Double Eclipse Page 5

  But I heard nothing in reply.

  I looked down at the flight attendant. Her lips and skin had a blue pallor, either because of the cold or because she hadn’t taken a breath in a good two minutes. I had taken a mandatory CPR class at school, but I couldn’t even do that because of our situation. All I could do was stare helplessly into her face and watch her die.

  “No!” I yelled.

  And then it came to me: Joanna! Ingrid and Freya’s mother. Something had happened to her about ten years ago that caused her to lose her earthly body, but her spirit still hovered over the East End, protecting it and lending aid to her family. She had even once saved a boy who drowned. I’d been there. I watched him come back to life with my own two eyes.

  “Joanna Beauchamp!” I called. “Great goddess Skadi! I don’t know if you’re my grandmother or my aunt or my sister, but whatever you are, I call on you in the name of our family! Do not let this mortal die! Please! I beg you!”

  When Ingrid and Freya had called on their mother that day, there had been a bolt of lightning that pierced the water, and a moment later, the drowned boy had awakened. I braced myself for the electrical current—we had been on a boat last time, and I didn’t know if I should expect a shock. I didn’t know if I could even survive it.

  But as it turned out, I didn’t need to brace myself for anything because nothing happened.

  “Joanna!” I pleaded with the empty sky. “Please! Save her! She shouldn’t have to die because someone was trying to kill Thor!”

  Still nothing happened. Nothing except the swirl of the freezing water, numbing my limbs.

  I don’t know how much later it was before someone found us. Ten minutes? An hour? I couldn’t tell you. I barely remember someone prying my fingers off the fuselage, uncurling my arm from the flight attendant’s body and hauling us into a dinghy.

  “It’s okay,” someone said to me. “We’ve got her now.”

  But I knew they didn’t have her. She was dead. She had died in my arms.

  8

  MODERN GIRLS AND OLD-FASHIONED MEN

  Mardi-Overbrook-Journal.docx

  So who’s the Norse god of the sea anyway? Who’s our version of Poseidon, or what’s the Roman guy’s name, Neptune?”

  “Well, there’s Norman, of course. Ingrid and Freya’s father. But he’s in Niflheim now.”

  “The Land of the Dead.”

  Dad nodded. “And then there’s Aegir,” he said, chuckling, then quickly switching to a groan. “I have to stop laughing. The ribs are still tender.”

  Dad’s ribs were the least of the problem. It turned out the crash had, like, shattered his pelvis. It was in six or seven pieces, which was why his legs had just hung there when I pulled him out of the ocean two days prior. For a mortal, such a wound would have been catastrophic—he probably would’ve never walked normally again, and it was a miracle his spinal cord hadn’t been injured. Even for a god trapped in Midgard, it was still serious. Because of the risk of internal bleeding, Molly and I had had no choice but to let the ambulance take him to the hospital, where the doctors had done a whole series of X-rays. In addition to his broken pelvis, there were fractures in his left arm and left femur. I guess that was the side the plane had come down on. On top of all that, he also had a pretty serious concussion.

  Left to nature, the injuries could have easily taken a year to heal, maybe more, and like I said, there was no guarantee that he would have fully recovered. Ingrid had been forced to whip up a fairly strong magical potion, dragging out her mother’s ancient spell books to find one that she thought would work, then hopping on the Internet to get all the things she needed. (Apparently, there are places out in the world that’ll FedEx the wings of a hundred Atlas moths—Ingrid only needed the dust, but she had to scrape it off herself—and a vial of venom from the Egyptian cobra, which, FYI, is the snake Cleopatra used to commit suicide.) It took almost two days to gather everything and make the potion.

  Dad spent most of that time looped out of his mind on morphine, his entire middle from his sternum to his thighs encased in a plaster cast. Ouch. If Dad had been in his immortal Aesir body, the potion would have healed him completely, but because he was in a mortal body (his seventh, it turned out), the potion could only speed up the process so that what would have taken a year to heal would probably end up taking about a month. Freya had to bewitch the doctor to cut the cast off him, and after that, she and Ingrid administered a forgetting spell to every single person who worked in the hospital so they’d have no memory of how serious Dad’s injuries were. That kind of thing is of course totally against Council rules, but it was that or have forty people talking about how Troy Overbrook broke his pelvis at the end of May and was back on the tennis courts by July. The Council likes that kind of talk even less than they like it when magic is used on mortals, so the aunts figured it was worth risking censure.

  Finally, we brought Dad back to Ingrid’s to finish his recuperation. Like I said, he was probably still going to be down for three or four more weeks, and because Ingrid’s potion basically made his metabolism run ten times faster than normal, he was exhausted all the time. Exhausted but starving—Ingrid and her housekeeper were kept busy making him coconut-oil-goji-berry-bee-pollen-whey-powder-flaxseed-wheat-grass-kefir smoothies. (Kefir, by the way, is fermented goat’s milk, and the smoothies tasted pretty much exactly like a barn smells.) But Dad, who’s much more of a steak-with-a-side-of-steak kind of guy, couldn’t seem to get enough of them. He was sipping on one while he rested in Jo’s bedroom, which had only that winter been equipped with a full-sized bed. Molly had helped her decorate, so the room was suffused with what can only be described as an excessive amount of pink satin and white lace, but it made for some good jokes at Dad’s expense. (I have to admit that I took a sadistic pleasure in making Dad squirm. It’s rare that you get to turn the tables on your parent when he’s a mere mortal, but when your dad is the god of thunder, you have to take every chance you get.)

  As you can imagine, all the magic and smoothie making had kept us pretty busy, but once Dad was well on his way to recovery, I couldn’t put off my questions any longer. I started with the whale because, well, a whale tried to kill my dad. I had to know if he thought it was on purpose. If he had any idea who was behind it.

  “Does Aegir rule the sea animals?” I asked.

  Another chuckle from Dad, followed by another groan. “What, like Aquaman?” He paused to take a sip of his greenish-grayish stink drink. “I don’t really know. I assume he has some kind of influence, but if you’re thinking Aegir sent that whale to kill me, you can set your mind at ease. Aegir and I go way back. We once threw a party that was the kind of party people wrote epic poems about.”

  “Kind of like Truman Capote’s masked ball? Or Diddy’s end-of-summer white party in East Hampton?”

  “Ha!” Dad said, then grabbed his ribs. “No, it was more like the Norse version of a rave. There was this cauldron—you wouldn’t believe what Tyr and I had to go through to get it. All I can tell you is that we pissed off a couple of giants.” A faraway look came over Dad’s face as he remembered the good old days when the gods took whatever they wanted and settled their disputes with swords. “It was the size of a hot tub. Much beer was made in it. Much beer was drunk from it. As I recall, Odin even ended up swimming in it.” He shook his head at the memory. “Parents—even gods—should know better than to get naked in front of their kids.”

  Having never met my grandfather, I was forced to imagine Anthony Hopkins from the Thor movies swimming in a hot tub full of beer. It was an amusing image, although I wondered if Dad was maybe stretching the truth a little.

  “Trent used to throw parties with you?” I asked. Sometimes I forgot that my seventeen-year-old boyfriend was also the two-thousand-year-old Norse god of war, and that he’d run around having adventures with my dad for centuries upon centuries before I was even born.


  “Why do you think I don’t trust him alone with you?” Dad said with a grimace that was only half ironic.

  I blushed. “Let’s not talk about Trent right now. We were talking about Aegir. You’re one hundred percent sure he wouldn’t try to kill you?”

  Dad nodded, then took another sip of his smoothie.

  “Positively. Aside from the fact that we’re united in our mutual hatred of Loki, Aegir’s been stuck in Utgard since the destruction of the bridge.”

  I fingered the tattoo on my neck, which commemorated the lost rainbow bridge.

  “Is Aegir a giant?”

  Dad nodded. “Although technically we’re all the same species, you know. Every one of us, even the giants. Whatever the celestial version of DNA is, we all have the same kind. There’s no more difference between us than there is between a Norwegian and a Russian or a Nigerian.”

  “But in all the drawings I’ve ever seen, giants are, like, twelve feet tall. How can we be related to them?”

  Dad nodded again. “Some were a lot taller than that. But look at a Saint Bernard and a Chihuahua. Their DNA is virtually identical. Besides, it’s not appearances that divide people—skin color, hair texture, height, things like that. It’s the ideas people have about appearances. Prejudice isn’t just a problem here in Midgard—it’s rampant throughout the nine worlds, including Asgard.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When my father led the Aesir in their revolt against the Jotun, he and Frigg, your grandmother, chose a new form for us, one that more closely resembled the humans of Midgard, because they had already developed a special relationship with them. A little shorter, a little less hair on the shoulders and the top of the feet. As the centuries went on, they started to talk as though we’d always looked the way we do now—as though the Aesir and Vanir really were different species from the Jotun and the elves and dwarfs. But take my word for it, there’s giant blood in your veins, my sweet.”

  “If Odin led a revolt against the Jotun, how were you friends with Aegir?”

  “In the same way the United States and England are allies. Once time passes and tempers cool, you come to realize you have more similarities than differences. Oh, some Jotun definitely held a grudge, as did some Aesir for that matter. Like any other society, it comes down to individuals. Aegir was definitely one of the good giants. I counted some Jotun as my closest friends back in the old days.” A far-off look came into his eyes. “Some were very close indeed,” he said longingly.

  I thought about the stories I’d heard concerning our mother—that she was a giant too. And even though Janet Steele looked human, I couldn’t help but wonder if that’s who he was thinking about.

  “We, um . . .”

  I stopped short. Now that I was so close to getting real information about my mother, I found it hard to bring up the subject. Part of the problem was that Molly should have been there with me. It seemed strange—wrong—that I would learn something about our origin without her.

  But ever since we’d pulled Molly out of the water, still clutching the lifeless body of that flight attendant, she’d avoided the entire family. She visited the hospital while Dad was there, but she sat apart from us in the waiting room and refused to talk to anyone, and if you actually tried to touch her, she sent out waves of negative energy so intense that cell phones and TVs would go on the fritz, randomly dialing numbers or changing channels. We were afraid that she might short out somebody’s life support machine or something, so we had no choice but to leave her alone.

  It hadn’t gotten better since we’d brought Dad home. Molly had moved out of her guest bedroom and into Ingrid’s gardening studio in the backyard. We only saw her when she came in to get food or take a bath. Still, I figured if she was taking the time to wash and comb her hair that things couldn’t be too bad, and she just needed time. But this was an important conversation. My sister should have been there with us.

  Dad must have sensed the struggle that was going on in me. He put his hand on mine and squeezed, as if he was the one comforting me. “Mardi? Did you want to ask me something?”

  I looked at the open door, as if Molly might appear there, but the only thing that came through was the sound of the television downstairs, where Henry and Jo were playing the latest version of Zelda. I turned back to Dad.

  “So Janet Steele—she’s our mom, right?” I tried not to hold my breath, and watched Dad intently.

  He nodded and tried not to squirm.

  “And I was just going to ask if . . . I mean, there are legends. That Thor’s children were born of a giantess. And so I was wondering if Janet Steele . . . ?” Somehow I couldn’t bring myself to voice the question Is our mom a giantess? It just sounded too weird.

  To my surprise, Dad laughed again and kept on laughing despite the obvious pain it caused him.

  “Janet? A giantess?” He reached for his drink and took a long pull. “By Odin, that is funny. I mean, she is six foot one, so I can see you might think that. But no, she’s as human as they come. A special kind of human, but still human.”

  My ears immediately perked up when Dad said special kind of human, and I felt my heart start to thud in my chest.

  “What do you mean, special?” I said, barely able to control my voice.

  To my surprise, Dad frowned.

  “I’m sorry, this brings up one of the less noble aspects of our history. But I think you’re old enough to hear about it now.” He took another swig of his smelly smoothie, then continued:

  “When the bridge was first destroyed, and those of us who were in Midgard realized we were trapped here for all of eternity, some people didn’t take it so well. There have always been some of us who took the whole god thing a little too seriously, basically treating humans like slaves or pets. I guess some people were inspired by the vampires and their human familiars and they basically claimed entire families as their indentured servants—generation after generation raised to do nothing but serve the gods. Janet is descended from one of these families. Her ancestors were forced to serve Loki for several hundred years, until the Council formally abolished the practice after Salem.”

  As if he’d heard us talking, Fury, Molly’s canine familiar, appeared in the doorway. Poor thing: Molly had been so distraught that she hadn’t even taken her out to the gardening shed with her. Fury had been wandering the house for two days looking forlorn—forlorn and ridiculous, what with her shaved hindquarters contrasting with the glossy mane that fringed her face.

  “Loki!” I couldn’t help but exclaim, patting my lap to invite Fury up. She stared at me blankly, then wandered away, her buffed nails clicking on the bare floorboards. “Does that mean our mother is . . . evil?”

  Another laugh from Dad. “Calm yourself, daughter. Janet’s got a temper on her, but I think it has more to do with being raised in the Australian outback by a bunch of rough-and-tumble cowboys and opal miners. She’d heard stories of her family’s history from her grandmother, but had no idea whether they were true or just something the old woman had made up to amuse her.”

  “Did she know who you were?”

  Dad didn’t say anything for a moment. His gaze went far away, and I could imagine him conjuring a mental image of when he first met our mother. Judging from the look on his face, however, it was far from the fairy-tale romance I would have hoped for.

  Finally, he nodded. “I wasn’t aware of it at first, but later on, I realized she’d known who I was all along.”

  Suddenly, I remembered Ingrid’s comment from the other day, about how Molly and I were never supposed to have been born.

  “Did she trick you? Into having kids, I mean.”

  Another long pause followed by another nod.

  “In the old days, when Loki and some of the refugees from the nine worlds still had human familiars, the humans would try to seduce their gods in order to have children
by them. As you and your sister and Jo all demonstrate, the offspring of a mortal and an immortal usually take after the immortal parent, and these children, who loved their human parent every bit as much as they loved their celestial one, would often cast longevity spells on their mortal parent to keep him or her alive. Such spells are incredibly difficult to cast—as I recall, one of the ingredients is a dragon scale, and another is the powdered fingernails of one of the undead guardians of Niflheim, which is the only one of the nine worlds those of us trapped in Midgard can still access.”

  “From the seam under Fair Haven, Trent’s family’s house, right?”

  “That’s right,” Dad said. “Anyway, your mother had heard these stories, and I guess she got it into her head that she wanted to have a god’s child. Specifically, this god’s child.”

  “Hey, give her credit for good taste, right?”

  Dad shrugged, but you could tell he was pleased. Modesty is not one of the godly virtues, and Thor was the godliest of them all when it came to loving himself.

  Then he turned to me, a nostalgic smile on his face. “She was so beautiful, she didn’t need that love potion she gave me.”

  “She charmed you?”

  “Maybe.” He winked. Dad was so bad. Growing up, Molly and I had met more Victoria’s Secret models, pop princesses, and grade-B starlets than Leonardo DiCaprio and Drake put together.

  “You really think she had access to magic?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “How do you know?” I said defiantly.

  “Well, honestly, because of you. You and Molly.”

  I stifled a gasp.

  “You mean it’s true? That we weren’t supposed to be born!”

  “It’s a little more complicated than that.”

  “Dad!” I almost yelled. “Don’t drag this out! I’m dying here.”

  He smiled and patted me on the knee. “You and your sister were always destined to be born. It’s just that we always thought your mother would, in fact, be a Jotun. And . . .” Again his voice fell off.