Once they were a little farther from the others, but still in sight, Owen said, “I want to go to Saint Agnes with you, but the twins will die if I do. The ravens tell me I need to go right now.”
No one else could hear him, and she wondered if he wasn’t supposed to tell her. She was pretty sure she wasn’t to tell anyone, or else he wouldn’t be pulling her away and whispering. She glanced at the birds warily. It wasn’t that she hated birds, not really, but they always seemed more frightening than she wanted to admit to anyone. She’d read that they were supposed to be descended from dinosaurs—which didn’t help ease her fears at all. Thought and Memory, Owen’s ravens, were staring at her; they’d been watching the descendants for who knows how long.
“You shouldn’t lie to me anymore,” Laurie whispered to Owen. She glanced pointedly at the ravens. “You didn’t want us to know we were being watched. I don’t know why, but secrets are why they don’t trust you.”
“Do you trust me?”
Laurie paused. She wasn’t sure why, but she did.
“What’s he saying?” Fen demanded.
Laurie’s gaze drifted to the ravens’ sharp beaks and talons.
“Cool it, Fen.” Matt sounded exhausted. “Please?”
The birds watched her.
“For now,” she told Owen. “I’ll trust you for now. No more secrets, though.”
“When I return, I’ll tell you what I can, but I can’t tell you everything. There are rules.”
She nodded, and Owen smiled.
“For now, try to make peace with your cousin. I provoked him so he would hit me. Don’t be angry with him because of today.”
Laurie blinked at him. Owen’s request to her was to patch things up with Fen. It was unnecessary. They always made peace. They were too much alike to avoid fights, though, and he was too protective of her, but after their tempers faded, they were fine again. “Fen and I are okay. We always are.”
“I hope so,” Owen said.
Laurie panicked a little at that. Owen saw the future. His tone made her think that he saw a future where she and Fen weren’t fine. That wasn’t going to happen. She wouldn’t let it.
Owen raised one arm in a signal of some sort and started to walk toward the shadowed trees. Every Berserker who was in the camp started following him, moving around him like ripples spreading out from a center. Owen was their center.
“Hey, wait!” Matt called. “We need to find Mjölnir, and we could use a few of them—”
“No,” Owen said. “I have to go somewhere. You four should go after the hammer.”
“Okay,” Laurie said.
“Now, wait a minute!” Fen ran forward and grabbed Owen’s arm, yanking him to a stop. “You have your birds follow us. You talk to my cousin away from all of us alone twice now—back in Blackwell and in the Black Hills. Now, when you know we need help, and you have all of these kids helping you, you leave? Thorsen needs his hammer, and the bad guys knew where we were, so they probably know where it is.”
“You should probably go now, then,” Owen said mildly. “I have something else I need to do.”
“He’s the All-Father, Fen,” Matt started. “Whatever he sees must be imp—”
“Not more important than this,” Fen interrupted.
“You are impulsive like Loki. You forget there are consequences until after it’s too late,” Owen said musingly.
“So?” The flash of teeth that Fen showed Owen would’ve caused most people to hesitate or at least pull away. Owen, however, acted as if Fen weren’t threatening him. He stood perfectly calm and relaxed, waiting.
Fen said, “Matt was knocked out. We fought monsters. What we should do is get some sleep, and you all come help us with Mjölnir in the morning.” His voice was more growl than words. “They need to be safe, and Thorsen needs his hammer.”
Owen smiled at Fen. “I see the future, Fenrir. I know what’s going to happen, and I’m not going to be with you at Saint Agnes.”
“Fen, let go of him,” Laurie said.
Matt and Baldwin might have said something else, too, but Fen wasn’t listening to them. He stared at Owen, ignoring the ravens and the Berserkers, and added, “You could help us.”
“If I weren’t helping you, you’d be in jail right now, and Baldwin would be dead. I need to be in Hot Springs now. Not here.”
Fen shoved Owen away. “Whatever.”
“You probably should go now,” Owen told them, and then he started running. The Berserkers closed around him, and they all took off into the darkness.
Laurie watched them vanish before looking at the boys. “Okay, then. Which way to Saint Agnes?”
Mouth open, Fen stared at her like she was cracked. “Seriously? That’s all you have to say? ‘Which way’?” He crossed his arms over his chest.
“He sees the future,” Matt said simply. Then he looked up at the sky. “We’re west of Saint Agnes, so we need to go that way.”
Baldwin shrugged. “Okay.”
“Nice of you to help reason with him,” Fen said bitterly to Laurie. “He might have actually listened to you.” Then he walked away from her, following Matt and Baldwin.
“Fen,” she started, but he waved his hand at her in a go-away gesture.
She understood that Fen was angry with her for agreeing with Owen, but the Berserkers were his followers. If he said they were to go with him, they would. She wasn’t sure what they could’ve done differently.
They all stayed quiet for a while until Fen dropped back beside her. She figured that his temper must have calmed, but when he started to speak, it wasn’t the apology she expected.
“You take everyone’s side but mine lately,” he said quietly as they walked toward Saint Agnes. “Do you ever think I might be right? Or is it just Thorsen and Owen you trust to make decisions?”
Laurie stared at him in shock. “You’re such a… arrrgh. How could you think that? I trust you, Fen. After everything, how could you doubt that?”
He shrugged, and Laurie didn’t know what to say. She could list all the times she’d done what he wanted, when she’d followed him into disastrous plan after dangerous idea before this whole the-world-could-end trip. Somehow, she didn’t think that would help.
“We’re a team, Fen.” She bumped her shoulder into his. “I listen to what all of you say.”
He didn’t bump her shoulder back like he usually would. Instead, he muttered, “So you listen and then decide I’m always wrong? Great. Thanks for that.”
“I love you, but you’re being ridiculous,” she said. It made her feel wretched that he was hurt, but until he calmed down, there was no sense talking to him. She shook her head and pressed her lips together, and they walked the rest of the way to Saint Agnes in silence. Even angry, he stayed by her side. She couldn’t imagine what her life would be like without him, and she really didn’t want to.
SIXTEEN
MATT
“GRAVE SITUATION”
Back to the cemetery. Back to Blackwell. It was different now. Before, it just felt like passing by, and Matt had been able to forget everything else. Now…? Now he wanted to be anyplace else on earth.
Matt had lost all hope and all faith in the one person who’d always believed in him. He wanted to talk to someone about that, but when he looked at the others… He liked them. He trusted them. But could he talk to any of them about something so personal? They weren’t like his best friend Cody or his brother Josh. Maybe they could be, someday, but right now it felt like there was no one he could really talk to.
He was angry that he’d been deceived. Furious, even—furious enough to call up the Midgard Serpent, apparently. But there was more than that. The serpent was his sworn enemy, and it had no reason to wake just because he was angry.
No, the serpent had sensed weakness. Despair—that was the right word. Mix that hurt and that despair and that fury, and he’d been vulnerable, his powers raging beyond control. That’s what the serpent had sensed, and even if it wasn’t time yet, if
it wasn’t Ragnarök, it had responded. Writhing in glee as Matt showed exactly how much of a child he was, throwing a temper tantrum because his granddaddy had hurt him.
The whole trip to Saint Agnes, he tried to snap out of it. Granddad wanted him to be the sacrificial goat? Too bad. He was the chosen champion of the greatest Norse god ever. He would not lie down and die obligingly. He would fight. He would win.
The others left Matt alone on that walk. Which meant that maybe, just maybe, they did understand what he was going through after all.
“Okay,” he said as they approached the cemetery. “This time, we’re taking precautions. My grandfather might know we’ll head back here. He might even have figured out this is where I expected to find Mjölnir. So let’s be extra careful. Baldwin? You’ll come over the fence with me. We need my amulet to find the hammer and, if there’s trouble, your invulnerability will help.”
“Invulnerability?” Baldwin grinned. “That’s a good word. I have to remember that.”
“Don’t encourage him,” Fen grumbled.
“I think it’s great he knows lots of stuff,” Baldwin said. “The stories always say Thor is just a big, dumb guy with lots of muscles. Matt’s not, and that’s cool, right?”
Matt managed a smile for Baldwin. “Thanks. So I’ll take you over. Fen and Laurie, I’d like you two to stand watch, one from either side, if you’re okay with splitting up.”
“We can do that,” Laurie said.
“Oh, no, we can’t,” Fen said. “We aren’t separating. Not if we’re expecting trouble.”
“Fine.” Matt lifted his hands against their argument. “You two work it out. But remember, Laurie has her bow, and I think it’s okay to leave her on her own. Fen? If you could change into a wolf, that would be great.”
“I can change, but I’m not letting Laurie out of my sight.” He glanced at his cousin. “Not happening, Laurie. The last time we were here, Thorsen got shot.”
“Matt has a good plan,” Laurie said. “We can stand watch without being too far apart. Now let’s get going before someone does show up to try to stop us.”
Again, Matt knew this was just to make him feel better. Baldwin complimenting him on his brains. Laurie quickly supporting his plan. Little pats on the back to say everything was okay and Matt could get past what happened and move forward. It helped. Fen didn’t seem to realize that and cast a scowl Matt’s way. Probably still upset about nearly being arrested for murder.
Probably? That almost made Matt laugh. Of course Fen would still be upset. Who wouldn’t? He’d had a scare. A bad one. It obviously had made him even more overprotective of Laurie, and Owen’s visit hadn’t helped matters. He just wasn’t feeling himself. Matt had to understand that and not take offense if he snarled and growled.
They discussed the signals they’d use for communicating. Then Matt said, “All set? Let’s move out.”
Saint Agnes Cemetery. It wasn’t the first time Matt had been inside the graveyard. He hadn’t said so to the others earlier, because they might have expected him to know a secret way in, and he didn’t. He always scaled the fence.
The first time he came out with Cody, they’d been nine. They’d poked around the cemetery, scaring each other with ghost stories. Cody had wanted to bring other kids back on Halloween, to do the same, but Matt had a better idea. As much fun as it would be to camp out in a graveyard and tell ghost stories, not many kids would turn down bags of candy for a cold night in a cemetery. So Matt came up with his own tradition, based on his research into the cemetery’s patron saint herself. Saint Agnes actually had her own eve, like Halloween. The eve of Saint Agnes was January 20, when girls were supposed to sneak out at night and go into the field, where at midnight, they would see… their future husband. Yeah, a perfectly good setup, totally wasted with a boring resolution. So Matt changed it.
There were actually four historical Saint Agneses. Or maybe five. He never bothered to keep track. He just made up his own version, where Saint Agnes had been a noblewoman accused of kidnapping and slaughtering young girls, which naturally meant she was a vampire. She’d been staked to death and her corpse beheaded. Only later did the townspeople discover that she’d actually been rescuing girls from horrible situations and sending them off to the convent for schooling. So they made her a saint. Yet, because of how she died, she would forever be associated with vampires and the undead, so on Saint Agnes Eve, if you went to a cemetery and invoked her name, you might see those very undead—vampires or zombies or ghosts.
That was a much better story. Their friends certainly liked it. So every January 20, they’d gather sleeping bags and tell their parents they were staying at a friend’s—and they’d troop off to Saint Agnes and start a bonfire and wrap themselves in their sleeping bags and tell ghost stories as they waited for the dead to rise. Of course the dead never obliged, but it was too much fun to cancel for a simple lack of actual ghosts.
There was another reason Matt hadn’t told the others he’d been here before. Because Fen and Laurie had never been invited to those nights. By last January, almost their entire class had been in the cemetery, and not one kid had ever said, Hey, how about we invite the Brekkes? Matt never even considered it, and he’d been the one who always suggested bringing the new kids and the shy kids, making them part of the secret. While he was sure Fen would have mocked the whole idea and certainly never joined in, he should have been invited. Laurie, too.
Matt thought about that as they went over the fence, while he tried to keep his focus on his surroundings so he didn’t get caught off guard again.
They slipped into the graveyard. It looked more like a proper cemetery than Deadwood’s, with its rolling hills and headstones spread everywhere. Here the graves were crammed together and you knew, with each step, that you were treading on the long-dry bones of some long-dead person.
People from town still visited. There were flowers dotting the kirkyard, weirdly bright bursts of color on weathered gray stones and dry brown grass. Matt noticed a bright spray of red near one of the mausoleums. Roses, it looked like, as he turned—
His amulet seemed to… move. Not vibrate so much as jump once, as if to say This way. Matt clutched it.
“Got a signal?” Baldwin whispered.
Matt nodded. They’d been keeping quiet, even though there was no sign of anyone here. Cemeteries did that to you.
“Let’s get it and go,” Baldwin said. “This place gives me the creeps.”
Matt looked around. He didn’t see creepy. He saw spooky… in a good, spine-tingling way. When he was younger, he used to imagine all the dead warriors here, now dining in Valhalla. As he got older, he’d realized most of them were probably farmers and traders who’d only ever held a blade to cut down corn or carve up meat, but it didn’t change the feeling of being surrounded by greatness. Thorsens who belonged in Valhalla, even if they’d never swung a sword.
Matt took a few steps to the left. His amulet stopped vibrating. It started up again when he went back to where he’d been, only to stop as he headed right. He turned and faced the mausoleum. Three careful steps toward it and…
The amulet buzzed against his chest.
“It’s in there,” he said, pointing.
“Of course it is,” Baldwin said with a shudder.
“Hey, would you rather it was in one of those?” Matt pointed at the graves beneath them.
“Good point.”
As he headed for the mausoleum, Matt heard a piercing birdcall. It was just Baldwin, giving the signal to tell Fen and Laurie that they were about to retrieve Mjölnir, meaning if there was any sign of trouble, let them know now. Fen replied first with a double whistle. Laurie repeated it. All clear.
Matt walked to the mausoleum. It looked like the oldest one in the cemetery, but it was impossible to tell because there wasn’t any date on it. Made of rough-cut gray stones, it wasn’t as fancy as some of the others. In fact, it might be the plainest one in Saint Agnes. Just a dull gray stone block witho
ut even an arched doorway—only a simple rectangular door with a big gray block over it. Carved in that block was one word: THORSEN.
“Cool,” Baldwin said. “I guess that means we’re in the right place.”
Matt didn’t tell him he’d find the same name on half the gravestones around them. Yet with all the others there were names and dates and a few words. Even the mausoleums, which usually held a bunch of people, would have a plaque outside listing who was in them. There was nothing like that here. Just the name. Thorsen.
“Now we just need to figure out how to open it,” Baldwin said.
That was indeed the problem. Matt and his friends had tried a few mausoleum doors in the past, to see if they could get in. They’d all been locked. Cody had wanted to break in to one, but Matt said no. If the door was open, that was fine, but breaking in was disrespectful.
Now as he looked at the door, he realized he had a very big problem. There was no lock. No handle, even. It was a solid stone slab.
He stepped up and pushed. Nothing happened. He ran his hands over the door, in case there was a secret latch. It was sealed shut.
“I’ll have to get Laurie,” he whispered. “See if she can open a gate.”
“Or you could just use that.”
He looked over to see Baldwin pointing at Matt’s amulet. Matt could feel it buzzing. When he looked down, it started to glow.
“I think it wants to help you get in,” Baldwin said.
Breaking in with his Hammer? That seemed even more disrespectful than picking a lock.
“Even if I could, I’m not sure I should.…” he said.
“Why not? Mjölnir is in there. And your other Hammer is there.” Baldwin pointed at the amulet again. “One should help you get the other, right?”
That made sense, Matt supposed. So he stepped back, set down his shield, focused, and shot his hand up, fingers out. He didn’t expect anything. He wasn’t angry or anything that would launch the Hammer. But a bolt flew from his fingers, making him stumble back in surprise. The door groaned, and it opened, just a crack, dust swirling out. Something else billowed out, too.
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