Starling by Lesley Livingston Page A

formulated other plans.
    Rory glanced nervously at the clock on the dash. He would have to return the diary soon to the brass-bound lockbox on the desk in Gunnar’s study. He didn’t like having it in his possession for more than an hour or two at a time. Rory was already worried that his father might one day notice that a few of the handful of gilded acorns were missing from the box. But before he returned the diary, he opened the leather book back up and flipped to the one page he’d spent the most hours staring at.
    The words of the prophecy were scrawled across the page, as if Gunnar had still been caught in the throes of the vision when he’d written them.
    One tree. A rainbow bird wings among the branches .
Three seeds of the apple tree, grown tall as Odin’s spear is,
      gripped in the hand of the Valkyrie .
They shall awaken, Odin Sons, when the Devourer returns .
The hammer will fall down onto the earth to be reborn .
     
    Even if Gunnar hadn’t spelled out the meaning in the diary, Rory would have figured it out. His mother’s maiden name had been Rose. Apple trees were part of the rose family, and apples held all kinds of significance in myths and legends. Starlings were birds noted for the iridescent rainbowlike sheen of their feathers. And Norse mythology was predicated on an end-of-the-world scenario—Ragnarok, when a monstrous giant wolf named Fenris would devour Odin, the father of the gods, and a great war, fought by the souls of the dead, would destroy the mortal realm.
    The prophecy, as Gunnar had understood it, meant that he and Yelena would have three sons who would become “Odin Sons,” leaders of the warrior host of Asgard, an army of fallen heroes. The Devourer, the Fenris Wolf, would appear. Then Thor, the god of thunder, would be reborn into the mortal realm.
    When Gunnar met Yelena, it was the start of the end of everything.
    Except that their third child born turned out to be a girl.
    And Yelena had died bearing her.

XI
     
    M ason had promised her father no nightmares, but it wasn’t a promise she’d figured she could realistically keep. Mason had been having nightmares since she was six. Most of them variations on a theme.
    This time, when she opened the dream shed door she found a different twist to the old hide-and-seek scenario. Stepping inside the old forgotten gardening hut led, quite unexpectedly, to a dark, rough-walled cell. Like a medieval dungeon carved into the earth. Manacles hung from rusting chains. It was a place Mason had never been before—in dreams or otherwise—but it felt strangely familiar. In the corner, she saw a bench, once painted a bright sky blue with red roses on it. But the design was faded, the paint dull and peeling. That was something she knew. It was the bench in the garden shed where she’d gone to hide from Rory when they’d played a game. Where she’d become trapped. After her second full day locked in the darkness, her six-year-old self had lain down on that bench and cried herself to sleep. Beyond that, she couldn’t remember what happened until after they’d found her.
    Now, though, she knew she wasn’t in a shed. She backed away, and her shoulders jammed up against iron bars. When she turned around, she saw that the Fennrys Wolf stood on the other side.
    He held something in his hand that looked like a staff or a spear. And he was smiling. But his smile, Mason thought, was … strange. And when he opened his mouth to speak, his whole face distorted, jaws opening wider and wider until all Mason could see was a cavelike blackness in front of her. And all she could hear was the sound of the Fennrys Wolf’s voice.
    Telling her to run.
    Mason’s eyes snapped open and she lay flat on her back, staring up at her ceiling. Moonlight poured in through her open window and shifting, silvery patterns shimmered along the walls and ceiling, reflections from the pool outside below. She must have been asleep for hours. But she knew that there