by E. G. Foley
He loosened his lucky bowtie, then took his safety goggles out of his leather tool-bag and strapped them onto his head. He took a deep breath and let it out, feeling better already.
Time to get to work.
Absorbed in his tinkering, Archie was unaware of two large eyes watching him from the cover of the woods.
Crazy hair, bowtie, spectacles…
Check, check, check.
But that’s a puny one. Must be the runt of the litter, thought Snorri. Still, the little one fit all the bird’s specifications, and the opportunity was too good to pass up. Besides, he might be on the small side, Snorri thought, but maybe his brain was extra-large.
He looked around, saw the coast was clear, and made his move with impressive stealth for a person of his size.
Boom-boom, boom-boom…
Archie let out a startled yelp as the ground began to shake and rattle and pound violently enough to break his concentration on his work. Egads.
Earthquake!
But as he steadied himself, he frowned, for the slams came at regular intervals; it had a rhythm, and earthquakes didn’t do that.
The sound was getting louder. Coming up behind him?
“What the—?”
Squinting with confusion, Archie turned around…looked up…and stared for a second in disbelief.
Then he screamed.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Put Me Down!
The moment Miss Langesund told him someone was abducting scientists, Jake bolted out of the Viking ship museum.
His first thought was of Archie.
Cursing himself for being paranoid, he nevertheless raced back across campus to the building where he had left his cousin half an hour ago.
Though Archie’s panel discussion would still be in progress, he decided he would just sit in the back of the classroom and wait until it was over. Whoever was kidnapping scientists wasn’t going to get anywhere near his cousin, he vowed. But striding down the hallway, Jake saw the door to Archie’s classroom hanging open ahead, and when he leaned in, nobody was there.
A wave of panic started to wash through him until he read the announcement scrawled across the chalkboard.
Archie’s handwriting: Aerodynamics panel rescheduled for 4:00 this afternoon.
Relief made him clutch his chest and lean against the doorframe. Well! Something must have come up, Jake concluded.
He immediately wondered if one of the scientists on Archie’s panel had failed to appear. Might he be one of the missing? This made the danger seem closer than ever.
He stepped out into the hallway, wondering if Archie would have returned to their rooms for safety’s sake, or would he instead have gone to work on his experiments, simply out of habit?
Hesitating for a second, Jake realized Archie might’ve decided to sit in on one of the other lectures currently in progress. He walked down a few of the empty hallways, glancing into the other classrooms to see if his cousin had taken a seat inside any of them.
He passed an old janitor pushing a mop around, but paid him no mind—until the old man spoke after Jake had passed him.
“Looking for someone?”
Jake paused, arrested by that deep, gravelly voice with its rich Norwegian accent.
He turned around, surprised that a humble janitor could speak to him in English. “Yes, actually, I am,” he answered with wary gratitude.
As he walked back toward the old man, he couldn’t help but sense the force of character in his steely gray eyes—or rather, eye. He only had one; the other was covered with an eye-patch.
The janitor wore faded coveralls and old, battered boots. He was a large-framed man with a shock of pewter hair and a sun-browned face like a weathered hunk of wood, as if he had spent most of his life outdoors.
Must be an old soldier, Jake thought, judging by the missing eye and the way the janitor grasped his mop.
He held it like a weapon.
As Jake approached, the old man’s single eye searched him with a probing, piercing stare, as though he were taking his measure, testing his mettle.
Jake shook off a vague uneasiness about the old man. “I’m trying to find my cousin, Archie Bradford. He’s about my age and would’ve been the only other boy in the building besides me. He has dark hair and freckles—”
“That way,” the janitor interrupted gruffly, nodding toward the exit at the end of the hallway. “I’d check down by the fjord if I were you. Better hurry,” he added in a low rumble.
“Why?” Jake asked in alarm.
The janitor ignored the question and simply went back to pushing his mop.
But when Jake rushed off at his warning, the mysterious old janitor watched him with a close eye and a faint, speculative smile.
Jake burst out of the classroom building a moment later and raced down the winding path to the water’s edge.
He could have kicked himself for not realizing sooner that, of course, there was only one place Archie would have gone when his panel was postponed: to tinker with the Pigeon!
Creature of habit that he was, Archie would have likely gone back to the same spot where he’d landed his flying machine yesterday in boat mode.
Jake ran down the path toward the water’s edge, still a bit puzzled about how that strange old janitor could have known where Archie went. But even before the fjord came into view, he suddenly stopped in his tracks.
Boom-boom, boom-boom…
There it was again!
That same dull, deep, pounding noise that he had heard yesterday in the forest and had mistaken for an earthquake.
He still had no idea what it was, but if he could catch up to Archie before it faded, he had no doubt the boy genius would know.
In motion once more, this time he ran even faster, barreling down the graveled path.
Jake rounded the bend and came to the bottom of the hill where the campus path joined the waterside Promenade. But upon arriving, he skidded to a halt and gasped in shock.
The pounding sound continued in the distance as Jake stared in horror at the shore.
There, at the water’s edge, lay the Pigeon—broken, floating on her side, bobbing like a dead thing in the waves.
“Archie!” he yelled. His heart in his throat, he sprinted toward it. “Archie?!”
As he splashed out into the shallows and grasped the wing, he didn’t know if Archie had had an accident or what.
Taking hold of the Pigeon, he heaved it over, terrified he was going to find his cousin pinned underneath it, drowned.
But, no. As the Pigeon splashed upright onto its canoe bottom, water running off its sides, there was still no sign of Archie, and somehow, this was almost worse.
Jake waded out deeper into the cold, swirling waves in a panic, diving in to search the water for his cousin. “Archie?! Where are you? Archie!” he screamed.
“Help!” A thin cry reached him from the distance.
Jake whirled around just in time to see the trees shaking in one part of the forest. He brushed the icy water out of his eyes and squinted in confusion.
It was as though some large creature had just shoved the branches aside and was hurrying through the woods. The pounding noise seemed to be coming from that direction, too.
Instantly, Jake slogged out of the water. Dripping wet, he bolted across the pebbled beach, racing toward the woods.
Boom-boom, boom-boom! The noise grew louder as he followed Archie’s cry for help. It sounded like gigantic footsteps, but that didn’t make any sense.
Jake didn’t know what to think or what was going on, but that did not stop him from following. He dashed into the green, shadowy woods—not his favorite place to start with—and paused, glancing in each direction, unsure which way to go.
The booming was so loud now it seemed to be coming from everywhere at once, reverberating through the very ground.
How could it be anything but an earthquake? he thought. But when he saw the treetops shaking up ahead, he immediately followed.
“Hold on, Arch, I’m coming!” he shouted, though he doubted his cousin could hear him over the clamor.
Jake ran, tearing through the underbrush, until a wall of bramble-bushes blocked his path. Protecting himself as best he could, he charged through the mass of thorn-tipped branches.
Woody needles pulled his hair and scratched him through his clothes, but he was undeterred, until finally, he burst out into a clearing on the other side.
Unfortunately, he was too late.
As he stood panting in the grove, it was impossible to say which way Archie had been taken. The pounding sound was fading in the distance.
“Archie!” Jake screamed, his hands cupped around his mouth. He took another breath to yell his cousin’s name in the other direction, but that was when he saw it, and the shout died on his tongue.
There in the grove before him, smashed into the soft brown soil, was the most enormous footprint he had ever seen.
He walked over to it in a daze. “Impossible,” he whispered.
The footprint was about five feet long, heel to toe, and made an indentation six inches deep in the forest turf.
Stepping down into the footprint, Jake turned around slowly in a circle, staring at it in disbelief. Miss Langesund’s tales of the old Norse legends echoed through his mind. “Oh, we love our Norse giants and our trolls here in Norway…”
Giants? Then came a darker thought. Loki!
Impossible as it seemed, in a flash, Jake was fairly sure that a giant had taken his cousin. And that meant that Loki was further ahead in his plans than anyone had guessed.
Heart pounding, Jake flipped his wet hair out of his eyes, trying to think of what to do next. But he was at a loss. Even if he could somehow catch up to Archie’s kidnapper, what could he possibly do to stop a giant?
He was just a twelve-year-old kid.
But then, all of a sudden, a familiar war-cry like an eagle’s screech from above signaled that help was on the way.
“Caw!”
“Red!” Jake drew in his breath, looking skyward. “I’m down here, boy!” He waved his arms so that his fierce, feathered pet would quickly find him. But with his sharp eyes, the Gryphon had already spotted his young master.
The large, dangerous creature depicted on Jake’s family’s coat-of-arms came diving out of the blue sky, angled through the trees, and swooped down into the clearing.
Red’s powerful, scarlet wings fluttered until his lion-paws touched down on a sun-dappled boulder.
“Am I glad to see you! Perfect timing.” Jake ran toward the not-so-mythical beast and instantly noticed Red looked agitated.
No wonder.
The Gryphon’s sole mission in life seemed to be to protect him, and danger was obviously near.
But with the arrival of his fearless pet, Jake’s dismay turned almost magically into determination. “Someone’s taken Archie. I think it was a giant!”
“Caw!” A war-like glow filled the Gryphon’s golden eyes, as if he already knew.
“Did you see who took him, boy? Do you know where they went?”
The Gryphon tossed his head and whipped his tufted tail from side-to-side with anger.
“I’ll take that for a yes,” Jake mumbled, climbing onto Red’s back, where he took hold of the beast’s sturdy collar. “Right! Let’s go save our genius.”
“Caw!” Red agreed. Then the Gryphon jumped off the boulder and took a few running steps across the clearing, his broad, lion-paws silent over the forest floor.
Leaping into the air, Red unfolded his wings with a whoosh, then they were spiraling upward into the treetops. Jake held on tightly to the collar, his knees hooked in front of the Gryphon’s wing joints.
Within seconds, they were above the forest, gliding toward the summit of the hills.
Dense woods that could have hidden any number of unexpected creatures covered the dramatic contours of the Norwegian landscape; in the distance, the fjord was a deep, dazzling blue.
The Gryphon soared higher so they could see farther in every direction. The breeze grew chillier as they ascended. Red’s head moved back and forth as he scanned the landscape with his eagle eyes.
Jake searched as well. A flock of birds passed under them, flying in the opposite direction. Down on the water, countless boats meandered this way and that. Tiny people promenaded along the path or teetered along on high-wheeler bicycles like the one Loki had crashed in the Exhibit Hall.
On the hunt for Archie, Jake and Red skimmed across the brushy, greenish-blue tops of another stand of towering Norway spruces. They passed the plunging cascade of the mountain waterfall so close that they felt the cold spray of the plume fleck their faces.
Then Red took him higher, over the cliff at the top of the waterfall. Beyond that were more rugged hills.
Jake was beginning to despair of ever finding them in this thick wilderness, when suddenly he noticed that the trees ahead were shaking. He pointed. “What’s that?”
Red made a small, uncertain noise and headed in that direction. Mighty conifers and massive oaks and elms were being pushed aside as something passed below.
Something big.
Their trunks swayed as if they were no more than blades of tall grass that shook when a badger hurried through the underbrush.
Obviously, this was no badger.
Jake murmured to Red not to get too close. He wanted to see for himself exactly who or what they were dealing with before they allowed themselves to be spotted.
His pulse pounded with half-terrified excitement. He had seen a lot of strange things ever since his twelfth birthday, when his supernatural abilities had started to appear. Still, a real, live giant was certainly something new. As they got closer, he heard once more the echo of that by-now familiar rhythm.
Boom-boom, boom-boom, boom-boom.
A giant’s footsteps? That mystery was on the verge of being solved…
Flying low enough that they could easily duck behind the treetops if they had to hide, Jake and the Gryphon followed. Branches creaked and treetops crackled, and all of a sudden, a towering shape emerged from the forest.
Archie’s kidnapper walked through a clearing, and Jake found himself looking down at the top of a bald head.
He blinked rapidly, making sure his eyes did not deceive him. He leaned low against the Gryphon’s neck. “Do you see that, too, or am I losing my marbles?”
Red’s answer was a low, lion growl.
The bald head sat atop enormous shoulders and a huge broad back, clad in a plain brown coat. That was a giant, all right—a big, lumpy lurch of a fellow, about five times the size of an ordinary man.
Jake shook his head to clear it, and wished with all his might that someone would’ve told him before he came here that Norway had giants, for he’d have just as soon stayed home.
Instead, he urged the Gryphon onward, and as they got a little closer, he could hear Archie yelling at the giant at top of his lungs. “Put me down, you big oaf! You’ve got no business kidnapping me! It’s bad enough you broke my Pigeon after years of work and testing—”
“Stop squirming!” the giant rumbled at him in annoyance. “You complain a lot for such a little thing.”
“I’m not little, you’re ridiculously large! You’re not going to get away with this, you know. They’re going to come looking for me. Not to brag, but I happen to be a very important boy!”
This was the angriest Jake had ever heard his cheerful cousin sound, not that he could blame him. Keep yelling, Archie. It helped reassure him that he was more or less all right for now.
Though it was a great shock to see his cousin being carried off by a giant in broad daylight, at least now he knew for sure that Archie was alive. When the giant disappeared into the trees again, Jake and Red swooped after him.
Now that they had seen the towering kidnapper for themselves and had at least an inkling of what they were dealing with, it was easy to track the giant by the din of his pounding footsteps and the sh
aking of the trees as he passed through the forest.
At length, the giant climbed out of the woods and lumbered across a bare section of rocky ground. He seemed to be heading for the high, arched entrance of a cave set into the mountaintop.
When Jake noted the remains of a huge campfire outside the cave’s entrance, terrible fairytales about giants instantly came to mind.
Fee, fi, fo, fum, indeed. He’d better not even think about roasting Archie.
Jake watched intensely as the giant disappeared into the tall, yawning entrance of his lair; he murmured to Red to land somewhere in the woods where they’d be able to see the cave without being seen, themselves.
As the Gryphon descended, Jake felt much better knowing his cousin was nearby, still relatively safe. Now it was just a matter of sneaking into that cave and getting Archie out of there.
Maybe the other missing scientists were in there, too.
But why? he wondered. What did the giant want with them?
Considering the Viking prophecy about the Battle of Ragnarok, he wondered if the huge fellow was actually doing Loki’s bidding.
In the Exhibit Hall, Jake had seen for himself how interested Loki was in all the new gadgets—especially weapons, or as he’d called them, toys. Maybe Loki wanted to force the kidnapped geniuses to invent dangerous things for him to help him wage his long-awaited war against the gods.
As Archie’s huge kidnapper disappeared into the cave, Jake wondered how many other giants might be in there. What if there were more, the beginnings of Loki’s army of giants?
That would make rescuing Archie considerably more difficult.
When Red’s paws touched down on the forest floor, Jake slipped off his back, then they both crouched down behind a fallen log with a good view of the cave.
“Becaw,” Red said unhappily.
“I know, boy. Don’t worry, I’ll get him out of there. You did a good job finding him.”
Red pushed his feathered head affectionately against Jake’s shoulder, rather like a giant cat. The beast did not know his own strength, however, and only succeeded in knocking Jake over.
