Rinda Elliott - Foretold

The car swerved, causing my hands to sweat as my hold on the steering wheel turned to a death grip. My cell phone buzzed in the front pocket of my jeans but I ignored it, too scared to reach for it because I was pretty sure I’d left actual road at some point.

Plus, every time the thing rang lately it was bad news. Especially three days before.

“You need to come home. Now.” My sister Kat’s voice barked out flat and hard.

Scurrying into the short hall by the diner’s restrooms, I growled into the phone. “You know I’m not supposed to have my cell out at work!” I peeked around the corner at my boss, Daddy Mac, still transfixed on the television.

“Have you been outside? Coral thinks it’s happening. She’s pretty freaked out.”

So was I. Like all the people stuffed into booths in the diner, I’d been watching that approaching storm blob on the news, my stomach in knots. “I thought you didn’t believe in it.”

“You gotta come home. Dru’s worse today. She took an iron skillet into her room and spelled the door closed. We can’t get in.”

I didn’t know as much about regular magic as Mom and my sister Coral but even I knew that iron was used in hexing spells. My magic came with the norn inside me.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath of oily air. “Do you smell lavender?”

Kat snorted. “House reeks of it.”

A woman passed me on the way to the restroom. I clasped the phone closer and turned toward the corner to whisper. “Then she’s doing spells. Has Coral tried a counter for the door?”

“Yeah. The backlash gave her a headache.”

“Look, I’ll try to get off work. Turn on the news and see if all the channels are using the same storm image. Maybe this is only a freak snowstorm.”

“Raven, it’s Florida. It’s August. And we turn nineteen in three months.” Her voice held a thread of fear I’d never heard from Kat, who thought all the prophecies were a load of bunk. She sighed in that loud I’m-totally-put-out way of hers—the one that never failed to get my back up. “I hope the rest of what our crazy progenitor has said is wrong,” she continued. “But it looks like she got this part right.”

“Gods, Kat.” I shut my eyes again, and rubbed them until they hurt.

“Just come home.” Her voice had lost the attitude. “Sometimes our mother listens to you.”

More like she relied on me. As the oldest of the triplets, I guess she thought I would be the most responsible. Like a few extra minutes on my time line gave me a maturity my sisters lacked. Unfortunately, it kind of had. Not that I’d had much of a choice.

Thinking about my mom made me sick because of the last time I’d seen her. The cruel curl of her lip after she’d shoved me. Shoved me. The past few years had been bad, but she’d never hurt me before. She used to be a pretty cool mother but our bond had cracked over the years, and something in her eyes before she disappeared had ripped my heart to shreds. She’d looked right through me—like the loving mother who’d sacrificed a regular life to keep us safe had finally been swallowed by years of fear.

And madness.

“Where did she go?” Kat had placed her palm against the window of Mom’s empty room. Mom had always been off but the past month or so things had been worse than usual. She’d lost her job—which had made me extra glad I’d taken a second one.

“Who knows? But look at this!” I crouched next to the papers scattered all over the floor. No wonder we ran out of printer supplies so often. The winter mix outside sent a cold draft along the carpet, like frigid fingers burrowing past skin and muscle and into bone. I tried not to think about the snow. Of the ramifications.

I sifted through the papers, my stomach aching. Something caught my attention, and I started stacking the papers, glancing at each one. Mom had been printing online newspapers from...everywhere. It didn’t take long for the pattern to become clear. “Oh, gods, oh, man, Kat. She’s looking for him.”

“Who?”

I shoved one of Mom’s graphs toward her. It had names, ages...towns. “The young warrior.”

The sheet crinkled noisily as Kat snatched it. Her ponytail slid around her shoulder to brush the paper as she stared at it.

I ran my hands through my hair, absently scrunched the short spikes on top. Kat and Coral would probably never cut their hair but I’d grown sick of messing with it and chopped mine off. Mom said it made me look like a fairy sprite.

The black color came more from our Native American Arapaho ancestors—Iñunaina—than from our Norse ones. We looked Indian, but our Scandinavian heritage raged strong. As if aware of my thoughts, that presence in me, that thing, shifted and stretched like a sharp-clawed cat waking from a nap.

It creeped me the hell out each and every time since it first happened. Nothing like growing up knowing that one of the three norn goddesses lived in your body. That she was there for one reason.

It hit me then. The terror. Something more than the usual fear and the constant anxiety that the norn could take over. That she could just wipe off my personality like words on a whiteboard.

Could this really be it? The end of the world?

Horror curled through my insides, thick and rolling like waves of sticky, oozing oil. It flowed into my limbs and made them sting. I fisted my hands and sat back as the room swirled around me. Terrified the norn’s seidr magic would kick in, I squeezed my eyes closed and held my breath.

I came out of it to find Kat stroking my shoulder, holding my hand. “It’s okay,” she whispered over and over. “Come on. You’re the one who never loses it. Don’t wig out on me now, Raven.”

My fear was reflected in her eyes. “Kat, it’s true. All of it. Ragnarok.” I whispered the last word.

“I know.” She closed her eyes. “I’ve spent my entire life ignoring Dru’s stupid stories and here I am scared to death, too. But we can’t let her do whatever it is she’s planning for those boys. We just can’t.”

Kat never called her Mom. Her resentment for the woman raged like a never-ending storm. She hated her for dragging us from town to town, from one campsite to another. Out of the three of us, the most forgiving of Mom was Coral, who padded into the room pulling on a fat, purple sweater.

“Where’s Mom?” Her loose hair was longer than her black skirt, which ended halfway down her thighs, above a pair of thick, trendy, hot-pink socks that stretched over her knees. They went well with the pajama top...and the pink feather she’d clipped into her hair. Her style was definitely her own. Kind of funky, fashion-conscious hippie.

“You didn’t see her outside?” Mom would have passed Coral on the front porch when she left.

“No. I was talking to Mr. Bennings next door.” She tried to smile. “He’s going to his sister’s in South Carolina. Not sure why he thinks that will help. It’s snowing there, too.”

“Mom couldn’t have gone through the backyard.” I frowned, bit my lip. The fence panels were tall, the gate had rusted shut and we’d had an exterminator out less than a week before to deal with a huge, creepy nest of snakes. “Coral, is there some spell she could have used to travel? Like disappear or transport?”

Kat snorted. “Beam Dru up.”

I glared at her. She hated the old Star Trek: The Next Generation reruns I loved and she never missed a chance to pick on me.

Coral shook her head. “Mom’s getting pretty good, but not that good. I don’t know anyone who can travel outside the bounds of reality.”

Faint heat filled my cheeks. Yeah, it was a dumb question. “She must have crawled through the window.”

She pointed to the white petals. “I want to know what she did with the datura. It’s poison.” Coral used a tissue to wrap the flowers and toss them in the trash. “Don’t know why I’m surprised. Yesterday, she hacked away all my solstice orange snapdragons.”