فصل 58

What the Hel?

I STOOD ALONE in a snowstorm on Bunker Hill.

My exhaustion was gone. Jack had returned to pendant form around my neck. None of that made sense, but I didn’t seem to be dreaming.

I felt like I was really in Charlestown, just across the river from Boston, standing right where my fourth grade school bus had dropped us off for a class trip. Gauzy curtains of snow swept across the brownstones. The park itself wasn’t much more than a white field dotted with bare trees. In the center, a gray obelisk rose into the winter sky. After my time in Geirrod’s fortress, the monument looked small and sad.

Thor had said I’d be sent where I needed to go. Why did I need to be here, and where were my friends?

A voice at my shoulder said, “Tragic, isn’t it?”

I hardly flinched. I supposed I was getting used to strange Norse entities popping up in my personal space.

Standing next to me, gazing at the monument, was a woman with elven-pale skin and long dark hair. In profile, she looked heart-achingly beautiful, about twenty-five years old. Her ermine cloak shimmered like a snowdrift rippling in the wind.

Then she turned toward me, and my lungs flattened against the back of my rib cage.

The right side of the woman’s face was a nightmare—withered skin, patches of blue ice covering decayed flesh, membrane-thin lips over rotten teeth, a milky white eye, and tufts of desiccated hair like black spiderwebs.

I tried to tell myself, Okay, this isn’t so bad. She’s just like that guy Two-Face from Batman. But Two-Face had always struck me as kind of comical, like, come on, nobody with that much facial damage could be alive.

The woman in front of me was very real. She looked like someone who’d been stuck halfway through a door when a devastating blizzard struck. Or worse…some hideous ghoul who’d tried to transform into a human, only to get interrupted in the middle of the process.

“You’re Hel.” My voice sounded like I was five years old again.

She lifted her skeletal right hand, brushing a tuft of hair behind her ear…or the stub of frostbitten flesh that might once have been an ear.

“I am Hel,” she agreed. “Sometimes called Hela, though most mortals dare not speak my name at all. No jokes, Magnus Chase? Who the Hel are you? What the Hel do you want? You look Hela bad. I was expecting more bravado.”

I was fresh out of bravado. The best I could manage was not running away shrieking. Wind gusted around Hel, lifting a few flakes of blackened skin from her zombie forearm and swirling them into the snow.

“Wh-what do you want?” I asked. “I’m already dead. I’m an einherji.”

“I know that, young hero. I don’t want your soul. I have plenty of those already. I called you here to talk.”

“You brought me? I thought Thor—”

“Thor.” The goddess scoffed. “If you want someone who can navigate one hundred and seventy channels of HD content, go to Thor. If you want someone who can accurately send people through the Nine Worlds, he’s not your guy.”

“So—”

“So I thought it was high time we talked. My father did mention I’d be seeking you out, yes? He gave you an exit strategy, Magnus: Surrender the sword to your uncle. Remove it from play. This is your last opportunity. Perhaps you can take a lesson from this place.”

“Bunker Hill?”

She turned toward the monument so only her mortal side was visible. “Sad and meaningless. Another hopeless battle, like the one you’re about to engage in….”

Granted, my American history was a little rusty, but I was pretty sure they didn’t build monuments at the site of sad and meaningless events.

“Wasn’t Bunker Hill a victory? Americans holding off the British at the top of the hill? Don’t fire until you see…”

She fixed me with her milky zombie gaze, and I couldn’t make myself say the whites of their eyes.

“For every hero, a thousand cowards,” said Hel. “For every brave death, a thousand senseless ones. For every einherji…a thousand souls who enter my realm.”

She pointed with her withered hand. “Right over there, a British boy of your age died behind a hay bale, crying for his mother. He was the youngest of his regiment. His own commander shot him for cowardice. Do you think he appreciates this lovely monument? And there, at the top of the hill, after their ammunition ran out, your ancestors threw rocks at the British, fighting like cavemen. Some fled. Some stayed and were butchered with bayonets. Which were smarter?”

She smiled. I wasn’t sure which side of her mouth was more ghastly—the living zombie, or the beautiful woman who was amused by massacres.

“No one ever said the whites of their eyes,” she continued. “That’s a myth, made up years later. This isn’t even Bunker Hill. It’s Breed’s Hill. And though the battle was costly to the British, it was an American defeat, not a victory. Such is human memory…you forget the truth and believe what makes you feel better.”

Snow melted against my neck, dampening my collar. “What’s your point? I shouldn’t fight? I should just let Surt free your brother the Big Bad Wolf?”

“I merely point out options,” Hel said. “Did Bunker Hill really affect the outcome of your Revolution? If you face Surt tonight, will you delay Ragnarok or hasten it? Charging into battle is what the hero would do—the sort of person who ends up in Valhalla. But what of the millions of souls who lived more careful lives and died peacefully in their beds at an old age? They ended up in my realm. Were they not wiser? Do you really belong in Valhalla, Magnus?”

The words of the Norns seemed to spiral around me in the cold. Wrongly chosen, wrongly slain; a hero Valhalla cannot contain.

I thought about my hallmate T.J., still carrying his rifle and wearing his Civil War coat, charging up hills day after day in a series of endless battles, waiting for his final death at Ragnarok. I thought about Halfborn Gunderson, trying to stay sane by earning PhDs in literature when he wasn’t going berserk and smashing skulls. Did I belong with those guys?

“Take the sword to your uncle,” Hel urged. “Let events unfold without you. This is the safer course. If you do so…my father Loki has asked me to reward you.”

The skin on my face burned. I had an irrational fear that I might be decaying from frostbite, becoming like Hel. “Reward me?”

“Helheim is not such a terrible place,” said the goddess. “My hall has many fine chambers for my favored guests. A reunion could be arranged.”

“A reunion…” I could barely speak the words. “With my mother? You have her?”

The goddess seemed to consider the question, tilting her head from the living side to the dead. “I could have her. The status of her soul, of everything that she was, is still in flux.”

“How…? I don’t—”

“The prayers and wishes of the living often affect the dead, Magnus. Mortals have always known that.” She bared her teeth—rotten on one side, pristine white on the other. “I cannot return Natalie Chase to life, but I can unite you both in Helheim if you wish it. I can bind your souls there so that you will never be separated. You could be a family again.”

I tried to imagine that. My tongue froze in my mouth.

“You need not speak,” Hel said. “Only give me an indication. Cry for your mother. Let your tears fall, and I will know you agree. But you must decide now. If you reject my offer, if you insist on fighting your own Bunker Hill tonight, I promise you will never see your mother again in this life or any other.”

I thought about my mother skipping stones with me at Houghton’s Pond, her green eyes sparkling with humor. She spread her arms in the sunlight, trying to explain what my father was like. That’s why I bring you here, Magnus. Can’t you feel it? He’s all around us.

Then I imagined my mother in a cold dark palace, her soul bound for eternity. I remember my own corpse in the funeral home—an embalmed relic, dressed up for display. I thought about the faces of the drowned souls swirling in Ran’s net.

“You are crying,” Hel noted with satisfaction. “Then we have a deal?”

“You don’t understand.” I looked at the goddess. “I’m crying because I know what my mother would want. She’d want me to remember her as she was. That’s the only monument she needs. She wouldn’t want to be trapped, preserved, forced to live as a ghost in some cold storage underworld.”

Hel scowled, the right side of her face wrinkling and crackling. “You dare?”

“You want bravado?” I pulled my pendant from its chain. Jack the sword stretched to full length, his blade steaming in the cold. “Leave me alone. Tell Loki we have no deal. If I see you again, I’ll cut you right down the dotted line.”

I raised my blade.

The goddess dissolved into snow. My surroundings faded. Suddenly I found myself balanced at the edge of a rooftop, five stories above a stretch of asphalt