her strength from it. Because she’d been a true warrior. And not just metaphorically speaking, like she was super tough or something. No, she was descended from an actual line of Norse chieftains. Tight-lipped and stoic were sort of in her genes.

  But I always knew she loved me. Despite her frequent absences on what she called monster-hunting expeditions, tracking our ancient enemies, the Grendels. Even though there hadn’t been any recent confirmed sightings, Mom knew the Grendels were still out there. Somewhere. Maybe in hiding, biding their time until the right moment.

  I craned my neck, looking through the car’s rear window as if clinging to a lifeline. Our little white house framed in a rectangle of glass like a painting of a safe haven in the wind-tossed sea that was my life. Then we turned the corner and it disappeared out of sight, leaving me with a few cardboard boxes full of my stuff and a secret that would follow me wherever I went.

  That I was just an ordinary girl from Charlotte. Who happened to be a Viking.

  Four a.m. at an all-night Waffle Stop off the interstate in southern Ohio looks about what you’d expect. A tired-looking waitress idly polishing cracked Formica tables while she waits for the end of her shift. In one corner, a solitary guy huddling over greasy eggs, looking like he regretted both the reheated bacon and the strange twists of fate that had brought him to that moment.

  I could totally relate to that. If someone had asked me yesterday where I’d be spending my next twenty-four hours, hurtling through darkness toward an unknown destination wouldn’t have been remotely near the top of my list. As we exited the restaurant, I earned a sidelong look from my dad when I shoved the door open hard enough to make it rattle against the doorstop.

  I shoehorned my five-foot-two frame into the back seat behind oversized cardboard boxes full of books. Because this is the reality of life as the kid of an English teacher. Instead of competing with real siblings, you lose shotgun to old, dead dudes like Shakespeare and the Brontë sisters. It only made me mildly insecure when Dad’s immediate reaction whenever he hit the brakes hard was to throw out his arm to protect the books the same way he’d do with his own flesh and blood.

  Our tires yelped on the cold pavement as we pulled away from the yellow glow of the Waffle Stop sign. I turned a raised eyebrow to Dad’s reflection in the rearview mirror, but he was busy singing along with “Let It Be” on the radio. Mom had been a huge Beatles fan. My name even came from their album Abbey Road. So listening to her favorites had become one of our ways of keeping her memory alive, especially when we were going through a tough time.

  I’ve heard that poker players have “tells” that clue you in to their hand. Dad’s was singing. He’d never let anyone hear him sing unless something was really bugging him. Right now, outwardly he was doing an Oscar-worthy job of faking it. But I could tell by the way he was really drawing out the notes in the chorus that he was majorly tense. It wasn’t the first time we’d pulled our Houdini act, but something about this time was different.

  He took the turn onto the freeway on-ramp like we’d just robbed a bank. The sideways momentum threw me against the pile of stuff in the seat next to me, and I winced when the side of my head came into contact with something hard. I extracted a dog-eared Roget’s Thesaurus from the pile and stuffed it into the footwell.

  “Sorry, honey,” Dad said with an apologetic look. We merged onto the freeway to join the few other anonymous sets of red taillights momentarily united by our mutual disregard for the waking hours of reasonable people.

  I studied his reflection in the rearview mirror. The crease of worry lines on his forehead and frequent checking of the side and rearview mirrors belied his calm exterior. He noticed me watching him and turned down the radio.

  “Everything okay back there, kiddo?” He smiled at me, but the smile didn’t reach his eyes.

  “Yeah, just … Don’t you think it’s time you let me know what the plan is? Where we’re going at least?” I shifted positions and immediately started to feel prickles in my numbing leg. Realizing I’d probably sounded a little harsh, I softened my tone. “I mean, we talk about things, you and I.” Or was it you and me? The kid-of-an-English-teacher thing again. “No secrets between us. Right?”

  As I’d gotten older, I’d noticed that adults sometimes put on brave faces thinking they’re somehow protecting us. Especially if they think it’s better for us that way.

  Dad considered this for a long time, then nodded slowly and said, “That’s fair. You deserve to be a part of this and not just along for the ride. So what do you want to know?”

  I sat forward, a million questions popping into my head all at once. “Well, how about where we’re going for starters?”

  He nodded again. “They’re moving us to Minnesota. To Minneapolis, specifically. It may be temporary. Or not. I don’t know. It’s just … Things are all sort of happening pretty fast right now.”

  “They?”

  “The Grey Council.”

  So the faceless entity that seemed to pull all the strings in my life from behind the scenes. Where we lived. When and how I could train and study. Sometimes it felt like even how many marshmallows I could have in my Luc
ky Charms. Great. “But what’s the plan, then? We just stay hidden until things blow over?”

  “Not exactly. You’ll be attending a school there called Vale Hall.”

  Vale Hall. It sounded like one of those preppy academies for rich kids. Which was … definitely not me. My stomach twisted into a knot as I thought of starting over again at yet another new school. Trying to fit in. Making new friends. The thousand-miles-and-a-left-turn-from-cool new home we were being banished to loomed ahead like some frozen, forbidding wasteland.

  “It’s where your mom went when she was your age.”

  I leaned forward. “Where … Mom went?” I knew she’d grown up somewhere up north but had always been fuzzy on the exact details. This unexpected chance to maybe fill in more pieces of her past suddenly made the whole prospect of moving a little less painful. “Where will we live? What will you be doing? I mean, you sort of had to bail on your old job and all.”

  Smiling at my new enthusiasm, he said, “Well, my old school has already been gracious enough to grant me an indefinite leave of absence. And I’ve been offered a teaching position in Vale’s English department. The new appointment comes with its own cottage right off the school’s campus. Just big enough for the two of us.”

  I stared out the window into the dark, trying to picture our new life that lay ahead.

  After a long pause, he added, “There’s just one part you may not be too excited about.”

  I jerked my head to look at him, alarm bells going off in my mind.

  His eyes flicked toward mine, then back to the road. “They sort of didn’t have any spots left in the sixth grade. With the school year having started already and all, you know. Except one. So they’re bringing you in on a knattleikr scholarship.”

  The word rattled around in my head like a coin falling into an empty jar.

  Kin-attle-eye-kur.

  When I didn’t say anything, he continued, “It’s sort of a mash-up of lacrosse and rugby.”

  I waited for more, but he just studied the road in silence. Maybe he was kidding. Was he kidding? The word sounded like something from Balderdash, that game where you make up definitions of words no one’s ever heard of to try to fool your friends. Dad had always been great at that game. Knattleikr: sort of a mash-up of lacrosse and rugby.

  I decided to call his bluff. “LOL, Dad. You almost got me there.”

  He shook his head and gave a little shrug. “Not kidding.”

  “But … but,” I sputtered. “I’ve never even heard of it before, much less played it. Are you sure it’s a real sport? Maybe I could kind of, you know, skip that part and no one would notice?”

  He laughed. “I’m pretty sure you have to at least go to practices and games or risk forfeiting the scholarship. Anyway, I’m glad your mom isn’t around to hear you say that. She loved knattleikr. I guess it’s real popular up north where we’re going. Sort of like North Carolina’s obsession with basketball.”

  I was just about to reply when the voice of Darth Vader cut in from the GPS suctioned to the dashboard: “Take the ramp ahead, then continue approximately forty miles.”

  The GPS is Dad’s one piece of technology from this century, and even that’s out of date. I got him the one with the Darth Vader voice for his birthday a few years ago as a joke, but he uses it all the time. Unlike the cereal bowl I made him out of construction paper in second grade. Turns out paper isn’t the best at holding milk.

  Dad nudged the GPS screen in his direction so he could see the map better. “Any word from Aunt Jess yet?”

  I knew he was trying to change the subject, but I dug my phone out of my back pocket anyway. There was only a link to a cat video that one of my friends had sent me. No word from Aunt Jess. She’s my mom’s younger sister, but I’d only really gotten to know her well since Mom’s death. I guess loss and grief sometimes bring people together like that. She lived on the West Coast, so we rarely saw her, but she was an Aesir like my mom. Like I desperately wanted to be.

  The Aesir are an elite class of Vikings with one main mission: to protect humanity from Grendels. You know, no big deal or anything. They have what my mom always called “extranormal abilities.” Since I’ve never felt normal at all, being extra normal always sounded pretty great, to be honest. It’s hard making close friends when you feel like you’re constantly hiding a big not-normal part of yourself. But in this case my mom just meant a variety of special abilities. She’d had the most amazing brain and could figure out what seemed like anything. Aunt Jess’s talents lay more on the athletic side. Mine were, well, still TBD. Short for “too bad, dude.” Because Aesir abilities aren’t necessarily passed down genetically. And usually by my age you know if you’re one or not. So the needle on my Aesir-o-meter was leaning hard toward “not.”

  “Nothing from Aunt Jess yet,” I said, and slid my phone back into my pocket without watching the cat video. I’d texted her before we left. It wasn’t like her to take so long to reply.

  “She’s probably out on one of her scuba-diving or rock-climbing expeditions,” Dad said. “I’m sure she’ll have some more exciting stories to regale us with when she gets back to civilization.”

  “Mmm …” I mumbled in reply, not really paying attention. Something about the timing of Aunt Jess’s silence set off the paranoia alarm in my brain. Was there some bigger picture I was missing here?

  Sometimes having time to think is therapeutic. But too much time can get your brain twisted into more knots than a string of Christmas lights in October. I leaned my head against the cold glass of the car window and chewed my bottom lip in frustration. Eventually the rising sun turned the sky a canvas of gold and orange. Buildings and trees took shape in the gray dawn, and then more cars joined us as rush hour came and went. Exits and overpasses led to more of the same endless gray miles. It’s impossible to understand how mind-numbingly long all those inches on a map really are until you drive them. We stopped now and then to gas up and for bathroom breaks. Later, with my stomach comfortably full of waffle fries and a chicken sandwich from lunch, combined with the steady hum of tires on asphalt, I drifted into a drowsy, Zen-like daze.

  “Ooh, it’s starting to snow!”

  I woke with a start at Dad’s words and realized I must have drifted off. The sun was hidden behind a canopy of slate-gray clouds. What seemed like the same trees and empty countryside flashed by the window like we were stuck in the most boring infinite loop ever.

  We passed a sign that read “Minnesota Welcomes You” as a few solitary white flakes swirled past my window, spinning and dancing wildly in our wake. Some welcome. The snowfall rapidly increased as we drove north and west. I shifted my gaze to the sprawling suburbs sliding past beyond the freeway while the world seemed to turn white. It looked like a thousand little kids had blown soft dandelion-seed wishes that filled the sky and settled to the ground.

  I made my own silent wish that I could somehow live up to my mom’s legacy and make her proud. Even though I knew by now one of the big secrets about growing up: Wishes don’t come true. Not really. They just float to the earth like tiny snowflakes and dissolve into nothing like they were never there. Still, I couldn’t completely let go of the hope that maybe I just had to find the right wish.

  The snowfall intensified until even to my inexperienced eyes, I’d say we were in the middle of a pretty decent blizzard. The sky had grown prematurely dark from the storm, making the afternoon look more like twilight. Eventually I noticed I hadn’t heard anything from the front seat for a while, so I sat up and rubbed my forehead. “You okay, Dad?”

  He sat hunched forward and squinting out the windshield, doing barely thirty in the swirl of white all around us. “Yeah, I—” Our car suddenly rocked side to side, buffeted by the wake of another car passing. In weather that would be basically an apocalyptic event back home, Minnesota drivers gunned their engines and cruised by like it was the Minneapolis 500. I turned and looked out the back window as an SUV suddenly emerged from the whiteness behin
d us. It spotted us at the last minute and careened into another lane to avoid turning us into roadkill.

  The swirling flakes obliterated the view beyond maybe five feet in any direction. But as I stared behind us, a single bright headlight materialized out of the snow. I don’t know why, but a little chill ran down my spine. The light grew larger and larger until I couldn’t imagine what it was attached to. For a second, the wild idea gripped me that we’d horribly lost our way in the storm and driven onto a railroad track where we were about to be crushed by a train. But I realized that was impossible. Right?

  Still, the circle of light behind us continued to grow, never wavering despite the wind and snow. Soon the shape of a big black motorcycle materialized. No, not just big. Ginormous. Cars swerved and skidded off the road to get out of its way.

  Straddling the motorcycle was a massive figure in wraparound black sunglasses and a thick mustache caked with snow. He looked like he could bench-press our car with his pinkie. Despite the freezing cold, the guy was wearing only a leather vest with his large, muscled arms exposed and leather chaps over black jeans.

  As he pulled up alongside us, I craned my neck to stare up at him. At full height, I guessed he was at least eight feet tall. I blinked, thinking maybe the storm was playing tricks on my eyes the way mirages do to people stranded in the desert. But he was still there. And still huge.

  Then he turned to me all cool-like. He smiled and tipped his dark glasses down. And I about needed a change of pants.

  Mr. Big, Dark, and Scary had no eyes.

  “D-D-Dad,” I sputtered, pawing at his shoulder while my brain froze like it had lost its Wi-Fi signal.

  “Abby, what are you … ? Can’t you see I’m trying to … ?” Then the car swerved off course, and I knew he’d seen him too. He gripped the steering wheel so tightly I could hear the plastic creak in protest. “Hold on.”