by E. G. Foley
He crept closer, trying not to let the gravel crunch too loudly underfoot. Then he held his breath, listening to the tense conversation in progress on the other side of the green boxwood wall.
“Those are some interesting children you have sitting at your table.”
Jake instantly recognized the mad prince’s voice.
“I met the older boy earlier today,” he continued. “Telekinesis? Very impressive. What do the others do?”
“So help me, you had better leave all four of them alone,” Henry warned.
“Or what?” the stranger taunted. “Do you think there’s anything you can possibly do to me? Frankly, I’m disappointed to see you letting yourself be used by lowly humans in this fashion—for what, a guard dog? Lapdog is more like it.”
“That’s enough, Loki.”
Loki? Jake’s eyes widened, but he set his astonishment aside for the moment as their tense exchange continued.
“Come, DuVal, you were meant for so much more than this, you and your beautiful sister. Both of you should join me. I always have room in my court for loyal subjects who share my blood.”
“We may share your blood, Your Highness.” Now it was Miss Helena who spoke. “But we do not share your views about the humans, so you’d better keep your distance from our charges.”
“Oh, my, my! Aren’t you precious! What a cute little threat, my dear. But you should know better than to try giving orders to your superiors. Bad kitty!”
Helena suddenly cried out in pain on the other side of the bushes.
“What have you done to her?” Henry cried while Jake held his breath, wondering if he should attempt to intervene.
“Loki, stop this!” the governess pleaded in a voice filled with pain.
Jake’s heart pounded as he listened. It sounded like she was being tortured!
It was all he could do to hold himself back.
Henry was furious. “Leave my sister alone!”
“What? I’m not touching her,” Loki said innocently.
“Henry, help!” Helena cried to her brother. “I can’t…make it…stop—” Her words broke off into a leopard’s roar.
Jake gulped while Loki laughed merrily on the other side of the bushes.
If only Derek Stone were here! The warrior had a particular liking for Miss Helena, and nothing would have stopped him from going to her rescue, even if this Loki was the actual Norse god.
“You find this amusing?” Henry snarled at the laughing loon-bat. “Let her change back, Loki! Whatever you’ve done to her—”
“Oh, shut up. Stop your whining! I’ve merely freed her true self, DuVal. And now I’ll do the same for you!”
When Henry let out a low shout of pain, Jake knew he had to do something. He had no idea what.
He moved his position, peering through the boxwood wall until he could just make out the shape of their tutor dropping to the ground, falling onto his hands and knees.
Loki laughed in delight, watching them. “Isn’t it liberating, Henry, to be who you truly are? You’ve grown much too civilized, the both of you. Her with her corsets, you with your cravats. So tidy, so disciplined! But you don’t have to wear a collar, Henry! Both of you can be free if you’ll join me! There, now. Doesn’t that feel better?”
Jake was already running down the side of the boxwood maze, trying to find an entrance. He did not know quite what he planned to do, but he had to help them somehow.
At last, he found an opening several yards away and flung around the corner.
“Enjoy yourselves!” Loki was saying. “Go and run free for a while! This is a gift I’ve given you both—welcome to Norway! Our lush forests should suit you well in your natural forms. Enjoy the break from all your tedious teaching duties. Take some time to think about my job offer, dear cousins. And don’t worry, I’ll look after those adorable children for you.”
Standing in the opening of the garden maze, Jake froze at the scene unfolding before him.
He had never actually seen Henry turn into a wolf before. He had only seen the end result, never the process.
It looked horrendously painful.
In the moonlight, the grimace of intense concentration on Henry’s face seemed to suggest that he was trying with all his might to fight the transformation. To remain himself, their trusty tutor. But it was no use.
“Blast you!” were the last human words Jake heard him say before great claws sprang forth from his fingernails. Fur sprouted from his face. His jaw buckled and began thrusting forward into a pointed snout.
Big, white fangs ripped down from his upper teeth, while his ears tapered into points rising from the sides of his head. He thrashed and let out a dog-like whine of pain.
Meanwhile, Helena’s transformation into her other form was already complete. In the sleek, silky form of a powerful black leopard, she was hissing at Loki.
She pounced in between the mad prince—or whatever he was—and her brother, at his most vulnerable in the middle of the changing process.
Henry’s cry of anger turned into a brief, canine yelp of pain as the base of his spine shot out into a furry tail.
Jake was aghast, watching it.
Although the change was nothing new to Henry or Helena, both being descended from a proud French shapeshifter lineage that boasted some of the finest bloodlines in Europe, Jake personally never could have imagined having to go through something like that.
As soon as their tutor had fully become a great brownish-gray wolf, he shook himself like a large dog to free himself from his neat tweed coat. All that was left of his clothes was the cravat tied around his neck like a dog’s collar, but he tore free of it with his front paw.
The DuVal twins, usually so civilized, were now in their most savage form, and both of them were furious.
They began circling the smug Loki, the wolf growling, the leopard snarling. Their white fangs gleamed in the moonlight as they warned their mysterious kinsman of his imminent doom.
Just as Henry and Helena lunged at him, Loki turned himself into a swarm of insects; the two big predators leaped harmlessly through the black, buzzing cloud of bottle-flies.
As the wolf and leopard landed and whirled around with angry snarls, Loki reconstituted himself into a man-shaped swarm of flies, laughed at them again, and flew away.
Jake’s eyes widened as the cloud of insects whooshed straight toward him, standing at the end of the green aisle near the entrance of the boxwood maze.
He tried to jump back around the corner to get out of Loki’s way, but he was not fast enough.
“Hullo, Cake,” Loki taunted as he rushed toward him, then the flies were upon him.
The bottle-flies swarmed Jake, swirling all around him—disgusting!—trying to get into his ears and his nostrils. All he could hear was the deafening buzz of their wings. Jake thrashed about and waved the insects off madly, but they just kept coming back, crawling through his hair, and trying to wriggle their way down into the collar of his shirt and up the edges of his sleeves.
“Get off o’ me!” he finally yelled, spitting out one fly that tried to crawl into his mouth when he spoke.
Having had his fun, the Loki swarm withdrew; the cloud of insects whooshed away.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Unchaperoned
Jake was left spitting with disgust and brushing off horrid, buggy, tickling sensations, while the trickster god, heading back down the garden path, turned himself back into his usual shape with a low laugh.
Coolly tugging his jacket into place, Loki strode back toward the dining hall.
Jake turned to find Henry and Helena as their respective animals loping toward him down the green boxwood corridor. Even though he knew they meant him no harm, he took an instinctive step back from the two large, wild-looking animals running straight for him. They stopped in front of him, both looking quite distressed.
The black leopard-Helena hissed in the direction Loki had gone, while wolf-Henry looked at Jake and tilted his head w
ith a nervous whine, as if to ask, “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine, it’s you two I’m worried about! How could this happen?” he cried. “Is that really Loki—the Viking trickster god?”
The wolf and leopard looked at each other, then at him, nodding their furry heads reluctantly.
“He’s real? And he’s your kinsman? Gadzookes, I don’t believe it,” Jake breathed, then he shook off his astonishment as best he could. “Never mind—just put yourselves back to normal and let’s go after him!”
When both animals made sad noises, Jake began to understand the situation. “What is it? What’s wrong? Can’t you turn yourselves back?”
The twins nodded.
“No, no, no. You’ve got to! Try harder! We need you! You can’t leave us like this! We’re just four kids in a foreign country, with a mad Norse god on the loose! Please!”
The pair exchanged a worried glance, and then proceeded to give it their best.
The wolf braced himself on all four paws and stared at the ground with his furry eyebrows knitted, like a dog trying with all his might to remember where he had buried his bone.
The leopard shut her golden-green eyes and let out a low meow of effort, plainly willing something to happen.
Nothing did.
Jake was getting seriously scared. “I’ll go send a message to Great-Great Aunt Ramona. I’m sure she’ll have some sort of spell that we can use to undo this…” The wolf suddenly bounded off while Jake was still speaking. “Where’s he going?”
His leopard sister turned around and watched Henry run back to his abandoned pile of clothes. The wolf rummaged around in his coat with his snout, then came back a moment later carrying his fob-watch in his mouth.
Henry dropped it by its small gold chain at Jake’s feet, much like a dog who had been taught to fetch.
Jake fought the urge to say “good boy,” since that was still his tutor in there. Immediately, he bent down to pick up the watch and grimaced as he wiped the canine slobber off it.
Henry let out a low yip.
“Oh! I get it! A watch…Time! Give it some time and maybe the spell will wear off? Is that what you’re saying?”
Wolf-Henry wagged his tail.
“Right! Of course. No need to panic yet. He’s a trickster god, not evil evil, like Miss Astrid said. This is probably just one of Loki’s pranks. I knew he was a loon when I met him earlier today in the Exhibit Hall. So, what do you think, then? We give it twenty-four hours, and if the spell hasn’t worn off, then send a message to Aunt Ramona?”
Both beasts seemed satisfied with this solution, though no one was happy about Loki’s trick. Wolf-Henry huffed as if to say, “This is very inconvenient!”
Leopard-Helena let out a low, vexed meow.
“Don’t worry, I’ll look after the others,” Jake assured them. “You two just stay out of sight some place until this wears off. Maybe I’ll do some snooping and try to figure out what Loki’s up to—”
Both twins growled at him in disapproval.
“Why not?”
Henry bared his teeth while Helena slashed the air with her claws in warning. Their message was obvious: “Too dangerous!”
“Fine. Don’t worry about Miss Langesund, Henry. I’ll tell her that you’re, er, sick.”
At that moment, Jake heard Loki yelling in distress from the direction of the terrace behind the dining hall.
“Help! Someone, help! Wolf! There’s a wolf on the grounds!”
Hang it, Loki was up to more mischief! Jake whipped around to face the terrace with a gasp. “That devil!”
But Loki wasn’t finished. Jake could hear him up on the terrace, shouting to the other men. “Somebody, do something! I just saw a wolf in the college gardens menacing a child! Quickly, bring a rifle! Shoot the beast before it eats the poor boy!”
Jake could hear the commotion growing louder as more of the gentlemen who had been smoking out on the terrace harkened to Loki’s alarm.
“Where did you see the beast?” one yelled.
“Near the garden maze!” said Loki.
“Call for the campus guard! He carries a gun!” another shouted.
Jake spun back to face Henry and Helena. “You’ve got to get out of here! Stay out of sight or they’ll shoot you. Hurry! Go to the woods! You’ve got to hide!”
The black leopard shrank into the shadows in fear, but the great wolf hesitated.
“Go, Henry! You’re in danger! I’ll leave your clothes under these bushes so you can get them later.” Jake was already shoving their clothes and shoes under the branches of a towering rhododendron, hiding them away. “If you’re not back with us as your regular selves in twenty-four hours, I’ll telegraph Aunt Ramona. She’ll know what to do—”
The sound of a gunshot interrupted him. The crack of a rifle tore through the night as someone on the terrace fired a shot into the air to scare away the “wolf.”
Jake turned to them, aghast. “What are you waiting for? Run!”
At once, the twins bounded off through the garden and disappeared into the night.
As they headed for safety, Jake immediately raced back toward the banquet hall to make the men call off this deadly wolf hunt.
Running through the garden, he could hear the commotion on the terrace growing louder. A crowd was gathering. Alarmed guests in formal attire were shouting suggestions at each other about what to do, and of course, there was Loki, right in the middle of the chaos.
“Did you say you saw the beast menacing a youngster in the garden?” one of the scientists cried.
The trickster god nodded earnestly. “Yes, it’s probably eaten him already. The poor lad probably never had a chance to scream!”
“How horrid!” a lady gasped.
“I’m fine, I’m right here!” Jake yelled as he pounded up the steps onto the terrace. “I’m the boy he saw, and there’s no danger! Everything’s all right, people!”
They seemed almost disappointed to lose out on their sport.
“Are you sure?” People gathered around him, while Loki stood back smirking.
“It wasn’t a wolf, it was just a dog, and he already ran away. Besides, he was friendly! Perfectly harmless, I assure you. The owner probably lives nearby. Anyway, he’s gone now,” he told them. “There’s no danger! No wolf hunt tonight, everyone!” he declared with as much authority as a boy-earl could muster. “Please, go back inside now. You’re going to miss out on your supper!”
This must have sounded reasonable to them, for the crowd dispersed, shuffling back inside to sit down for their meal.
All except for Loki.
He feigned a caring frown. “So, it wasn’t really a wolf after all?” the prince mocked him.
“Of course not—as you know perfectly well,” Jake shot back with a glare.
Loki glanced at the last of the adults heading into the dining hall, then he eyed Jake warily. “Well, you’re rather clever, aren’t you, Cakey boy?” he murmured. “But are you clever enough? That’s the question. After all, you’re not exactly a genius like the rest of us here, are you?”
Jake clenched his jaw at the insult, considering it was aimed at the exact weakness about which he already felt self-conscious in this place. He knew he didn’t belong here, but no matter, he told himself. He had come for Archie’s sake—to cheer on his cousin.
Refusing to be intimidated, he took a bold step forward as Loki drifted toward the shadows. “What have you done to the twins?” he demanded.
But the trickster merely gave him a sly smile, lifted his arms out to his sides, and suddenly, in the blink of an eye, turned himself into a crow as black as night. He let out a raucous caw and went flapping off into the sky.
Jake shuddered to witness such a thing.
As some sort of shapeshifter god, it seemed that Loki did not have to go through any pain to transform himself like Henry and Helena did. He could do it instantly, and unlike the twins, could assume various shapes, based on what he had told Jake
earlier in the Exhibit Hall. A salmon, a horse, a fly.
Even a woman.
A chill ran down Jake’s spine as it sank in that Loki could be anywhere, turn into anything…
Take on the appearance of anyone.
No wonder Ragnor the Punisher had tattooed the trickster’s cheek so he could be identified. Loki must have figured out a way to cover it up most of the time.
I’m going to need those Lie Detector Goggles, Jake thought. He glanced around uneasily, scanning the darkness in case Loki had doubled back.
His expression hardened. There was no telling what the devious fellow was up to, but Jake had not forgotten the mad prince’s interest in ‘those talented children.’
He had promised Henry and Helena that he’d protect the others in their absence. Without a moment to lose, Jake pivoted and marched back into the banquet hall to make sure Dani and his cousins were still safe. He might not be a genius, but he had guts.
If Loki wanted to harm the girls and Archie, he was going to have to get through him first.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Not The End of the World…Or Is It?
“There you are! Finally! I was starting to worry,” Archie said when Jake slid back into his seat at their table.
He was relieved to find the boy genius and the two girls just as he had left them, with Professor Schliemann still rattling on about his favorite method for removing dirt from his archeological site.
Jake was glad to see that Miss Langesund had not yet returned from fetching her father. Nice as she was, he was not looking forward to lying to her about Henry.
But it was not as though he could tell her the truth.
“Where are Henry and Helena?” Archie whispered. “What happened out there?”
Isabelle studied Jake with a worried gaze, but Dani frowned at him. “You all right? You look…weird.”
Jake did not answer directly. “Everybody, outside. Now. C’mon. We need to go.”
At his grim tone, Archie’s eyes widened behind his spectacles. “Something wrong?”
“You might say that,” Jake muttered.
“What is it?” Dani exclaimed.
