Rinda Elliott - Foretold

My mouth dropped open. They were Coral’s favorite flower. She’d worked her butt off to grow those and we’d carted the pots around for years. “Oh, Coral, I’m so sorry. Why would she do that?”

“They detect spells,” Kat murmured. She only made that pinched-mouth, evasive-eye expression when she was hiding information.

“Kat, did you know?”

“Know what?”

I lifted one eyebrow. We both jumped when Coral smacked Kat’s shoulder.

“Hey!” Kat yelled, eyes narrowing, hand balling into a fist.

I scrambled to my feet to stop Kat from hitting her back. “We don’t have time for this.” I turned Kat toward me, feeling the frailness of her shoulders. We were all built small, but she felt thinner, like she’d been stressing more than usual lately. “Do you know something or not?”

Fury built in my stomach when she stared at the floor. “You got something, didn’t you?” I whispered.

Kat jerked from my hands and stomped from the room. She came back with her favorite yellow chenille throw bunched under her arm. She snapped it open and laid it on the floor. We all squatted around it, but I winced when I saw the perfect rune-shaped holes—obviously cut with scissors. When the norn’s magic hit during sleep, our subconscious found any way to get the messages across.

We’d been carving, writing and even burning these symbols in seidr magical trances since our ninth birthdays.

“‘Mother berserker,’” I translated. “Yeah, I see why you didn’t say anything. Stupid, cryptic shit.”

“Dru was already certifiable.” Kat lifted her eyebrows, shrugged. “I didn’t think the runes meant all that much different. But then she fell off that ladder and I figured the snakes had startled her.”

“The ones from the backyard?” Coral asked.

A few weeks ago, our mother had fallen off a ladder painting the outside of the house. She was unconscious for three days. I’d found her. Also found some snakeskins in a sort of circle at the base of the ladder. I’d trashed them before Coral could see them and think they were a sign. “Yeah, that exterminator sucks. The ‘berserker’ thing could have meant that. It would be nice if this dumb magic came with instructions.”

We had tons of books and countless Xeroxed copies of old writings—we’d collected everything we could find on our heritage, trying to figure out what was truth and what wasn’t. We had some kind of trance magic, a version of the Norse seidr magic inherited from our father’s side, but none of us had any control over it or even understood it.

Our mother’s abilities were different. She was an earth witch. Eyeing the iron skillet, I shuddered. If she was doing something with dark magic, this could be bad. Really bad.

I 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.