The Ship of the Dead Read online

  stairs like What are you waiting for? I’m a wolf. I can’t open that hatch.

  I climbed to the top of the stairs. The temperature was like the inside of a greenhouse. On the other side of the hatch, the wolf snuffled and chewed at the Plexiglas, leaving drool smears and fang marks. Those protective-barrier runes must have tasted great. Being this close to an enemy wolf made the hairs on the back of my neck do corkscrews.

  What would happen if I opened the hatch? Would the runes kill me? Would they kill the wolf? Or would they deactivate if I let the wolf in of my own free will, since that was literally the stupidest thing I could do?

  The wolf slavered at the Plexiglas.

  “Hey, buddy,” I said.

  Jack buzzed in my hand. “What?”

  “Not you, Jack. I’m talking to the wolf.” I smiled at the beast, then remembered that showing teeth meant aggression to canines. I pouted instead. “I’m going to let you in. Won’t that be nice? Then you can get whatever you came for, since I know you’re not here to kill me, right?”

  The wolf’s snarl was not reassuring.

  “Okay, then,” I said. “One, two, three!”

  I pushed against the hatch with all my einherji strength, shoving the wolf back as I surged onto the roof deck. I had time to register a barbecue grill, some planters overflowing with hibiscus, and two lounge chairs overlooking an amazing view of the Charles River. I wanted to slap Uncle Randolph for never telling me he had such a cool party spot.

  The wolf stepped from behind the hatch and growled, its hackles raised like a shaggy dorsal fin. One of its eyes was swollen shut, the eyelid burned from contact with my uncle’s rune trap.

  “Now?” Jack asked with no particular enthusiasm.

  “Not yet.” I flexed my knees, ready to spring into action if necessary. I would show this wolf how well I could fight…or, you know, how fast I could run away, depending on what the situation called for.

  The wolf regarded me with its one good eye. It snorted dismissively and bolted down the stairwell into the town house.

  I wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or insulted.

  I ran after it. By the time I reached the bottom of the stairs, Alex and the other wolf were having a snarl-off in the middle of the library. They bared their teeth and circled one another, looking for any signs of fear or weakness. The blue wolf was much larger. The neon wisps glowing in its fur gave it a certain cool factor. But it was also half-blind and wincing in pain. Alex, being Alex, showed no sign of being intimidated. He stood his ground as the other wolf edged around him.

  Once our glowing blue visitor was confident Alex wasn’t going to attack, it raised its snout and sniffed the air. I expected it to run toward the bookshelves and chomp some secret book of nautical maps, or maybe a copy of How to Stop Loki’s Ship of Death in Three Easy Steps! Instead, the wolf lunged toward the fireplace, jumped at the mantel, and grabbed the mead horn in its mouth.

  Some sluggish part of my brain thought, Hey, I should probably stop it.

  Alex was way ahead of me. In one fluid movement, he morphed back into human form, stepped forward, and lashed out with his garrote like he was throwing a bowling ball. (Actually, it was a lot more graceful than that. I’d seen Alex bowl, and it wasn’t pretty.) The golden cord wrapped around the wolf’s neck. With one yank backward, Alex cured the wolf of any future headache problems.

  The decapitated carcass flopped against the carpet. It began to sizzle, disintegrating until only the drinking horn and a few tufts of fur remained.

  Jack’s blade turned heavier in my grip. “Well, fine,” he said. “I guess you didn’t need me after all. I’ll just go write some love poetry and cry a lot.” He shrank back into a runestone pendant.

  Alex crouched next to the mead horn. “Any idea why a wolf would want a decorative drinking vessel?”

  I knelt next to him, picked up the horn, and looked inside. Rolled up and crammed into the horn was a small leather book like a diary. I pulled it out and fanned the pages: drawings of Viking runes, interspersed with paragraphs written in Uncle Randolph’s cramped cursive.

  “I think,” I said, “we’ve found the right dead white male author.”

  We reclined in the lounge chairs on the roof deck.

  While I flipped through my uncle’s notebook, trying to make sense of his frenzied rune drawings and cursive crazy talk, Alex relaxed and sipped guava juice from the mead horn.

  Why Uncle Randolph kept guava juice in his library’s mini fridge, I couldn’t tell you.

  Every so often, just to annoy me, Alex slurped with exaggerated gusto and smacked his lips. “Ahhhh.”

  “Are you sure it’s safe to drink from that horn?” I asked. “It could be cursed or something.”

  Alex grabbed his throat and pretended to choke. “Oh, no! I’m turning into a frog!”

  “Please don’t.”

  He pointed at the diary. “Any luck with that?”

  I stared at the pages. Runes swam in front of my eyes. The notations were in a mix of languages: Old Norse, Swedish, and some I couldn’t begin to guess. Even the passages in English made little sense. I felt like I was trying to read an advanced quantum physics textbook backward in a mirror.

  “Most of it’s over my head,” I admitted. “The earlier pages look like they’re about Randolph’s search for the Sword of Summer. I recognize some of the references. But here at the end…”

  The last few pages were more hastily written. Randolph’s writing turned shaky and frantic. Splotches of dried blood freckled the paper. I remembered that, in the tomb of the Viking zombies in Provincetown, Randolph had gotten several of his fingers lopped off. These pages might have been written after that, with his nondominant hand. The watery cursive reminded me of the way I used to write back in elementary school, when my teacher forced me to use my right hand.

  On the last page, Randolph had scratched my name: Magnus.

  Under that, he’d sketched two serpents interlocking in a figure eight. The quality of the drawing was terrible, but I recognized the symbol. Alex had the same thing tattooed on the nape of his neck: the sign of Loki.

  Below that was a term in what I assumed was Old Norse: mjöð. Then some notes in English: Might stop L. Whetstone of Bolverk > guards. Where?

  That last word trailed downward, the question mark a desperate scrawl.

  “What do you make of this?” I passed the book to Alex.

  He frowned. “That’s my mom’s symbol, obviously.”

  (You heard right. Loki was normally a male god, but he happened to be Alex’s mother. Long story.)

  “And the rest of it?” I asked.

  “This word looks like moo with a j. Perhaps Scandinavian cows have an accent?”

  “I take it you don’t read Old Norse, then, or whatever that language is?”

  “Magnus, it may shock you to learn that I do not have every talent in the world. Just most of the important ones.”

  He squinted at the page. When he concentrated, the left corner of his mouth twitched like he was enjoying a secret joke. I found that tic distracting. I wanted to know what he found so funny.

  “‘Might stop L,’” Alex read. “Let’s assume that’s Loki. ‘Whetstone of Bolverk.’ You think that’s the same thing as the Skofnung Stone?”

  I shuddered. We’d lost the Skofnung Stone and Skofnung Sword during a wedding party in Loki’s cavern, when he’d escaped the bindings that had held him for a thousand years. (Oops. Our bad.) I never wanted to see that particular whetstone again.

  “I hope not,” I said. “Ever heard the name Bolverk?”

  “Nope.” Alex finished his guava juice. “I’m kind of digging this mead horn, though. You mind if I keep it?”

  “All yours.” I found the idea of Alex taking a souvenir from my family mansion strangely pleasing. “So if Randolph wanted me to find that book, and Loki sent the wolves to get it before I could—”

  Alex tossed the journal back to me. “Assuming what you just said is
true, and assuming it’s not a trap, and assuming those notes aren’t the ramblings of a madman?”

  “Uh…yeah.”

  “Then best-case scenario: Your uncle came up with an idea to stop Loki. It wasn’t something he could do himself, but he hoped you could. It involves a whetstone, a Bolverk, and possibly a Scandinavian cow.”

  “When you put it like that, it doesn’t sound so promising.”

  Alex poked the tip of the mead horn. “Sorry to burst your bubble, but most plans to stop Loki fail. We know this.”

  The bitter edge in his voice surprised me.

  “You’re thinking about your training sessions with Sam,” I guessed. “How are they going?”

  Alex’s face told me the answer.

  Among Loki’s many disturbing qualities, he could command his children to do whatever he wanted whenever they were in his presence, which made family reunions a real drag.

  Alex was the exception. He’d somehow learned to resist Loki’s power, and for the past six weeks, he’d been trying to teach his half sister Samirah al-Abbas to do the same. The fact that neither of them talked much about their training suggested that it hadn’t been a rousing success.

  “She’s trying,” Alex said. “It doesn’t make it easier that she’s…” He stopped himself.

  “What?”

  “Never mind. I promised not to talk about it.”

  “Now I’m really curious. Is everything okay with her and Amir?”

  Alex snorted. “Oh, yeah. They’re still head over heels, dreaming of the day when they can get married. I swear, if those two didn’t have me to chaperone them, they’d do something crazy like hold hands.”

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  Alex waved off my question. “All I’m saying is that you shouldn’t trust anything you get from your Uncle Randolph. Not the advice in that book. Not this house. Anything you inherit from family…it always comes with strings attached.”

  That seemed a strange thing for him to say, considering he’d been enjoying the view from Randolph’s magnificent roof deck while sipping chilled guava juice from his Viking mead horn, but I got the feeling Alex wasn’t really thinking about my dysfunctional uncle.

  “You never talk much about your family,” I noted. “I mean your mortal family.”

  He stared at me darkly. “And I’m not going to start now. If you knew half the—”

  BRAWK! In a flutter of black feathers, a raven landed on the tip of Alex’s boot.

  You don’t see a lot of wild ravens in Boston. Canadian geese, seagulls, ducks, pigeons, even hawks, sure. But when a huge black raptor lands on your foot, that can only mean one thing: a message from Valhalla.

  Alex held out his hand. (Not normally recommended with ravens. They have a vicious bite.) The bird hopped on his wrist, barfed up a hard pellet the size of a pecan right into Alex’s palm, and then flew away, its mission accomplished.

  Yes, our ravens deliver messages via barf-mail. Ravens have a natural ability to regurgitate inedible substances like bones and fur, so they have no qualms about swallowing a message capsule, flying it across the Nine Worlds, and vomiting it to the correct recipient. It wouldn’t have been my chosen career, but hey, no judgment.

  Alex cracked open the pellet. He unfolded the letter and began to read, the corner of his mouth starting to twitch again. “It’s from T.J.,” he said. “Looks like we’re leaving today. Right now, in fact.”

  “What?” I sat up in my recliner. “Why?”

  Of course, I’d known we were running out of time. We had to leave soon in order to reach Loki’s ship before Midsummer. But there was a big difference between soon and right now. I wasn’t a big fan of right now.

  Alex kept reading. “Something about the tide? I dunno. I’d better go bust Samirah out of school. She’ll be in Calculus. She’s not going to be happy about leaving.”

  He rose and offered me a hand.

  I didn’t want to get up. I wanted to stay there on that deck with Alex and watch the afternoon sunlight change the color of the river from blue to amber. Maybe we could read some of Randolph’s old paperbacks. We could drink all his guava juice. But the raven had barfed up our orders. You couldn’t argue with raven barf.

  I took Alex’s hand and got to my feet. “You want me to come with you?”

  Alex frowned. “No, dummy. You’ve got to get back to Valhalla. You’re the one with the boat. Speaking of which, have you warned the others about—?”

  “No,” I said, my face burning. “Not yet.”

  Alex laughed. “That should be interesting. Don’t wait for Sam and me. We’ll catch up with you somewhere along the way!”

  Before I could ask what he meant by that, Alex turned into a flamingo and launched himself into the sky, making it a banner day for Boston bird-watchers.

  LEGENDS TELL US that Valhalla has 540 doors, conveniently distributed across the Nine Worlds for easy access.

  The legends don’t mention that one of those entrances is in the Forever 21 store on Newbury Street, just behind the women’s activewear rack.

  It normally wasn’t the entrance I liked to use, but it was the closest to Uncle Randolph’s mansion. Nobody in Valhalla could explain to me why we had a gateway in Forever 21. Some speculated it was left over from a time when the building was not a retail store. Personally, I thought the location might be one of Odin’s little jokes, since a lot of his einherjar were literally forever twenty-one, or sixteen, or sixty.

  My dwarf friend Blitzen especially hated that entrance. Every time I mentioned Forever 21, he would launch into a rant about how his fashions were much better. Something about hemlines. I don’t know.

  I strolled through the lingerie section, getting a strange look from a saleslady, then dove into the activewear rack and popped out the other side into one of the Hotel Valhalla’s game rooms. There was a pool tournament in progress, which Vikings play with spears instead of pool cues. (Hint: Never stand behind a Viking when he shoots.) Erik the Green from floor 135 greeted me cheerfully. (From what I can tell, approximately 72 percent of the population of Valhalla is named Erik.)

  “Hail, Magnus Chase!” He pointed at my shoulder. “You’ve got some spandex just there.”

  “Oh, thanks.” I untangled the yoga pants that had gotten stuck on my shirt and tossed them into the bin marked FOR RESTOCKING.

  Then I strode off to find my friends.

  Walking through the Hotel Valhalla never got old. At least it hadn’t for me so far, and einherjar who’d been here hundreds of years had told me the same thing. Thanks to the power of Odin, or the magic of the Norns, or maybe just the fact that we had an on-site IKEA, the decor was constantly changing, though it always incorporated a lot of spears and shields, and perhaps more wolf motifs than I would’ve liked.

  Even just finding the elevators required me to navigate hallways that had changed size and direction since the morning, past rooms I’d never seen before. In one enormous oak-paneled lounge, warriors played shuffleboard with oars for pushers and combat shields for pucks. Many of the players sported leg splints, arm slings, and head bandages, because—of course—einherjar played shuffleboard to the death.

  The main lobby had been re-carpeted in deep crimson, a great color to hide bloodstains. The walls were now hung with tapestries depicting Valkyries flying into battle against fire giants. It was beautiful work, though the proximity of so many wall torches made me nervous. Valhalla was pretty lax about safety codes. I didn’t like burning to death. (It was one of my least favorite ways to die, right up there with choking on the after-dinner mints in the feast hall.)

  I took the elevator up to floor nineteen. Unfortunately, the elevator music hadn’t changed. It was getting to the point where I could sing along with Frank Sinatra in Norwegian. I was just glad I lived on a low floor. If I lived somewhere up in the hundreds, I would have gone…well, berserk.

  On floor nineteen, everything was strangely quiet. No sounds of video-game violence emanated from Thomas
Jefferson Jr.’s room. (Dead Civil War soldiers love their video games almost as much as they love charging up hills.) I saw no signs that Mallory Keen had been practicing her knife-throwing in the hallway. Halfborn Gunderson’s room was open and being serviced by a flock of ravens, who swirled through his library and his weapons collection, dusting books and battle-axes. The big man himself was nowhere to be seen.

  My own room had recently been cleaned. The bed was made. In the central atrium, the trees had been pruned and the grass mowed. (I could never figure out how the ravens operated a lawn mower.) On the coffee table, a note in T.J.’s elegant script read:

  We’re at dock 23, sublevel 6. See you there!

  The TV had been turned to the Hotel Valhalla Channel, which displayed a list of the afternoon’s events: racquetball, machine-gun tag (like laser tag, except with machine guns), watercolor painting, Italian cooking, advanced sword-sharpening, and something called flyting—all done to the death.

  I stared wistfully at the screen. I’d never wanted to practice watercolor painting to the death before, but now I was tempted. It sounded much easier than the trip I was about to take from dock twenty-three, sublevel six.

  First things first: I showered off the smell of Boston Harbor. I changed into new clothes. I grabbed my go bag: camping supplies, some basic provisions, and, of course, some chocolate bars.

  As nice as my hotel suite was, I didn’t have much in the way of personal stuff—just a few of my favorite books, and some photos from my past that magically appeared over time, gradually filling up the fireplace mantel.

  The hotel wasn’t meant to be a forever home. We einherjar might stay here for centuries, but it was only a stopover on our way to Ragnarok. The whole hotel radiated a sense of impermanence and anticipation. Don’t get too comfortable, it seemed to say. You might be leaving any minute to go die your final death at Doomsday. Hooray!

  I checked my reflection in the full-length mirror. I wasn’t sure why it mattered. I’d never cared much about appearances during the two years I’d lived on the streets, but lately Alex Fierro had been teasing me mercilessly, which made me more conscious of how I looked.

  Besides, if you don’t check yourself from time to time in Valhalla, you could be walking around for hours with raven poop on your shoulder, or an arrow in your butt, or a pair of yoga pants wrapped around your neck.

  Hiking boots: check. New pair of jeans: check. Green Hotel Valhalla T-shirt: check. Down jacket, appropriate for cold-water expeditions and falling off masts: check. Runestone pendant that could turn into a heartbroken magical sword: check.

  After living on the streets, I wasn’t used to my face looking so clean. I definitely wasn’t used to my new haircut, which Blitz had first given me during our expedition into Jotunheim. Since then, every time it started to grow out, Alex hacked it off again, leaving my bangs just long enough to fall in my eyes, the back chopped to collar level. I was used to my hair being much wilder and more wiry, but Alex took such glee in murdering my blond locks it was impossible to tell him no.

  It’s perfect! Alex said. Now you at least look like you’re groomed, but your face is still obscured!

  I slipped Randolph’s notebook into my pack, along with one last item I’d been trying hard not to think about—a certain silk handkerchief I’d gotten from my father.

  I sighed at the Magnus in the mirror. “Well, sir, you’d better get going. Your friends are eagerly waiting to laugh at you.”

  “There he is!” yelled Halfborn Gunderson, berserker extraordinaire, speaker of the obvious.

  He barreled toward me like a friendly Mack truck. His hair was even wilder than mine used to be. (I was pretty sure he cut it himself, using a battle-ax, in the dark.) He wore a T-shirt today, which was unusual, but his arms were still a wild landscape of muscle and tattoo. Strapped across his back was his battle-ax named Battle-Ax, and holstered up and down his leather breeches were half a dozen knives.

  He wrapped me in a bear hug and lifted me off my feet, perhaps testing to make sure my rib cage would not crack under pressure. He put me down and patted my arms, apparently satisfied.

  “You ready for a quest?” he bellowed. “I’m ready for a quest!”

  From the edge of the canal, where she was coiling ropes, Mallory Keen called, “Oh, shut up, you oaf! I still think we should use you as the rudder.”

  Halfborn’s face mottled red, but he kept his eyes on me. “I’m trying not to kill her, Magnus. I really am. But it’s so hard. I’d better keep busy or I’m going to do something I’ll regret. You have the handkerchief?”

  “Uh, yes, but—”

  “Good man. Time’s a-wasting!”

  He tromped back to the dockside and began sorting his supplies—huge canvas duffels no doubt full of food, weapons, and lots of spare leather breeches.

  I scanned the length of the cavern. Along the left-hand wall, a river rushed through the canal, emerging from a train-size tunnel on one end and disappearing into an identical tunnel on the other. The barreled ceiling was polished wood,