picked up the stack of papers and handed a section to each sister. “We have to figure out which boy she went after.” I stared from one to the other. If I’d been wrong all this time, the warrior was important—so, so much more important than we were. Gods, we’d spent our lives snickering over the idea of the young warrior killing one of us...but now, I didn’t know. Maybe it was real. Maybe one of us would change the prophecies and save one of the warriors carrying the gods’ souls. Maybe we could help stop the end of the world, crazy as that sounded.
All I knew was that I wasn’t willing for any of us to die. Mom running off to interfere probably altered all of it—even the prophecy we’d grown up fearing.
A tear slid down Coral’s cheek. I felt her pain in that strange way twins and triplets have of knowing when a sibling is hurting. She lifted her gaze to me, gray eyes shiny. “I can’t believe this is happening.”
Neither could I, but my tongue felt thick and the words stuck in my throat. I pulled my gaze from her and shuffled through the pages, finding story after story about boys with strange abilities or affinities with animals. Mom must have hardly slept recently, must have spent night after night searching the Net. Looking for the boy who would kill one of her daughters.
Going silently mad.
What did she plan to do to him?
I knew when I found the one I was supposed to because the norn inside me shifted again. She was getting more potent. This time she scraped and clawed.
Holding my breath, I worked hard to ignore her and stared at the grainy black-and-white photo of a boy, his longish, light hair in midswing, covering one eye. The photographer had obviously been more interested in the two wolves staring from the forest, half-hidden by the trees. The boy was pointing them back into the woods.
Light of hair. Wolves.
Odin, the Allfather God, had two wolves.
My hands started sweating and I rubbed them on my shorts, noticing that the temperature in the room had dropped enough to make my toes numb. I blew out air, watched it mist. Scrambling to my feet, I shot to the window.
The snow fell in sheets now. White smothered the still-blooming trees and flowers. Would be killing them fast at this rate.
I turned to find both sisters behind me, knew they’d found potential warriors, which could mean the norns wanted us to stop this.
Coral handed me her page and I stared at the picture of a tall guy with crazy-short hair so pale it looked gray in the black-and-white photo. Temper blazed in his eyes, but the hammer in the corner of the piece stilled my heart.
Kat’s boy looked a lot friendlier with an easy smile stretching his lips. This picture was in color. Sunlight sparkled on his light hair—the article was from one of those stupid tabloids and said something about a boy who called rain and made crops grow.
A shiver crawled up my spine when I looked back at the one I’d found. The story was several years old—about a boy and the wolf pups that had followed him home after the accident that killed his parents. I could see they were creatures of magic and that the boy held something powerful. It was there, in the eye not covered by his hair. Vanir McConnell, it said. Norse and Irish.
“Born of two magical clans,” I whispered, thinking of the swirled symbol shared by both.
“That share life’s spiral,” followed Kat.
Coral took her paper back, stared at it as her bottom lip quivered. “Light of head, dark of eyes.”
We didn’t say the rest aloud. We’d always thought it was so stupid.
The young warrior will herald the beginning of Ragnarok. His hand to the death of a norn.
The resulting silence was broken by the sudden violence of the snowstorm. It battered the windows and roof, causing me to clench my teeth.
“We don’t have much time,” I said. “It’ll be hard to travel soon.” I met Kat’s eyes. “We’ll have to use the college money.” They’d been saving, too. None of us wanted to believe our mother’s stories about one of us dying.
Kat crossed her arms, bit her lip. “Probably won’t need it, anyway.”
“We’ll need it,” I insisted. “I won’t accept that. We’ve worked too hard for it—a better life. We’ll just have to replace the money when we can. We’ll still go to college. If this really is Ragnarok and we’re in for three years of winter, it’ll just be cold. Life goes on.”
None of us said what we were probably all thinking. Yes, life would go on, but it was going to be different. Even if the prophecy was wrong and none of us died, the world would be very unlike what it had been. According to the writings on Ragnarok, there would only be one short summer break in those three years of winter. After that? I couldn’t form images in my mind. They all froze my blood. Tidal waves and earth-consuming fire. Even with the magic in my veins, I’d never, ever taken the stories of warring gods seriously. It was too big.
Too scary.
I looked down at the boy in the picture, at his one eye staring at me in an absurd parody of Odin and his one eye. “I’m pretty sure our mother went to find the guy who’s supposed to kill us. But which one?”
Kat voiced my biggest question. “You don’t think she’d actually hurt them, do you?”
Hot tears burned the corners of my eyes but I held them back. “You guys know we can’t let her. If they live to fight and we play our part, one of them could survive and there will be no end of the world.”
Coral sniffed. Tears streaked her cheeks. “We have to stop her. No matter what it could mean.”
We stared silently at one another, each of us knowing what the others were thinking.
I couldn’t worry about dying or losing one of my sisters. We’d never been apart. We fought, sure—all sisters do—but we shared a deeper bond, one forged through years of only having one another in the weirdest of living situations. Out of the three of us, only Coral had braved a date. It was hard to date when your mother thought every potential boyfriend could be a killer. Other than that, only our jobs separated us.
Pathetic? Maybe.
But our purpose had been drilled into us from birth. We carried the norns’ souls, making us the new sisters of fate. We carved the old words in seidr trances and revealed secrets, lies and hopes. And now, we had to find all three potential world-saving warriors because we didn’t know which one Mom had gone after first.
Or what she’d do once she found him.
I risked one hand off the wheel long enough to rub my temple. This anxiety was eating me alive. I’d been driving too long and my head had ached the past twenty-four hours. I missed my sisters. We’d never been apart this long before.
So when the flash of brown stepped in front of my car, I panicked and swerved. The car hit a patch of ice, glanced off a tree and sailed with a groaning, metallic cry right over a ravine and into fast-moving, icy water.
The jarring crash rattled every bone in my body.
Shock
