was no way she would ever be able to make her brain calm down so she could return to that state.
Fennrys …
The Fennrys Wolf …
What kind of a name was that? Well, she knew exactly what kind of a name it was. She just wanted to know the why of it. She rolled her head on her pillow and gazed over to where the messenger bag with her laptop in it lay on her desk in the corner of the room. She thought about getting it out and just calling up Wikipedia, but after a moment, she got out of bed and wandered instead down the long hall to her dad’s study.
Stretching as she went, Mason padded on cat-silent feet, stiff from having fallen so instantly asleep. In her nightmare, she hadn’t been able to run when Fennrys told her to, and she had awakened in the exact same position she’d fallen asleep in.
It was the thought of him that sent her now to the wall of books that covered one long side of the study, floor to ceiling. Mason had spent a lot of time here when she was a little girl, climbing like a monkey up and down the rolling ladder, running her fingers across raised letters on leather-bound spines. On one of the high shelves, Gunnar had a large collection of Scandinavian literature—histories and myths and folklore—and it was to those volumes that Mason climbed. She was careful not to make any noise. She didn’t want anyone to know why she’d taken a sudden, fierce interest in the myths of the Vikings.
Mason had learned some of the stories of the Norse gods, but they had always struck her as just grimmer, colder, weirder versions of the same kinds of stuff found in Greek and Roman myths. Jealous gods, scheming and plotting against one another—only with the added bonus of a fatalistic rush toward the eventual prophesied annihilation of the world. Mason had never developed her father’s fierce fascination with the myths. Still, she knew enough about the ancient stories of her ancestors to know that a wolf figured prominently in the lore.
She pulled down a large hardcover picture book that she remembered fondly from reading it repeatedly as a kid. It was full of brightly colored, fanciful illustrations of long-haired maidens and spiky-haired bearded warriors. A merry depiction of a fatalistic cosmology that was supposed to end—or already had ended; Mason could never get the whole Ragnarok thing quite straight—with the destruction of the world.
Cheery , she thought.
“F-e-n …,” she murmured to herself as she ran a finger down the index and remembered that the story of the Fenris Wolf—or Fenrir, as the creature was often called—was under the heading of “Loki’s Monstrous Brood.”
“Monstrous,” Mason muttered, turning to sit on the ladder step with the book in her lap. “Well, there’s a comforting adjective....”
Even just flipping through the book brought back her dormant memories of the stories. She remembered that the wolf was the offspring of an occasionally mischievous, frequently downright malicious jotun, a giant, named Loki. She knew that, in the great apocalyptic Norse battle at the end of days, Ragnarok, the Fenris Wolf was fated to devour Odin, the one-eyed father of the Aesir, what the Norse called the good guys in their convoluted pantheon of gods.
Mason avoided turning to the page that she knew depicted Odin, in helmet and eyepatch, astride his eight-legged steed and with his mighty magic spear in his hand, riding full tilt straight into the giant wolf’s slavering maw and down its gullet to his doom. She knew that all sorts of really bad stuff happened when he did.
What she didn’t know was why some guy named after that particular monster had made such a bizarre and frightening entrance into her life. Or why she couldn’t stop thinking about him in ways that weren’t necessarily bizarre or frightening, but were nevertheless disturbing enough to keep her awake in the middle of the night.
Calum Aristarchos was having similar difficulties sleeping, jolted from restless
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