Autumn Bones

Twenty-two

After leaving the Wheelhouse, I swung by Sedgewick Estate to visit my mom. I’d call it a whim, but the truth was, after everything that had happened in the past few days, I was in need of some maternal sympathy.

As it turned out, I was totally in luck. Mom was just putting a pan of lasagna in the oven, and there was plenty of time to fill her in on my latest trials and tribulations—although I didn’t tell her the part about Emmy’s charm sending me to Doc Howard’s office—get some quality Mom-style commiseration regarding my breakup with Sinclair, eat a home-cooked meal, and still get back to my place well before sunset.

In the bedroom of my apartment, I went into my narrow closet to retrieve the iron casket I’d stashed on the top shelf, then fetched the key from its hiding place in the jewelry box on my dresser.

The casket wasn’t much bigger than a jewelry box, but it was heavy as hell, ancient and battered and inscribed with intricate Norse knotwork designs. Hel had given it to me the first time she’d summoned me into her presence and offered me the position of serving as her liaison to mundane authorities.

I took it into the living room to unlock it and examine its contents. Everything was in order: the little copper bowl, the packet of scaly pine bark from Yggdrasil II wrapped in soft wool, the box of wooden kitchen matches I’d added.

Whether or not it would work, I couldn’t say for sure. In the few years that I’d served Hel, I’d never had occasion to attempt to contact Little Niflheim. It had always been the other way around.

Truth be told, I was curious.

Lee Hastings appeared on my doorstep at exactly ten minutes after eight, looking like death warmed over and wrapped in a black leather duster. I bet he was one of those guys you could set your watch by.

“I’m here,” he announced, proclaiming the obvious in a magisterial tone. “Shall we go?”

“Hold on, cowboy.” I tucked the iron casket under my arm. “You don’t just waltz into Little Niflheim uninvited. Besides, I don’t have a dune buggy.”

Lee frowned. “A dune buggy?”

“Jeep, four-wheel drive, all-terrain vehicle, whatever. I don’t have one, and it’s not a route I’d risk if I did. How else did you think we were going to get there?” I asked him. I might have been the only citizen in living memory to visit Pemkowet’s underworld, but everyone knew where it was, more or less. Yggdrasil II is the entrance, and it’s tough to miss a pine tree the size of a skyscraper jutting out of the sands that swallowed the old lumber town.

“I don’t know,” Lee admitted. “I imagined something less . . . prosaic.”

“Well, let’s see if we can get an invite,” I said.

He followed me back downstairs and into the park across from the alley, gathering the folds of his duster around him to sit opposite me on the grass. There was a hint of afterglow along the western horizon, but dusk was falling and there was a slight chill in the air warning that autumn was coming.

I set the iron casket between us and opened it, taking out the copper bowl and nestling it in the grass.

“What is that?” Lee asked.

“It’s a bowl,” I informed him, unwrapping the woolen packet and extracting a scaly chip of pine bark. There were seven of them, each about the size of my hand and densely inscribed with lines of runic script. Hel hadn’t given me any criteria for using them to contact her or any assurances that she would replace them if and when I’d used the last. I hesitated, second-guessing my decision.

“I can see it’s a bowl,” Lee said with irritation. He pointed at the pine bark. “What does it say?”

“I have no idea.” I wondered what Hel would do if she determined I’d wasted her time to satisfy the whim of a geeky gaming genius. Then again, my rationale was a valid one. If Hel disapproved of the idea of a database documenting the entire eldritch population, I’d better find out now. I’d already made a few promises regarding the significance of my as-yet-nonexistent ledger. It was probably best to stick with my initial decision.

“You don’t read futhark?” Lee asked in disbelief.

I scowled at him. “No, I don’t read futhark. What’s futhark?”

“Uh, it’s only the runic alphabet.” Clearly, he thought I was an idiot. “See here in the center?” He pointed again. “H-E-L. It’s written horizontally and vertically. Probably some kind of summoning locus.”

“Great,” I said. “What does the rest of it say?”

He pursed his lips. “I can’t tell. I’m afraid I don’t actually speak Old Norse.”

“Neither do I,” I said. “Except for a few words here and there that I’ve picked up along the way. So that sort of invalidates the purpose of learning to read futhark, doesn’t it?”

Lee couldn’t bring himself to agree. “Knowledge is never wasted.”

“Maybe not,” I said. “But it can on occasion be somewhat superfluous.” I watched a flicker of surprise cross Lee’s gaunt face and silently thanked Mr. Leary for drilling vocabulary words into me back in the day. “Look, do you want to sit there and tell me how to do my job, or do you want me to actually do it?”

He took a deep breath. “I’m sorry. I just want to know.”

“Know what?”

“Everything.” Lee tilted his head a little and smiled wryly. It was the first truly candid expression I’d seen on his face and it transformed him, bringing out an unexpected charm; less Skeletor, more mid-1990s heroin-chic male model. Well, except for the ill-advised facial hair, baseball cap, and goth duster. “Go ahead, Daisy. I’ll shut up.”

“Okay.” I held the inscribed chip of bark harvested from Yggdrasil II itself in my left hand, struck a wooden match with my right, and touched the flame to the dry bark.

It caught quickly, kindling to a bright, dancing glow in the dim twilight of the park. I watched the flames lick at the runes neither Lee nor I could read, darkening and consuming them. The occasional spark snapped and a thin stream of aromatic, piney smoke trickled upward into the evening sky. When the flames got close to my fingertips, I dropped the bark chip into the copper bowl. It struck the bottom of the bowl with a faint ringing sound. In the trees above us, a trio of blue jays took flight in a raucous burst of chatter.

I smiled.

“What is it?” Lee asked, watching me.

I pointed after the birds. “They’re Hel’s harbingers.”

“Blue jays?” he scoffed.

“Odin had ravens,” I said as though I’d known it forever. Actually, I’d just learned it a month ago. “Blue jays are in the same family.”

“Odin’s ravens were named Hugin and Munin,” Lee mused, tracking the flight of the blue jays. “Thought and memory. I’ll be damned.” He looked back at me. “What happens now?”

I stirred the ashes in the bowl with the burned-out matchstick, making sure there were no live embers left. “Now we wait and see. And, um, take this stuff back to my apartment and put it away,” I added. “I forgot, I need to put on some warmer clothes. It’s always cold in Little Niflheim.”

We returned to my apartment and sat in awkward silence, Lee slouching on my futon.

“So . . . um . . . have you been in touch with any of your old friends since you’ve been back?” I asked, trying to remember the names of the two guys he’d hung out with in high school. Together, they’d been a sort of nerdy Three Musketeers. “Steve Geddes, or Ben, um . . . ?”

“Lewis,” Lee said shortly. “Ben Lewis. He’s in Afghanistan.”

“He is?” I blinked. “In the army?”

“Well, he’s not there on his honeymoon.”

“You don’t have to get sarcastic,” I said. “I’m just surprised I didn’t know.”

Lee shrugged. “I don’t know why you would.”

“It’s a small town,” I reminded him. “So I guess that means you’re still in touch with him?”

“Yeah.” His voice softened. “The character Dan Stanton in my first-person shooter was named after a buddy of his. Kind of a tribute. Ben’s the one who suggested it, even told me to use it as an alias. Said his buddy would have thought it was hilarious.”

“This is a buddy who . . . didn’t make it?” I asked. Lee nodded. I thought about that for a minute. Ben Lewis had been a short, stocky little guy in high school. Everyone called him the Hobbit. It was hard to imagine him in a war zone. “I’m sorry.”

“You didn’t know.”

“How about Steve?” I couldn’t remember anything about Steve other than his name, which was sort of ironic; he’d been the kind of kid who made so little impression, he didn’t even have a nickname.

“He’s fine. He’s in New York.”

“Doing what?” I asked.

“Set design.” Lee regarded the toes of his Converse sneakers. “It was his major at NYU.”

“Huh. Good for him.” It felt strange to realize that two people I’d grown up with, however little I’d actually known them, had left Pemkowet to make such diverse lives for themselves elsewhere. Three, if you counted Lee. I wondered what had prompted him to return.

Before I could ask, Mikill and his dune buggy pulled into the alley beside my apartment, waiting patiently while Lee and I came down to meet him.

“Daisy Johanssen,” Mikill greeted me in a booming voice, raising his left hand. A spear-headed rune glimmered on his palm, indicating that he was one of Hel’s guards. “Your request for an audience has been granted.” Rivulets of meltwater dripped from the icicles in his hair and beard. Mikill was a frost giant, eight feet tall with pale blue frost-rimed skin and eyes the color of dirty slush.

Well, unless you happened to be mortal and of mundane birth. Then he just looked like a huge, hairy guy who was sweating profusely.

“Who the hell is that?” Lee asked, the words emerging in a squeak.

“Hi, Mikill.” I raised my left hand in reply, displaying my own rune. “He’s our escort,” I said to Lee. “He’s a frost giant.”

Lee glared at me. Whatever goodwill had been emerging between us evaporated. “Oh, very funny. Ha ha, you got me.”

“Look, I realize he doesn’t appear . . . Mikill, can you drop your glamour for a minute?” I asked.

The frost giant shook his ponderous head, sending droplets of water flying. “It is of Hel’s doing, Daisy Johanssen, that her servants might move freely aboveground at need. If it is your wish that the mortal accompany you, he will see clearly in Niflheim.”

I shrugged. “You’re just going to have to trust me on this one, Lee.”

Lee backed away. “No. Oh, hell, no! What were you going to do?” he asked grimly. “Drop me off in the middle of the dunes at night and let me walk home? Hell, don’t tell me! Is there someone else in on it? Maybe you’ve got some other big hairy guy out there pretending to be the Tall Man’s ghost?”

“Lee—”

“I’m not falling for it, Daisy! I put up with enough shit like that in high school—”

“Lee!” I raised my voice and dropped my hand to dauda-dagr’s hilt. Amazingly, he actually shut up. “Look, I know you’ve got high school damage, okay? Everyone does. You’ve made it very clear that you’re not the dorky nerd in high-waisted floods your mom bought for you anymore. You went away and made a ton of money and came back. . . . Why the hell did you come back, anyway?”

“My mom’s not well,” he said in a quieter tone. “Someone had to look after her.”

“Okay, well, I’m sorry to hear it. But I’m not the same person I was, either,” I said. “I’m not asking you to help me pass computer science. I get that you think this project is beneath you, but it’s important to me, and I’m not pulling some stupid prank just because you’ve been kind of a dick about it.”

Lee stared at Mikill and his dune buggy and swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “If you drop me in the dunes, I swear to God, I’ll never forgive you.”

I felt bad.

It was easy enough to say everyone had high school damage, but the truth was, hell-spawn or not, I’d gotten off light compared to Lee and his friends. No one had ever held me upside down in the bathroom, dunked my head into the toilet, and given me a swirly. It had happened to Lee, though, probably more than once. And I didn’t doubt that the shadow of that humiliation lingered.

“No one’s dropping anyone in the dunes, Lee,” I said to him, making my voice gentle. “I promise. Just don’t fall out. Because unlike the Tall Man’s ghost, Garm is real.”

“The hellhound?”

“Uh-huh.” I wedged myself into the narrow storage space behind the buggy’s two seats, wishing I’d thought about the logistics earlier. “You’ll find a loaf of bread on the floor at your feet. That’s the offering to Garm. Lee, you’re in charge of throwing it to him. Mikill”—I took a death grip on the roll bar—“drive carefully.”

As soon as Lee climbed gingerly into the front seat and buckled his seat belt, Mikill gunned the engine and headed out of town.

A mile north on the highway, he turned into Pemkowet Dune Rides, passing the stable where the fancy dune schooners were sitting idle for the night and roaring into the path beyond it.

I’d made this trip before, but it didn’t get any less frightening. Quite the opposite, considering I was squished into a cramped space without a seat belt and holding on to the roll bar for dear life.

And once we departed from the graded paths and set course for the massive, looming figure of Yggdrasil II, jouncing over the sand, it got worse. I narrowed my eyes against the stinging mist of ice pellets streaming from Mikill’s hair, searching the darkness in the vain hope of catching a glimpse of Garm before he spotted us.

No such luck. As we entered the sand basin from which Yggdrasil II emerged, somewhere off to the left, an ear-shattering howl split the darkness.

“The hound is nigh,” Mikill announced.

“Lee!” I shouted. “He’s coming! Get the bread ready!”

In the passenger seat, Lee struggled, the folds of his capacious leather duster caught on something. “I’m stuck!”

Directly in front of us, Garm bounded into the headlights, yellow eyes reflecting the beams. He was approximately twice the size of the dune buggy and his slavering maw was big enough to chomp me in half in a single bite.

“Lee!”

“Why the hell is he attacking us?” he said in a high, panicked voice. “Isn’t he on our side?”

“The hound is doing its duty,” Mikill said, swerving violently. The hellhound snapped as we veered around him, jaws closing with a click that sounded like the world’s biggest bear trap. “Throw the offering now, mortal!”

Lee yanked at his trapped coat. “But aren’t we past—”

A fast, heavy tread padded behind us, and then a vast figure darkened the emerging stars overhead as Garm leaped over the dune buggy, landing with a thud and turning to face us, growling low in his throat and wrinkling his muzzle to show his teeth.

“Oh, for God’s sake!” Letting go of the roll bar with one hand, I leaned over to snatch the loaf of bread from Lee’s hand. Garm’s ears pricked up. He wagged his tail hopefully, strings of drool dangling from either side of his jaws. “Here you go, boy!” I threw the loaf as hard as I could. “Go get it!”

The hellhound bounded after his treat. In the front seat, Lee turned to give me an incredulous look.

“What?” I said to him. “You want to visit Little Niflheim, you bring a loaf of bread for Garm.”

“Um . . . why bread?” he asked in a faint voice.

“Because that’s the way it is,” I replied firmly. I’d asked the exact same questions on my first visit and gotten the exact same highly unsatisfying response. Somehow it felt better being on the other side of the equation.

Mikill gunned the buggy’s engine again. “Be sure to keep your limbs inside the vehicle during the descent.”

Lee looked around the basin. “Descent? Descend where?”

I pointed at Yggdrasil II. “There.”

The fact that a gap large enough to admit a small vehicle looked like a mere crack in the mammoth trunk gives you an idea of the scale of the tree. Lee let out a terrified sound as we hurtled toward it, then slumped in deflated relief as we passed through the opening and began spiraling down the path carved into the walls of the hollow interior. The temperature dropped as we descended, an icy mist rising from the depths below us. Mikill stopped dripping, his hair and beard freezing.

Down, down, down we went, emerging beneath the immense canopy of roots that the three Norns tended with tireless care, drawing water from the wellspring and pouring it over Yggdrasil II’s roots. One of them smiled at me, her eyes as colorless as mist in her grandmotherly face. I smiled back at her. She’d given me a piece of soothsaying earlier this summer that had saved a lot of lives.

“Are those . . . ?” Lee asked in a hushed whisper.

“The Norns,” I said.

Turning his head, he looked at Mikill hunched over the steering wheel. “And he’s . . . blue.”

“I told you,” I said. “He’s a frost giant.”

Little Niflheim really is little. There’s nothing left of the buried city of Singapore but a single road and a handful of buildings, including the abandoned sawmill where Hel holds court. Or at least that’s what it looks like, insofar as it’s possible to see in the darkness and mist. I suspected that here, as elsewhere in the eldritch community, the laws of physics didn’t necessarily apply.

Duegars, the ancient Norse dwarves whose magic had excavated Little Niflheim and kept the whole thing from collapsing, came out to observe our passage, silent and watchful, looking as knotty and hardened as though they’d been carved from Yggdrasil II’s roots.

“What do they want?” Lee whispered to me.

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never heard one speak. Maybe if you learn Old Norse, you can ask them.”

In the driver’s seat, Mikill made a muffled sound that might actually have been a chuckle before halting in front of the sawmill. “Come, Daisy Johanssen,” he said to me. “You are expected.”

“Hey, wait!” Lee clambered out of the dune buggy. “What about me?”

Mikill fixed him with an implacable slush-colored stare. “You are not expected.”

“Daisy—”

I spread my hands. “Look, I told you I couldn’t promise you anything. I’ll ask, but don’t hold your breath. She’s a goddess, Lee. She’s not some imaginary character made of bits and bytes and pixels.”

“Okay.” He swallowed hard, then glanced around at the misty darkness, the watching eyes of the silent duegars. “Right. Of course. Do what you can, and I’ll . . . I’ll just wait here with the car.”

“Fine.”

With that settled, Mikill escorted me into the sawmill.

Being in the presence of a living deity is another experience that’s hard to describe. There’s just so much . . . well, presence. It’s awesome in the oldest sense of the word. It makes the very air feel different, charged and intense. It makes your skin prickle and raises the hair on the back of your neck. Whether you’re a worshipper or not, you will tremble. And you will kneel and bow your head, whether you intended to or not.

Don’t get me wrong—as Hel’s liaison I was more than prepared to offer her honor and respect. I’m just saying it would have happened regardless.

“Rise, Daisy Johanssen,” the goddess bade me, her voice tolling like a bell.

I rose.

Seated on a throne wrought from the immense saw blades that the duegars had salvaged and brilliantly repurposed, Hel regarded me. “So, my young liaison. What compels you to seek an audience?”

With an effort, I made myself return her gaze evenly, which wasn’t an easy feat. On her right side, Hel resembled some Renaissance painter’s idea of a goddess, fair-skinned, beautiful, and luminous, with boundless depths of compassion and wisdom shining forth in her gaze. That part was easy. The left side . . . the left side was another matter, burned and blackened and withered, her sunken left eye glowing like a baleful red ember in its hollow socket. It was hard to meet that eye.

“There’s something I’d like to do, my lady,” I said to her. “But I felt I should ask your permission.”

Her right eye closed, the right half of her face lovely and gracious in repose. Her left eye continued to blaze at me. “Tell me.”

I outlined my idea for a database, floundering as I tried to couch it in terms that would be comprehensible to someone whose idea of modern innovation was the Gutenberg printing press. Aboveground, there were plenty of members of the eldritch community who have embraced technology. It was different in the underworld. Well, except for Mikill’s dune buggy.

“Enough.” Hel opened her right eye and raised her graceful, elegant right hand to stop me. “Although the means may be unfamiliar, the notion is not. Humankind has catalogued the world since first they began scratching marks in the soil. Even so, we have never abetted them in this task.” She closed both eyes and fell silent a moment before opening them again. “Although I have misgivings, your idea has merit. I grant you permission to execute it.”

I let out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding. “Thank you, my lady.”

Her right eye closed again. Oops, not out of the woods yet. “And this mortal you have brought into my demesne?”

“I would need his help to accomplish the task,” I said. “You might say he’s the only scribe in town.”

Hel said nothing, which I took to be her equivalent of raising her eyebrows and saying, “And . . . ?”

Despite the cold, a trickle of sweat ran down my back beneath the old down coat I’d donned for the occasion. “He promised to give me everything I want for one glimpse of you.”

The shadowy frost giant attendants behind Hel’s throne murmured at the audacity of Lee’s request. The goddess turned her head this way and that, revealing one perfect and one devastated profile in turn as she silenced them with a look. “I will consider it, Daisy Johanssen. Tell me, what else passes above?”

A blue jay roosting in the rafters gave a rather self-satisfied squawk, leading me to suspect it had observed me stumbling along the streets of Pemkowet the other day, half-blind, pain-dazed, and clinging to Jen’s arm. I shot it a covert glare as I reported on events of the past month, including Emmeline’s attempt to hex me and her threat to return.

But I managed to keep it on a professional level and Hel heard me out impassively. She was a goddess; she didn’t care about petty issues—she cared about results. “Well enough, my young liaison,” she said when I finished. “See that you continue to uphold my order.”

“Yes, my lady.”

Hel glanced upward. A pair of jays fluttered down to perch on the back of her throne, peering at me with bright, beady eyes. “There have been reports of a . . . person of interest . . . inquiring about purchasing large tracts of land in Pemkowet.”

“A person of . . . oh.” The sweat trickling down my back turned icy and my tail twitched uneasily. I remembered the lawyer I’d seen leaving the PVB. Hel was being polite. “You mean a hell-spawn like me.”

“No.” Closing her ember eye, her fair right side regarded me with gentle compassion. “Quite unlike you, Daisy Johanssen.”

My throat tightened with an unexpected surge of gratitude. “Thank you, my lady,” I murmured. “Have your, um, harbingers told you more? Is there something you’d like me to do about this?”

“No. I do not know.” Hel was silent for a long moment, her expression undecipherable. “It troubles me. Learn what you may.”

I inclined my head. “Of course.”

“Now!” Her voice rose, making the rafters tremble. Her ember eye sprang open, blazing in the ruined left side of her face. “Send in this mortal who thinks to bargain for the sight of me!”