Loki's Wolves (20 page)

“Anyway, I caught up with them this morning. Only my cousin won’t listen to me. So I want you to catch her and take her home. Can you do that?”

“Sure can. Your folks will be proud of you, son, looking after your cousin like that.”

“It’s the right thing to do,” Fen said.

“All right, then. Just hop on in.”

“See, that’s the problem,” Fen said. “My cousin and me, we’re kinda friends, and if I turn her in, she’s not going to be happy with me. Could you pick them up first? Then I’ll walk to the next street over, and you can pretend to corner me there?”

The officer agreed. Matt realized that Fen wasn’t even surprised that there wasn’t an APB on him. Matt strained to listen as Fen told him that Matt and Laurie had raced along the row of lawns, intending to circle back downtown and hide out in the shops. Fen was explaining that he wasn’t sure exactly which shop, but “Thorsen’s not hard to find, with that red hair.” The officer thanked him and promised to meet up with him as soon as he could.

After Fen’s trick, they got away easily. They did stay off the roads, though, walking just inside the forest, keeping an eye on the ribbon of blacktop so they didn’t get lost.

“I’m really sorry,” Matt said as he held back a branch for Fen and Laurie. “I screwed up. I didn’t—”

“—see it coming,” Fen interrupted. “
None
of us saw it coming, but we should’ve. You’re the sheriff’s kid. Of course the cops are looking for you. For both of you.” Fen paused, and with more patience than Matt had expected, he added,
“We’ve had other things on our minds, though. Tornadoes, Raiders, Valkyries, and trolls. We’ll just add cops to the list, right?”

“Right.” Laurie nodded, and then she bumped her head against Fen’s shoulder and laughed. “We just hadn’t stopped to think of regular problems. Like the fact we’re all runaways.”

“We can’t forget it again,” Matt said. “We need to be extra-careful now. No more hitching rides or anything.”

“Exactly,” Fen murmured. He shot a look at Matt and then at Laurie and smiled.

And no one commented on the fact that only two of them had APBs out on them.

L
aurie was surprised that they’d had a reasonably calm walk, but they’d realized that once again they had no more than a vague plan: “go to Deadwood, find the twins.” It wasn’t all bad to get a few hours’ peace. Neither boy admitted that they were becoming friends, but they obviously were. Between the cops and the creatures out of myths, their world was turned completely upside down, but they were working together as a team. After a few hours, though, Matt seemed worried, and Fen was fussing over food.

“Let’s go up here first.” Laurie motioned to Mount Moriah, the cemetery on the hill above Deadwood. She wasn’t sure why, but it made perfect sense to her.

“Sure,” Matt agreed. His eyes lit up in the same way they had at the museum.

“Whatever,” Fen said, but he trudged up the hill in front of her.

Both boys obviously were scanning the area for threats as they had during the several-mile walk, but Laurie couldn’t fault them for that. She could fault them for thinking she hadn’t noticed, but she didn’t feel like bringing it up just then.

Just inside Mount Moriah, Laurie saw them: two kids, a boy and a girl who were unmistakably siblings, doing gravestone rubbings. There were other people inside the cemetery, and there had been plenty of people in town, but her feet had led her here. She wasn’t sure how she knew they were the ones she needed to reach, but as soon as her gaze fell on them, she knew they were the descendants. She looked closer and confirmed that these two weren’t just siblings: they were twins.
Like Frey and Freya. They are the ones we need.
The question was how to tell two strangers that they ought to join up with three kids they’d never met and plot to kill a big reptile to save the world. It sounded crazy any way she tried to phrase it.

“That’s them,” she whispered. “The twins.”

The one holding the paper on the stone watched them approach; the one kneeling on the ground rubbing the chalk over the paper looked back at them briefly and then resumed
rubbing. They didn’t smile, say hello, or seem at all sociable. At school, she would’ve been a bit nervous approaching them.

But this wasn’t school.

And after trolls… well, a couple of kids who were trying to be unfriendly didn’t seem nearly as scary. She’d seen scary, and the bored, you’re-not-worth-my-time looks she was getting weren’t scary. She smiled, and they continued to ignore her. The one standing up said something to the one on the ground, who laughed.

“Are you sure?” Fen asked.

Laurie nodded, but she didn’t take her attention off the twins. She had the sudden fear that they’d run.
They can’t. We need them.
The problem was that she didn’t know how to convince them to join the team.

She wasn’t sure why, but she had sort of expected them to be like Matt or like Fen, but they weren’t. From here, they seemed tall, and she thought they might be almost as tall as Matt. They both had shoulder-length, straight, pale blond hair. She wasn’t entirely sure which of the twins was the girl and which was the boy because they were dressed almost identically in black pants with straps and zippers, big black boots, and jewelry flashing in their ears and on their fingers.

“Do we have a plan?” Fen asked.

Matt said nothing, but he shifted his path to walk toward the twins.

The twins, however, seemed completely unconcerned with the attention that they were getting. Maybe they were used to being watched, because they weren’t uncomfortable about it. Then again, they hadn’t faced wolves, Valkyries, or trolls. Laurie reminded herself that she probably ought not to mention any of those details just yet. The twins continued their studious not-paying-attention while Laurie and the boys continued walking through the hilly cemetery toward them.

She wanted to hurry. The cemetery bothered her more than she’d expected; as they passed graves of people long dead, she shivered. Maybe it was just the cold, or it was that she just now realized that they could die. Fen almost did die—and according to the mythology, Matt would die. The thought of either of them dying made her feel sick. She hadn’t known Matt that well before the tornado, and what she thought she knew about him wasn’t entirely accurate. After facing a few monsters at his side, they were becoming friends.
They can’t die. They won’t.
She was going to do everything possible to keep that from happening.

And that started with convincing the twins to cooperate.

She walked faster.

Matt sped up to keep pace with her. His voice was a low whisper as he asked, “What are you doing?”

“Talking to them,” she said resolutely.

“You’re just going to go up and tell them they need to
help us fight a big snake and stop the end of the world?” Matt asked incredulously. He wasn’t whispering this time, but he was still too quiet for the twins to hear. “This isn’t Blackwell. They might not even know who Thor and Loki are.”

“So we ask what they do know,” Laurie said.

Matt looked at Fen for help, but Fen just shrugged. Her cousin might not like her plan, but she knew he’d side with her. Fen always took her side. Okay,
almost
always. He would side with Matt if he thought it would keep her safe. She knew that. She also knew he’d pound anyone who was rude to her. He’d made that pretty obvious as far back as kindergarten. And maybe it made her a little braver knowing that, she admitted.

In another few moments, they reached the gravestone where the twins were and stopped. This close, Laurie could see that they both had short black fingernails and both wore black eyeliner. The twins still acted like Laurie and the boys weren’t there. They didn’t even glance at any of the three of them.

“Hi,” Laurie said.

Neither twin replied.

“My cousin is talking to you,” Fen said.

“And my brother and I aren’t interested in talking to her… or you,” said the standing twin, who, now that she’d spoken, Laurie could tell was the sister.

Fen growled.

The twin on the ground stood and moved so he was shoulder-to-shoulder with his sister. He said nothing, just glanced at her, a little uncertain.

“Look,” the girl continued. “We don’t know you, don’t want to know you, and really don’t care about whatever you want. Ray and I are busy.” She turned her back on them and flicked her hand at her side as if to shoo them away. “Now go away.”

Fen growled again.

“Fen,” Matt started.

“I got strangled by a
troll
to find Goth Ken and Barbie here, so I’m not going to ‘go away’ so they can play with chalk or go do each other’s makeup.” Fen’s eyes actually flashed yellow, and Laurie wondered briefly if he’d hidden a lot more of himself from her than she’d realized or if he was just exhausted.

“Excuse me?” the girl said in a tone that made it sound more like a challenge than a question.

“Reyna…” her brother said under his breath.

She ignored him and turned back around to face Fen. “Don’t think our eyeliner means we can’t kick your scrawny butt. Ask anyone in town. And trolls? Seriously. Go back to your video games.”

“Whoa! Both of you, stop. We’re not here to fight.” Matt stepped between Ray and Fen. “We just want to talk to you.
We’re tired, and some of us”—he glanced at Fen—“have had a rough trip. We don’t care about the, ummm, makeup.”

“Really? He’s wearing nail polish and
guyliner
,” Fen grumbled.

“Stop it, Fen.” Laurie put her hand flat on Fen’s chest, and then she looked at Reyna and Ray. “Please? Just let us explain.”

They all stood in an awkward standoff for several moments until Reyna said, “Fine. Say whatever you need to say and then leave.” She linked her arm through her twin’s at the elbow.

A strange tickle crept over Laurie, as if she had pins and needles all over. Whatever god powers these two had, they were stronger when they were connected. Apparently, Matt could feel monsters, and she could sense descendants?
And what? Trouble? Threats?
She wasn’t sure, but there was something going on here and it increased when the twins touched.

“Right,” Laurie started. “Do you want to sit down or walk or—”

“No. We don’t,” Reyna said. Apparently, she spoke for both of them. Ray stood silently at her side, more like an extension of her than an actual person.

“Fine.” Laurie took a deep breath, but she didn’t know how to start. She looked at Matt. “Ummm?”

He stepped in and said, “The end of the world is coming. We need your help to stop it.”

Reyna took a step backward, pulling Ray with her.

Matt hurried on. “There’s more, of course. That’s the short version. I can tell you the rest if you just give us a few—”

“Come on, Ray.” Reyna crouched down and started gathering up their stuff with one hand. Her other hand was still holding Ray’s elbow. Ray stood staring at Matt.

“There’s something different about you, something you can do that most people can’t,” Laurie blurted out. “It’s because you’re like us.”

“We’re nothing like you.” Reyna released her hold on her brother and folded her arms over her chest. “We’re—”

“Descendants of the Norse gods. You have some sort of power. I know you do,” Matt said evenly.

“Or you will soon,” Laurie added.

The twins exchanged a look, and then Ray murmured, “We don’t know what you’re talking about.”

In the next minute, the twins had scooped up their art supplies and they all but ran away from the three of them. They were walking so quickly that if they went a single step faster, they would be jogging.

“That went well,” Fen deadpanned.