Winter Fire Page 11

  Their slider was open and I heard strains of harsh, raised voices from inside the apartment, but I didn’t slow to listen. Maybe Bren’s uncle had found out what had happened, but I had as much right to yell at Bren as he did. I yanked open the heavy door, pivoted to the right, and pounded. The arguing inside the apartment halted and after a moment, Bren answered, his expression solemn.

  I took a deep, steadying breath.

  I stared at Bren, then glanced into the living room, where Frieda and Dag sat on the couch facing the TV. Frey reclined on the other, Skye perched next to him. A tiny icicle stabbed at my chest at the sight of her here and I turned to the kitchen, where Bren’s uncle stood over the table, working on the edge of Bren’s board with a big, metal file. He was the only one not watching me.

  Bren moved aside. I took a few steps into the apartment and he closed the door behind me.

  “Jenna,” he said, “This is my uncle Val.” He glanced back at Val. “This is Jenna.”

  Val’s ice blue gaze rose to meet mine. His face was grave, but his eyes changed enough to convey warmth. “Hi Jenna,” he said.

  “Hi.” I didn’t seem able look away until he did. Once again, he focused on the edge of the board. I turned back to Bren.

  “So,” I said. “I went into the lobby just now to talk to my mother, and guess who was there?” I didn’t bother to fight the sarcasm in my voice.

  “Who.” His tone was flat.

  “Tyler.” I cut in. “And his father. Tyler looked really messed up. His face was bruised and his knee was sprained. And his father was yelling on and on to Mr. Neil and my mother about how some snowboarders attacked Tyler on the raceway this morning. Isn’t that horrible?”

  “Horrible.” Bren said. “Why don’t we go talk about this in my room?” He reached for my arm and I pulled away.

  “No.” I said. “Why would we do that?” I wondered if he planned to charm me out of my anger. “This involves all of you, doesn’t it?”

  I glanced around the room, letting my eyes stop on each one of them. None of them made eye contact now except Frieda, whose green eyes glistened when she finally looked away.

  “What are you, the Norwegian mafia?”

  A smirk broke on Frey’s face as he stared at the floor.

  “I told you I didn’t want you to do anything,” I said to Bren. It occurred to me then that he would have had to tell them all what Tyler had done. Then I remembered that Skye had known, too. I felt like I was standing there in transparent clothes.

  “Which one of you told everybody?” I asked, glaring from Bren to Skye. I studied their expressions – hers stoic, his anxious – and took a guess.

  “You?” I said to Bren. “So basically you completely invaded my privacy, and then you went behind my back and did exactly what I asked you not to do. What you agreed not to do.”

  “I didn’t exactly agree…” he started, holding up a hand.

  “Don’t give me that. I asked you to leave it alone. And then you were with me all morning long,” I glanced briefly around the room again before turning back to him, “and you just acted like nothing happened. As if you didn’t just attack somebody like a pack of freaking wolves.”

  “Jenna.” Bren said.

  “No.”

  “In all fairness,” Frey said, looking up at me, “the guy’s a dick. He deserved it.”

  “Not helping,” Bren said, his eyes closed.

  “That’s not the point,” I said to Frey, stepping around Bren. “It’s not about Tyler. You don’t understand.”

  Frey leaned forward, clasping his hands between his knees. “I do,” he said. “You feel invaded. You feel like you had your choices taken away.” He said this softly, his sandy, seascape eyes moving over mine. “So you can sympathize with the next girl who takes a walk with Tyler.”

  The anger ran out of me like cold bathwater. Staring into his eyes, seeing only compassion, seeing only right, I felt lost to my own sense of things. I saw Frieda watching me in my peripheral vision, saw her shaking her head back and forth, her lips parted. I couldn’t look at her. The fact that she had known was a soft, tender bruise inside my chest.

  “Jenna,” Bren said again. I shifted my gaze to his. “I should’ve told you this morning. I just…” he let his arms fall to his sides, shook his head. “I didn’t know how to tell you. After what you’d gone through last night…I didn’t want you to have to think about it anymore. I was trying to protect you.”

  His words rose against me like a dark wave in a recurring nightmare. I felt the familiar saline prick behind my eyes, but this time bitterness corked the tears. I let my focus blur and everything went numb. Here is where I was safe, floating, detached.

  “You know what?” I said, backing toward the door now, my hand searching for the knob behind me, “my father cheated on my mother for three years before she found out. And when she asked him how he could have lived in the house with us all that time, could have slept in their bed, could have eaten dinner with us every night, all without telling her a thing, do you know what he said?”

  Bren’s expression was tight as he waited.

  “’I was trying to protect you.’” I pulled the door open, heard Bren call my name, and slammed it behind me.

  I regretted saying it all out loud as soon as I hit the cold air. I had been walking a precarious line, trying to fit in with them, and now they knew I was broken and crazy. The fear of losing Bren for good was seeping back into my thoughts now, but I was too angry to figure out how to forgive him.

  I stopped after a few paces and let my head fall back. The day had grown dark. The sky was a roiling sea, the snow drifting down toward my face like volcanic ash.

  “I can’t let her go like this.” I heard Bren say from the other side of the screen. Why was their door always open? I didn’t want him to come after me now.

  “It’s for the best.” Val’s voice, quiet and rough.

  “It’s not the best for me.”

  “For all of us,” Val said. “We agreed not to get involved with them.” Them? “Well we haven’t all stuck to that plan have we?” Bren said.

  “You and Frey have had your share of women,” Val said, and I winced, tried to squeeze the image from my mind. “But this is not the same and you know it.”

  “What about the woman in Colorado?” Bren asked.

  “That was for a short time. I left my wife behind for gods’ sake.” Val was just short of yelling now.

  “You did that long before we left Asgard,” Bren shot back.

  “You’re misdirecting your anger. I understand your feelings for Jenna, but you were all incredibly careless today, both on the raceway and in the park. We are lucky that she didn’t notice how the world yields to your play.”

  I didn’t understand his words at first, and then my breath caught. I thought about the things I had seen at the terrain park that morning. The rise and fall of the hills, the bending of the trees, the ground stretching like taffy.

  “Skye could have made her forget,” Dag said.

  This, too, was a mystery to me. What, was Skye their henchman? When I thought of what she had done to Tyler, I could almost believe it. A bump on the head like that could have given anyone amnesia.

  There was a moment of quiet. Then Bren said: “I’m going to find her.”

  “If you stalk her now, she’ll feel pressured.” Frey’s voice, but closer to the door. “Just give her some space. She cares about you. It’ll all be well.”

  Their speech sounded different to me now, more formal, with a touch of an accent that I hadn’t heard before.

  “Yes,” Frieda said. “And besides, I don’t know if it’s such a good idea for her to be close to us now. The earthquakes…”

  “It could be nothing,” Dag said, “We’re near a fault line, aren’t we?”

  “We are, but they’ve gotten closer and more frequent,” Frey said. “I think we should speak with Sif. Just to be safe.”

  I remembered how Bren had asked F
rieda about the earthquakes on the news. Why were they worried about earthquakes? Were they some secret society of seismologists? Is that what the rings with the cracks were about? And who was Sif, besides another person with a crazy name?

  “We’ll speak with Sif,” Bren said. “But now I need to find Jenna.”

  “She’s here.”

  I stiffened. It was the first time Skye had spoken.

  “She’s been listening.”

  Every muscle in my body gave. I turned away from the screen, afraid to see one of them step up to peer out at me. When I heard the apartment door open, I ran, tripping over my clunky boots, the rhythm of my own heavy breathing and the footsteps behind me mingling in fearsome counterpoint. I didn’t know what I was running from, didn’t know exactly what I’d heard, but the urge to escape this strange scene turned to panic as I took a longer stride to make the first wooden plank of the bridge. The footsteps behind me sped, overtaking mine, and a hand grabbed my upper arm. Bren spun me, the snow whirling around us, and backed me against the rail.

  “I can’t let you leave like this,” he said. His breath was slow and even, but his expression was tense.

  “I need to get out of here.” My eyes shifted frantically. I tried to pull away from him.

  “No.” He had been holding my arms, but now he took my face in his hands. “Look at me.”

  When I avoided his gaze, he tightened his grip and searched my face. “Look at me, Jenna.”

  I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to look into his face and see that I couldn’t lose him, that I would’ve done anything, forgotten anything, to be with him. But his voice had taken on the imposing tone I had heard the night before, and I felt like a magnet giving in to force.

  I raised my eyes to his and his face softened.

  “Do you really think I wanted to hurt you?” He asked. His hair lifted with a small breeze and settled around his face again.

  “No,” I said, my voice no more than a whisper. Hating the weak sound of it, I cleared my throat. “But keeping something from me is as good as a lie.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “And you didn’t respect what I wanted.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “And what you did to Tyler makes me sick.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Is that all you think you need to tell me?” It was an effort to keep the goose bumps from rising when I felt his hands on my neck. I pulled back, but he let his fingers tangle in my hair.

  “No,” he said. “I know you heard our conversation back there. So it looks like I’m going to have to tell you a lot more than that.”

  Chapter 13

  I wasn’t sure which one of us was waiting for the other to speak, whether this was supposed to be Q and A format, or a lecture. So we stood on the bridge and watched the snowflakes land on the frozen pond for a while.

  Bren glanced over at me first. “How much did you hear?” He asked.

  “Everything.” I didn’t want to commit to specifics, in case I had missed something. “But that doesn’t mean I understood any of it.”

  The only other explanation I had come up with besides a secret seismology society was that they might be some group of extreme environmentalists – the kind who chain themselves to trees and lie in front of bulldozers. I didn’t know of any controversial projects going on in the area, but following tree huggers wasn’t exactly a hobby of mine.

  “Jenna,” Bren said, turning toward me. “I won’t lie to you. But let’s just start with what you heard.”

  I nodded once, making my expression stiff so that he wouldn’t notice how I had softened when he said my name. “Fine. I’ll tell you what I heard. When I left, I heard Val say it was for the best.” I had felt disheartened at that, only then realizing how much I had wanted Val to like me. “Then I heard something about leaving Asgard, and then a comment about Skye being able to ‘make me forget,’ which sounded like some kind of threat.” Bren smiled a little at this, but I had the feeling I was already forgetting things, so I continued.

  “Then I heard Frieda say that I shouldn’t be around you all during the earthquakes – although to be honest, all of our books and trinkets and whatnot have remained on our shelves so I’m not sure what the hell she was talking about, and I am also not sure how a quake in Japan or even California would affect any of you.” I paused to see if he would say anything, but he waited for me to finish. “And then there was talk about someone named Sif. And while I’m on the subject, does everyone in Norway have names like that?” I saw him smirk again. “I mean, I don’t think I’ve met any other Norwegians, but you know, I’ve heard of Jacques from France, and Maria from Spain, and I even had a German friend in New Jersey, Heidi, whose real name was Adelheid, but aside from Frieda and Skye, it seems like your parents might have all been on crack when you were born.” I stopped, sulking at my own meanness.

  Bren laughed and ran his hand through his hair.

  “This isn’t funny.”

  “I know it isn’t.” He sighed.

  “Are you stalling?” But curiously, I felt no impatience. It was as if I was trying to stall, too.

  He leaned over the rail. Clasping his hands in front of him, he ducked his head and glanced over at me. “Maybe. I’m a little afraid to tell you the truth.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m not sure you want to hear it. And because it will change things. Everything.”

  “Between us?” I stared at the ice.

  “Between you and everything.”

  “Bren,” I started, unsure of how to proceed. “If you are a part of something…I mean…if you guys are doing things you shouldn’t be doing out of concern for…whatever.” I watched him frown, trying to keep up. “Well, it’s not like I’ve never heard of anything like that before. I mean, people protest all kinds of things.” His brows made a deep “v” as I continued. “Or, you know, investigate things on their own maybe?” I thought again of their talk of the earthquakes. I had heard of amateur astronomers finding things in the night sky that NASA would just as soon have kept quiet. Near earth objects and such.

  Bren sighed. “I see where you’re going,” he said. “But I think maybe it’s time for me to talk.” He raised his brows, waiting for my consent. I gave him a wary nod.

  “How much do you know about Norse mythology?” He asked.

  “Norse Mythology?” I thought I might have heard him wrong but he just stared.

  “Not a lot,” I said. “I had a mythology class, but they didn’t really go into the Norse stuff. Thor.” I blurted the name as the only specific that came to mind.

  He gave me a rueful smile. “Right. Thor.”

  “Hammer of the gods – that was his,” I added. It was the only other thing I could think of.

  “Actually, that was Led Zepplin’s,” Bren said.

  My mother still had a Led Zeppelin tee-shirt that my aunt had brought her back from a concert that she had been too young to go to, but I didn’t get the connection.

  “The Band?” Bren tried.

  “I know they’re a band,” I snapped. “What does that have to do with Thor?”

  “Forget it, forget it.” He waved a hand. “Thor has the hammer, right. Well, the home of the Norse gods, Thor and all the others, is Asgard.”

  “Asgard. Okay.”

  “Okay. So,” he continued. “There are a lot of faiths that believe that creation is a cycle. That there is the beginning, and then a certain number of events happen over a certain amount of time, and then there is some sort of destruction which wipes everything out, and then it all starts over. ”

  I nodded. The concept sounded familiar so I gestured for him to go on.

  “So in Asgard, there is Ragnarok.”

  “Ragnarok.”

  “Heard of it?”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s the end of the world, both in Asgard and on Earth. The destruction. It begins with a pretty brutal war among the gods in Asgard – a fight
that causes the earth to shake with natural disasters and superstorms, and finally sparks an outbreak of human battles -- and it ends with the deaths of many of the gods, the fall of Asgard, and the complete annihilation of Earth. Once it’s over, the cycle starts again. The gods are reborn, and the earth is renewed with life. So Ragnarok is said to ensure the restoration of hope when the worlds are on the brink of disaster.”

  “Okay” I said. I watched a flake fall between us, Bren’s face only slightly less pale. He opened his hand on the railing and the flake shifted and floated into his palm.

  “It’s a little known fact,” he said. “Very little known – that there was a small group of gods who were opposed to Ragnarok. Who wanted to see the cycle end.”

  “Why?”

  “Different reasons. Some were tired of watching their friends and families die in battle over and over. Some suffered worse fates than death during Ragnarok. And there were a few who believed that the earthly annihilation clipped the wings of humans – stopped their progress before they could make something truly great of themselves.”

  “You said it only happened when things were on the brink of destruction.”

  “But how would they really know if humans were on the brink of destruction? Humans had never been allowed to continue beyond the cycle, had they? They’d never been allowed to push themselves past their obstacles.”

  “Well maybe the gods were on the brink of destruction, then.” I said.

  Bren smiled and nodded, his eyes narrow, like I had just caught on to some conspiracy. It was the way my father used to look at me when we talked politics or history, and I had made some realization about the fix being in.

  “Right.” Bren said. “Because it’s people who stop praying to and worshipping and wanting connection with gods, not the other way around. So maybe once the gods lose all their power with humans, Ragnarok doesn’t look so bad. Then there’d be a whole new set of humans to impress.”