فصل 22

Pretty Sure Hearthstone’s Dad Is a Cow-Abducting Alien

IT WAS the nicest cop car I’d ever been in, and I’d been in quite a few. The black leather interior smelled of vanilla. The Plexiglas divider was squeaky clean. The bench seat had a massage feature so I could relax after a hard day of loitering. Obviously, they served only the finest criminals here in Alfheim.

After a mile of comfortable cruising, we pulled off the main road and stopped at a pair of iron gates monogrammed with a fancy A. On either side, ten-foot-tall stone walls were topped with decorative spikes to keep out the upper-middle-class riffraff who lived down the street. From the tops of the gateposts, security cameras swiveled to study us.

The gates opened. As we drove through into Hearthstone’s family estate, my jaw nearly dropped off. I thought my family mansion was embarrassing.

The front yard was bigger than the Boston Common. Swans glided across a lake edged with willow trees. We drove over two different bridges crossing a winding creek, past four different gardens, then through a second set of gates before coming to the main house, which looked like a postmodern version of Sleeping Beauty Castle at Disneyland—white-and-gray slab walls jutting out at strange angles, slender towers like organ pipes, huge plate glass windows, and a burnished steel front door so large it probably had to be opened by chain-pulling trolls.

Hearthstone fidgeted with his bag of runes, occasionally glancing back toward the car’s trunk, where the cops had stowed Blitzen.

The officers said nothing until we parked at the front door.

“Out,” Wildflower said.

As soon as Hearthstone was free, he walked to the back of the cruiser and rapped on the trunk.

“Yeah, fine.” Sunspot popped the lid. “Though I don’t see why you care. That has to be the ugliest dwarf lawn ornament I’ve ever seen.”

Hearthstone gently lifted out Blitzen and slung the granite dwarf over his shoulder.

Wildflower shoved me toward the entrance. “Move, thick.”

“Hey!” I almost reached for my pendant but caught myself. At least the cops now treated Hearthstone as off-limits, but they still seemed perfectly fine pushing me around. “Whatever thick means,” I said, “I’m not it.”

Wildflower snorted. “Have you looked in the mirror recently?”

It dawned on me that, compared to elves, all willowy and delicate and handsome, I must have looked squat and clumsy—thick. I got the feeling the term also implied mentally slow, because why insult someone on one level when you can insult them on two?

I was tempted to wreak my revenge on the police officers by bringing out Jack to sing some top-forty hits. Before I could, Hearthstone took my arm and led me up the front steps. The cops trailed behind us, putting distance between themselves and Hearthstone as if they feared his deafness might be contagious.

When we reached the top step, the big steel door swung open silently. A young woman hurried out to meet us. She was almost as short as Blitzen, though she had blond hair and delicate features like an elf. Judging from her plain linen dress and white hair bonnet, I assumed she was a house servant.

“Hearth!” Her eyes lit up in excitement, but she quickly stifled her enthusiasm when she saw our police escorts. “Mr. Hearthstone, I mean.”

Hearth blinked like he might start crying. He signed: Hello/Sorry, blending them together in a single word.

Officer Wildflower cleared his throat. “Is your master home, Inge?”

“Oh—” Inge gulped. She looked at Hearthstone, then back at the cops. “Yes, sir, but—”

“Go get him,” snapped Sunspot.

Inge turned and fled inside. As she hurried away, I noticed something hanging from the back of her skirt—a cord of brown-and-white fur, frayed at the end like the tassel of a belt. Then the tassel flicked, and I realized it was a living appendage.

“She’s got a cow tail,” I blurted.

Sunspot laughed. “Well, she’s a hulder. It would be illegal for her to hide that tail. We’d have to bring her in on charges of impersonating a proper elf.”

The cop gave Hearthstone a quick look of distaste, making it clear that his definition of proper elf also did not include my friend.

Wildflower grinned. “I don’t think the boy has ever seen a hulder before, Sunspot. What’s the matter, thick? They don’t have domesticated forest sprites in whatever world you crawled out of?”

I didn’t answer, though in my mind I was imagining Jack belting out Selena Gomez right in the policeman’s ears. The thought comforted me.

I stared into the foyer—a sunlit colonnade of white stone and glass skylights that still managed to make me feel claustrophobic. I wondered how Inge felt about being required to display her tail at all times. Was it a source of pride to show her identity, or did it feel like a punishment—a constant reminder of her lesser status? I decided the really horrible thing was entwining the two together: Show us who you are; now feel bad about it. Not much different from Hearth signing hello and sorry as a single word.

I felt Mr. Alderman’s presence before I saw him. The air turned cooler and carried a scent of spearmint. Hearthstone’s shoulders slumped as if Midgard gravity were taking over. He shifted Blitzen to the middle of his back as if to hide him. The spots on Hearth’s scarf seemed to swarm. Then I realized Hearth was shivering.

Footsteps echoed on the marble floor.

Mr. Alderman appeared, rounding one of the columns and marching toward us.

All four of us stepped back—Hearth, me, even the cops. Mr. Alderman was almost seven feet tall, and so thin that he looked like one of those UFO-flying, strange-medical-experiment-conducting aliens from Roswell. His eyes were too large. His fingers were too delicate. His jaw was so pointy I wondered if his face had been hung on a perfect isosceles triangle.

He dressed better than your average UFO traveler, though. His gray suit fit perfectly over a green turtleneck that made his neck look even longer. His platinum blond hair bristled like Hearth’s. I could see some family resemblance in the nose and the mouth, but Mr. Alderman’s face was much more expressive. He looked harsh, critical, dissatisfied—like someone who’d just had an outrageously expensive, terrible meal and was contemplating the one-star review he was going to write.

“Well.” His eyes dug into his son’s face. “You’re back. At least you had enough sense to bring the son of Frey with you.”

Sunspot choked on his own smug smile. “Sorry, sir. Who?”

“This lad.” Mr. Alderman pointed to me. “Magnus Chase, son of Frey, isn’t it?”

“That’s me.” I bit back the urge to add sir. So far, this dude hadn’t earned it.

I wasn’t used to people looking impressed when they found out my dad was Frey. Reactions normally ranged from Gee, I’m sorry to Who is Frey? to hysterical laughter.

So I’m not going to lie. I appreciated how quickly the cops’ expressions changed from contempt to oh-poop-we-just-dissed-a-demigod. I didn’t understand it, but I liked it.

“We—we didn’t know.” Wildflower brushed a speck off my shirt like that would make everything better. “We, um—”

“Thank you, officers,” Mr. Alderman cut in. “I will take it from here.”

Sunspot gaped at me like he wanted to apologize, or possibly offer me a coupon for fifty percent off my next imprisonment.

“You heard the man,” I said. “Off you go, Officers Sunspot and Wildflower. And don’t worry. I’ll remember you.”

They bowed to me…actually bowed, then made a hasty retreat to their vehicle.

Mr. Alderman scrutinized Hearthstone as if looking for visible defects. “You’re the same,” he pronounced sourly. “At least the dwarf has turned to stone. That’s an improvement.”

Hearthstone clenched his jaw. He signed in short angry bursts: His name is B-L-I-T-Z-E-N.

“Stop,” Alderman demanded. “None of that ridiculous hand-waving. Come inside.” He gave me the subzero once-over. “We must properly welcome our guest.”