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  Marik shook off the idea, leaving the two of us with his “Don’t worry about me. I finish what I start.”

  While this cheered Penny measurably, it jarred me to the core. And it was my turn to feel a sharp pain.

  I way preferred having Jack in the stands with me during a football game than watching him play, even though he had been a fine specimen to behold. I could tell by the way his body shifted with every play that he missed the sport. I was happy, anyway, and snuggled in close to him, risking the occasional elbow he threw when reacting to the action down on the field.

  Penny was a nervous ninny the entire first half watching for Marik, who was late. Jinky — off taking photos — had reported earlier that he was “on his way.”

  When it was time for the members of the court to assemble pre-halftime, Penny started down the bleachers with a nervous backward glance in my direction.

  “He’ll show,” I called down to her. “He said so.”

  Just as the court began their procession onto the field, I caught sight of Marik hotfooting it to catch up with them. Had I not known he was razor-edge close to missing the whole show, I wouldn’t have noticed anything amiss. And if he still wasn’t feeling well, he sure didn’t show it. He carried out his escort duties with grace and ease as he smiled and waved pleasantly when his own name was called. He got a big cheer from the crowd, as big as John’s, I’d have guessed.

  Our team, contrary to the vitriol shouted at the Asking Fire, did not destroy Pinewood. Sadly, it was the reverse. With a twenty-one to three victory, Pinewood high-stepped it off the field while our Falcons hangdogged their way to the locker room.

  Postgame, while we lingered in the commons area near the concessions, Jack got pulled into a Homecoming photo of past players. The moment he headed off to the field, Marik appeared at my side.

  “May I talk to you?” he asked.

  “Sure,” I replied.

  “In private.” He grimaced as he said this.

  I led the way to the side of the snack stand. Behind me, I could hear Marik’s labored breathing.

  “What’s going on, Marik? Are you OK?”

  “No.”

  “What do you mean, no?”

  “I’m not well,” he said, grabbing at his front below his ribs. “I’m in pain and feeling weak.”

  “What do you think it is? Can you see someone for it? You know, a doctor?”

  “I don’t need to.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because I know what it is. Something happened at the Asking Fire.”

  “Yes. I know. A presence invaded. Thank God for the storm, or else —”

  “No,” Marik interrupted. “The storm is what happened.” With this, he winced.

  “You’re confused,” I said. “The storm chased the evil away.”

  “The evil,” Marik said, “was too distant and too crude to affect me. The rain, the cold, however, its icy core . . .” Marik closed his eyes as if the memory was too much. “I knew of your mission to Brigid’s Niflheim and what, or who, rather, you sought to recover.”

  “Jack,” I said plainly.

  “Our mistake was to underestimate his effect.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I am water.” Marik dropped his head. “Jack freezes water. We are not a good combination. His recent . . . display . . . has been most detrimental.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I am not of this world. I was never meant to be here permanently. This incident has impacted my viability. I am, I fear, out of time.”

  When the realization of what his being out of time meant for me, for Leira, I gasped.

  “But if you have to go . . . ?” I asked.

  “Then my mission is coming to an end.” With this pronouncement, Marik doubled over as if clubbed by a sudden spasm of pain.

  In a weakened state, he braced his right arm on the wall, reaching over me to do so. In reaction, I reached up with both arms to support him, my fear being that he’d collapse to the ground without assistance.

  “What’s going on?” Jack asked, stepping around the corner of the concessions hut.

  A warning look glinted in Marik’s eyes; with this brief prompt, I was reminded of the gravity of our pact.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Marik’s not feeling so great.”

  “But why are you back here?” Jack’s voice registered mistrust.

  “I followed him when he didn’t look well.”

  Jack gazed from me to Marik and back to me. Marik, in the meantime, recovered enough to stretch to his full height.

  “I. Am. Fine,” Marik said, passing us and heading back toward where we’d left the others.

  Watching him go, I shuddered.

  “What’s wrong? You look upset,” Jack said. He took my arm at the elbow.

  “It’s nothing,” I said, pulling away gently.

  “You are. You’re upset. Did he do something to you? Say something to you?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “There’s something. I know there is.” He held me by the shoulders.

  “I was worried for him; that’s all. He was late tonight, and Penny’s counting on him for the dance.” I pulled myself together, drawing on the pressure building in my chest and directing it toward the bluff I was presenting for Jack. “I just want to make sure he knows how important tomorrow is to Penny, that he doesn’t bail on her.”

  Jack looked as deeply into my eyes as he ever had, searching, penetrating. I steeled myself against his figuring it all out. He could. I knew he could. He was so confoundingly close to splitting me open. But he didn’t. Instead, he took my hand gently and pulled me toward the commons. Marik, I noticed, was gone. When the first moment presented itself, I excused myself for the bathroom.

  En route, I found Jinky talking to Shauna — huh? — and pulled her aside.

  “Are you up for another field trip tonight?” I asked.

  Jinky looked side to side, making sure we were out of earshot. “Does it have to be tonight?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?” she asked with a small sigh of disappointment.

  I told her where to be and when and then took my fake trip to the restroom. Rest. Ha. Not likely anytime soon.

  Late that same night, Jinky and I beat a quick path to Alpenstock and its sweat lodge. She wanted no assistance with the sacred fire, so I, again, sat back and observed her. She was cool and efficient in all things. I’d have called it dispassionate, once upon a time. I now saw her as confident. And focused. And hardly without passion. She was out here in the middle of the night assisting me, though I still had never fully explained why. She deserved her shaman wings, all right.

  Once inside the small space, I gave myself freely to the ceremony and transition. Again, upon passage, I felt myself dissolve as if into smoke.

  A whinny roused me from slumber. My lids parted slowly, reluctantly. Grasses tickled my cheek and nose. I stifled a sneeze as I sat up with a cottony head and unwieldy limbs. Above me, upon a tree limb, the lark sang: Tee, tee, hoo. Tee, tee, hoo.

  When the song gave way to voices, I stood, crouching behind the tallest of nearby reeds.

  Frigg and most of her maidens were still gathered with only a few noticeable changes. The freckled tomboy held the reins of a horse, the white-blond identical twins were no longer present, but two swans circled the glassy waters beneath a giant weeping tree.

  For a better view, I stepped forward, crunching a branch underfoot. I gasped, thinking I’d surely alerted them to my presence, but, as before, they took no notice of me.

  “Hurry, my maidens, for evil threatens,” Frigg urged. “One queen is consumed by rage, while the other grows desperate and restless. Should they conspire, it would be catastrophic. Ragnarök, I fear.”

  The women reacted with cries of alarm.

  “We prepare,” Frigg said, silencing their outburst. “Bleik, Norn of Childbirth, and Eyra, Norn of Healing, have you my magical aliments, kept in another’s
stead?”

  At the mention of “another’s stead,” the lark startled, flying off with an agitated kerr, kerr, kerr. Something about the bird’s vacant post caught my eye. There, wedged between two limbs, was the pretty young girl’s upside-down basket.

  The two with similar dark features — the one who held a golden bowl and the other who held a mortar and pestle — stepped forward. “Yes, Goddess Frigg,” they answered as one.

  They handed items to Frigg, but from my position I could not make them out. Frigg took it quickly and dropped it into the pocket of her voluminous skirt.

  “And Helin, Maiden of Protection, do you and Orbotha, Chooser of the Dead, stand ready?”

  “We do,” answered the sword bearer and the shroud wearer.

  “Then Saga, Maiden of Poetry, recount our epic preparations. Already Blith and Frith, my Swan Maidens, swim in the wells of fate. Only Nyah, my Carrier of Messages, remains.”

  Nyah opened her pouch. From the fold of her skirt, Frigg removed objects and carefully placed them in Nyah’s bag.

  I stepped closer, hoping to see what it was that Nyah received, but I only caught her folding down the large flap and buckling its closure. With the satchel stored across her chest, Nyah swung atop the horse. Once secure in the saddle, the horse took two or three thundering strides, vaulted over the water, and was, astoundingly, airborne. With a great flap of wings, one of the swans also lifted into the air and fell behind Nyah’s horse as if a contrail to her flight.

  The start of Homecoming Saturday was brutal. I slept in but still felt like I had left a particle or two — brain matter, for sure — back at Alpenstock. Or would it be Asgard?

  On rubbery legs, I limped over to my desk. It couldn’t be good that Frigg — queen of Asgard — was panicking. With the nearest pen and scrap of paper, I scribbled down the names she had called out. When I got to Bleik, Norn of Childbirth, my hand cramped and I had to set the pen down. What had she and Eyra given to Frigg? And what was with the lark calling my attention to the empty basket, which could only have been Idunn’s? Naïve Idunn, who had wanted to play games with the wicked Loki but ended up stripped of her magical apples and expelled from Asgard. Had she been there? If so, what was she trying to tell me? And one of the blonds had shape-shifted into a swan and followed the messenger. It made for an interesting convoy and for some wild speculations on my part, but nothing I could prove or act on. And I’d about had it with patience.

  Downstairs, my mom had left a message stating that she and Stanley were at the hospital but would be home in time for pre-dance photos. With the house to myself for the entire day, I holed up in my room, writing notes regarding every piece of advice I’d received from Hulda, what I knew of the other worlds and their portals, what was bequeathed to me by my amma — her lullaby, for instance, and the cameo — and both vision quests and their potential meaning. Those, I felt, were the most important. More than once I thought about reaching out for help: Hulda, Ofelia, Jinky, Jack. Above all Jack. I was ready to. And ready to admit that I was unequal to this challenge, unworthy of my gifts, and responsible for so much that was amiss: Leira’s not-meant-for-this-world frailty, the presence of a merman among us, and the looming threat of Brigid’s domination scheme.

  At the end of this exercise, I’d filled a good portion of a composition book, my hand was cramped, and I had come to only one conclusion. If the goddess Frigg was rallying her maidens against a threatening “evil,” I was in — we all were in — seriously deep trouble. Trouble it was up to me, and me alone, to fix.

  In the late afternoon, I turned my attention to the dance. Plenty of girls, I knew, had spent the day at the salon getting pampered. I seriously gave my hair a long look before deciding I could not get away without washing it.

  As I was putting an iron to the last of a few curls, my mom called out, “Knock, knock,” as she ascended the last few steps to my attic space.

  After filling me in on Leira’s holding-stable condition, she fussed over my dress and said all the things a mother is supposed to. And, in spite of the overall funk I was in and entitled to, I did like the way my dress had turned out. What was once a silvery chain-mail jacket was now a scoop-necked bodice that shimmered like glass. And the gauzy, light putty-colored skirt had its own gossamer qualities.

  “It’s gorgeous,” my mom said. She lifted one of the skirt’s layers and then stood back and watched it drop into place. “Your creations always amaze me. A talent from your father’s side of the family, I have to admit.”

  I’d inherited enough from my mom’s side, with both the Stork and selkie lineage dropping from her branches of the family tree. Besides, there had never been any question where my style gene came from. My mom had no less than four pairs of Birkenstocks, while the clerks at the Coach store at Santa Monica Place knew my grandmother by name. No need to consult the Human Genome Project on this DNA sequence.

  “Thank you. And it didn’t even cost that much.” I knew that feature of the dress would impress my number-crunching mom.

  We heard the old-fashioned dong of the front doorbell.

  “That must be Jack,” my mom said, springing to action. “Give it a minute or two and then make your entrance.”

  So maybe I’d sold my mom short on the vogue gene; the ability to premeditate an entrance required some innate understanding of style.

  I did give it a few minutes, but not many. I had a sudden onset of restless body syndrome that produced in me an irrepressible urge to get the evening under way —“over with” being the sentiment I couldn’t quite admit to at the time.

  Jack held up his side of the requisite girl-enters-and-boy-goes-gummy equation. Another thing to add to the growing list of things for which I could count on him.

  “You look beautiful,” he said, coloring. He was always a little different, more reserved, in front of the parental units.

  My mom and Stanley did their best to get the obligatory photos quickly so that we could be on our way. My mom did want a few snapped in front of the house. We didn’t have too many of it in its still-pink capacity, and she thought it would be fun “in the future” to remember it that way. Personally, I thought it would be fun to have a future at all, but I didn’t bring that up while we were posing for posterity.

  Until I stepped into the transformed gym that evening, I wasn’t sure I had ever fully registered the dance’s “Starry, Starry Night” theme. The celestial decor created an alternate world. As if I needed another of those! But, once again, I had to hand it to the decorations committee for an above-and-beyond effort. A thousand glittery stars and orbs hung from the ceiling. Wall art consisted of backlit dark canvases depicting the various constellations: Orion, the hunter; Canis Major, his hunting dog; Aquarius, the water bearer; Pegasus, the winged horse; and many more.

  While the event was fresh and we were settling into the occasion, Jack and I did the auto pilot routine. I talked dresses and hair with the girls I knew and liked, a much larger and still-growing group compared to the year before.

  Penny looked radiant in her pink. Her loose updo held an array of shimmery star pins, which looked gorgeous against her red locks. I was more than a little surprised, and oddly miffed, to see the cameo — the pink lady?— at her throat. It looked lovely and belonged with the dress, but I still felt peevishly proprietary about the piece. I only hoped that Penny’s procurement of it had been an act of defiance. That would, at the minimum, be a mitigating factor.

  Jinky looked great, too. Her long, black mandarin-style tunic was exotic among the pastels and brights. And with her full complement of nose and brow rings, as well as her dramatically penciled eyes, she was striking while fully retaining her bad-girl image. I kept looking around for her date, but she seemed to be hanging only with Shauna and a couple of her track friends until it hit me like a boot to the face. Shauna. How had I not seen that one coming?

  Jack, over in guy world, talked football and lamented the stuffy shirts and ties. For that first part of the evening, ou
r two separate spheres were like a moving Venn diagram, intersecting at points, veering off for a while without a single point of contact, until eventually merging.

  The first few songs played by the DJ had been top-forty and lame. At last he slowed it down, and I immediately tugged on Jack’s arm. For all his protests about not liking to dance, the guy definitely wasn’t opposed to a little rubbing of bodies and long, hot kisses. And nothing like moving to the center of a mash-up of couples to avoid notice. At moments like these, with Jack’s body fitting into every contour of my own, I was strengthened by our bond and practically brought to my knees by his strong hands around my waist and the intensity of his gaze.

  When the tempo picked back up, we returned to our corner, where I was surprised to see Penny standing alone.

  “Where’d Marik go?” I asked Penny.

  I’d only had one brief look at him earlier — kitted out in all black — before he hurried away from our group with his head down.

  “That’s the question of the day.” Penny searched the room, pinching her brows together as she did so. At that moment Beyoncé’s “All the Single Ladies” started up.

  “Come on,” I said, dragging her toward the dance floor. “We’ll show the guy what he’s missing.”

  One of the best things about Penny was that, given the opportunity, she could be over-the-top, girly-girl silly. We worked that song, oh-ohing and ring-finger wagging, until finally even Jinky succumbed and joined in for some booty-shaking. I noticed Jack up against the wall with his arms crossed and a bemused expression skewing his mouth to the side. I’d hear about the display, suffer a comment or two, but he had enjoyed the show. His foot may have even tapped to the beat.

  We returned to our group, and, to my surprise, Marik was still nowhere to be found. He and Penny were due to take part in the pageantry that was about to start.

  “Would the members of this year’s Homecoming court please assemble behind the stage?” the DJ said over the microphone. His announcement produced another anxious swiping left-to-right glance from Penny.