Also by Abby Geni

The Body Farm

The Wildlands

The Lightkeepers

The Last Animal

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Copyright © 2026 by Abby Geni

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For Joe

1

I have always hated the word murder. It sounds like a heartbeat, doesn’t it? It sounds like the end of a human life. Listen to the thump of rhyming syllables, then consider the pause that follows. One final pulse of the heart—then silence.

I have come here to tell you my story. I have never shared these things with anyone. But it is time.

Seven months ago, I watched the sky darken with bees. It was a swarm, an uncanny marvel, a masterpiece of chaos. Before my eyes, tens of thousands of tiny bodies rose from the ground like an inversion of rain.

Six months ago, I fell in love for the first time in my life. Honestly, I did not believe I was capable of any such thing. Love is usually a boon but always a weakness.

Five months ago, the local farmers’ market began its spring season. Imagine the aroma of fresh strawberries and cut flowers.

Four months ago, the river rose beyond its banks. There was a storm that forced the water to swell and surge.

Three months ago, I celebrated my birthday for the first time in more than thirty years of life.

Two months ago, I placed a phone call to an agent of the FBI.

And one month ago, there was a murder.

Do you hear it now? The word murder is a brief, brutal demonstration of its own meaning. A perfect pulse. The last one.

It was raining that day, and the steady drizzle drenched my clothes and plastered my braid against my nape. The corpse lay on its back on a pallet of autumn leaves. Its eyes were open, lips parted. I stood at the edge of the stain of blood that seeped slowly outward. There were too many stab wounds to count.

But I am getting ahead of myself. A life is measured in heartbeats. My story is measured in secrets. Before we go any further, I must bring you into the past.

2

It began with red.

I was hiding under the kitchen table when my brother found me. I can’t be sure of my age—four or five, probably—a pale, barefoot girl with a messy blond braid. Busy in play, I did not notice Finn’s approach until he leaned over the edge of the table, blotting out the sunlight.

“Come on,” he said. “There’s a mess to clean up.”

“What happened?”

“Get up.”

I glared at him. “You clean it up. I didn’t make any mess.”

“Liv.” His tone made my name into a command. Finn was three years older, not exactly an authority figure but close enough.

I crawled out from under the table. The curtains undulated in a summer breeze that circled the kitchen, warm as breath. Finn led me down the hall to the living room and stopped in the doorway.

Red on the floor. I blinked, trying to verify what I was seeing. A track of scarlet splotches trailed from one end of the living room to the other. The drips varied in size and shape, some as big as my palm, some mere pinpoints. The window screens shimmied in the breeze, casting rectangles of light on the floorboards and fluorescing each crimson blot. I smelled something unfamiliar—iron, rust.

“I’ll get the mop,” Finn said, leaving me there to marvel.

The front door seemed to be the origin point of the mess. It stood ajar on the far side of the room, creaking slightly in the wind. The path of blotches began there, splattering the floor between the hat stand and the shoe rack, dribbling past the couch, skirting the end table, crossing the open space by the threshold where I stood, and terminating at the basement door. I had never seen our tidy house so disfigured.

Finn appeared at my elbow again, holding the mop, the bucket, and a bin of bleach-scented rags. His face was solemn beneath his corn-silk curls.

The rest of the living room seemed normal. The basement door was shut and bolted, as always; it had never once been left open or unlocked. Pappa’s armchair, threadbare but sturdy, sat in its usual corner. The items on the end table hadn’t been disturbed: a stone figurine of a wolf, a book of Viking sagas, and Pappa’s favorite knife, a six-inch dagger in a leather sheath. Only the red was out of place.

“How did it happen?” I asked.

My brother didn’t answer.

“Finn? Who did this?”

He remained silent, but his face said that he wasn’t the one to blame. I knew all my brother’s expressions; I could discern his mood from the pattern of his breath alone. Just now, he was determined, not worried or ashamed, which meant the catastrophe was not of his making.

“Was it Pappa?” I asked.

There were only three of us in the house: father, son, daughter. Suspects were limited. Still, Pappa was not the sort to make a mess of this caliber, let alone leave it lying there to ruin the living room floorboards. He liked everything in its place, always.

“I’ll go fill the bucket,” Finn said. “You mop, I’ll scrub.”

The red was persistent. The more we tried to erase it, the more it spread. Finn scoured so hard that his fingers went white at the knuckles, but he succeeded only in smearing the stain wider. My mop proved equally useless, merely pushing the crimson into the cracks. Red dyed each rag in turn, tinted the mop strings, and pinked my bare feet.

“It’s just getting worse,” I said. “Where’s Pappa? He’ll know what to do.”

“He’s working,” Finn said. In other words, we were on our own.

My brother rose to his feet, and I could see the cogs whirring in his brain as he surveyed the living room. His eyes were crystalline cobalt. I leaned on the mop, glad for the respite; my arms ached from the unaccustomed effort.

Finn strode off down the hall again. “Wait there,” he called over his shoulder. “Don’t follow me.”

Glancing down, I took stock of my appearance. My shorts were tie-dyed scarlet, my hands inked to the wrist, and even my braid had not escaped: a few clots of crimson stood out vividly against the white-blond canvas of my long, limp hair.

This is a memory, you understand. My first memory.

Finn returned wearing rubber gloves that went up to his elbows. He brought a smaller bucket and a caustic stench into the room. I backed up, coughing and covering my nose. My brother’s mouth was a taut line, and I did not like the set of his jaw. It was the same stoic expression he wore when he and Pappa sparred with their wooden battle-axes. Finn left those sessions covered in bruises and welts.

He poured a noxious froth onto the floor, then wiped it up quickly but carefully with a sponge. His movements were controlled and precise, as though the liquid in the little bucket might explode if he wasn’t careful enough.

“What is that?” I asked behind my palm.

“Lye,” Finn said without looking at me.

“Lie?”

“Pappa showed me where the container is. I’m not telling you where. It’s not safe for kids.”

It didn’t occur to me to argue that he was a kid too—seven or eight at most. Finn had taught me to fish, build a fire, and splint a broken finger. He was in charge whenever Pappa left us alone overnight or locked himself in the basement for days. I never thought of my brother as a child.

The fumes from the lye made me gag, but Finn was undaunted. Pour and wipe, pour and wipe. In a few minutes, the floorboards shone clean. Only in certain lights did a faint peachy hue become visible. Subtle but permanent, the stain endured throughout my childhood.

Now, looking back, I don’t know how Finn disposed of the lye. I don’t know if he understood the danger of using it. I don’t know if he was yet aware of its true purpose in our home. Pappa taught Finn a lot of things I never discovered.

“We both need baths,” he said. “We’ll have to burn these clothes.”

At that moment, a question bloomed in my mind.

“The red,” I said. “What was it?”

I’d been so caught up in the whirl of work that it hadn’t occurred to me to wonder. Finn closed his eyes as though he’d been waiting for this question.

“It was paint,” he said, without emotion.

“Paint?”

“Yes. Pappa spilled a bunch of red paint on his way to the basement. He’s working now, and I don’t know how long he’ll be down there. I wanted to clean it up before he was done.”

“Okay.”

And that was that. I took Finn at his word; I always did. At that age, the imagination is psychedelic in its intensity. Little children don’t form conjectures, and they can’t distinguish reality from pretend. They do what they’re told—at least they did in my house.

I did not think about the events of that morning again, not for years to come. But I did not forget either. There is a knowing and a not-knowing. Sometimes a person’s first memory is unimportant: a smell, a voice, or the face of a loved one, a random event that the brain saves for no particular reason. But sometimes a first memory is essential and revelatory.

Finn said I could have the first bath, using up most of the hot water and relegating the tepid leftovers to him. We lunched on peanut butter and jelly, then went out back and burned our clothes along with the mophead, sponge, and rags. He gave me the box of matches and showed me how to strike one without singeing my fingers. In a whoosh of heat and light, the last remnants of red were erased.

3

I am descended from Vikings. My paternal lineage runs all the way back to Erik the Red, the first European to stumble upon the shores of North America. Even for a Viking, he was brutal and hotheaded. His clan exiled him from Norwegian soil for murdering too many of his kinsmen, so he gathered up a raiding party, sailed across the Atlantic, landed in a frozen wasteland, named it Greenland for some reason, and made war on the people he found there.

He was born Erik Thorvaldsson. The title “Red” came from his flame-colored hair, explosive temper, and penchant for bloodshed. You can draw a straight line down the family tree from him to Ulf Thorvaldsson, my father.

Perhaps all children see their parents as larger than life, but Pappa really was. Standing seven feet tall, he had a chest like a boulder and wore his hair and beard long, usually in intricate braids. He looked like a creature from the Old World, a hero or villain from the tales of the Vikings. He looked like what he was.

We lived on the outskirts of a small Iowa town, Pappa, Finn, and me. It was the end of the twentieth century, though I didn’t know it then. My brother and I grew up placeless and timeless, cut off from the outside world. Our neighbors were prairie and pines. Our days consisted of archery and epic poetry. No school. No other children. No extended family. No authority but Pappa. Modern civilization was a strange fantasy that existed in books, on the other side of the TV screen, and, theoretically, beyond our fences. In that faraway realm, people spoke the wrong language, followed the wrong calendar, and prayed to the wrong gods. Finn and I lived almost entirely off the grid in a reality our father built for us. At the time, it seemed like the only reality.

Pappa had grown up in Uppsala, and he only ever spoke Swedish with Finn and me. He did know some English, enough to get by at the grocery store or the pharmacy, but he found it a lesser language. Nasal and chirpy. He did, however, permit Finn and me to speak English with each other and study it on our own. We were technically Americans, after all.

According to the Iowa State Board of Education, my brother and I were being homeschooled, but Pappa scoffed at book learning. He brought us up in the way of our ancestors, whose children did not waste time solving equations or parsing sentences. They learned what mattered by watching their elders: how to fight, how to live, and how to die. There were no toys in our house; Pappa could not see the point of stuffed animals or building blocks. He taught us to handle knives, chop wood, hunt, cook, and endure pain.

Viking men were warriors, and Finn’s education proceeded accordingly. He studied the wall of mounted weapons in Pappa’s bedroom—swords and knives of every shape and size, all kept razor-sharp and ready for battle. Our father had no art, no photographs, only a lovingly arranged armory. In the Viking tradition, each weapon was given its own name: Wolf’s Tooth, Serpent of Blood, Torch of Blood. Finn learned the use and properties of them all. He sharpened the blades with a whetstone and leather strop. He and Pappa sparred with battle-axes and swords—wooden ones for now. Finn would graduate to real weapons when Pappa decided he was ready.

My lessons were different. Pappa was softer with me—a girl child and the baby of the family. In an ideal world, my mother would have been the one to guide me, but she was dead. The care and upkeep of the house were the purview of Viking women, which was not an inferior calling, Pappa always said. Men fought and pillaged, and women maintained the home, and both things were honorable and worthy. My education consisted of carpentry, gardening, baking, fixing the plumbing, and stitching up wounds in fabric and flesh.

Pappa did give me one blade, a slender six-inch knife named Vargbett: Wolf’s Bite. He showed me how to wield it without endangering my own fingers and, afterward, how to sheathe it safely. He advised me to keep it on my person during the rare times we left our land. Just in case.

Every night, my father would bound up the stairs with a book in hand—sometimes the Eddas (the stories of the gods) and sometimes the sagas (the tales of Viking warriors). Usually the former. My brother and I shared a room, and Pappa would fold his enormous body between our beds and read aloud for hours. In his booming baritone, he brought every part to life: frost giants and dwarfs, Valkyries and soothsayers.

I remember it all so vividly. Twenty years have passed since that time, but sometimes the wild crucible of my youth seems more real to me than this adult life. I remember the smell of pickled herring and lingonberry jam. I remember splinting my brother’s broken wrist under my father’s watchful eye. (No doctors—not ever.) I remember the beehives in the field, nine of them, perfuming the air with the tang of honey. Our house was surrounded by several hundred acres of prairie and forest, which felt like an infinite universe to me as a girl. Finn and I named the trees, swam in the pond, and spun stories about the rocky hill where trolls surely lived. We were a Viking clan of three.

4

Once a story is told, it no longer belongs to the teller. I have chosen to share mine with you. It is difficult for me to find the words, and there will be a cost to my spirit, my well-being.

Just so you know, there are certain people who would pay a great deal to hear it. Any media outlet in the country would offer me a king’s ransom to learn the truth.

Few stories are objectively valuable. Mine is.

But of course that doesn’t matter between you and me—money, I mean.

So let us return to my story.

There came a July afternoon filled with wind. I was five years old, or maybe six. I remember sitting at the kitchen table with Finn at my side. My brother was a head taller, always. No matter how much I grew, I could never catch up. I remember his fingernails, bitten down to the quick, and the restless jiggle of his knee against the table leg. Finn was summer-colored: twilight-blue eyes and flaxen curls.

I was darning a hole in one of his socks as he read aloud to me from an English-language book of Swedish fairy tales. The smell of pollen and the hum of bees carried on the wind. Finn read slowly, tracing each line of text with his finger and stumbling over the multisyllabic words. We were both fairly proficient when it came to speaking English; we had watched enough TV and movies to get the gist. Reading and writing, however, were another matter. There seemed to be no logic to the pronunciation of vowels or the elision of consonants.

And then Pappa strode into the room. His footfalls were heavy enough to jangle the silverware in the drawer. Finn shut the book at once and rose to his feet, at attention. I scanned my father, taking in the openness of his stance, brow clear, arms loose at his sides. No suggestion of anger.

“We will check our borders,” he said in Swedish, pointing at me.

“Yes, Pappa.”

“Finn, get your sword. Practice what I taught you yesterday and remember what I said about your elbows.”

“Yes, Pappa.”

I followed my father outside. He stretched in the open air, and his head seemed to scrape the sky.

“A good day,” he said, sniffing the wind.

Finn emerged from the house with his wooden sword. It was scaled to a child’s height, well balanced but heavy. Pappa had given my brother a new fight sequence to memorize, a pattern of movements that looked almost like dancing. Finn lunged, pivoted, and darted backward. His expression was deadly serious, his eyes narrowed in concentration.

“We’ll duel when I return,” Pappa called to him. “Be ready.”

Finn nodded without pausing in his gruesome ballet.

The day brimmed with heat. Pappa and I passed the row of beehives that stood behind the house, surrounded by a fog of tiny golden flecks. My father walked too fast for me, but I knew better than to fall behind, let alone complain. Once a month Pappa circled the perimeter, sometimes with Finn, sometimes with me, to check that the fence was secure. The process took several hours, and I needed to remain energetic and alert the whole time, at my father’s elbow.

In truth, the fence around our land was no fence at all: it was a massive, bristling cloud of barbed wire, taller than Finn and wider than Pappa. An intruder, even one as slender and small as I was, would have been cut to ribbons if they’d tried to slip through. In addition, Pappa armed the near side with bear traps and splashes of broken glass.

To me, this formidable border was as much a part of the landscape as the pond and the rolling hills. I did not find it unusual or bizarre; it had always been there. I suppose Pappa must have built it before I was born. He would never have hired local workmen. Only other Vikings could be trusted, and there were none to be found in small-town Iowa.

I jogged at my father’s heels, ignoring the stitch in my side. Grasshoppers exploded into startled flight around my feet. Pappa’s copper braid swung rhythmically with each step. He was carrying a leather pouch filled with glass shards. In anticipation of each border check, Pappa would smash our empty jars and bottles and collect the pieces. Now he strewed handfuls of glittering chips and slivers along the fence. He tested each bear trap too, tossing a stone onto the plate to watch the teeth snap shut. I flinched involuntarily at each bite. Occasionally he picked up a branch and smacked the surface of the barbed wire to check its tensile strength and bounce-back. If the metal thorns rusted, that was fine, since they were even more dangerous that way. But if the wire itself became so corroded by age and weather that it weakened, Pappa would replace it immediately.

The fence was our own personal Jörmungandr, the World Serpent, a giant, malevolent creature that encircled our realm, biting its tail, an infinite loop of scales and bitterness. Jörmungandr cropped up frequently in the Norse Eddas and my nightmares. The World Serpent was so enormous that only the oceans could contain its length. Even Thor, strongest of the gods, could not move Jörmungandr. The most he had ever been able to do was lift one of its coils out of the water, and then only briefly.

At the top of a sunbaked hill, Pappa turned to me. “Vikingabarn,” he said. Viking child.

It was the first time he had acknowledged me in over an hour. I straightened up, trying to look intelligent and strong rather than breathless and sweaty. Pappa bent down so that his face was at my level. His head was massive, a block of marble with blazing blue eyes.

“We must keep the fence strong,” he said. “No one else can come here. Not ever. If strangers enter our land, it will be the end of everything. Do you understand? Look at me, Vikingabarn. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Pappa.”

He said this every time we circled the barrier.

—

You may be curious about my late mother. I was too. Mamma died before I was able to form memories of her. Even now, I know very little about who she was. There were no photographs of her in my childhood home. Finn never talked about her, either of his own volition or in answer to my questions. If I pressed him for information, he would only flatten his lips into a thin line and turn away from me. For days afterward he would wrap himself in a chilly silence, avoiding my gaze and refusing my requests to play or read aloud. I could not bear for there to be any distance between us and eventually stopped asking.

Maybe he did not remember her at all. He would have been only four when she died, and it was possible that he simply missed her the way I did, without knowing her. But something in his manner, in the quality of his silence, made me think that he had retained at least a memory or two. As close as we were, Finn did keep secrets from me.

Pappa only ever said one thing about our mother: “Hon var svag.” She was weak.

5

The nearest town to our property was so tiny that it had only one grocery store, one library, and one pharmacy—the bare minimum needed to sustain a human population. A single gas station. A solitary traffic light, blinking yellow. From what I understood, there was only one school too, and it catered to all ages from kindergarten to twelfth grade.

Every couple of weeks, out of necessity rather than desire, Pappa would drive Finn and me into town. I remember the eerie, unsettling freedom of crossing from Viking land to American soil. Finn and I knew not to speak at all during the drive. Pappa would be tense and snappy, shoulders hunched, hands tight on the wheel.

The first sign of civilization was a medical building. Doctor and dentist shared the space, according to the sign over the front door. Both occupations were hypothetical to Finn and me. Pappa treated the frequent wounds my brother sustained while sparring (and taught me how to do the same). Both of us came home with bruises and cuts from running loose on our land, and Pappa realigned and wrapped the occasional dislocated shoulder or sprained ankle. When one of my permanent teeth had shown signs of rot, he’d removed it with pliers. Finn and I were never sick; we did not have enough contact with other people to be exposed to germs.

In the aisles of the grocery store, Pappa turned heads. People scurried out of his way. Finn and I were insulated by the force our father exuded, shielded from friendly banter, even from eye contact. Still, I enjoyed eavesdropping on other people’s sharp-edged, rapid-fire English—a test of my comprehension skills.

These trips were brief: grocery store, library, home. The strangest part was seeing other children. They thronged at the playground, kicking on the swings and screaming down the slide. Finn had explained the utility of seesaws and monkey bars—or, rather, their lack of utility. The concept of recreation eluded us both. These foreign children laughed and cried so readily. Joy seemed always at their fingertips, and the smallest thing could make them smile: a butterfly or a cloud, commonplace and unimportant. By the same token, a scraped knee might bring on a flood of tears. I could not imagine weeping over such a thing.

Pappa never joined Finn and me in the library. He would wait in the car with the engine running. The only books that interested him were the Eddas and the sagas. Still, he understood the importance of the library in helping Finn and me with our English. My brother was working his way through world history, while I explored picture books about animals.

The librarian was the only American who ever looked directly at Finn and me. We moved through the town like ghosts—passive observers, never acknowledged—but she saw us. She had mud-brown eyes, impossibly dark. Sometimes she even spoke to us. “How are you?” she might say, or “Ooh, this book is one of my faves.” I was never able to come up with a response in time to answer before Finn hustled me outside. I puzzled over the word faves for a long while before realizing that it was a different English word cut off after the first syllable.

On the drive home, Pappa would grind his teeth and simmer. He jerked the wheel at each turn, sending Finn and me jolting side to side in the back seat. With the benefit of hindsight, I understand why our trips into town disturbed him so. The need for food and books and toothbrushes and gauze and antiseptic cream was the one part of his life he could not control. There was safety in our isolation. He did not want to be noticed, yet he could not help but stand out among the small, soft locals. If he’d had his way, we would never have left our property at all.

He relaxed only when the paved road turned to dirt. I remember watching the signs of civilization diminish on the other side of the window: the houses fewer and farther between, a farm with horses and pigs, a silo that had fallen into disrepair, a barn collapsing into vines, a copse of trees, the unmarked turnoff toward our property, and then our gate, up the path through the prairie, home.

Finn and I would explode out of the parked car and pelt toward the forest. We were as unsettled as our father by these trips to town, though in a different way. America was so different from our Viking enclave that each world seemed to render the other impossible. Was reality made of swaying grasses and rocky hills, or was it made of buildings and vehicles? Were we the only children in the universe, or were there hundreds of others who exhibited unfathomable behaviors? Was Pappa our own familiar father, or was he a glowering behemoth who made every other adult look small? Which one was the fantasy, the falsehood?

Finn and I came home disoriented, overstimulated, and contaminated by the residue of civilization: the saccharine stench of the bakery clinging to our hair, library dust in our clothes, the clamor of strangers’ voices ringing in our ears. Back on our own land, we immersed ourselves desperately in the known. We climbed trees and skinned our palms on the sap-scented bark. We waded into the pond in a vain attempt to catch minnows. We rolled down the tallest hills, thatching our hair with grass. By the time Pappa called us home for dinner, we smelled like the forest and felt like ourselves again. We shook off that other world as though waking from a dream.

—

The Vikings did not perceive time as linear. They imagined the year as a great wheel, pulling weeks and months in an endless rotation. Wolves chased the sun and moon across the sky, keeping them on schedule. The quick whirl of days was contained within the wide, unhurried, undeviating pattern of the seasons. The Vikings followed a lunar calendar, and so did Pappa. Holidays were spokes rather than pillars. Each human life was not a sequential amassing of years but a predetermined cycle, birth to death.

The English names for the days come from the Vikings. Did you know that? Sunday and Monday: sun and moon. Tuesday celebrates Tyr, the god of justice and war. Wednesday honors Odin, the Allfather, omniscient and omnipotent. Thursday pays tribute to Thor, the hotheaded god of storms. Frigga, Odin’s wife, gave her name to Friday. Only Saturday stands apart. The Vikings called it Laugardagr, which translates to hot-water day. They were a clean people; they built a weekly bath into the calendar. Pappa always insisted we all have a thorough scrub on Saturdays. If the hot water ran out, which it often did, we washed in cold.

It complicates my storytelling, this rhythmic remembering. Most people organize their childhood recollections around benchmarks: a beloved third-grade teacher, a month of sleepaway summer camp, a sweet-sixteen party. But I have no school calendar to anchor my recollections. Pappa never noticed our birthdays. There were so few milestones to mark the passage of my young life.

The Wheel of Time spun, and we rose at dawn, Pappa boiling eggs for breakfast in the frilly apron that somehow only enhanced his raw maleness, and then our morning chores, me sweeping the house or weeding the vegetable garden, Finn sparring with Pappa in the clearing behind the house, until eventually our father tired of us and shooed us away, so we chased each other to the forest, Finn leading, me following, a visit to the stick fort we were building, a contest of skipping stones at the pond, losing track of time, forgetting about lunch, devising a plan to catch a troll by digging a deep pit and covering it with tree branches, wondering if Pappa would let us use his spade, probably not, Finn swinging upside down by his knees from a tree branch and making monkey noises, me announcing that I was Thor and chasing my brother around throwing pretend lightning bolts, a chill in the air, the sun setting, the whole day gone, so Finn and I straggled home exhausted, cartoons on TV, practicing our English, Pappa laughing, Pappa raging, Norse poems at bedtime, always different, always the same. The Wheel of Time spun, and Pappa cooked ärtsoppa and pannkakor on Thursday, always Thursday, a tradition in Sweden. Saturday bath, Thursday pancakes, the same each week. Once a month Pappa circumnavigated the fence with Finn or me to test the bear traps and scatter glass. Every fortnight we visited the library, returned our books, and checked out new ones—different books, same pattern. The Wheel of Time was a remorseless force, dragging every aspect of the known world into its unyielding orbit. Wax and wane, solstice and equinox, ebb and rise. Pappa’s life, Finn’s, and mine.

6

We marked our holidays with blood, as the gods demanded. There was Yule, the winter solstice, an evening of revelry; Ostara, a joyful welcoming of spring; Walpurgis, an eerie night when evil spirits ran wild; Midsommar, a feast day; and Vetrnaetr, a thanksgiving for the year’s harvest and a prayer for an easy winter.

When Finn and I were little, Pappa facilitated the blót sacrifice. He killed for us, bringing down a deer or a turkey with a bow and arrow as Finn and I crouched beside him in the bushes, still and silent, watching and learning. Back home, Pappa would hang the carcass and drain its blood into a bowl. He would cook up a delicious stew, leading me through the recipe, showing me how to dice the vegetables and season the meat. (Pappa was an accomplished cook, and he usually prepared all our meals himself. He taught me how to make each dish and made sure I could do it successfully; I would need these skills when I married. But he preferred his own masterful work: semla with a golden crust and hand-whipped heavy cream, surströmming brined for months in our pantry, or boiled potato dumplings stuffed with crunchy bacon. There was no shame in a widower who liked to cook, especially for Pappa, who had proved his manhood a thousand times over.)

I remember one Midsommar in particular. Finn snared a rabbit and I skinned it. We were eleven and eight respectively: old enough to manage the blót sacrifice on our own. Hunting was easier in the warmer months, when game was plentiful. Winter holidays required hours of motionless waiting in the bitter cold, hoping for a squirrel or mourning dove.

Pappa was always in a good mood on Midsommar. He smiled as Finn drained the rabbit’s blood and put the bowl aside for later. He nodded as I yanked off the furry hide, unveiling the eyeless, earless creature within, pink and larval, unrecognizable as a rabbit or any other animal. I averted my eyes from the jagged yellow teeth, bare in the gums.

Our vegetable garden provided fresh parsley, chives, and dill, along with new potatoes and tangy scallions. As my stew bubbled on the stove, Pappa led Finn and me into the forest. I carried the bowl of blood, stepping cautiously and wincing each time the liquid sloshed too close to the brim. I didn’t know what Pappa would do to me if I dropped it. There was nothing more terrifying than his anger—except, perhaps, that of the gods.

In an ideal world, we would have celebrated all our holidays with a horde of other Vikings in a great temple. Dozens of animal carcasses would decorate the walls as their meat boiled in a cauldron over a roaring fire. The warriors of the tribe would pledge their service in battle to Odin, the Allfather. They would toast Njord, ruler of the oceans, and Frey, the god of peace, fertility, and sunny days. We would dip twigs into bowls of fresh blood and splatter the room and one another, painting the sacred hall red and making altars of our bodies.

Since there were no Viking temples in Iowa, Pappa said the forest was the next best thing; all wild places were holy. As we walked deeper into the woods, I slowed down. The ground was a tangle of roots and underbrush, and I had to pick my way with care to keep the bowl level. Heedless of my struggle, Pappa strode ahead, almost disappearing between the trunks. Finn remained in the middle, keeping both of us in sight and throwing reassuring smiles over his shoulder.

“Here,” Pappa called.

We never performed the rite in the same place twice. Pappa chose a different tree each time, spreading the grace of the gods throughout the forest. Now he pointed at the base of a huge pine. I laid down our offering among the roots with a little gasp of relief. Pappa dipped a finger in the blood and marked our faces, painting a slash of red beneath each eye. We did the same for him.

Then it was time for flower crowns, a lovely ritual that was sharpened in its joy by its proximity to the intensity of the blót sacrifice. Every spring, Pappa seeded the prairie with wildflowers to nurture his beehives. On the way back to the house, the three of us waded through the sea of tall grasses and blossoms, plucking the flowers we wanted and making sure to keep the stems long. If Mamma were with us, she and I would have woven crowns for everyone, but under the circumstances Pappa saw no harm in the menfolk making their own. It was fun to interlace the stalks, using the leaves as anchorage. Pappa did not weave a crown for himself. He tucked the stems directly into his braids and hair and beard, decorating his whole head like a garden. Midsommar brought out a whimsical side of my father that I almost never saw. Perhaps it took him back to his own childhood in Sweden.

Over dinner, he sipped akvavit and boomed out “Helan Går,” a drinking song. Finn and I sang along, our reedy voices overpowered by our father’s thundering vibrato. The moon rose in the window and cicadas screamed from the trees. As the hours passed, Finn’s flower crown and mine gradually came apart, the stems wilting into instability, limp petals raining onto our shoulders each time we moved. Yet Pappa’s headdress of blooms seemed undiminished. Sprigs of wild lupine and buttery coneflowers in his beard. Iridescent bee balm marking his hairline.

There came a moment of stillness. I wondered if Pappa would send us to bed, but instead he leaned back in his chair and stretched out his long legs.

“I look forward to my death,” he said.

Finn and I were unfazed. Pappa said this almost every day, unprompted, as though the subject was always on his mind.

There were three realms belonging to the dead. Valhalla was the best of them, according to Pappa. Only the bravest and most brutal warriors went there. You had to die with a weapon in hand, covered in the blood of your enemies, to gain entrance. The dead of Valhalla became the einherjar, Odin’s elite forces. It was a realm of ceaseless warfare. Under Odin’s watchful eye, the einherjar fought one another to the death every single day—both to maintain their prowess as warriors and, of course, for fun. When night fell, the slain arose again, and they all feasted on Odin’s great boar and drank the mead of the gods.

To me, it sounded dreadful.

The second realm of the dead was Fólkvangr, ruled by Freya, the goddess of love and witchcraft. The Eddas described it as a pleasant, sunlit place, comparatively peaceful. Honorable men went to Fólkvangr: noble Viking warriors who did not happen to die with weapon in hand.

The third realm was Helheim, a cold, silent wasteland, the afterlife of women, children, and cowardly men—those who succumbed to illness or old age rather than falling on the battlefield, as a Viking should. An icy, poisonous river encircled Helheim, and the only bridge was guarded by a monstrous hound. Once consigned to that place, no one could ever leave—not even the gods.

“I look forward to my death,” Pappa repeated.

I waited for him to continue; I knew what was coming.

“Valhalla,” he said. “The glory of battle. War without end.” He gazed into his glass of akvavit as though divining the future there. “I expect you to join me in Valhalla one day, Finn. That is what every father wishes for his son. When it’s your time to die, you will die the right way.”

“Weapon in hand,” Finn said. “I know, Pappa.”

“You will never come to Valhalla, min dotter.” My daughter. He shook his head, and the flowers in his hair and beard trembled in response, a shimmying rainbow. “Nothing can be done about it. The rules of the gods…”

“Yes, Pappa,” I said.

With a sudden, savage movement, he slammed his fist on the table, nearly cracking the wood. I jumped in my seat, and Finn went pale behind the stripe of blood on each cheek.

“You will not see me after this life, min dotter,” Pappa growled. “No, it isn’t fair.”

Finn reached for my hand under the table. We were both expert meteorologists, alert to any shift in our father’s weather. His moods were as unpredictable as a Midwestern spring. Whenever the wind changed, it happened fast—a shouting rage, a fit of laughter, a lesson patiently taught, an instructive lecture about our ancestors. He might tell a joke or bellow an order. He might rise into rollicking good humor or dip into fury. The barometric pressure was shifting now.

We were lucky this time. Pappa shook off his dour mood as quickly as it had come. He threw back the rest of his akvavit, then smiled at me.

“I will miss you every day, Liv.” He leaned forward, the chair creaking beneath his weight. Still smiling, he cupped my chin in his massive fingers.

“My little vargunge,” he said. Wolf cub. The best of all his endearments.

I stayed perfectly still, afraid to break the spell. Finn shot me an astonished glance. Neither of us had anticipated gentleness in this moment, much less affection.

A sprig of lupine cascaded down the plane of Pappa’s cheek. He blinked twice, glanced up at the thicket of flowers twined above his brow, and gave a shout of laughter, making me jump again.

“I’d forgotten,” he said. “I can’t go to bed like this. Children! Clean me up. Vilken jävla röra.” What a fucking mess.

He chuckled as we darted around him, plucking the blossoms from his braids. Everything was wilted, the petals crumbling in my hands, the stems as limp as overcooked spaghetti, leaving damp pieces in Pappa’s hair. Pollen stained my fingertips. Would he be angry if we couldn’t remove every stray piece? I was beginning to fret when Pappa gave another belly laugh. He pushed our hands away, then leaned forward and shook his huge head, scattering petals all over the floor.

“Good enough,” he said. “Go to bed, Vikingabarn.”

As Finn and I brushed our teeth and washed the blood from our faces, the realms of the dead were still on my mind. I could imagine Helheim clearly: a landscape of shifting shadows, thick with weeping and whispers. I could not, however, imagine how my father could ever die. Finn and I would one day perish—that was easy to understand—but Pappa would surely outlive the trees in the forest, the river in the valley, even the moon.

7

I don’t know where Pappa learned to keep bees. In general, he disliked animals. Hated might be a better word. Once he drowned a baby rabbit in front of me. “Too little to live without its mother,” he said, but his smile unsettled me. Once he crushed a harmless garter snake beneath his boot. Once a songbird flew into our living room window and fell to the ground, uninjured, just stunned, until Pappa grabbed it up and ground it into paste between his palms. “Förbannade ohyra,” he said when he caught me watching. Shitty vermin.

But the bees were another matter. There were nine hives on our property, and each colony lived in a box that was roughly the size of an end table. Pappa tended them with such care. Perhaps the bees reminded him of himself—always armed, willing to die in battle. Their stingers were designed for warfare with other insects. In combat with wasps or ants or rival bees, they could stab right through an enemy’s exoskeleton, deploy their venom, extract their stingers with a deft flick, and fly off unharmed. But the thick skin of a mammal was too much for them. Their barbs lodged in the flesh and could not be removed. Bees tore their bodies in half trying.

They stung people anyway. Pappa would have done the same.

Throughout the summer, the bees were a constant presence. They wafted above the wildflowers in a glittering mesh, and their dreamy drone was the soundtrack of my childhood. Every so often Pappa would use a little crowbar to pry off the lid of each hive in turn. He would check the health of the queen, the production of honey, and the condition of the wooden box, making sure there were no mites or mildew. Then he would replace the lid and move on to the next colony. The bees were accustomed to these periodic examinations and never made a fuss. They knew that when he was done he would secure the roof where it belonged and leave them in peace and safety.

I have since learned that most beekeepers wear elaborate gear to protect themselves: a full-body suit of thick white material with elastic at the wrists and ankles. There is a helmet too, attached by a collar and hood, with a faceplate of multiple layers of netting. Boots and elbow-high vented gloves complete the ensemble.

Pappa did not show such weakness. His only concessions to the cowardly notion of self-protection were leather gardening gloves and a flimsy mesh stapled to the brim of his sun hat. He tucked his pants into his socks too. “If you feel something moving down your leg, that’s sweat,” he told me. “If you feel something moving up, that’s a bee.”

In the fall, Pappa harvested honey. Finn was his constant companion in this work. My brother had a way with the bees, moving among the hives with the slow glide of a fisherman wading into a lake, making no ripples. Pappa insisted that I help too, though I almost always got stung. “You have to learn,” he would lecture me.

Before approaching the hives, I always loaded the smoker: a tin instrument shaped like a kettle with a leather bellows attached to the side. I would fill it with wood chips and set them smoldering. Smoke put the bees into a stupor, rendering them docile and logy—that was the theory, anyway. But our bees apparently disliked me enough that a few aggressive fighters always managed to shake off their trance and launch suicide missions on my gloves or unprotected arms. They ended their little lives for the sake of scaring me and leaving welts on my skin.

In winter the bees hibernated, generating just enough heat with their wingbeats to survive the brutal Iowa cold. Every year I worried they wouldn’t make it. Ice storms brought down power lines. Snow fell so deep that it smothered the hives completely, reducing them to little wavelets in an ocean of white. Sitting in our cozy house by a roaring fire, I fretted over the bees’ uninsulated boxes.

When spring came they swarmed, answering my fear with an explosive reawakening. As the weather warmed, foragers and scouts would emerge from their hives in a slow trickle, investigating the first blossoms to uncurl in the prairie. And then, without warning, the bees would rise en masse.

Rather than progressing in an orderly fashion from flower to flower, they caromed desperately through the air. Their normal hum would increase to a shrill, throbbing roar that seemed to come from every point of the compass at once. Each bee seemed to have its own lunatic trajectory, separate from all the others. This was not a time to collect pollen or build honeycombs; every job was on temporary hiatus, and they circled in every direction at top speed like a hailstorm unstuck from gravity.

Pappa said that a swarm was not something to be feared. It was merely the bees’ way of expanding their population. When a colony grew too big to fit comfortably in its wooden hive, it would split in two. Half the bees would remain in their original home, under Pappa’s jurisdiction, while the other half took to the skies to search for somewhere new to build a hive of their own. A swarm was celebratory madness. In this liminal moment between their old home and the new, the bees experienced a kind of apian Rumspringa. Unhoused and untethered, they were free of all constraints, able to fly wherever they wished without a plan or destination. Of course they careened through the wind in a roar of wingbeats. They were dancing, singing.

But their moment of liberation was fleeting. There was work to do. Worker bees—that was their nature. In a matter of minutes, the ambient siren would start to diminish. The dance floor would clear, the music quieting as the party stuttered to a halt. The bees would coalesce into a shimmering knot in midair, surrounding and shielding their new queen.

We would watch from the ground as the amorphous, translucent curtain of the swarm undulated against the sky. The bees were no longer whizzing hither and thither as individuals; the hive mind was back in control. The center of the airborne colony remained somewhat solid as the edges rippled and blurred, pooling outward and roiling back in. I never felt more earthbound, more weighted.

The swarm rose. It swirled away over the treetops. It melted into blue.

Even Pappa did not know where the bees went when they left us. Sometimes they flew for miles, he said. They abandoned everything they’d ever known, leaving innangarðr for útangarðr—civilization for the wild.

—

So you see that even the bees cycled through the Wheel of Time. Night and day pirouetted together. Week folded into week. The seasons and the bees followed the same timetable: spring swarm, summer honey-making, autumn calm, winter hibernation. These were the rhythms of the natural world as I understood it. Within the Wheel of Time, there were smaller axis points: the sun, the moon, and the hive.

Seven months ago I watched a different swarm of bees darken the air. Remember it. Remember the farmers’ market and my first-ever birthday celebration. Remember the dead body on the forest floor. Remember that especially.

8

Now I must tell you about my father’s work.

The phone rang on a peaceful afternoon. It was autumn, and Finn and I were watching Bröderna Lejonhjärta, our favorite film. Pappa sat on the front stoop with all his knives and swords laid out beside him, biggest to smallest, sharpening each blade. The grainy scrape of the whetstone carried on the wind.

I have no idea what I looked like as a girl. There are no photos from my childhood. We had only one mirror in the house, head height for Pappa. He’d hung it over the bathroom sink so he could trim and maintain his beard, and it was too high up for me to see anything but the reflection of the opposite wall. I can only tell you that I was pale; I have always been winter-colored. My white-blond hair, never cut, hung to my waist with a ragged hem.

At the first chime of the landline, Finn and I locked eyes and switched off the TV. We laced up our shoes and grabbed snacks from the kitchen cabinets to sustain us through what was coming: long hours away from home.

The landline only ever rang for Pappa. There were no cellphones in those days, only a clunky contraption with push buttons and a long cord that curled like a pig’s tail. Finn and I had never used the phone; we never even touched it. Who would we have called? We did not know anyone except each other.

As we pulled on our jackets, Pappa crashed into the living room, still holding the sword he’d been sharpening, a slash of silver at his side. He answered the phone in heavily accented English: “Who calls?”

Finn and I slipped out the back door, into a chilly breeze. Whenever Pappa got a work call, he wanted us out of his sight, even out of earshot. We raced each other to the forest. The wildflowers had withered into husks that rattled among the dry stalks of dead grasses, and the bees spent most of their time indoors now, preparing their homes for winter. Finn reached the trees first, as always. Pretending not to care, I climbed onto a fallen log. I was nine or ten, still very much a child, while Finn was on the cusp of puberty and already showed signs of taking after Pappa. There was a suggestion of a thickening chest, and his hands and feet were overlarge, preparing for the growth spurt that would launch him into manhood.

Without warning, a pine cone whizzed past my head. Finn pulled a mischievous face and hurled another, and I ducked just in time. He picked up a third missile from the underbrush and pointed its tip at me like a knife blade.

“Defend yourself, woman!” he yelled in English. We always spoke English when we were alone. We practiced our pronunciation, struggled with irregular verbs, and imitated the slang we learned from American sitcoms.

I grabbed a pine cone and flung it at him. Laughing, we hurled our missiles and dodged between the trees. I managed to strike Finn right on the forehead, and he clutched his brow in mock agony, staggering backward.

“It’s all over,” he cried. “Everything’s going dark.”

He collapsed onto his back in the grass, sending up a pulse of ochre leaves.

“My brother is dead,” I said solemnly, standing over him. “He died in battle.”

“I totally did,” Finn gasped out.

“My brother died with honor.”

“Tell Pappa…I was a great…warrior…”

I nudged him with my toe. “Die already.”

He went limp, tongue lolling. I jostled him a few more times, pretending to check for signs of life, until he snickered and shoved my foot away. There was a moment of stillness. In the distance, a crow gave its harsh call.

Then Finn lifted his arms straight above his body, showing off his handfuls of pine cones.

“I died with weapons in hand,” he cried. “I’m going to Valhalla!”

I laughed until my stomach ached. We were different children away from our father. We were children.

—

The last rays of the setting sun outlined the high clouds like paper touched with flame. Finn and I were not permitted back in the house until our father shouted for us. I cast yearning looks toward the bright windows. Pappa’s call was long over, but these phone conversations were always followed by a burst of activity, and this required our absence too. Sometimes Pappa would pass in front of the windows, silhouetted, carrying boxes or bags. Sometimes he would make or receive other calls, just as brief as the first had been. I was hungry, our snacks long gone. The sun dipped below the horizon, taking away the colors of the world.

“How long is he going to be?” I asked.

“Don’t whine,” Finn said in Swedish, switching tongues to give his words more weight. “Come on, catch me.”

We pelted through the gloaming. Finn led me around a copse of birch trees—bars of white against the gunmetal backdrop of the evening. Then, at the top of the hill, he stopped so suddenly that I slammed into him.

“Ouch,” I screamed. “What’s the matter with you?”

“Grave,” he said, pointing between the trees.

I peered through the darkening air and saw what he meant: a patch of bare earth at the crest of the slope.

Pappa had a strange passion for burying dead animals around our property. Our fence was lined with bear traps designed to safeguard us against intruders, but they often snared hapless raccoons or groundhogs instead. Sometimes Pappa was alerted to the existence of a corpse by the turkey vultures that marked the location of any dead thing by circling above it in lazy revolutions. Other times Pappa discovered these sad bundles of bloodstained fur during his perimeter patrols. Either way, he always brought the cadavers home with him, whistling as he walked.

He also collected roadkill. Whenever we drove past a dead deer or squashed skunk or the bloody pulp that remained of some unidentifiable creature, Pappa would pull the car over and gather up the putrid corpse. Every time. He kept bags in the trunk for this purpose. Finn and I would hold our noses during the drive back to the house.

Stranger still, Pappa didn’t bury the carcasses right away. He would lock the remains in the shed, instruct Finn and me to stay away, and keep the putrefying cadaver there for whatever amount of time pleased him—a day, a week, longer. Flies would drone around the plywood door, and the stench would increase to the point where Finn and I avoided that entire side of the house.

And then it would be gone—the smell and the corpse. Pappa always buried the bodies at night. Patches of bald earth appeared on random mornings, each in a different location. Pappa strewed his work across the landscape with a logic that defied my understanding. A grave in the valley by the pond. One in a clearing in the forest under the overhang of a dead oak tree. Another on the hilltop where Finn and I stood that evening.

Pappa never said a word about them, leaving us to discover their locations or not. The whole ritual was none of our business.

The graves were surprisingly large—nearly as wide and long as my mattress—regardless of the size of the dead animal in question. Each empty scrape in the soil would eventually be filled with grass. The prairie and the forest were forever hungry, claiming any square inch of available ground.

I always felt relieved when the graves vanished into green. I didn’t know why Pappa engaged in this bizarre behavior. He didn’t like animals. Hated them. Why would he care if their stinking cadavers lay rotting in bear traps or smooshed on the pavement? Why would he go out of his way to collect the remains? Why would he give them the dignity of a private funeral?

I never asked. Conversation with my father flowed only one way: from him to others. He would pose a question, which Finn and I would answer. He would broach a topic, and Finn and I would reply. Never in my young life had I tapped Pappa’s shoulder to interrupt his thoughts. Never had I asked him a question unprompted. My father’s attention was like sunlight focused through a magnifying glass, scalding the tiny insects below. In the blistering beam of his gaze, I might be burned alive.

So there we stood, my brother and me, exiled from home, staring at a grave that had appeared overnight. I could tell it was brand-new by the immaculate bareness of the soil. Not a single seed had sprouted in that upturned earth.

The last of the evening light ebbed from the air. Stars flowered. I had the strange urge to approach the grave, maybe even dig up the decomposing flesh and bone. What had Pappa buried this time? Raccoon, squirrel, rabbit? I could not remember the most recent roadkill he had scraped off the pavement. What would happen if I desecrated his solemn efforts? Would the gods strike me dead? Would Pappa? Even in darkness, half a mile from the house, I did not dare to go against his implicit wishes. In theory he could not see or hear me, but the logistics of space and time did not apply to him. As far as I was concerned, he was as all-wise as Odin, and I wasn’t safe from his gaze anywhere.

On cue, Pappa shouted, “Vikingabarn! Middagsdags!” Dinnertime.

Even before the echoes of his voice had stilled, Finn and I were in motion, weightless, running side by side.

9

Over dinner Pappa said, “I will be going away in the morning.”

Finn bowed his head. Swedish folk music burbled from the record player, a false note of cheer.

“When will you be home?” I asked.

Pappa shrugged. “While I’m away, you will be good.”

There were no stories that night. Lying in bed, I waited in vain for Pappa’s tread on the steps. I could hear him packing downstairs: the scrape of the suitcase pulled from the closet shelf, the squeak of dresser drawers, and the chime of weapons leaving their hangers on the wall as he readied them for transport. Finn sat propped up against his pillows, reading an English-language superhero comic, though he hadn’t turned the page in a while. His face was stoic, as if he was not interested in the noises downstairs—as if he was not listening, like me, to our father preparing to leave us.

“Can I sleep in your bed tonight?” I asked, using Swedish to sweeten the request.

With a sigh, Finn scooted against the wall to make room for me.

—

Pappa did not say goodbye in the morning. He did not say anything. He breakfasted with us, but his coat was already on, his gaze lifted to the window.

The family car was a nondescript gray sedan, neither brand-new nor noticeably out-of-date. (It was chosen to go unnoticed, I realize now.) I watched through the window as Pappa threw his suitcase into the trunk. His face wore an expression I could not identify—some combination of rage and elation, potent and unsettling. The car lurched over the potholes in the long dirt path that led to our front gate. I watched until it was out of sight.

“What if he never comes back?” I asked.

“He always comes back,” Finn said. Then he picked up a science textbook from the library and curled up on the couch to read.

I lingered at the window, though I knew Pappa would be gone at least overnight. Maybe longer. Maybe for days. His work always followed the same pattern: first the phone call, then his absence. This happened at least once a month, but I never seemed to get used to it. I pressed my palm against the cold glass. I breathed a cloud of condensation and wrote Pappa with my forefinger.

“Did you know that if you ring a bell, dogs will start drooling?” Finn asked.

“What?”

“It was an experiment,” he said, tapping the page of his book. “There was a scientist called Pavlov. He wanted to see if he could teach some dogs that whenever they heard a bell, they would get food. So he did it over and over, and eventually just the sound would make them drool.”

I shrugged.

“Pavlov called it conditioning,” Finn informed me. “Isn’t that interesting?”

“No.”

Throughout the day, worry simmered in my chest. There was no particular object for my concern, no nameable threat, only an awareness of our unaccustomed defenselessness. Pappa could have fought off an army, but Finn’s battle-axe was only made of wood.

Mac and cheese for lunch. Finn boiled the water while I lay on my belly in the living room, coloring with crayons. Whenever Pappa was gone, my brother did all the cooking. His training had not included frying potato pancakes or fermenting herring, so we ate American foods, easily prepared, like boil-in-the-bag rice or peanut butter and jelly. Finn had taken up the mantle of default chef when I was too little to bake crispbread or make köttbullar: meatballs in cream sauce. Since those early years, I had become a fairly skilled cook, but for comfort’s sake we maintained the tradition of Finn at the stove in Pappa’s apron.

As my brother stirred the pasta, I attempted to draw Ragnarök, the bloody apocalypse that awaited us all. Pappa spoke of it often. There would come a war between gods and monsters. The giants would arm themselves and march from their rocky realm. The dead would rise out of Helheim, hollow-eyed and filled with wrath. A monstrous wolf would swallow the sun. Jörmungandr, that enormous snake, would thrash through the oceans, spitting venom. The World Serpent spent its long life waiting for this moment, biting its own tail as it encircled the world, holding all of Midgard in the hoop of its body. When Ragnarök came, the snake would finally let go its hold, freeing its huge coils to churn the seas into froth.

I drew the giants in burnt umber, the souls of the dead in silver. The wolf used up my whole black crayon. Then I began work on Asgard, the stronghold of the gods. I rendered the pantheon in bold, bright hues: the glitter of their chain mail, the solid oak of their helmets, and the steel plating of their shields. I drew Odin, king of the gods, in a heroic pose on the front lines.

The Eddas said the Allfather would lead the charge when Ragnarök came. Freya, goddess of love and battle, would prepare her spells and sorcery. Thor would don the belt that doubled his strength. Heimdall, guardian of the rainbow bridge, would blow his magic horn, an instrument so powerful that its call could be heard in every corner of the universe.

A popping sound roused me from my work. Gunshots in the distance. This was not uncommon in rural Iowa, but still, I closed the curtains and hurried to find Finn, who was pouring neon-orange powder onto the noodles.

“When will Pappa be home?” I asked.

“He’ll be home when he’s home. You know that. Set the table.”

Two placemats, two plates, two glasses, Pappa’s chair empty. Finn and I ate in silence, washed our dishes in silence. He put on Bröderna Lejonhjärta, but my attention kept drifting. Whole swaths of the film passed without my realizing it, even the part when the ancient lindworm surged from the waters to fight the dragon. The gunshots had unsettled me—or maybe it was something else, something I could not yet name. I did not realize I was wringing my hands until Finn reached over and pushed my fingers apart.

Together we bolted the doors, latched the windows, and circled the house, checking that everything was secure. Then we climbed the stairs.

10

My mother emerged from the black forest, her body painted by moonlight. The sky was spattered with stars. My heels sank into the soil, which seemed to have been recently dug up. Glancing down, I saw that I was standing in one of Pappa’s graves.

Mamma appeared to be a young woman, slim and small-boned. I wanted to run to her, but my feet were now entirely swallowed up by damp, loamy earth. I was sinking. I tried to lift my right leg, which pushed my left calf farther into the mud. I tried to cry out, but no sound came.

Still, Mamma seemed to register my distress. She came closer, her face hidden by a fall of snow-bright hair. Her movements were languid, almost weary. She held out a hand to me, but she was too far away; I was knee-deep in wet dirt now and could not reach her.

She turned back toward the trees. I struggled desperately to free myself, but every lurch and gasp pushed me farther down through the soaked soil.

“Snälla vänta på mig,” I cried. Please wait for me.

“Jag är alltid här,” Mamma replied without looking back. I am always here.

Mud tangled around my hips like damp fabric. The dream became confused, cold and slippery, pressure and discomfort.

I woke to find that I had wet the bed.

—

Finn helped me load the sheets into the washing machine. He promised not to tell Pappa. It was three in the morning, and my brother bore a streak of purple beneath each eye, the stamp of fatigue. At least this time I had been sleeping in my own bed when the catastrophe occurred, so I had not soaked Finn too.

“I’m sorry to be such a baby,” I sobbed.

“This always happens when Pappa’s away.”

It was true, though I did not want to admit it. As I poured detergent over my soiled pajamas, a screech owl cried out somewhere in the forest. I was familiar with its ragged howl, but at that ungodly hour it seemed like an omen.

“I don’t want to go back to bed,” I said.

“It was just a bad dream, Liv.”

“I know.”

“Here.” Finn switched on the TV. “Watch Bröderna Lejonhjärta again. It’ll calm you down,” he added with a yawn. “Come to bed when you’re ready, okay? Don’t stay up too late.”

I said nothing.

Finn started up the stairs, then paused, his shoulders sagging. He turned back, scanning my face and registering my panic. Yawning again, he shuffled resignedly back down and settled on the couch next to me. He held out an arm, pulling me into a side hug, and I nestled against his chest, shivering a little.

I suppose you have never heard of Bröderna Lejonhjärta. Why would you? The name translates to The Brothers Lionheart. The film is beloved in Sweden—a classic—and virtually unknown anywhere else. Finn and I must have watched it a thousand times in our youth. Our copy was a VHS tape so well used that the name and image on the label had been entirely worn away. The simple clunk and whir of the VCR accepting the cassette and slotting it into place was a tiny solace. Pappa never watched with us but often found some pretext to hover in the doorway behind us, smiling a little. Even the mightiest warriors are not immune to nostalgia.

In retrospect, Bröderna Lejonhjärta was a melancholy movie. Two orphaned brothers lived in squalor, the younger one dying of tuberculosis. The older, Jonatan, soothed poor sick Karl by telling him wonderful tales of an imagined country. When a fire broke out in their hovel, Jonatan died saving his little brother from the flames, leaving Karl to succumb to his illness alone.

But magic prevailed, and the brothers were reunited in Nangijala, the fantastical realm Jonatan had created in his stories. Jonatan returned to life there and Karl was healed. They joined a resistance movement and fought bravely against a tyrant and his dragon. Adventures ensued.

Sometimes stories are true—I suppose that’s the lesson. Let’s not think too hard about the fact that the brothers committed suicide at the end of the movie. At least, that’s how I see it now. Paralyzed by the dragon’s venom and unwilling to live that way, Jonatan told Karl not to mourn. He promised that in the afterlife he would travel to an even more magical land, Nangilima, a realm of only light. Karl, unwilling to be parted from his brother again, carried Jonatan’s limp, immobilized body to a cliff. As they both fell to their deaths, Karl cried out that he could see the light of Nangilima.

As a child, I believed wholeheartedly that he could.

Finn dozed throughout the movie, his chin dipping and rising as he blinked himself awake. At one point he murmured, “That’s my first memory.”

“What is?”

He pointed at the screen, where Jonatan was desperately trying to rescue Karl from rising flames. “Fire,” Finn said.

“The fire in the movie?” I asked. “That’s your first memory?”

“No,” he said. “Real fire. Out on the prairie. The fire—” He broke off with a jolt.

“What fire?” I asked.

“It’s nothing. Forget it.” Finn straightened up, rubbing a hand over his eyes to force himself all the way awake. “Watch the movie. You like this part.”

“Okay.” I curled against his warmth once more.

As the screen flickered and shone, the screech owl called at irregular intervals, waiting long enough between each vocalization that I would begin to hope it had flown away, then screaming right outside the house, as high-pitched and frantic as a woman in distress.

“Rövhål,” Finn said, glaring in the direction of the cry. Asshole.

And then I heard it. The crunch of dry dirt. Car wheels in motion.

Finn cocked his head, listening too. I ran to the window, yanking the curtain aside. Distant headlights sliced through the inky air. In the stillness of the witching hour, I could hear the clang of the chains uncoiling at the front gate.

“Pappa!” I cried.

Finn turned off the TV. “Back upstairs. Now.”

“But Pappa’s home. Let’s run out and meet him.”

Finn’s expression quieted me. His brows were knitted, mouth taut. “Pappa doesn’t want to see us right now.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do. Trust me.”

I hesitated. I wanted to see my father with my own eyes, inhale the musk of his sweat, and reassure myself with all my senses that he was really home. Maybe he would open his arms for a hug and let me fling myself against his sturdy frame. Maybe he would call me his little vargunge. Wolf cub.

“Quick,” Finn said, a new urgency in his voice.

I knew better than to argue with that tone. We hurried up the stairs, Finn dragging me by the hand. He hurled himself into bed and tugged the covers up to his chin, but I went to the window.

“Damn it, Liv,” he rasped.

Headlights swept the house, splashing over the boxes of the beehives. The sedan lumbered into view and shuddered to a halt in its usual spot. Pappa uncoiled his massive frame from the driver’s seat, straightening to his full height.

I felt something loosen inside my chest, a tension I’d been carrying since his departure. At once I was tired—so tired. I leaned my forehead against the glass, ready to nod off right there at the window.

Pappa did not immediately return to the house. I watched him go around to the back of the sedan and open the trunk. For a moment he stood staring down at what was inside, hands on hips, his thinking pose, his face lit from beneath by the eerie glow of the trunk’s interior. He was too far away for me to read his expression, but I caught a gleam of teeth.

“Get in bed,” Finn whispered behind me. “Now.”

This time, I obeyed.

11

For the next few days, Pappa lived in the basement.

This was the third phase of his work: first the phone call, then the disappearance, and then the locked door. I had no idea what the basement looked like—how large, how well lit, unfinished or carpeted, furnished or bare. I had never been down there, not once. There was a dead bolt on the door, and Pappa kept the only key on a chain around his neck, never removing it. He wore it even in the bath.

After returning from one of his work trips, he always spent at least one night in the basement, usually longer; sometimes he remained down there for as much as a week. He did not emerge for meals or sleep in his own bed. He was both present and gone—home but absent in every practical way. There was a bathroom in the basement, which I was grateful for, since each time Pappa ran water in the sink or flushed the toilet, the pipes on the first floor would knock. Each rattle was a moment of reassurance, as soothing as a smile.

I was no longer frightened. Even behind a bolted door, Pappa was near enough to keep the wolves at bay. I could return to life as usual, doing my chores, bathing on Saturday, and trying once more to draw Ragnarök. Finn continued to prepare all our meals, though he seemed a bit subdued.

The Vikings believed that there were nine realms of existence, rather than one. As a child this idea made sense to me, since my home, too, was many things at once.

Alfheim was the abode of the light elves, a tranquil place inhabited by creatures as lovely as the stars. That was the bedroom I shared with Finn; I always felt safe there. The checkered curtains. The ceiling fan. The ancient lamp on the bedside table we shared. Finn’s snores were as familiar as my own breath. We used the same dresser, where Finn’s clothes gradually passed to me by a process of osmosis: his size, then a little too small for him and a little too big for me, then my size, and finally torn up to use as rags. Pappa never entered our bedroom unless he had a book in hand, and there was safety in that too.

The living room and kitchen combined to make up Midgard, the human world. Sometimes it was a pleasant place: liver pâté and pickles in the mornings, Swedish folk music, and Pappa humming along as he soft-boiled the eggs and set out the bread. The sun shone when he was calm, but the slightest twitch of his mouth sent thunder rolling through the house. Midgard was an unpredictable realm, living and dying on Pappa’s absence or presence, his humor or his anger.

Asgard was the basement. The Eddas said this golden stronghold contained many rooms: Odin’s royal hall, the living quarters of his kin, and Valhalla, the sacred chamber of the most honored dead.

Beyond the house lay the rest of the nine realms. The beehives were Muspelheim, the home of the fire giants, a landscape of lava and flames. That charred, boiling realm was too hot and bright for a mortal even to look upon. The venom of the bees’ stings burned with a fiery ache that lingered for days. (I had never once complained about it, though. Pain was an important part of life, a teacher and a guide.)

The silken curtain of the prairie was Vanaheim, the home of Freya’s kin, the Vanir gods. The rolling hills to the north made up Jotunheim, the mountainous territory of the giants—frost, fire, and all the others. The forest was Svartalfheim, the labyrinthine land of the dwarfs, a rocky maze of tree roots and muddy creek beds. That was where Finn and I built our stick fort, a marvelous creation that stood strong through several Iowa winters. The underworld of Helheim was the apple orchard, which had been planted by some long-ago farmer. Pappa had no interest in maintaining the trees, so they had declined into witchy statues, their branches interlocking to make a lattice from which warty, sour fruit hung.

Lastly, there was Niflheim, a netherworld of ice, fog, and poisoned rivers. That was the graves Pappa dug on our land. Always shifting locations. Strange and unsettling. Each raw scrape that appeared in the grass jolted me. Each time the bare dirt began to sprout slender shoots of pale green, I hoped and fretted. Hoped it was the last time a new grave would appear. Fretted because I knew it wasn’t.

—

Pappa lived in the basement for three more days. I was alone when I heard the rhythmic earthquake of his feet on the stairs. I held my breath, hardly daring to believe it. Then came the grind of the dead bolt and there he was, my own dear Pappa, large as life, larger than life, ducking through the basement door. The familiar bob of his head made me smile. Pappa had to bow to fit through any doorway; the world was too small for him.

Finn had gone out to practice swordplay in the waning afternoon light. I wondered if I ought to call him inside but thought better of it. Pappa would require a moment to readjust to reality aboveground. He always did. I watched as he twisted back and forth at the waist, working out the tension in his back. He stank of sweat and something else. His expression was peaceful, oddly so, as though he had been emptied of all thought.

He did not seem to register that I was just a few feet away on the couch with a book in my lap. He strode right past me into the bathroom and slammed the door. I listened as he ran a bath and splashed among the suds, filling the house with the smell of peppermint soap, his baritone echoing off the tiles as he sang cheery tunes from his youth. An hour later, resplendent in jeans and a clean T-shirt, he wafted into the living room on a cloud of steam. His beard was braided and oiled, and his mane flowed loose past his shoulders, dampened to gleaming copper, the color of pennies.

Still, he did not seem to notice me. He was holding a bundle of soiled, smeary fabric. I watched him leave through the back door. I heard the thump of the cloth landing in the bottom of the rusted trash barrel. The tang of kerosene-fueled flames carried into the house on the breeze.

At last, Pappa returned to the living room and saw me.

“There you are,” he cried. He spread out his arms and I ran to him, crashing into his tree-trunk torso. Pappa threw back his head and roared with laughter.

“I’m glad you’re back,” I said in Swedish. “I missed you.”

“My work went very well this time,” he said. “Come, come. It’s time for you to learn to make blodpudding, min dotter. We’ll have it for dinner with bacon and lingonberry jam. What do you say?”

I would have agreed to anything.

12

There is no story without trouble. In the Eddas, trouble always began with Loki, the trickster god.

His origins were a mystery. Odin claimed him as a blood brother, but Loki’s parentage was unknown and he possessed strange magic. The other gods viewed him as mischievous but harmless. To me, however, he was the most terrifying figure in the lore.

To begin with, the trickster was the father of three dreadful children. He married a goddess of Asgard, but three times he snuck off to mate with a giantess. From their union came Fenrir, a wolf imbued with the size and strength of his monstrous mother. Born an ordinary cub, he grew with astonishing rapidity. Unlike ordinary living things, Fenrir seemed to have no natural endpoint for his physical development; he reached the proportions of a typical wolf and kept on growing, outpacing any other animal in the nine realms, taller than the walls of Asgard, with char-black fur, eyes like embers, paws like boulders, and teeth as sharp as any Viking sword.

Loki’s second child was Jörmungandr, the World Serpent. Like Fenrir, the snake grew with a speed and fervor that defied understanding. The blood of its giantess mother ran strong in its veins, and it quickly attained such girth that the land cracked under its coils, a swipe of its tail could knock entire forests to the ground, and a single droplet of its venom contaminated the soil for miles in every direction, rendering it barren and toxic. Since the earth could not support the World Serpent’s weight, it slithered into the oceans, where it encircled the whole of Midgard with its length and sank its teeth into its own tail, making a loop without end, lurking in the icy depths and waiting for Ragnarök.

Worst of all was Hel, Loki’s only daughter, the goddess of death and ruler of Helheim. She was split down the middle from crown to soles. One side of her body was that of a lovely young woman, the epitome of Viking beauty and strength, while the other side was a rotting corpse, stinking of putrefaction and pearled with maggots. Even by the standards of her siblings, Hel was the stuff of nightmares. Nothing is so final as the division between life and death. Each state makes the other possible, and the change from one to the other is irrevocable: flesh to spirit, breath to nether. Fenrir and Jörmungandr might be the strangest and most frightening of all living creatures—but at least they were living creatures who would one day die. Hel existed always at the impossible midpoint: dead and alive and both and neither.

Loki himself was not as overtly horrifying as his children. His danger was hidden beneath the surface, harder to see, which made him all the more sinister to me. He could change his shape, size, and sex. He appeared in the Eddas as a hawk, a salmon, a pregnant mare, and an elderly crone. He could even take on the appearance of the other gods when he chose. But his true form was a handsome charmer with a weakness for alcohol and an insatiable appetite for mischief.

Trouble was Loki’s specialty. Once he wagered the sun and moon—and Freya’s hand in marriage—to a wicked giant. Once he ruined the Aegir feast with his insults and taunts. Once he stole the apples of immortality, which kept the gods young. They shriveled into weak, shameful senescence—all except Loki, snacking on his private store and laughing at his fellows.

In the end, he usually rectified the damage he had done. This was not, however, by his own choice. The suffering and pleas of his victims did not awaken the trickster’s conscience; he had none. Only fear could motivate him.

Thor, god of war and storms, was brave, fierce, and a little dumb—at least, that’s how I saw him. He traveled the nine realms with a hammer that always flew straight and true, striking its target with lethal force and returning to his hand. Whenever Loki played one of his cruel pranks, Thor would intervene. His customary method of solving any problem was to kill someone with his hammer. Annoyingly, he could not kill Loki, sworn and protected as Odin’s blood brother. (Even the gods, for all their power, were bound by their promises, Pappa always said. There was nothing worse than an oath-breaker.) Still, Thor could shatter every bone in the trickster’s body. Loki was sly and clever, but a coward. He always gave in rather than endure pain.

For a while he would behave himself. The gods would begin to believe that the trickster had finally changed—but I never fell for his innocent act. He was drawn to cruelty like a bee to a nectar-rich flower. It amused him to hurt the innocent.

In one of the Eddas, Loki shaved Sif’s head while she slept. Sif was Thor’s wife and the goddess of the harvest. Her hair was her crowning glory, bright as wheat, smooth as silk, and rich as honey. She woke one morning to find herself bald. In tears, she hid from everyone, even her husband, who loved her long hair. Sif’s humiliation and sorrow made Loki laugh. Only when Thor roared at him, hammer in hand, did Loki fix things. He went to the dwarfs and tricked them into making a wig of spun gold, perfectly fitted to Sif’s head, to replace what he had ruined.

Throughout Viking lore, Loki wreaked havoc on the nine realms. Sometimes his pranks were malevolent enough that the other gods punished him. One time they sewed his lips together with a leather thong. On another occasion, the trickster was forced to tie his testicles to a rope pulled by a goat. Loki screamed in agony as the animal tugged and the other gods laughed. When they felt that he had made amends, they welcomed him back into the fold.

But one day Loki will go too far. His final prank will set the wheels of Ragnarök in motion. At the end of days, Odin will die, Thor will die, Loki will die, even Jörmungandr and Fenrir will die. The prophecy has already been written.

—

It is important that you understand that the Eddas are not fairy tales or folklore to me. The gods are real, and their stories are intertwined with my own. That is the nature of faith: what we believe affects who we become.

13

I remember the day Pappa gave Finn his first real sword. I was eleven, maybe twelve. After breakfast, my father invited Finn and me into his bedroom, a space I rarely entered. I cast a glance at Pappa’s bed, which was oversized, just as he was—long but lean, made for one tall person. It was hard to imagine that he had ever been married. He was so complete, so self-contained, that I could scarcely believe he’d ever shared a bed with anyone.

Finn was the recipient of the ceremony; I was there as witness. Pappa’s wall was decorated with weapons, each one mounted on its own hanger. He tapped the ornate hilt of a midsized sword, then removed it from the wall and balanced it in his palm. I remember a vein pulsing in Finn’s throat, the only sign of emotion. Pappa handed him the weapon with solemn slowness and Finn received it with due reverence. Unsure what to do, I stood stoic at my brother’s side.

Then they pulled on their coats and left the house without a word to me. Evidently I was not invited to this part of the ritual. It was deep winter, the sky papered over with gray. I watched through the window as Pappa led the way to their sparring ground, his breath glazing the air. Finn carried his new sword proudly but awkwardly.

I began to worry. Was Pappa about to make Finn fight him with actual blades? My brother would be killed in seconds. I had looked on so often as they sparred with wooden weapons, hearing the splinter and clack of blunt swords, Pappa grunting and shouting instructions, Finn silent, always. In these practice sessions, Pappa showed no mercy. Finn would use his slight frame to his advantage, dodging, ducking, and knocking Pappa’s blade to the side rather than taking the full force of a thrust. Sometimes he could even sneak a hit under Pappa’s arm before Pappa whacked the weapon from his hand. In the real world, Goliath would have pulverized David. Once or twice Pappa had struck Finn unconscious.

Now, out in the snowy field, Pappa turned to face my brother. I couldn’t hear what my father was saying, but his loose, easy stance brought me a measure of comfort. No anger or contempt. Pappa readjusted the sword hilt in Finn’s hands, then gripped my brother’s elbow to extend his arm, slicing into the wind.

I understood now what was happening. Finn was a skilled fighter for his age, but he had only ever used play weapons, as unwieldy as baseball bats. Holding an actual sword, Finn’s swings were awkward, his posture off-kilter. Everything about the new weapon was different: weight, tensile strength, air resistance, and, of course, danger. Finn would have to adapt his previous training to accommodate the real thing, and this was his first lesson. Pappa would not rest until my brother had earned the weapon by proving his mastery.

I turned away from the window, unsure if I was envious or relieved.

—

Over dinner that night, Pappa was in a pensive mood. He had prepared köttbullar, a traditional Swedish dish, my favorite. He and Finn kept exchanging glances, communicating something in silence from which I was excluded. Father and son. Warrior and apprentice.

“Let us review the nine noble virtues,” Pappa said. “What are they, Finn?”

Finn swallowed a mouthful of potato with a frantic gulp. “Courage and honor,” he choked out. “Self-reliance, perseverance, and discipline. Fidelity and industriousness. Hospitality. Truth.”

“Correct.” Pappa drummed his thumbs on the tabletop. “Liv, what is meant by hospitality?”

I jolted a little in my chair. “We must welcome other Vikings,” I said quickly. “We are all one people.”

“Other Vikings,” Pappa echoed with emphasis. “Do we open our doors to outsiders? Do we welcome those who are not of our tribe?”

“No,” Finn and I said in unison.

Pappa paused to wipe a smear of sauce off his beard. Finn pressed his knee against mine under the table, a microcosm of a comforting hug.

“What is meant by truth, Liv?” Pappa asked.

“Never lie to another Viking.”

“Never lie to me.” The words came out in a growl. “Never betray me.”

Without warning, he lunged toward us and gripped Finn’s wrist in one hand, mine in the other, so tight that I would find bruises in the morning.

“The most important virtue is fidelity,” Pappa said. “I have heard Americans use this word. They use it wrong. They speak of fidelity between husband and wife. Fidelity has nothing to do with the bonds of marriage. It is loyalty to the tribe. There is nothing worse than an oath-breaker. Do you understand?”

—

Over the next few weeks, Finn sustained so many cuts and gashes that I started to worry he would lose too much blood to survive. Pappa insisted on training him nearly every day, both of them using real blades now. Watching anxiously through the window as I washed dishes or swept the floor, I took some comfort in the fact that Pappa was obviously being careful—as careful as he was capable of, anyway. When he and Finn had sparred with wooden swords, Pappa had shown no mercy, but now he was exercising a measure of restraint. When he inevitably defeated Finn, he could easily have sliced off an ear or a finger, but he settled instead for gentle bloodletting. Usually Finn did not require stitches.

Yet something was happening to my brother—something I could not quite identify. He drew inward and his gaze never met mine anymore. At first, I fretted that he had left me behind, since he was now a grown man by Viking custom, while I remained a child and a girl besides. But no—Finn would never think like that. He was decent through and through.

Then I wondered if he was simply adjusting to this new, heightened level of perpetual pain and fear. Finn had spent his youth covered in bruises and welts, but a real sword raised the stakes immeasurably. Cut, scab, scar—Finn now lived in a constant state of all three at once, not to mention the anticipation of the next to come. There was a terrible intimacy in the slice of a blade. Even broken bones left the skin intact and the blood in the body.

Finn limped from a deep cut to his thigh. His left hand was bandaged from a gash in the palm that was healing slowly due to its inconvenient placement; every time Finn flexed or curled his fingers, the wound reopened. (Fortunately, it was not his sword hand. Pappa would have been furious.) Sometimes I saw Finn pause while walking and sway a little.

Whenever I asked him, he told me he was fine, but that meant nothing. There was no other answer to be given.

I had read about blood loss in a library book, and knew that if severe, it necessitated a transfusion. As a trip to the doctor, much less a hospital, was not an option, Finn would simply have to produce more blood—enough to keep up with what Pappa kept taking from him.

14

Ulf means wolf in Old Norse. Wolves were central to Viking theology—and to Ulf Thorvaldsson’s identity. They appeared often in the Eddas, sometimes as harbingers of death, other times as pets or totems for the gods. Fenrir—Loki’s monstrous child—was central to several tales. One of Odin’s many names was Hildólf: Battle Wolf.

Perhaps you have heard of the berserkir: berserkers. These fighters are known, even now, for having charged onto the killing fields dressed in bearskins and not much else. They entered a trancelike state of exalted ferocity and fought with the strength of bears. The modern word berserk, of course, is their legacy.

But the wildest and most savage of all Vikings were the úlfhéðnar: wolf-warriors. They are less well known today, but Pappa spoke of them often. He told stories of the úlfhéðnar howling and biting at their enemies’ shields, possessed by the essence of the wolf. He told stories of them shaking off sword slashes like paper cuts. He told stories of them shape-shifting at the height of battle, transformed into wolves by their own ecstatic bloodlust.

That was how my father saw himself: as an úlfhéðn, infused with the spirit of his namesake, driven by primal instincts, and unaccountable to the lesser concerns of human conscience.

God, how I loved him. I know it may be difficult for you to understand. He taught me to braid my hair like his: the plaiting taut, intricate, and overlapping. He took me through the forest in the spring, teaching me which mushrooms were edible and which would make me sick. He showed me how to care for our lingonberry bush, providing it with mulch, harvesting the fruit, and making jam of the second bloom. He taught me to snare animals and bring down game with a bow and arrow, since providing meat for the menfolk was a vital part of a Viking woman’s duties.

Holidays with Pappa were a delight, especially Yule. In anticipation of the sacred night, we would make a halmbock, a straw goat, as an offering to Thor, who traveled the rainbow bridge and the nine realms in a chariot drawn by goats. It took us weeks to build, since Pappa would not settle for some children’s toy. A tiny halmbock would have been an insult to the god of storms, and Pappa wanted nothing less than a sculpture large enough for Finn or me to have ridden on its back. Pappa braided curled horns out of dried grasses and twined red ribbon down the animal’s legs. The halmbock stood sentinel outside our house throughout the holiday season.

On Yule itself, Pappa would pretend he could hear the clatter of hooves and the cries of the Wild Hunt. Led by Odin, the gods flew through the sky collecting the souls of the dead, Pappa told us, so we stayed inside the house lest we be accidentally abducted. He would let Finn and me try glögg, a hot, spicy mulled wine that tasted of almonds and raisins. A few sips left us pink-cheeked and giggly.

I remember the pride of walking at Pappa’s side through our little town. We would leave the grocery store together, Pappa laden with bags, his hair loose, cascading past his shoulders. Other adults paused at the sight of him, and I was reminded once more that my father was built on a different scale than the rest of the human race. Head and shoulders taller than anyone else. Twice as wide. Americans were wispy, insubstantial things.

That was the father I adored. That is the father I miss even now.

I remember the last good day I spent with him. I have carried the memory with me all these years, a talisman in my pocket, warm to the touch.

It was morning, cloudy and gray, the air heavy with the suggestion of oncoming rain. I lay on my belly in the living room, drawing. I had recently become fascinated by Yggdrasil, the World Tree. A great white ash speckled with clay, it held the nine realms in its roots and branches. Yggdrasil bound the universe together and fired my imagination.

During our latest trip to the grocery store, artistic inspiration had struck me and I had asked Pappa for a roll of butcher-block paper. The World Tree was too immense, too holy, to be captured on some teeny sheet from a sketch pad. Now, in the living room, the paper stretched from wall to wall. A drizzle bejeweled the windows as I laid out my crayons in a row, organized by color.

The Eddas were inconsistent in their accounting of which worlds lay among Yggdrasil’s roots and which rested among the leaves. I decided to draw Jotunheim, Svartalfheim, and Helheim deep in the dark earth. Giants, dwarfs, and the dead belonged underground, buried like bulbs waiting for the spring—waiting for Ragnarök. I hung Vanaheim, Asgard, and Alfheim high in the branches, rendered in royal colors, as befitted the gods and elves. Niflheim and Muspelheim—dichotomous realms of aquamarine ice and fiery orange—encircled the trunk. Midgard, my own dear Earth, nestled in the low branches, a swirl of ocean and cloud.

Then a door slammed in another room—Pappa’s bedroom, I knew instantly. I had learned that every step on the staircase creaked with a different tone and every door closed at a different pitch. It was essential to be aware of Pappa’s location at all times.

His shadow fell over me. “What are you drawing there?” he asked.

“Yggdrasil.”

To my amazement, Pappa sat on the floor beside me. I stared at him as he picked up a brown crayon, peeled off its paper jacket, and turned it sideways to begin filling in the open space of Yggdrasil’s trunk. I wondered how he knew this technique, using the long side of the crayon rather than its tip for maximum coverage. It had never before occurred to me that Pappa might have drawn with crayons at some point in his past. It had never occurred to me that Pappa had ever been a child.

A little smile played around his mouth as he worked. The crayon looked like a toothpick in his hand. I mimicked him, stripping the burnt-umber crayon of its wrapper and scraping its full length back and forth over the paper. Despite the name, white ash trees had brown bark that cracked into diamond-shaped grooves as the trunk grew. Rain pattered dreamily against the window, and Pappa and I drew.

I don’t know why he chose that day to join me in my efforts. We worked together in calm silence until Yggdrasil was finished. Then Pappa stood up and stretched his arms over his head, his spine crackling, hands grazing the ceiling. He looked down at the drawing for a long moment and nodded, the same way he did when I had cooked a perfect köttbullar or sewed up a hole in his most comfortable jeans. Pride and contentment. No words needed.

I remember that my breath caught in my throat. I loved him so much in that moment that I could scarcely bear it.

I wish I still had that drawing. But Yggdrasil was taken away from me on the day I lost my father, my home, and everything I had ever known.

15

I was thirteen when it happened.

As I have told you, dates are hard to pin down in many of my childhood memories.

But that day is charred into my mind like a brand on flesh. There is no question about my age or the season. Thirteen years old. Cold spring. Some events are powerful enough to stop even the Wheel of Time.

Finn and I were watching cartoons in the living room. Pappa was out by the beehives, checking each colony for signs of an incipient swarm. He was worried about the temperature. Most hives swarmed between March and May, but spring was slow to settle that year. Another frost was still possible, which would be lethal to a colony on the move.

On TV, a hapless hunter chased a gangly rabbit. Finn imitated the man’s ridiculous cries. The rabbit kept escaping, as sly as Loki. The hunter threw his hat on the ground in fury, and I giggled.

“It’s not actually ‘wabbit,’ though,” Finn informed me. “You must say the R.”

“I know that,” I said.

“Good.”

A strange sound caught my ear—a grating, metallic impact—carried from far away on the wind. I did not recognize the noise. Finn switched off the TV and rose to his feet.

I watched as he moved to the window and pulled the curtains open. His mouth went slack and his arms fell to his sides as though he could no longer support their weight. For a moment I was sure that my fears had come true: Finn’s blood loss had finally taken too much of a toll.

But then he turned to me and I realized it was something else, not physical pain—this was mental, internal, ghastly. I had never seen that expression on a human face. It was the look of a squirrel caught in a snare.

“What is it?” I rasped. “What’s wrong?”

As though in answer, a rumbling filled the air. Were the bees swarming already? No, the morning was far too cold.

The back door slammed open with such force that the knob cracked the drywall. I turned, and Pappa was there, blotting out the sunlight. I almost didn’t recognize him. His shoulders were heaving, hands fisted, face disfigured by a snarl that showed top and bottom teeth.

“Which of you?” he growled.

I was too terrified to breathe. The ambient rumbling grew louder, tangible now, vibrating in the floorboards. Was this the coming of Ragnarök? Had the World Tree begun to shake? That was how the end of days would begin: Yggdrasil trembling from root to crown as the giants marched on Asgard and the dead rose out of Helheim.

“Which of you?” Pappa whispered, each word icy and distinct. This soft timbre was somehow even more frightening than his growl had been. I desperately wanted to give the right answer, to stop whatever was happening, but my mind was empty.

Pappa glanced at me, making a brief, searing examination. I flinched away from his gaze as it swept the length of my body. After a second, he shook his head and turned to Finn.

I looked too. My brother swayed where he stood. I thought of the wilted stems of our flower crowns as they unwove and disintegrated in our hair.

“Eiðrofi,” Pappa spat. Oath-breaker.

It was the worst insult—I could scarcely believe he’d said it out loud. He crouched like an animal, teeth bared, hands rising. Finn closed his eyes as though accepting his fate.

I threw myself between them. It was the bravest thing I ever did. I had never disobeyed my father, never questioned his orders, never said no, not once. Now I opened my arms to screen my brother. I did not know what was happening, but I understood that Finn was powerless to save himself.

Pappa shoved me aside with a blow that sent me flying. In that moment, I was a mere obstacle in his path, not his daughter. My feet left the floor and my head struck the wall with the force of a boulder tumbling downhill. A pocket of darkness. A scream. Mine? Pappa was moving, Finn was moving, the whole house swung around the axis of my aching head. I tried to stand, but the floor bucked and the ceiling pivoted sideways.

Everything that followed was filtered through the blurred lens of concussion. The front door exploded inward. I watched it happen as though in slow motion. Chunks of wood whizzed over the couch and struck the ancient, boxy TV, which Pappa had refused to replace as long as it still worked. It occurred to me that if the shards broke the screen, he might finally buy us a new one. I tried again to stand and felt my gorge rise. The air pulsed. When I looked again, the front door was gone, a ragged rim of shadow around a portal of blinding light.

A battering ram, I would later understand. They came prepared for anything.

Figures in dark clothes poured through the gap. Adult voices. A dozen strangers. More. Time accelerated now and the intruders moved with inhuman speed, fanning out through the living room without even wiping their feet on the mat, bodies in the kitchen, bodies in the hallway, all of them clamoring in English too rapid for me to understand.

“Pappa,” I screamed.

But he was gone, Finn too, and the door to the basement stood open.

“It’s not allowed,” I cried.

And still the invaders came. An uncountable swarm surged from room to room, up and down the stairs, throwing open closets, never still. Pappa’s bedroom door slammed, then the back door; I could tell by the pitch. The strangers all wore dark colors and bulky vests, rendering them anonymous and indistinguishable.

How had they penetrated the barbed-wire World Serpent that ringed the property? Why wasn’t Pappa here brandishing his axe with a roar? None of the intruders were even armed; I couldn’t see a single knife among them, much less a sword. He would have cut them down like grass.

“Pappa!” I shouted—or maybe I merely thought it. My head throbbed so intensely that the world purpled with each heartbeat. I gave no outward sign of pain, of course, though I wasn’t sure how much longer I could remain conscious.

The strangers kept moving. I noticed now that each one was holding something. Guns. One gun each. I would have laughed if my head didn’t hurt so much. Guns were lesser weapons, Pappa always said. They offered craven safety at a distance and unleveled the field of war. To die with a blade in hand—that was valor. To die with a gun in hand—that was cowardice.

I must have lost consciousness then. The memory ends in black.

16

It would have been better if I had stayed unconscious for longer. A few days, maybe. That happened on TV shows—a blow to the head followed by a weeklong sleep—but real life is rarely so kind.

A breath of wind, cold and clean. I found myself outside, surrounded by what seemed like hundreds of vehicles. Some were squad cars, others black and sleek with tinted windows. There was someone next to me, jostling me. Gradually I understood that I was in motion, stumbling along like a newborn colt. A sharp shoulder lodged in my armpit, half-carrying me forward. I inhaled the tang of sweat and something floral. Finn and Pappa didn’t smell like that. The figure at my side was the wrong size, too—too short for Pappa and too delicate for Finn.

“God, you poor child,” a woman’s voice murmured in my ear. And then, louder: “I’ve got the daughter. No sign of the boy.”

“The basement,” somebody answered, a distorted voice that crackled with static.

“Förbjuden,” I said weakly. Forbidden.

Despite the chill, it was a lovely morning, the sky as soft as a baby’s blanket. The prairie was at its greenest in early spring, a hopeful carpet of nascent grasses. They did not make sense together, the bucolic landscape and the chaos of squad cars.

“A little further,” the woman said. “Hang on, honey.”

My vision contracted with each hesitant step. A bear-sized SUV loomed toward me, and then I was curled on a plush seat that smelled of leather. I had never been in any vehicle except Pappa’s sedan.

An American woman leaned over me. Her skin was cedar brown, her black hair pulled back in a tight bun. All these years later, I remember her face with painful vividness: Cupid’s bow lips, thin brows, and a dimple in one cheek.

“That’s a nasty head wound,” she said. “Did your father do that to you?”

I lifted a hand to my skull, and my fingers came away stained with crimson.

“Var är min far?” I asked. Where is my father?

“Do you speak English, honey?”

I tried to answer, but the blow to my skull had jumbled English and Swedish together in my head.

“We’re here for Ulf Thorvaldsson,” the woman said. “He’s your father, right? You’re Liv?”

“Liv,” I echoed. “It means life,” I added idiotically.

“You do speak English. That’s good. That’ll help.” She nodded. “I’m Amber Lopez. I’m a federal agent. Do you know what that is?”

“I need to see my brother,” I said. I tried to rise from my seat, but Amber pushed me back against the cushion, her touch gentle but firm. That was when I realized how much my head hurt. The pain was so intense that I had not recognized it as pain.

“You need to stay where you are,” Amber said. She was staring at me with such concern that I wondered if we had met before. That wasn’t the sort of look you gave a stranger—it was too kind, too intimate.

Or maybe this was the way women looked at one another all the time. The only other females I’d ever encountered were figures on TV and, rarely, the librarian. The simple fact that Amber could see me—talk to me—was fundamentally bizarre, as though a character in a soap opera had climbed through the shimmering veil of the screen.

“The EMTs should be here any minute,” Amber said in her honeyed voice. “I really shouldn’t have moved you, but it seemed best to get you out of that house.”

Before I could reply, a metallic report split the air. It rang clearly over the cacophony of voices, a single sharp shock. I knew the sound—gunshots in the forest; hunting or target practice—but it was too close, coming from the wrong place. It almost sounded as though it had rung out from inside my own house.

Amber ran. I watched her careening through the smashed front door that Finn and Pappa had so recently sanded and varnished. The wood was too damaged to be repaired; it would have to be replaced. Pappa would be so angry.

A wolf began to howl. No—it was a robotic wailing, a shrill sequence of notes growing louder with each repetition. My headache spiked and I clapped my hands over my ears. An ambulance rocketed past the open door of the vehicle in which I sat, so close that I could have leaned forward and touched its side. Its doors opened and more strangers spilled from its depths.

Were they here for me?

No—something new was happening.

I saw a body on a stretcher being wheeled from inside the house. It emerged into the sunlight through what remained of the front door, and a second stretcher followed right behind. The figures on both gurneys were covered in sheets stained with crimson, just like in the movies. Metal struts, black wheels. Clusters of people blocked my view, pushing the stretchers toward the ambulance while shifting and shouting. It reminded me of the organized chaos of a queen bee’s attendants. They encircled her at all times, alert to her every movement.

Between the throbbing in my head and the misalignment of gravity, I could not tell what was up or down. I caught a few phrases here and there:

“Blood loss and shock, I don’t know if he’ll make it.”

“I’ve never seen anything like that. Jesus, what a horror show.”

“Who took the shot?”

“Now now now!”

The ambulance began moving away as soon as the stretchers were loaded inside, even before the doors were fully shut. It occurred to me that I must be dreaming. I blinked, trying to wake up, but that was not the nature of nightmares—they did not grant requests or follow orders. I only hoped that I would not wet the bed.

I waited to wake up as an uneasy peace descended over the scene. I waited to wake up as the other cars drove off, rumbling back down the hill. I waited to wake up as my head pounded, as the sky spun, as someone shut the door of the SUV and sealed me in darkness, as the key turned in the ignition, as a lurch of motion pushed me back into the seat, as my home glided away from me. The last thing I saw was the beehives on the prairie, nine stalwart boxes outlined with sunlight.

17

The paper-covered table was cold beneath my thighs. Amber Lopez had put my clothes in a plastic bag and handed them off to another officer. She didn’t tell me why. Now I wore a cloth gown that smelled of chemicals.

The doctor treated me like a specimen on a microscope slide, a topic of conversation rather than a person. He did not address me once, speaking over his shoulder to Amber, who stood in the doorway with her arms folded.

“Mild skull fracture,” he said. “We’ll observe her for forty-eight hours, but I’m not concerned. Rest, that’s all she needs.” He shone a pinprick of light into my eyes, triggering fireworks of pain. To Amber, he said, “The girl has never been to a doctor before, is that right? No vaccinations, no checkups, nothing?”

Amber shifted her weight. “Is that right, Liv?” she asked, her voice even sweeter than before.

I did not know the word vaccinations.

“I’m amazed her teeth are in such good shape,” the doctor said, shoving a rubber-gloved, foul-tasting finger in my mouth without warning me first. “Good genes, I guess.”

I resisted the urge to bite down.

“She’ll be fatigued for a while,” the doctor said over his shoulder to Amber. “We’ll do oral meds. She lost consciousness at the scene, you said?”

“I think so,” Amber said. “Is that right, Liv?”

I wasn’t sure.

“Where did you say the father was from?” the doctor asked.

I knew the answer to this question, at least. “Uppsala.”

“Ah, Norway.” The doctor nodded. “Or is it Finland? Wonderful place, Scandinavia. Fjords. Anyway, we’re done here,” he told Amber. “We’ll keep an eye out for vomiting or seizures, and we’ll do another round of scans tomorrow. No urgency. Right now, while all this is going on…” He trailed off, waving vaguely around.

“Right,” Amber said.

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

Maybe I had spoken in Swedish. Nobody answered me. The doctor had already turned away.

—

White walls, white blankets, white ceiling—my hospital room was eerily monochromatic. I swallowed two little chalky pills with water, a new sensation. I’d only ever seen medication like that on TV. Lying in bed, I buzzed with overstimulation and adrenaline. Amber remained at my side like a shadow.

Nobody would tell me where Pappa and Finn had gone. Their absence was more painful than the pervasive headache. I was still expecting to wake up. Amber took the chair beside my bed, staring at a palm-sized device. A TV set, bolted to the wall, showed the news. Something about the prep races for the Kentucky Derby, whatever that was. Something about higher property taxes, whatever that meant. Any minute now I would wake up. This was a strange dream, to be sure, but no stranger than my recurring nightmares about Fenrir lurking in the forest, his black fur blurring into the night, red eyes glowing between the trees.

“Do you want something to eat?” Amber asked. “You must be starving.”

“It’s not necessary to eat,” I said. In dreams, I did not add.

Amber raised her brows but said nothing. Her eyes were so dark they seemed to be entirely pupil, no iris at all. I felt a surge of longing for my brother’s familiar eyes, the blue shot through with glittering fractures.

“Where’s my father? Where’s Finn?” I asked for the hundredth time.

“It’ll be a couple more hours,” Amber said.

I sighed. This was dream logic; people never replied in a sensible manner.

On the TV screen, a red banner scrolled: Breaking News! There was a burst of theme music and a man in a suit appeared behind a desk. He began talking about shocking developments, a coordinated raid, and a serial killer. I didn’t know the term, but it sounded silly: a notorious murderer of breakfast cereals.

And then there was a photo of Pappa.

I stared, my mouth falling open. Pappa looked particularly fierce in this photograph, which had been taken from above, apparently without his knowledge, since he was not looking at the camera. The angle of his shoulders suggested a rapid gait. His hair was loose, streaming past his shoulders. He appeared to be on a city sidewalk, not our hometown. There was a fragment of a car bumper behind him, and someone else’s hand swung into view as though Pappa were moving through a crowd.

“That’s my father,” I said, pointing. “How funny!”

“Oh shit,” Amber said.

She sprang to her feet and lunged at the TV, running her hands along its smooth edges. “How do you turn this off ?” she yelled.

No one answered. The nurses had left us alone for once. In apparent desperation, Amber yanked the power cord from the outlet. The screen went dark, though not before I heard the announcer say, “Several bodies—”

18

Until my incarceration in the hospital, I had believed in America the same way I believed in the Norse gods: unquestionably real but difficult to understand. The stories of the gods were told in the Eddas; the stories of Americans were told in TV shows. Thor rode through the nine realms in a chariot; TV characters drove through suburbs in minivans. Odin’s elite forces fought in Valhalla; American children gathered together on grassy fields to compete in meaningless ball games.

Now I sat in the cafeteria picking moodily at a plate of food. Amber was still in line to pay for it. She had rolled me down the long halls in a wheelchair. There was a TV here too, blaring a commercial for toilet paper. I was beginning to worry that I was not dreaming after all. No nightmare had ever lasted this long or consisted of so much sitting around with nothing to do.

Could this actually be happening? Was this the fate the Norns had woven for me? The notion made me shudder. I closed my eyes, attempting to blot out the harshness of fluorescent lighting, the stench of gluey pasta, and the agony of unceasing unfamiliarity.

The Norns were the three wise women who wove the destinies of every living thing on magical looms. They were not humans, or giants, or even gods. They were beings of time itself.

As I understood it, the Norns were both more and less powerful than Odin and his kin. The gods were violent and active, always meddling in mortal lives or making war on somebody or other. But the Norns did not take part in any of that. They did not act; they simply knew.

Urth was responsible for the past. She wove the history of every creature born, and her name meant What Once Was. Verthandi spun the present, the ephemeral glimmer of the now, and her name meant What Is Coming Into Being. The third was Skuld, whose name meant What Shall Be. She knew death and the future. Together the Norns wove the fate of us all—Pappa, Finn, and me.

Amber approached the table and set her tray down.

“Where’s Finn?” I asked. “Where’s my father?”

Before she could reply, there was a beeping from inside her pocket. She withdrew her BlackBerry (that was the odd name, I had learned, of her little device). Her mouth tightened as she looked at the screen.

“Come on,” she said. “He’s out of surgery. You can see him now.”

—

There was a creature in the bed, half human, half machine. Its face and throat were obscured by overlapping strips of gauze and tape. Translucent tubes crisscrossed the tableau, connecting the figure’s mouth and nose to a giant monitor that flashed neon shapes. A rhythmic pump and hiss filled the room.

Amber rolled my wheelchair to the side of the bed and locked me in place. I did not cry—Pappa had forced me to permanently shut down that impulse—but my eyes burned with tears I would have shed if I could.

“Finn?” I whispered.

No response. His chest inflated and contracted with each electronic whir of the machine. His eyelids flickered as though he was dreaming. His hand was slack and cold in mine. A nurse in purple scrubs was fiddling with a hanging bag—an IV, I would later understand.

Finn was the only yardstick I had ever had to measure myself against. Now, at seventeen, he was taller and stronger than I would ever be.

But the hospital bed dwarfed him. He was as white as the blanket tucked around him.

“Finn.” I squeezed his hand in both of mine. “Finn.”

When I glanced up again, the nurse was gone. Amber stood over me, and her face held such compassion that I had to look away.

“What happened?” I asked.

I must have spoken in Swedish because she did not reply. She leaned over the bed and smoothed the wrinkles in the blanket.

I no longer believed I was caught in a nightmare. This was the waking world. This was the fate the Norns had woven.

“He lost a lot of blood at the scene,” Amber said. “There was a transfusion. A couple, I believe.”

That word, at least, I knew.

“What did Pappa do to him?”

“You’re speaking in Swedish, hon,” she said.

I brushed a hand over my eyes.

“We found them in the basement,” Amber said. “Right after. Your brother almost didn’t make it. The EMTs worked a miracle, honestly, on the way to the hospital.”

“What did Pappa do to him?” I repeated, trying again.

Amber spread her hands helplessly. “I don’t speak Swedish, Liv.”

I cleared my throat and tried one more time.

“What did Pappa do to him?”

I could tell by the shift in her expression that I had finally gotten through. She took a step back and inhaled deeply.

“He cut out your brother’s tongue,” she said.

I recognized all those English words, but they did not make sense together.

“Did you hear me?” Amber asked, apparently worried by my lack of reaction.

“Ja.”

“The surgeons say he showed amazing resilience. He’s a fighter, your brother.”

“Vikingabarn,” I said, laying a palm on Finn’s clammy brow.

19

To continue my story, I must now split my father into two different people. That was how I learned to think of him in the days and weeks that followed.

First there was Pappa, my sun and moon. You know what he meant to me.

And then there was Ulf Thorvaldsson. A wolf-warrior, he called himself, but in truth he was a hit man, a serial killer for hire. Murder was his profession and his vocation. Find a job where you can do what you love, people say, and you will never have to work a day in your life.

I met Ulf Thorvaldsson for the first time on the day of the raid on my childhood home.

I can’t be sure exactly when the transformation happened. It was Pappa who left the house that morning to tend the bees. I wish I had said something to him, or he to me, before he shut the door behind himself and disappeared from the world.

When did Ulf Thorvaldsson take his place? Looking back, I must assume it happened when our gate was smashed into shards. I was in the house watching TV and scarcely registered the faraway crash, but Pappa was outdoors, and noises carried far on the prairie wind. Locks twisting apart, hinges giving way, chains shattering.

How long had he prepared for that moment?

Ulf Thorvaldsson was the monster who returned to the house. It was Ulf who threw me against the wall and fractured my skull. It was Ulf who dragged my brother into the basement with a knife in his hand.

That was what he chose to do with his last moments as a free man. As federal agents swarmed our house, armed to the teeth, hoping to capture him, ready to kill him, Ulf did not flee or try to negotiate. As I lay concussed in a corner, trying in vain to stand up—my father gone, Finn gone, only empty air where they had stood—Ulf was already in motion with his blade at the ready.

Can you imagine the mindset of a man like that? I spent less than five minutes in the company of Ulf Thorvaldsson, and the memory of it still makes my skin crawl. They found him standing over Finn’s unconscious body, actually standing in the pool of blood, the tips of his boots soaked in it. He was playing with his knife, I was later told. Twirling it like a child with a beloved toy. The agents told him to drop the weapon, to put his hands up, but Ulf only grinned at them. His lunge was so fast and sudden that the nearest officer was barely able to get a shot off. The knife was inches away from the man’s throat by the time he pulled the trigger.

—

“Did they kill my father?” I asked.

Amber shifted her weight uneasily. Finn lay between us, eyes flickering beneath veiny lids. Occasionally his fingers danced against my palm. The machine whirred and puffed, the robotic percussion of my brother’s breathing.

“The agents had no choice,” Amber said. “They had to open fire.”

I had grown accustomed to this tendency of hers—not quite answering the question, offering related but tangential information.

“Did he die?” I asked, stressing each individual word.

“He’s in critical condition. It’s touch and go.” She fidgeted with the hem of her shirt. “We’ll just have to wait and see if he stabilizes. The surgeons did the best they could.”

The hospital loudspeaker crackled into life; a doctor was being paged to some faraway room. I glanced at my brother, but he did not react to the sound.

“Was the weapon in Ulf’s hand?” I asked.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Was my father holding the knife when they shot him?”

Amber stared. “Yes, he was.”

“Good. I hope he dies.”

20

In the hospital, time did not move like a wheel. It hardly seemed to move at all. Fluid dripped from Finn’s IV, the machines beeped and puffed, his chest rose and fell, and it was never really dark or light; the buzzing fluorescents brightened and dimmed but did not shut off completely. I endured interminable interviews with law enforcement officers, social workers, and other unspecified adults—usually men, spindly and brown-haired, as alike as siblings. I was a minor, whatever that meant. Someone, somewhere, was my advocate—another unfamiliar word. Of all the strangers I met during that harrowing time, only Amber fixed herself in my mind. I showered in a bleach-scented stall. I slept on a rickety cot in the corner of my brother’s room. Visiting hours did not apply to me.

One day Finn no longer needed a machine to breathe for him. The nurses told me I should be happy about this development, even though a plastic mask still obscured his face to provide him with oxygen. The electronic grind of the life-support mechanism was replaced by the soft, phlegmy gasping of his own lungs. I kept watch over the rise and fall of his chest, making sure the rhythm never faltered.

Ulf was somewhere in the hospital too. I was not permitted to see him, and I did not want to. He remained in critical condition. I still hoped he would die.

Ragnarök was always on my mind.

Pappa’s favorite story to read aloud to Finn and me had been Völuspá, an epic poem about the rise and fall of the gods. The tale began with the golden age of Odin and his kin and ended with the nine realms crumbling into fire and blood.

Völuspá was told by a dead witch. The Allfather wanted to know his future, but none of the gods had the gift of foresight. So Odin summoned the witch and forced her to prophesy for him. It was she who looked into the future and saw the apocalypse that awaited us all.

First, she said, there would come an influx of storms. Winter would descend, the Fimbulwinter, final winter, and spring would never return. Crops would fail and the fish and game of Midgard would perish. Birds would drop from the sky and shatter like hailstones on the ground.

Pappa used to read Völuspá aloud to Finn and me at least once a month. Somehow his fierce enjoyment made it all the worse.

In the deepest frost of the Fimbulwinter, the sun would shine black. Poison would choke the rivers and lakes, and stars would cascade from the sky. Yggdrasil would tremble, and those of the nine realms that had been held securely in its branches for so long would be shaken loose and plummet away, while the rest of them, which had until now been nestled safely among its roots, would be pulverized as the trunk shuddered. The World Tree’s quaking would shatter every shackle and chain and prison door, freeing monsters and spectral hounds.

Loki would lead the charge against the gods. The mask of the rascally imp would fall away, revealing the remorseless brute that had always lain just beneath the surface. He would show no mercy to the gods who had so often granted mercy to him. His children would rally at his side. Fenrir would swallow the sun and moon. Hel would captain the army of the dishonorable dead, all of them raging after their centuries of gray, pitiless incarceration. The wicked creatures that stalked the darkness would slither out of hiding.

War would consume the nine realms. For a time, the gods would hold their own. The honorable dead—the warriors of Valhalla—would follow Odin to the front lines. Freya would wield the strange magic she alone had mastered. Njord, god of the sea, would raise waves the size of mountains and fling them onto the shores to wash away entire battalions.

But no one could match the wild cruelty of Loki and his children. The trickster, Hel, Fenrir, and the World Serpent—they would cut through Odin’s forces like a knife through blood pudding.

Völuspá was not a warning or a threat: it was inescapable fate, woven by the Norns and told by a dead witch with the gift—the curse?—of foresight.

Odin would perish in Fenrir’s jaws, bitten in two. Loki and Heimdall would fight to the death, evenly matched; neither would survive their duel. Thor would slay the World Serpent, but the god of storms would walk only nine steps from the fallen body of his foe before falling too, struck down by the snake’s venom. The sun would be quenched, Asgard awash with gore, Midgard shattered, the sky burned to ashes.

Pappa’s voice vibrated with joy every time he read Völuspá: the glorious, savage, inevitable end of all things.

21

I learned who my father was at the same time as the rest of America. “The Viking Assassin,” they called him, and he was the headline of every news story. The media couldn’t get enough of him. For everyone else in the viewing audience, the unfolding saga was probably a titillating experience, the kind of true-crime exposé that makes you shiver, then keep watching.

For me—only for me—it was a private Ragnarök. My father was lost to me, my brother a living ghost, the nine realms of my childhood reduced to embers and ashes.

The reporters on TV informed me—and everyone else—that Ulf Thorvaldsson had buried the bodies of his victims on his own land. Nine corpses discovered so far. Several of them had moldered into skeletons, and the only hope for their identification would be dental records. Other cadavers were fresher, offering scraps of tissue and marrow that could be scanned for DNA. Two of Ulf’s victims had been buried for just a few months. The condition of these more recent bodies testified in no uncertain terms that torture had been a central part of his methodology.

I won’t go into detail. I wish I didn’t know the details myself. I will only say that his victims died slowly, by increments, over a matter of days. And—and—there was a purpose for the lye—a caustic mixture capable of melting flesh—that Finn had used to clean the blood from our living room floor so many years ago.

Thus far, all Ulf’s victims appeared to be male. The media made much of this discovery. I watched interviews with psychiatrists who explained that serial killers lived by private moral codes that seemed perfectly logical to them but insane to anyone else. Maybe Ulf’s personal ethical rubric allowed him to murder only other men. But what about his work as a hit man? He did not kill for pleasure—or, rather, he killed for both pleasure and business. Had his employers known he’d accept exclusively male targets? No one could be certain. The Viking Assassin might not survive his injuries. He could not be interviewed by the media or law enforcement.

One day—one particularly awful afternoon—I was sitting at Finn’s bedside when the theme music for the news blared. I flinched, my response Pavlovian, like the ones Finn had taught me about. That cheery tune now zapped me like a live wire. On the screen, a reporter in a salmon-colored blazer appeared, standing in front of a wealth of summer prairie. I felt a pang of longing for my own flaxen grassland, which rippled and whispered like the sea.

I did not pay attention at first to what the reporter was saying. The camera left her face, scanning the landscape behind her. Fat dark trees. Wildflowers tossing in the wind. Arrow-tipped pines. A crow in flight.

And then the camera zoomed in. Nine brown boxes stood in a row on the hilltop, gleaming in the sunlight.

Every prairie in the Midwest looked more or less alike, but those hives were unique. The first box was so weather-worn that its cedar had dimmed to gray. The fifth listed slightly to the side. The seventh was the newest; the original hive had fallen during a storm and Pappa had built a replacement only a few months ago. It still bore the penny-bright sheen of fresh wood.

I held back a scream. These reporters were as clever as Loki and just as cruel. How had this evil witch discovered our secret sanctuary? How dare these heathens claim any part of Viking land, even its image?

The reporter was standing in the empty space where our gate had once been. The enemy horde had broken it to pieces during the raid, leaving our house undefended. Looking closer, however, I realized that the gap was not entirely empty. The gate had been replaced by a fluttering zigzag of yellow crime-scene tape. The intruders apparently did not dare to breach this flimsy barrier, thank the gods.

But they had a telephoto lens, and the camera moved ruthlessly across the pond and Finn’s favorite boulder, shaped like a sleeping troll. Rage roiled in my belly. One blow from a battle-axe, one thrust from a sword, would right the scales of justice.

The camera centered on our house, but here the telephoto lens evidently reached the limit of its capacities. The shadowed structure was too far away to come into focus, and the image dissolved into pixels. I felt a small surge of triumph. Some part of Pappa—of me—remained beyond their grasp.

At last, the camera cut away. I realized I was grinding my teeth and clutching Finn’s hand hard enough that it would have caused him pain if he could feel it. The screen now showed a male newscaster in a studio. In a nasal, reedy voice, he explained that the following photograph was not suitable for children or sensitive viewers.

I was neither.

An unfamiliar room appeared on the screen. The image was grainy and everything was red-brown. The walls were patterned with uneven blotches of every shade from auburn to cinnamon to umber. There was a rust-colored chair with leather straps on the arms. Dimly, in the background, I made out the shape of what looked like a sink, with a thick, ropy cord spilling from it like a twining snake.

Then the camera cut away, and the reporter informed me that I had finally glimpsed my father’s personal Asgard, his torture chamber, the basement of my own house.

22

Even now, I don’t know when Ulf began killing. Certain parts of my story will remain incomplete forever; your guess is as good as mine. Nothing about Ulf’s childhood in Uppsala could ever be verified. Working off estimations and guesswork, the authorities said he probably came to America in his early twenties. His employers may have facilitated his transition. During the raid on our home, the law enforcement officers found a dozen driver’s licenses with the same unsmiling photograph but completely different information—name, address, state, all of it. Ulf possessed a similarly varied collection of license plates. This made sense, I suppose, as he did most of his killing on the road and regularly drove around with a body in the trunk.

I could only guess at why he chose Iowa as his permanent home. When and where he encountered my mother was also a mystery. In fact, the only proof that Mamma ever existed was Finn and me. Ulf kept nothing of hers after she died, no photos, no Social Security card, not even an old letter that might have borne her signature.

Neither Finn nor I had a birth certificate or a Social Security number. Legally we did not exist until the raid on our home.

Ulf’s precautions were manifold: overseas bank accounts, no presence online, and some kind of anonymizing electronic system for our landline. (I never really understood that part.) He organized his entire life around his bloodthirsty compulsions. Our trips to town were the only risk he took—a calculated risk. As a seven-foot behemoth accompanied by two feral children, he knew he couldn’t help but stand out among the locals. There was always a chance that some townsperson might get suspicious. They might wonder what was happening beyond Pappa’s locked gate. They might call the police just to be sure that everything was on the up-and-up.

So, Ulf had collected roadkill and the dead animals that perished in the bear traps around our property. For years he had been preparing for the possibility of cadaver dogs: specialized sniffers trained to locate decomposing flesh. However, they could not distinguish between different varieties of decomposing flesh. They would have led their masters to the graves of animals strewn all across our land. Why would anyone ever think to dig beneath a decaying raccoon or deer carcass to see if there happened to be a human cadaver beneath it?

Ulf left no traces, made no mistakes, and probably would have gone on killing forever if Finn had not turned him in.

Give me a moment.

Twenty years have elapsed since those days in the hospital. I am not that child anymore, seated at my brother’s bedside in a fugue of panic and grief.

But twenty years is not enough distance. No amount of time would ever be enough.

—

On a gray, gloomy afternoon, Amber and I were in our usual arrangement: me holding Finn’s hand, her poking at her BlackBerry. Finn lay inert, thinner and paler than ever. He seemed to be melting away like candle wax.

I was thinking about Ulf Thorvaldsson’s last name—our name. Pappa had loved to explain its illustrious significance. Many Scandinavian names ended in “sson,” meaning, as you may have guessed, “children of.” Karlsson: children of Karl. Johansson: children of Johan. Our surname, however, went above and beyond these pedestrian patronymics. Thorvaldsson: children of Thor, the valdr. Ruler.

“Did Finn tell you what he was doing?” Amber asked.

I glanced up, startled. Neither of us had spoken in over an hour. I gathered my wits but failed to make sense of her question.

“What do you mean?”

“Did you know about the calls?” Amber leaned forward in her chair. “I’ve been meaning to ask. I heard the recordings, but it was only ever his voice, not yours.”

“What recordings? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She nodded. “That’s what I thought. God, what an amazing boy.”

It felt strange to be discussing Finn when he was right there between us. A gasp, and his chest rose. A sputter, and his chest fell.

“Everybody’s been talking about it,” Amber said. “He called the local cops first, but they blew him off. I guess I can’t blame them? They’re stationed in Dubuque and cover all the little rural towns around there. They get a lot of prank calls, teenagers reporting nonsense crimes, you know, just to get a reaction. And here was this kid with this thick accent telling them about a murder happening in his house. More than one. A bunch of murders.”

I glanced at my brother’s ashen face. “Finn called the police?”

I had not yet put the pieces together. Can you blame me? Too much had happened, all of it terrible, and I hadn’t had a moment’s peace in which to wonder how the FBI had located Pappa’s sanctum in the first place. I had not considered the meaning behind Ulf’s accusation: oath-breaker.

“Finn called the local cops a few times,” Amber said. “They wouldn’t take him seriously. Started hanging up whenever they heard his voice.”

I tried to picture my brother talking on the telephone. Had he waited until our house was empty before lifting the receiver and pushing the buttons like people did on TV? No, he wouldn’t have dared to touch Pappa’s phone.

“Your brother is a hero,” Amber said.

“Vígdrengr,” I murmured. Brave warrior.

“He never gave up. He found the number for the FBI. Called and called. At first, he got the same kind of reaction there too. People hanging up on him. People telling him it was a federal offense to prank-call the FBI. But finally, finally, he got the right person on the line.”

With a jolt, I remembered the pay phone at the back of the library. Finn and I had always separated as we roamed the stacks. I’d never paid attention to how long he was away from me; I was too busy seeking out undiscovered adventure series. There would have been plenty of time for Finn to make a call, load his arms with books, and return to me. Now that I thought about it, his selections had sometimes seemed rather random.

Finn kept secrets for only one reason: to protect me.

Ulf Thorvaldsson was nothing if not quick-witted. On the day of the raid, he understood instantly what must have happened. I remembered the door-slamming explosion of his entry into the house. Which of you? I remembered the clinical way he had assessed me. As the clamor of approaching vehicles grew louder, he had scanned me from head to toe, eyes flinty. I remembered the way he had pivoted to Finn, appraising him in turn. I remembered how Ulf’s expression had changed as he took in Finn’s shaking legs, his pallor, his obvious guilt.

That was how my brother had protected me. He ensured that when the fateful moment came, my innocence would be written all over my face.

Now, in the hospital room, a grunt roused me from my musings. Finn’s hand clenched mine, his overlong fingernails digging into my palm.

“Amber,” I screamed.

She was out of her seat in one bound.

Finn’s eyes fluttered open. I watched his pupils constrict, trying to focus. He lifted his other hand—weak, uncertain—and scrabbled at the mask covering his mouth and nose. A groan escaped him, followed by a flinch of what looked like excruciating pain.

“I’m here,” I said in Swedish. “I’m right here. You’re okay.”

Finn’s gaze bounced around the room. He couldn’t seem to find me. I crushed his hand between both of mine, repeating his name as tears leaked from the corners of his eyes. His free hand pawed again at the mask, but his movements were clumsy, unfocused, as though he’d forgotten how to use his fingers. Belatedly, I remembered the remote control attached to his bed. I snatched it up and slammed my thumb on the call button.

Finn’s gaze finally locked on mine. There was the familiar cobalt of his eyes—panicked, wide, and brimming. I leaned over him, cupping his face in my palms. I thought he was trying to say my name, but he winced in agony, crying harder, each sob leading to more pain.

“Don’t try to talk,” I said in Swedish. “Your tongue—Pappa—”

And then a thousand nurses, or so it seemed at the time, swarmed into the room like bees on the wing.

23

After Finn and I left the hospital, there is a period of gray emptiness in my memory. I was undergoing a kind of second birth—yanked from sanctuary, plunged into a perpetual sensory assault, always aching for what I’d lost.

For sixteen months, Finn and I apparently stayed with foster parents. I don’t remember them at all beyond a vague impression of American cooking, heavy and lacking flavor. Since that time, I have seen photographs of them: the man weak-chinned, the woman rotund, both of them sporting large gold crosses around their necks. They brought Finn to his rehab appointments, fed us, made sure we bathed, and generally kept our bodies in working order. Our minds, of course, were beyond their reach.

Only one memory remains from those lost months. In autumn, we went back to our childhood home to retrieve our things.

I remember Finn hunched beside me in the back seat of the car. He was chalk pale and hollow-eyed, and his hands trembled all the time now, from either fatigue or residual fear. He had lost so much weight in the hospital that his chest seemed concave. He hadn’t been able to eat solid food for weeks. Every so often his hand encircled his Adam’s apple; he retains that habitual, unconscious gesture to this day.

Past the fluttering remnants of the crime-scene tape. Up the dirt drive. It was chilly, the sky blank with clouds. In the past, the expanse of my family’s land had filled me with pride, but now the prairie had an unloved look, overrun with invasive nettles and clots of wild rose. Our house appeared the same as ever from a distance, but as we got closer I saw that a sheet of plastic had been hung to fill the gap where the door had been.

I climbed out of the car. Finn looked as shell-shocked as I felt. There were other people with us, a pair of grown-ups, though I don’t remember any details about them.

“Är du redo?” I asked. Are you ready?

Finn nodded. My heart slammed against my ribs as I crossed the threshold. The basement door was closed, thank the gods. Finn and I dragged our brand-new suitcases up the stairs and packed quickly. There was not much to take. All our books belonged to the library. Our clothes had only ever been the bare necessities.

When the essentials were packed, Finn and I thumped our suitcases down the stairs again and stared helplessly around the living room. No one had explicitly said so, but we knew that we would never return to this place.

Everything was infused with the essence of its opposite. The copper kettle reminded me of Pappa’s home-brewed dandelion tea, which I would never taste again. The sight of it evoked equal parts solace and distress. Finn grabbed a little stone wolf from the end table, a carved figurine from Pappa’s childhood in Sweden. I packed the six-inch knife Pappa had once given me for protection from Americans. There were two copies of The Poetic Edda on the bookshelf; Finn and I each took one. Occasionally he would turn to me, lips parted, about to speak. Then he would remember and his head would droop.

“What is it?” I would ask. “Can you write it down?”

He always shook his head. He kept a pen and notepad in his pocket now, but apparently some things needed to be said out loud.

The couch radiated nostalgia. Finn and I had watched Bröderna Lejonhjärta there countless times. The cassette sat in its usual place on the TV console, ready to be inserted into the VCR. Neither of us touched it. Standing in the living room with my brother at my side, I knew I would never watch that movie again. I never have.

Finn began to weep in a kind of choking rattle. I stared at him and saw that he, like me, was horrified by the bizarre noises emerging from his throat.

I ushered him outside, where the cool autumn wind dried his tears. Gradually he got control of himself. A crow soared overhead, streaking the prairie with its shadow. My brother pointed to Pappa’s beehives. The sight of them made me sway where I stood. It seemed impossible that our father would not appear now, striding through the back door of the house and smiling in the particular way he reserved for his bees. He visited the nine boxes at least twice a week throughout the summer months. “Mina bin,” he would say, fingering his beard. My bees.

Still, I assumed that the hives had done all right without him. Bees were wild creatures, fully capable of thriving on their own. Pappa was their landlord rather than their master. They paid their rent in honey and he kept their homes in good order: clean of pests and safe from predators. Each time a hive swarmed, the new colony would travel into the green and flourish there without human aid.

I linked my arm through Finn’s as we walked down the hill. I don’t know what we were expecting: maybe to say a kind of farewell, maybe to just watch the bees bustling away as they had always done, unaffected by the strangeness and strife of the human world. It would have been a comfort to see that Pappa’s hives had survived his loss, just as Finn and I—surely, one day, given enough time—would do.

At my side, Finn froze, and I saw his face darken. There were dead bees in the grass, their little bodies spilled around the entrance of the closest hive. A heap of glittering brown shapes, almost unrecognizable in their stillness.

I knelt for a closer examination. Perhaps the bees had merely been taken by a chill. Their species was capable of sinking into temporary hibernation during a cold snap. I had often come upon what appeared to be a dead bee lying uninjured but motionless in the grass. If I cupped the creature in my hands, warming it with my skin, it would miraculously revive and fly away.

But no—these bees were not sleeping. Their little legs were folded inward, abdomens hunched in the unmistakable insectile curlicue of death. Dozens of corpses littered the ground. Everywhere I looked, there seemed to be more of them.

“What happened?” I gasped.

Finn pried off the roof of the nearest hive with his bare hands and peered inside. A guttural cry escaped him.

The honeycombs hung in rows, as silent as tombs, and corpses carpeted the floor of the wooden box. Their bodies were intact, no sign of wound or infection. I spotted the amber shine of the queen’s unstriped abdomen curled among her subjects, her long body stilled. The larvae, unfed and untended, had perished where they lay in the brood comb. The nursery attendants had tucked them in and left them to die.

“Jävlar,” I whispered. Fuck.

The other hives were the same. Finn and I yanked off each roof and found corpses clinging to the wax combs with their lifeless legs held in place by the coating of honey. The air was eerily quiet, lacking the hum of wingbeats that had always been there, as fundamental as sunlight. Tiny bodies lay strewn through the grass as though they had died in mid-flight and plummeted to earth.

Not one of them was marked by injury or disease. Every single bee in Pappa’s nine hives had perished for no apparent reason.

Had they died of grief ?

Would I die of grief ?

Footsteps jarred me from my reverie. I turned to see Finn dashing toward the car, wiping his eyes as he ran.

24

Ulf Thorvaldsson survived. I was saddened but not surprised when Amber told me. As much as I wanted him to die—as much as he surely wanted it too—a wolf-warrior could not be felled by something as dainty as a bullet.

The trial was brief. No reasonable doubt, nothing reasonable at all. Life sentence stacked on top of life sentence in a maximum-security prison. He remained alive only because the great state of Iowa did not countenance the death penalty. Perhaps that was why Ulf had taken up residence there in the first place.

After his incarceration, the Viking Assassin was once again front-page news. There was a new photograph now: his mug shot, glacial eyes, sand-colored beard, features carved with a blunt chisel. Reporters rehashed the details of his penchant for torture, his exclusively male victims, and the graveyard he had made of his own land. Apparently Ulf did not speak at all during the trial. Despite his silence, people couldn’t get enough of him, his photo on every TV screen and newspaper, his name in every mouth, as famous and feared as Odin himself.

I began to worry that the spotlight would fall on Finn and me. So much had already been illuminated: our prairie, the blurred exterior of our house, and, of course, Ulf’s red torture chamber. Finn and I stood on the periphery of that white-hot glow—for now.

Amber Lopez assured us that reporters were not allowed on Pappa’s land, much less inside our former home; it was a crime scene and always would be. They could stand outside the gate all they wanted, but our bedroom would never be filmed. They would never know about the child-sized wooden weapons gathering dust in the shed. They would never open our bedroom drawers or flip through my sketchbooks. They would never see the drawing of Yggdrasil that Pappa and I had made.

Only one photograph had been leaked. The blood-spattered basement had by then been featured by every news organization on the planet. Amber explained that it was a crime-scene photo rather than a media still. The FBI intern who had dared to send the image to a friend—who had then sold it to a major news outlet for a hefty sum—had been tracked down and fired. He was even facing criminal charges. No other images would be leaked; the FBI took these matters seriously.

Still, I fretted. A few people in our hometown were interviewed. They described their brief interactions with the Viking Assassin, the small moments that stayed with them: an elbow bump at the grocery store or a shock of eye contact on the street.

Absolutely no one was surprised to learn that he was a serial killer. Ted Bundy’s neighbors had described him as charming, John Wayne Gacy was a pillar of his community, but Ulf Thorvaldsson had been a towering menace who moved through the little town like a great white shark through a school of minnows.

My fears were realized when a tabloid ran a shocking exposé. The front-page article claimed that the Viking Assassin had not lived alone. He had once been married, according to the headline. There were rumors of a child, or maybe two children.

The town librarian, whom I had always liked, had been bought off by the tabloid. In an exclusive interview, she revealed that Ulf’s son and daughter had come in regularly to check out books. She mentioned our thick accents, ill-fitting clothes, and frequent bruises. She had thought more than once about calling CPS, she said.

An oath-breaker. If anyone deserved to have their tongue cut out, it was that faithless traitor.

The librarian did not, however, know our names. Pappa was the one with a library card, which Finn and I both used. And her treasonous account was refuted by other, better people. The clerk at the grocery store insisted that Ulf always came in alone. Of course she had seen us lurking behind our father’s bulk, but she was no oath-breaker. She proved herself a loyal friend.

Other townsfolk had apparently never noticed Finn and me at all; Ulf’s presence overshadowed us completely. No, they told the reporters, that brute was nobody’s father. The FBI would not confirm the existence of minors in the home. The reputable news media could not substantiate anything. Only that one tabloid ever mentioned us, and even its account quickly grew confused: a wife, a son, two sons? As the spotlight on Ulf Thorvaldsson grew brighter, Finn and I slipped deeper into shadow, into safety.

Eventually we changed our last name. Many children of infamous villains have done this. There are no little Hitlers or Dahmers to be found these days—and no Thorvaldssons either.

By then, Amber had become our own personal seeress. She was not omniscient, of course, like the dead witch who had prophesied for Odin, but she knew enough. She explained that when Finn and I came of age, we would no longer be shielded by our minor status. An intrepid reporter could find us then.

We chose our new name with care. Finn wrote his ideas on a notepad. I crossed out the ones I didn’t like, circled the ones I did, and added a few of my own. We wanted a surname that did not resemble our previous one in any way—but we agreed that it needed to be Swedish, since that was our ancestry, for better or for worse. And we were thinking always of our father, bewildered by him, haunted by him.

And so we became Finn and Liv Ulfsson: children of the wolf.

What Is Coming into Being

25

I am thirty-four years old now. It is time for you to learn a few things about me—not the child but the storyteller.

So far, I have told you only about the events of the past, woven for me by Urth, the Norn who looks backward through time. A father split into halves, Finn mutilated, little Liv traumatized—those things happened two decades ago. Another Norn has come to pick up the thread: Verthandi, weaver of the now.

My story resumes seven months ago.

Finn and I still lived together. Normal siblings separate when they grow up; but Finn and I were not normal, and we had never spent more than a single day apart from each other.

We shared a house out in the rural countryside of Michigan. The place was small, cozy, just the right size for two people—and it did not resemble our childhood home in any way. The downstairs area was open-plan: the den flowed into the kitchen with no interstitial doors to remind us of Pappa bobbing his head to pass from room to room. We had gleaming new appliances, track lighting, and a wafer-thin TV.

There was no basement.

To be clear, Finn and I no longer shared a bedroom. We were not so broken as that. My room faced west for sunsets; Finn’s faced east for sunrises. I had decorated my living space with an antique dresser and a wrought-iron headboard that scrolled into lattices. My walls were hung with landscape paintings I had purchased at thrift stores—amateurish but pleasant. It was like something from a dollhouse, my bedroom. It did not reflect the truth of me, and that was what I wanted.

Finn’s room was a utilitarian box with moss-green walls and no art, not even an unframed poster. The overhead light was a bare bulb. It was the bedroom of someone who spent his life outdoors and came inside only to sleep.

Finn remained voiceless. There is no cure for an absent tongue.

Beyond our house lay nearly one hundred acres of untamed nature. Our land was different from Pappa’s in size, shape, and specifics—creek instead of pond, oaks instead of pines, no rocky valleys, no graves—but the similarities could not be denied. Spring brought the same pungent petrichor. In summer, the same species of wildflowers bloomed among the tall grasses in a flaxen prairie. Autumn winds howled at the same mournful pitch. Winter gripped the world in the same unrelenting cold.

People are drawn to the familiar. We love what we know. Finn and I replicated the best aspects of our childhood and left the rest buried back home. We traded Iowa for Michigan. We chose a small town, though we upgraded from a pinprick on the map to a bucolic municipality called Haven. A bumpy gravel driveway led from our house to the gate—no lock, no chains, just a loop of wire to keep it shut in strong wind. Our acreage was smaller than Pappa’s had been. We wanted space, not isolation. We were friendly with our neighbors, but we did not often leave our land.

This is the legacy of a childhood like ours. We grew up as foreigners in our own country, born in a place and time that did not exist anymore. The most fundamental aspects of our upbringing were incompatible with true civilization. We did not pray to their god. We did not recognize their pop culture references. Their cuisine was upsetting. Their notion of right and wrong was quaint, even silly. They had no knowledge of weapons or combat. They smiled constantly and made wanton eye contact. They were as soft as little children.

So Finn and I inhabited a halfway existence. We were no longer Vikingabarn and not fully American. Like the brothers Lionheart, we were natives of an imaginary land. On the rare occasions when an ambulance siren rang out in Haven, Finn and I flinched in unison. I still had nightmares about Ragnarök and would wake in a cold sweat in my pleasant dollhouse bedroom. Finn was a nonviolent man, a gentle soul, but I saw in the way he moved that his childhood training had never left him. Had I handed him a sword, he could have cut down an enemy in seconds. There are some things you can never outgrow.

I spoke mostly English now, but there was still Swedish deep inside, and I often had the disconcerting experience of reaching for a word and realizing I couldn’t find it in either language; it had slipped into the space between. I went into town for groceries, chatted pleasantly with the other shoppers, then came home jittery from the sustained effort of miming normality. I moved among them but was not one of them.

Do you see? The home that Finn and I had built for ourselves, the little house we shared in rural Michigan, was both a refuge from American society and a safer, saner incarnation of our long-lost Viking realm. It was a temple to our strangeness. No one could understand us but us. We were comrades in arms, the sole survivors of the private war that had been our childhood. A support group of two. A dyad of secret keepers.

That was the way of things seven months ago.

—

I’m sure you’re wondering about Pappa. He was dead.

At least, that’s how I thought of him. He died the day of the raid on our home. He went out to tend the bees and I never saw him again.

Ulf Thorvaldsson, on the other hand, was caged in the Coldwater Correctional Facility in Tin Hill, Iowa. Solitary confinement. Meals on a tray pushed through a slot. He spent twenty-three hours a day in an eight-by-twelve-foot box. One hour a day, five days a week, he was allowed access to a solitary exercise cell. He had been incarcerated for nineteen years.

There was comfort in these numbers, unequivocal and certain. I whispered them to myself like prayers.

Nobody in Haven knew the truth about Finn and me. At the time, I had never told my story to anyone.

I hope by now you understand the power of my gift to you. The measure of my trust in you. There is no bond more intimate than the one between storyteller and listener. We are connected now, you and me. Can you feel it?

26

There came a balmy morning in March, cotton-candy clouds, a breeze as soft as breath. The weather was so fine that it almost seemed like an overly perfect staging of a beautiful spring day.

I woke to the smell of coffee and padded downstairs barefoot. Finn was seated at the kitchen table, tapping away on his laptop. Hati, our ancient wolfhound, lay on the floor in her usual position, resting her anvil of a head on my brother’s foot. Her enormous limbs made an obstacle course of the kitchen tiles.

A mug of coffee, its surface still swirling with a pale whorl of recently spooned cream, sat steaming at my usual place. A lifetime together had solidified all these little routines. Finn knew how I took my coffee. I knew that he never ate breakfast. He knew that my guilty pleasure was procedural crime dramas. I knew that he required daily hikes in the forest to maintain his emotional equilibrium. He knew that I suffered from nightmares and often woke in a panic, then wandered the house in the witching hour, unwilling to face the danger of returning to dreams. I knew that he went to bed at sunset and woke at dawn. The daily minutiae of our shared existence was so firmly established that we could go without direct interaction for hours, even days, moving companionably around each other without eye contact, him handing me a napkin before I asked for it, me fixing the leaky sink in the bathroom before he indicated that the drip was bothering him, these patterns worn as indelibly as grooves in an old dirt road.

I have not told you yet about our work. To begin with, you should know that we did not need to work at all. There was money, as it turned out. The government had seized the ill-gotten gains Pappa kept in offshore accounts, but that was only a fraction of his income. Vikings buried their gold, and so did my father. The bulk of his wealth—his substantial wealth—had been transferred into gold bars and coins. He had known better than to store them in safe-deposit boxes, which could be traced. Instead, he interred his treasure deep in the soil of small secondary properties bought for this specific purpose. He had purchased each lot in cash, the money changing hands without the seller ever setting eyes on their rather extraordinary buyer. Pappa left each acreage empty and overgrown—just like uncountable similar plots across Iowa. The government did not know about the customs of Vikings, and even if they had, Pappa had randomized his landholdings too deftly for discovery.

Only Finn knew. Long before his arrest, Pappa had shared the details with him in case of an emergency. He trusted Finn with things like that, never anticipating that his son might be an oath-breaker.

But back to my story. To my surprise—and presumably yours too—Finn and I became beekeepers. It started with one hive, a hobby, but Finn fell in love and there was nothing I could do to stop him. Now we had ninety hives. They filled the valley behind the house, standing in rows like city blocks lined with identical apartment buildings. Each tenement held a colony with tens of thousands of members.

In silence, with his customary kindness, Finn had taught me what Pappa never could: how to walk among the bees so gently that they accepted me. They even befriended me in their own way. They allowed me to pry open their wooden roofs to check the health of the colony. They let me gather their honey in autumn. In winter they hibernated under snowcapped lids. In summer their constant drone was a mighty thing. During the dog days of August, I often closed the windows that faced the hives, shutting myself off from a lovely breeze for the sake of a little peace.

So—it was a balmy morning in spring. Our wildflowers had not yet begun to bloom en masse; only the mayapple and bloodroot were open for business. The weather had been fluctuating for weeks, rainy afternoons interspersed with cold snaps. That day in March was the first real glimpse of the summer to come, and the bees responded accordingly.

Hati caught the sound before Finn and me. I was stirring more cream into my coffee when the old wolfhound hefted herself up from the kitchen floor and loped over to the window, ears perked. Finn closed his laptop and followed. Panting uneasily, Hati leaned against his leg, the canine version of an embrace. Long ago, she had been black all over, a twilight creature with trailing fur and a ragged silhouette. Now her coat was threaded with gray and she bore the white mask of old age. Technically she belonged to both Finn and me, but in truth she was my brother’s dog, heart and soul.

Then I heard it too—a rising, unlocalized thrum—and I joined Finn and Hati at the window. I had seen hundreds of swarms in my years as a beekeeper, but I’d never gotten used to the swiftness with which the colony ascended into madness. The sound was the aural equivalent of television static, fizzy and electric. Each bee picked a random route and flew. They moved so fast that they seemed to outpace the sunlight; their bright bands disappeared into blur, rendering them black as bullets. It looked like a gunfight in an old western, with lead slugs whizzing in every direction.

As a child I had imagined that a swarm was a celebration, but now I knew better. Bees were never frivolous. Everything in their little lives was work, even this.

Right now, there were two queens in one hive. Only during a swarm could such an extraordinary duality exist. One hive, one queen: that was the law of nature. The only exception—brief, difficult, and wild—was a swarm. When a colony outgrew its home, the population would split in two. Each half could not survive without a queen of its own, the source of all life, the one essential member of the collective.

To the human eye, the bees seemed stunned or drunk, yet there was order here. Everything depended on the safety of the new queen in this transitional moment. The raucous chaos of the bees was designed to conceal her flight from the hive. Even Finn couldn’t pick out her elongated body, amber-colored and oversized, in the pandemonium. There was no more perfect illustration of the hive mind. The bees were miming anarchy in a precise, coordinated dance.

The queen never traveled far—not at first. She would settle on a nearby object, and her subjects would follow her scent and coalesce around her. In the past I’d seen swarms drape the drainpipe of our house, turning the rusted iron to bronze. Sometimes they patched the roof of the shed or sleeved the branches of trees. Once they had pooled in the wheel well of our car. Another time, a queen had landed on the ground, and the swarm formed a bath mat of wriggling bodies right there in the grass.

Today the queen settled on the oak outside my bedroom window. I didn’t see her alight, of course, but I knew where she was because the swarm condensed around her branch, drawn inexorably by her unique pheromones. Tens of thousands of bees thickened into a vibrating clot with the queen’s precious personage hidden among them.

The whole thing was over in a matter of minutes. As the roar of wings diminished, I realized that Hati was whining. Her whole body was pressed against Finn’s leg, and he scratched her ears while bracing himself on the wall to offset her enormous weight.

“Vild,” I said. Wild.

Finn nodded his agreement.

27

Do you remember what I said at the beginning? I told you about the sequence of events that brought me here. I told you that seven months ago, I watched a swarm of bees darken the sky.

We have come full circle now.

Urth, the weaver of the past, has the easiest job among the Norns. Her work is curation rather than creation. With the clarity of hindsight, she can see cause and effect. She can pluck the important threads out of the muddle of details. Stories are made of retrospection. Stories are built on the ordering of things.

Verthandi, weaver of the present, has a harder task. The ephemeral heartbeat of the current moment belongs only to itself. Context comes after the fact. Which threads are important and which can be discarded? Story-making cannot happen in real time, but Verthandi never looks forward or back.

So here I am, in the middle.

Do you remember the rest of what I told you?

Six months ago: I fell in love.

Five months ago: the farmers’ market opened.

Four months ago: the river overflowed.

Three months ago: I celebrated my birthday.

Two months ago: I called an agent of the FBI.

And a dead body. You remember the dead body.

That was one month ago. Give or take.

Murder dilates time. A panicked breath extends into a shimmering hour of anguished revelation. Inhale—process the sight, mud and blood inextricably mingled, fog coiling between trees—and exhale. Slowly, slowing, pulling time like taffy. The tick of seconds on the clock no longer corresponds to the languid, lazy splash of rain ricocheting off the open eyes of the corpse. The shovel bites into the dirt. Blisters rise on skin. How many stab wounds? Too many to count—overlapping, now shallow, now deep, a chest cavity reduced to a soup bowl filled with gore.

No. This won’t do.

The murder was catalytic and irrevocable. Everything hinges on that bloody cadaver in the forest. But even now I can’t just skip ahead, as tempting as it may be. The middle of a story is difficult to organize, but it must be told nonetheless, however raw and unpatterned. I must bring you with me every step of the way.

I am no Norn, but I will do my best.

—

So—the swarm.

Once the colony had settled, Finn went outside to check on the bees while I watched from the safety of the window. Hati was there beside me, watching too, though she did not press her body against my leg for comfort; we didn’t have that sort of relationship.

Unlike Pappa, Finn and I always wore bee suits, white from top to bottom, with faceplates and sting-proof gloves. Sensible precautions. Sane behavior. Framed against the prairie, Finn was the photo negative of a shadow.

He carried a cedar box: transport for the swarm. The colony now hung from the branch of the oak like a tumor, round and eggy brown. The tree was solid, but the dangling growth seemed to phase in and out of focus. The bees gripped each other’s feet and hung from one another’s abdomens to form a drooping oval. Their constant motion, the shuffle of wings and slither of thoraxes, made the tumor’s surface shimmer. It looked like something from the fairy tales of my youth. A dragon egg on the verge of hatching. A baby troll dozing in a sticky hammock, left to nap by its parents and guarded by a protective spell.

Swarms always moved in two stages. The first was the calculated pandemonium of leaving the hive. The bees never traveled very far at this point, staying within sight of their original home. The queen would choose a way station and wait there, obscured by the protective huddle of her subjects. At this stage, the swarm was a vulnerable thing. Without shelter, the bees were susceptible to predators, accidents, and weather.

So the scouts would scour the landscape, searching high and low to locate an ideal site for the hive’s new residence. Maybe a sturdy branch, maybe a gap between boulders. Somewhere deep in the forest. Somewhere distant and lonely. Honestly, I don’t know how they choose.

Then again, I’m not entirely sure how Finn and I chose Haven. It just felt right.

Eventually the scouts would return to their queen. They would lead the swarm away, leaving innangarðr for útangarðr—civilization for the wild. Most swarms made their new homes so far away, so secret, so high in the trees or deep between the boulders, that Finn and I never discovered them. In this moment, as Finn walked gently across the lawn in his bee suit, the colony was ripe for the picking. Swarms are oddly docile things. Between the call of their deepest instincts and the overstimulation of unwanted freedom, the bees enter a state so dreamlike and bewildered that they seem to forget how to defend themselves—or why they would even do such a thing.

Finn placed his cedar box on the ground below the swarm. He stood on tiptoe to reach the branch and slid his palms down its length, interspersing his gloves between bees and bark. His movements were unhurried and deliberate, a kind of gestural lullaby. Sometimes Finn’s communion with the bees annoyed me. It was useful for our business, but it was a gift I would never possess. The bees and I shared a bond, yes, but I did not truly know them, not the way Finn did. Perhaps no other human ever had.

The swarm swallowed his hands to the wrist. Thousands of tiny feet, gossamer wings, incessant motion—what did it feel like through his gloves? Furry, prickling, feathery, warm? Finn stepped away from the tree and the golden ball came with him. It was attached to him now, hanging from his hands.

A shiver tracked down my spine. The notion of Viking magic still bubbled at the back of my brain. In his bee suit, my brother did not look entirely human—a faceless, colorless entity, part frost giant, part troll. How heavy was the ball of bees? It seemed weightless in his grasp, a mystical ovoid emitting a chaotic murmur. The exterior swirled like the surface of a witch’s scrying pool.

Finn knelt. With one swift thrust, he plunged the colony down into the cedar box. A liquid tide of bees surged back and forth between the wooden walls, but they did not take flight again. They oozed and pooled, filling up the corners. As long as they could smell their queen among them, the bees would settle, accepting the accommodations Finn had built for them. They always did.

28

Hati welcomed Finn back home by standing on her hind legs to wrap her paws around his neck. She was taller than he was, drooling onto the top of his head. Despite her stiff limbs, she always greeted him this way.

Their bond, like Finn’s connection to the bees, was primal. Dogs lived without speech, and so did my brother. In silence, he and Hati communicated so deftly and subtly that it almost seemed like telepathy. With a mere shift of posture, Finn might tell her that it was time for a walk, time for a tick check, time for dinner, time for bed. Hati answered him in kind, voicing comments and questions with the cock of an eyebrow or a tilt of her head. The two of them had whole conversations without me even noticing. Finn and I would be lunching on pickled herring or lounging on the couch watching TV, and then suddenly he and the wolfhound would rise at the same time, stretch in unison, and go to the back door. By the time I realized they’d made a plan, they were already outside striding off toward the woods for a long hike.

Our business was called Swedish Honey. The name wasn’t accurate, of course, since our bees were as American as my brother and me, but we knew our audience. The people of Haven treated Finn and me as a unit. “The Swedes”—that’s what they called us. Sometimes they even addressed us that way in lieu of our names: “Hi, Swedes!” We had never been to Europe, never even flown on a plane, but Finn and I had captured the imagination of Haven, and nothing I said could alter our mystique.

Perhaps it was only to be expected. My English still had a Swedish flavor, or so I’d been told. I couldn’t hear my own accent, but people often asked me to repeat things, especially when there was a J or W in the word. Sometimes they mimicked my pronunciation, grinning.

Part of my work for Swedish Honey involved returning calls and answering emails. Finn could have done the latter, but he was such a chronic procrastinator that eventually I had taken over. Weaponized incompetence—a useful English phrase.

Today there was an order for a starter hive from one Penny Westerman. In her email, she wrote that she wanted to dip her toe into the waters of beekeeping. This sort of request was common, especially in spring. Nothing notable. Another name on the roster.

Nine was a sacred number for the Vikings. Nine realms. Nine noble virtues. Heimdall, the guard of the rainbow bridge, was born to nine mothers. When Ragnarök comes, Thor will battle the World Serpent, but after his hard-won triumph, the god of storms will walk only nine steps before succumbing to Jörmungandr’s venom.

Finn and I had ninety hives, and we intended to keep it there. Most of them had come from the gathering of rogue swarms. A colony would split in two, and Finn and I would collect the runaway half of the population, settle them in a cedar box, and set them up in their own tenement next to the one they had left.

Nowadays, however, we gathered swarms only for the purpose of selling them. Ninety was enough to deal with. Many customers purchased our colonies in the spring: almond growers to pollinate their trees, farmers to increase their crop yield, and newbies who wanted starter hives.

I emailed Penny back and explained that Finn and I had just collected a colony. It would be best, I said, for her to take possession of the bees as soon as possible. They were currently swarm-addled and docile in their box, but soon they would begin to protest their confinement.

Her answer came almost at once. We agreed on price and scheduling. I would drop off the swarm at her place the following morning.

—

Finn went to bed early. The circadian rhythm was a command for him rather than a suggestion. Hati followed, shuffling and panting with the effort of climbing the stairs. She always slept in Finn’s bed, claiming most of the mattress with her bulk.

My brother would have had ten dogs if I let him. I didn’t want even one; I hated stepping in slopped water from her bowl and vacuuming her fur off the couch. Undaunted, Finn often showed me photos of adoptable dogs at the local shelter. Face crinkled with hope, he would tap the images on his laptop screen. I always said no. It was one of the few things we disagreed about. Hati was a compromise that, like most compromises, did not entirely please either of us.

The night was eerily still. I attempted to answer a few more emails but couldn’t focus. Not a breath of wind stirred the curtains as I logged on to the website for the Iowa Department of Corrections.

And there he was: Ulf Thorvaldsson, Coldwater Correctional Facility, Tin Hill, Iowa. Nothing reassured me like seeing his name in black and white, printed in an official, dispassionate font, on the roster of inmates.

In my teenage years I used to check Ulf’s status obsessively, multiple times an hour, confirming again and again that he was caged. Gradually I outgrew the intensity of the compulsion, but even now I occasionally found myself logging on once again. Just to be certain. I still knew his DOC number by heart.

29

Just after dawn, Finn helped me load the swarm into the back of our shared SUV. He did not come with me to deliver it to Penny Westerman—Finn avoided social contact whenever possible. With humans, anyway. Voicelessness will do that to a person.

As I drove into town, gusts of wind smacked the side of the car. Haven was broken into two discrete sections: the old and the new. Finn and I lived in the old part, a sprawling network of dirt roads that fed like capillaries into the cobblestoned artery of Main Street. This quaint shopping area sported an independent bookstore, half a dozen mom-and-pop shops, and a yoga studio.

On the other side of the river, the new half of Haven flourished: competing gas stations, every possible fast-food chain, and the mother ship, a Walmart the size of a museum. The old neighborhood had smoky streetlights, an indie movie theater that showed one art film per week, and Tony’s, a bar that quietly catered to the LGBTQ+ population in town. The new part of Haven offered car dealerships, a cineplex, and a strip club.

Driving down Main Street, I turned on the radio. With a rural twang, a male voice announced that a man in Moore, Michigan, had been reported missing by his daughter, who had come home from college on her spring break to find her home empty. The radio station had apparently posted a photo of the missing man on their website in case anyone had seen him. And now—time for a segment about the bookmobile!

I drove past Tony’s, the windows dark. The mere sight of the bar kindled heat in my belly. I was a regular there. I’d seduced most of the queer women in Haven over drinks in the tang of those neon lights.

I should pause here to explain that I am sexy. That isn’t my own opinion; all my lovers have described me that way. In fact, I had a reputation as a heartbreaker in the lesbian circles of Haven. This baffled me. What did sex have to do with the human heart? Sex was a primal need like hunger or thirst, a requirement for well-being. When my lovers began to want more—pillow talk, secrets in the dark, declarations of love—I moved on.

The prevailing American attitude toward sex is repressed, fearful, and ashamed. The Vikings had a healthier take on carnal desire. They were wise about so many things. Sex was an integral part of their lives, openly discussed and acknowledged. A Viking man could take more than one wife. A Viking woman could divorce her husband if he did not satisfy her in bed. Sex was also a source of pleasure and joy for the gods, who were frank and unabashed in their liaisons.

The Vikings believed in sex magic. Seeresses were known to pleasure themselves with sacred objects, attaining wisdom through orgasm and ascending to new planes of understanding. Make of that what you will.

Penny lived as far away from Finn and me as possible without leaving the town limits. Her location was a mirror of ours: on the outskirts, down a dirt lane, into the woods. My GPS led me to a solitary mailbox on the side of a road bordered by forest.

I climbed out of the car. Kudzu, the scourge of the Midwest, had begun to engulf the trees here. I was not sure exactly what kind of plant it was—possibly a vine, given the way it twined up trunks and clung to branches. But no other vine had ever assaulted the forest with what seemed to be a vendetta and an organized system of attack. In recent years, kudzu had surged across the landscape of Michigan like a slow-motion forest fire, claiming tree after tree. Its leaves were a bright, citrusy green, suggesting a tropical origin or perhaps an unnatural one—a curse from the gods. Half the pines that lined this road were smothered beneath robes of kudzu that obscured them from root to crown, cutting them off from the sunlight.

The address on the mailbox matched the one Penny had given me, but there wasn’t a house or driveway in sight. It was like a fairy tale: a lonely, rusted mailbox that seemed to belong to the trees themselves.

I’ve heard it said that the first moment of a relationship can be prophetic. The way things begin is the way they tend to go on. This was certainly true for Penny and me. I would never have found her if she hadn’t come to me like an apparition, shadow-dappled, slipping between the trunks. She pushed through a curtain of kudzu, stepped into the road, and offered me a little wave. Her coloration matched her name: a coppery pixie cut and tawny skin.

“Follow me,” she said.

I climbed back into the driver’s seat, unsure what was happening. Penny beckoned me down the road, and I drove after her at a snail’s pace. The sensation of fairy tale grew stronger.

Eventually Penny stopped walking and pointed into a wide hollow between two ample pines. These trees, too, were swathed in scarves of kudzu, and the bright leaves of the vine seemed eerily cheerful against the inky branches. Penny gestured like a game-show hostess. Then I saw it: a rusted gate spanned the gap between the pines.

I stared. The metal had corroded to umber, scarcely discernible against the backdrop of tree trunks. Kudzu wound around the slats. I could easily have driven past the gate without registering it at all. It certainly didn’t look functional.

Penny took a key ring from her pocket and began opening locks. Multiple locks. I heard the snaky chime of a chain being unwound. Multiple chains. Penny pulled the gate open on protesting hinges and pointed between the trees.

I shrugged and swung the steering wheel. Up close, I could see the driveway—the ground deeply scored by tire tracks, the bushes cut back to allow passage. Kudzu twined overhead, creating a tunnel of green. I braked and waited for Penny, who pulled the gate shut behind me with a rusty squeal.

She came around the car, trailing her fingers over my window, and walked ahead of me to lead the way. My headlights flicked on automatically, backlighting her lithe figure as I drove deeper into the woods. She turned, grinned, and curled her index finger to summon me onward. By this point I had abandoned all my agency.

Her body blazed into full color as the trees released me into an open field. Wind smacked the car, no longer muffled by the dense woods. Half-blinded by the dazzling sunlight, I parked the SUV and stepped into a wide glade bordered by forest. House. Shed. A strong smell of animals. I shaded my eyes with a hand, trying to get my bearings as Penny approached me.

Over the years, I had become fairly proficient in human interaction. That was part of my role in life—I was the voice for Finn and me—but it did not come easily. Empty small talk was a complex code I was still learning to navigate. (“How are you?” was not an actual question. The weather was always an appropriate topic, no matter the season. “Yeah, no” meant no and “No, yeah” meant yes.) Chitchat was bad enough, but the occasional attempt at intimacy was so much worse. The opening move for most people was a sword thrust that required deft parrying. They might ask where I grew up. They might ask what I was doing for Christmas or Halloween or Father’s Day. They might ask what I did for a living, and then, inevitably, why I had become a beekeeper. Most of my conversations were an exercise in cross-purposes: they wanted to know me better, whereas I wanted to reveal as little as possible. I had mastered the art of the subtle subject change. Rural Midwest. No holiday plans. Bees are interesting. How about you?

Now I took a deep breath, preparing myself for the war of words to come.

“Liv,” Penny said, stepping closer. “Thanks for making the trip.”

She took my hand in hers, squeezing it in a warm, firm grip. She held on a little longer than necessary. I did not mind.

“Is Liv short for Olivia?” she asked.

“No, it’s a Viking name. It means life. Is Penny short for Penelope?”

She shook her head. “Beatles song.”

I didn’t know the reference. Her voice was a throaty contralto, surprisingly deep for her slight frame. Her eyes were brown and green: forest-colored.

Love stories are dull. They’re all the same. I wish I could bring you inside that moment—the lock of her gaze, the gravity of her body—but love has been written and sung and talked about so many times that only clichés are possible.

Mine is not a love story, anyway.

“So,” Penny said. “A starter hive.”

“Back here.” I led her around the SUV and opened the trunk. Penny stared down at the cedar box, tapping her lower lip with her forefinger. Up close, her spiky pixie cut was a fiery bronze, almost metallic. I wondered if she dyed it. Could human hair possibly be that color naturally?

“There’s a swarm in there?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Really?”

“Definitely,” I said. “We caught them yesterday.”

She shot me a glance, a gleam of green. “We?”

“My brother and me,” I clarified.

She nodded as though she was glad to hear it. Every new emotion seemed to require its own gesture and expression; she was never still. The wind shook the surrounding trees, roaring like the sea, and the leaves showed their silver underbellies. Penny’s house was old, sprawling, too big for one person. Multiple porches. A gabled attic. Solar panels. A satellite dish. That same pungent animal odor carried from somewhere on the far side of the house. Horses, maybe.

“I hope I’m not making a horrible mistake here,” Penny said. “I think I’ll be able to do this. Probably. I’ve got hens and pigs and—” She leaned forward, patting the box with the flat of her hand. “How many bees are in there?”

“Thirty thousand, give or take. It was a pretty big hive.”

“Jesus. You’ll help me set everything up, right? You’ll make sure I don’t make a mess of it?”

“All part of the service.”

“And then you’ll leave me all on my own with thirty thousand bees?”

The wind caught hold of my hair and flung it across my face. Penny leaned toward me and tucked it back behind my ears. I felt myself blush.

“You’ll be fine,” I said. “Once the hive is set up, there’s not a lot to do right away. Mostly you just leave them alone to settle in.”

“Thirty. Thousand. Bees.”

I laughed. “I can come back in a day or two and check on you. Check on the hive. If you want.”

“Oh, thank god,” she said. “I’d be lost without you.”

30

As the weather continued to warm, Finn and I were able to examine our hives thoroughly for damage and mildew and pests. Early April found the bees in a lackadaisical, welcoming mood. Hive 17 was suffering from varroa mites. One entire wall of Hive 31 was damp with mold. Hive 45 seemed healthy enough, but Finn noticed that the queen was missing a leg. Her egg-laying skills remained strong, but her attendants were clearly agitated, and it was likely that they would soon replace her. Finn made a note to keep an eye on things there.

Swedish Honey did more than sell its namesake. Finn and I provided bee-related services all across the Midwest, including hive removal. Most laypeople now understood that bees were useful to the environment and shouldn’t be destroyed—but nobody was happy when they found a hive in a tree next to a playground, for instance. They wanted the bees transported far away fast—but safely, of course. Finn and I were happy to help. Mostly Finn.

He would approach the wayward colony, exuding calm. Hive into box. Box into trunk. Finn would serve as scout for the bees and locate a new home, usually high in a sturdy tree near water and flowers but far from people.

The relationship between bees and keepers is a mutually beneficial symbiosis, not a true domestication. Caregivers are not essential to the survival of their hives. At heart, all bees are wild, and if the human species were wiped off the face of the earth tomorrow, the apian population would live on.

Except for my father’s bees.

Every now and then the image came back to me: a genocide of tiny bodies spilled onto the grass. In life, bees are quick, reactive, frilled by diaphanous wings. In death they are reduced to mere exoskeleton, an empty suit of armor.

It did not make sense that my father’s hives had perished in his absence. The more I had learned about bees over the years, the less sense it had made.

I tried not to think about it. I tried not to think about my father at all.

—

On Ostara, Finn and I hiked into the forest to leave offerings for the gods. We no longer slaughtered animals for a blót sacrifice, but we did not neglect the holidays either. In lieu of blood, we brought tamer, more reasonable gifts. In Hávamál, a passage from The Poetic Edda, Odin claimed that humble offerings were as welcome as lavish ones.

The Vikings had no name for their faith. Why would they? The essential phenomena of the universe don’t require naming. Faith is the wrong word, honestly, but there is no word for the simple acceptance of reality.

For the record, Easter belonged to us first. Ostara was the spring celebration of Idun, the Norse goddess of fertility, and her generosity was a matter of life and death for Viking tribes. If she brought rain and sunlight, the crops would flourish and the clan would thrive. If not, the winter to come would kill the children and the weak.

Now Finn and I hiked through the forest toward a great white ash near the northern border of our property. Panting loudly, Hati crunched through the underbrush in our wake. Finn and I had explored every inch of our land when we’d first moved to Haven. We did not name the trees as we had in childhood, but we mapped the layout of the forest. Finding the great white ash had been a stroke of luck—our own personal temple, a miniature Yggdrasil.

Finn walked a little too fast for me, as usual. I watched him bat aside a low-hanging branch with his elbow. People often said the two of us looked alike, even asked if we were twins, but I couldn’t see much of a resemblance beyond our classic Nordic coloring: blond, fair, and blue-eyed. At six feet, Finn had never reached Pappa’s height and girth, which was for the best; it allowed him the possibility of beauty. He turned heads, but not the way Pappa had. I often felt like a lesser copy of my brother. Finn had gorgeous honey-blond curls like a cherub in a Renaissance painting, while my lank hair was at the palest end of the spectrum, just shy of white. His eyes were a striking cobalt, while mine were as glassy and smooth as skating rinks. The gods had painted me in watercolors, the merest tinge of yellow in the hair, the slightest hint of blue in the eyes, a barely-there person.

The ash tree was marvelously wide. Ten people holding hands could not have encircled its crown. The branches were barrel thick, and many hung low to the ground, claiming space outward as well as up. At this season the tree stood bare, but it was palpably alive, brimming with suppressed vitality.

Finn and I knelt and placed our offerings among the roots. I had brought gifts for Odin: blueberries, a jar of honey, and a stack of silver dollars. Finn laid down a packet of raw beef wrapped in waxed paper to honor righteous Tyr. Hati approached, sniffing at the meat, but a glance from Finn made her retreat. I bowed my head, praising Odin and thanking him for his grace.

Do you pray?

Who do you pray to?

In my limited understanding, the Christian god—just one!—runs a sort of crisis hotline. His disciples kneel in pews and make wishes. Prayer, for them, is a matter of asking for things. They beg for romance, wealth, a good grade on an exam, or even just a parking spot at the mall. In extremis, they cry out to their god to rescue them from danger. They have no shame.

For a Viking, prayer is a matter of offering things. We honor the gods with gifts and subservience because they are wonderful beyond measure. Kneeling there in the forest, head bowed, I would never have dared to ask Odin for anything. The Norse gods despise weakness as much as Pappa did. They do not take requests and they cannot abide whining. They intervene in the lives of mortals by their own choice, in their own time, and never for the asking.

There are sixty-six gods in the Norse pantheon. Pappa always said that nobody could pray to them all. The gods understand this; they know that we mortals are ephemeral creatures with little lives. Circumstances dictate that each Viking choose only one.

Pappa had prayed to warlike Thor in honor of our last name and, perhaps, a shared bloodlust. For me it was Odin, since I often felt his gaze upon me, taking note of my adherence to or betrayal of the nine noble virtues.

And Finn prayed to Tyr, the god of justice and righteousness. My brother always brought a packet of raw meat, sometimes with fresh-baked bread or mustard seeds or holly branches. I knew Finn’s god of choice because he had told me years ago, signing the letters to me as we walked through the woods.

We had both learned the basics of American Sign Language when he lost his tongue, though Finn quickly made it clear that he did not intend to replace his voice with his hands. Only those in the Deaf community would understand him then, and he did not belong there. He did not belong anywhere.

Still, he and I both retained the ASL alphabet and a few key phrases to use in a pinch: yes, no, more, sorry, stop it, I like [this thing], I don’t like [this thing]. In particular, Finn tended to ask his questions that way: the five basics, along with sibling stuff like are you okay, do you want to do [the thing], why are you acting [that way], how late did you stay up last night, et cetera.

Tyr’s story was a sad one. He was a proud warrior, valued by his comrades for his honor and loyalty; it was those same qualities that led him to tragedy. Loki, as usual, was the source of the trouble. After a tryst with his giantess lover, the trickster brought his newborn son, Fenrir, to Asgard. Loki left the wolfling there in the care of the gods and went away to seek mischief elsewhere.

No one dared to approach the little creature except Tyr. The god and the wolf became something like friends. Tyr would tell stories, offer meals, and pet the animal to sleep. The two of them wrestled and played, and soon the wolf trusted Tyr completely, even loved him.

But all the while, Fenrir was growing with monstrous rapidity. Soon he filled the golden halls of Asgard with his bulk and black fur and hot breath. No hint of a savage nature had yet made itself known—in fact, the wolf seemed almost tame—but the gods became more and more afraid of what he might be capable of one day.

You can probably guess what came next. The gods decided to cage the wolf and attempted to lock him in chains. Righteous Tyr protected the others by surrendering his own flesh. Fenrir was still a cub then, but strong enough to tear off Tyr’s hand with a single bite. The wound was terrible, nearly fatal. Tyr sacrificed his hand—right hand, sword hand—for the sake of his tribe. After his recovery, he could no longer hold a weapon in battle, a fate almost worse than death in the Viking ethos.

And so Tyr became known as Vargens Rester: Remnant of the Wolf.

31

Do you remember the man who disappeared?

His daughter, home from college, had found her father’s house abandoned and reported him missing. This had happened in Moore, eighty miles west of Haven. I’d caught the news on the radio, just briefly, on the drive to Penny’s place.

That woman! The glow and pulse of her threw everything else into shadow. She burned in my mind.

So I did not give the missing man a second thought. Of course I didn’t. His absence—a stranger in a faraway town—seemed like a nonevent, unconnected to my life.

But I did not forget about him either. Not completely.

Now, looking back, I wonder what would have happened if I had never heard that thirty-second snippet of a news broadcast. Would the entire course of my life have been different? Would I even be here now, telling my story to you?

—

To be clear, it wasn’t love at first sight. I don’t believe in such things. But we flirted, Penny and me, when I returned a few days later to see how the bees were settling in. The colony was in good condition. In anticipation of the hive’s arrival, Penny had planted a wildflower garden. On my recommendation, she had also purchased a birdbath where the bees could drink, since there was no natural source of water on her property.

Standing in the shadow of the house, the two of us observed the hive from a safe distance. No wind today. The glade was a pool of sunlight. Bees zipped in and out the door of their new residence as though they’d always dwelled there.

“I haven’t tried to take the roof thingie off yet,” Penny said. “I have no idea what’s going on inside.”

“Bee stuff.”

She smiled, catlike. Her teeth were so even that they’d probably benefited from orthodontia at some point.

“The wood of the hive is brand-new,” I said. “There won’t be any pests or mildew for you to deal with for a long while. And you shouldn’t try to harvest the honey until the fall. It takes the bees all summer to build up a good supply. I can talk you through the harvesting process. It’s not as complicated as it seems.”

“Oh, I’m not doing that.”

I blinked at her. “You aren’t going to collect the honey?”

“God no.”

There was a moment of silence. I waited for her to elaborate. She didn’t.

“Then why did you buy the hive?” I asked finally. “Why keep bees in the first place?”

As though in answer, she took my hand—a little shock of pleasure—and led me around the corner of the house. A chicken coop stood in full sunlight, its weathered wood gleaming like silver. The structure was my height and plated with mesh panels. The chickens strutted around in clean sawdust, making little warbles. Some white, some brown, all frowsy and silly and proud. Feather dusters with beady eyes.

“I collect the eggs, but I don’t hurt the birds,” Penny said. “I don’t eat the chickens, I mean, just the eggs. I’m a vegetarian.”

She tightened her grip on my hand and pulled me past the coop, away from the house, into deeper shadow. I could tell by the chill in the air that the sun had not yet touched this place today. A slatted wooden fence surrounded a generously sized pen. I heard the animals before I saw them—grunt, scuffle, snort. The smell was enough to make my eyes water.

Penny towed me right up to the fence, released my hand, and leaned her elbows on the top slat. I had always known pigs were pink, but the creatures in front of me appeared hilariously naked. There were six of them, the color of pencil erasers, sausage-shaped, mud-spattered, and bristly. One of them was lying on its side, so flat and pancaked that I couldn’t imagine how it would ever get up.

Two of the pigs approached Penny, lifting their damp snouts. She scratched their spiky foreheads, which brought forth happy little tail wags.

“No treats,” she said. I thought she was talking to me, but the pigs seemed to understand her, retreating into the pen to snuffle in the dirt. I noted a food trough in the corner of the fence and a trough of water next to it.

“Are they trained?” I asked.

“No, just smart. Smart as dogs.”

“I didn’t know that.”

Penny ran her fingers through her cropped hair, rumpling it into tufts. “I don’t kill them. I don’t sell their meat. I just…It’s going to sound weird.”

“Tell me.”

She took my hand again—another frisson of pleasure—and pulled me away from the pen, all the way around to the front of the house, where she settled on the porch swing and dragged me down to sit beside her.

“I like animals,” she said. “I just like them. They’re so peaceful. I hang out with the pigs and feed the chickens. And now I can watch the bees. Like this.”

I turned this idea over in my mind. Animals without purpose. Bees for bees’ sake.

“What do you do for work?” I asked.

She laughed. “What was the segue there?”

“Just making conversation. It’s one of those questions people ask when they’re getting to know someone. I’ve never been good at chitchat.”

“Shit-shat,” she echoed.

Normally it bothered me when people mimicked my accent. But Penny repeated the word as though marveling rather than mocking.

“Well,” she said. “Since you ask, I do boring computer stuff. I work from home. Coding. Admin. Building websites.” She opened her palm in the sunlight. “I stay here.”

The rest of the morning passed pleasantly. We talked about beekeeping and pig husbandry as Penny rocked the swing back and forth with gentle pushes of her toes. The wood of the slats was soft with age. The trees stood sentinel around the edges of the glade. I thought of Pappa’s fence, the barbed-wire Jörmungandr. Penny’s barrier was just as formidable.

At one point she mentioned a breakup with her most recent girlfriend. I had already determined that she was gay (or queer—pan—there are so many words for love and desire, aren’t there?). I knew attraction, and it was there between Penny and me. Still, I appreciated the confirmation, and I answered in kind with a description of my latest fling, a woman passing through Haven on her way to Detroit. I didn’t add that I recognized the name of Penny’s ex-girlfriend because I had slept with her a year prior. Mediocre sex and too much cuddling, as far as I could recall.

I wondered if Penny would invite me in. I wondered what would happen if she did. Usually, I tried to skim through the getting-to-know-you phase of any new romance. My preference was to cut to the chase: brush fingertips, charge the air with electricity, lean in for a kiss. Passion was my goal—connection, release—and the price I paid for it was conversation. I wanted to pay as little as possible.

To my surprise, however, I was enjoying Penny’s company. She didn’t ask about my family of origin. She didn’t offer intimate details from her own past. She kept the conversation where I liked it—surface level but not superficial. She told me that she had once kept goats as well as pigs, but found them too rambunctious. I told her that I lived with my brother. She said that Finn and I must get along well—not a question, I noticed, but a statement that left me free to offer more information or not. Haltingly, I explained that Finn couldn’t speak due to a childhood accident. I braced myself for the onslaught of curiosity that always followed this disclosure, but Penny only nodded, pushing the swing back and forth in a gentle, sea-surf sway.

“Can I have some water?” I asked at last. I wanted to look inside her house, not necessarily to seduce her, though I was open to it if she was.

Her response was not what I expected. She stiffened and glanced toward the front door.

“I’ll get water for both of us,” she said. “Stay here, okay?”

I watched her close the front door behind herself. A minute later she returned with two tall glasses clouded with condensation, the ice clinking as she handed one to me.

“Do you live on your own out here?” I asked casually.

“Yep. Just me.”

“And the pigs and hens.”

“And the bees.”

She sipped from her glass, gaze lifted to the sky. Her shoulders were hunched. I watched her posture gradually loosen as she realized I wasn’t going to push.

“Listen,” she said. “If the bees end up stinging me to death, you’ll avenge me, right?”

“Of course,” I said. “Vengeance is the Viking way.”

32

The second man to disappear, this time in Haven, went unnoticed by everyone, even me. Warm days intermingled with sudden storms—a typical spring in Michigan. Daffodils and magnolias burst into flower. Our bees sent out foragers and reacquainted themselves with the lay of the land.

One morning Finn found an injured squirrel in the forest and carried it home in the crook of his arm. I watched him approach from the window, noting how the little gray creature nestled against his jacket, seemingly at peace. My brother’s communion with all animals was both freakish and divine.

I wouldn’t let him bring the squirrel into the house. I blocked the door with my foot and yelled about fleas and the black plague until Finn rolled his eyes and retreated. He splinted the animal’s injured leg out in the grass. He settled the squirrel in a fabric-lined box in the shed, where Hati couldn’t get at it.

For the next few days, he brought food and water to the squirrel at regular intervals. I worried that the animal would adapt to its cushy new life and stay forever, but once it had recovered from its injury it crawled out through a rotted gap in the shed and fled back into the forest. Finn was pleased and proud to find it gone.

But let us return to the man who vanished.

Even now, I don’t know many details. He fell into the river one night and nobody ever reported him missing. The reeds snared his corpse and held it underwater, disintegrating, nibbled by fish. His death would go unnoticed for months, until a powerful storm battered the countryside and forced the river to overflow its banks. The flood would dislodge the man’s bloated corpse and carry it downstream.

But I’m getting ahead of myself again.

—

Ulf Thorvaldsson escaped from prison. He bent the bars of his cage with his bare hands. He slaughtered the guards, slamming their heads against the wall and bursting their skulls like ripe melons. Still dressed in his prison garb, Ulf crossed the country with the rapidity of dream logic, blinking from one place to another.

Though nearly twenty years had passed since his incarceration, he still towered over me, twice my height, just as he had been in my early childhood. Had he grown into a giant, or was I a little girl again? He stood so tall that I could not see his face, only the underside of his thicket of beard.

He was there in the kitchen I shared with Finn. He roared with laughter, looking around at the ridiculously modern abode we had chosen for ourselves. Growling, he lumbered down the stairs into the basement.

I woke up choking in panic and, before I was even fully alert, dashed down the hall to check on my brother. He was curled next to Hati, dreaming deep. The old dog lay with her long limbs sprawled across most of the bed, relegating my brother to the very edge. I stood over him, reorienting myself to the living world. My pajamas were soaked with sweat. Hati cracked an eye, registered my presence, and dropped immediately back into dreams.

Next I ran downstairs and threw open every door, verifying that none of them contained a secret staircase to my father’s torture room that I had never noticed. I poured myself a glass of water with shaky hands. Then I opened my laptop.

Ulf Thorvaldsson, Coldwater Correctional Facility, Tin Hill, Iowa.

My breathing slowed. I told myself to go back to bed, but sleep was out of the question.

Instead, I typed my father’s name in the search bar.

I already knew what I would find. I’d often googled him on restless nights. I’d watched footage of the news reports that followed his arrest. I’d spent long hours bathed in the glow of the screen, searching for true-crime podcasts and reading exposés about the infamous Viking Assassin until my eyes burned with fatigue and unshed tears. There was no peace to be found down that rabbit hole. It was like picking at an unripe scab; it scratched the itch and exacerbated the wound at the same time.

“Sluta,” I told myself. Stop.

But my fingers did not seem to be under my control, typing relentlessly away. Blog posts. Op-eds. Psychological analyses. Fan sites, believe it or not. They were all stamped with the same photo: Ulf’s mug shot, his taut mouth and lightless eyes.

I read what I already knew. Ulf Thorvaldsson had killed only adult men. No women or children. Aldrig. Never.

Even among the population of possible male victims, Ulf had been choosy. He murdered only men who were hale and strong, in the prime of life. The youngest body found on our land was twenty or so years old; the oldest was in his early sixties. Each unearthed corpse possessed at least passable musculature. Some were athletic, some couch potatoes, but none seemed elderly or disabled or sickly. Ulf wanted a certain kind of prey, it seemed.

According to interviews given by law enforcement, Ulf’s method of capture was always the same. His victims simply vanished. There was never any sign of violence at the scene, no calls to 911, no gunshots or screams, not so much as a drop of blood. His victims drove to work, ran errands, and disappeared. Their names went on the missing persons list and stayed there. Ulf left the families wondering. They might have suspected foul play, but there was never any evidence. Ulf took his victims when they were alone. No witnesses. No surveillance footage. No body, no crime.

The raid on my childhood home had changed so many lives. Years, even decades, after my father’s victims had vanished into thin air, their remains had been found on our property. The cadaver dogs had proven ineffective, just as Ulf had planned; he had buried so many animals that the scent of decay was omnipresent and indistinguishable. But eventually, with ground-penetrating radar, all the dead men had been located, some reduced to bare bones, some fresher. DNA and dental records did the rest. Not all the cadavers were claimed, of course; many John Does were buried without headstones. But a couple hundred families were finally granted closure. That was the gift Finn had given them.

“Sluta,” I told myself. This time my hands obeyed me and closed the laptop. I shuffled upstairs to bed, where I lay awake until dawn.

33

The farmers’ market was a necessary evil. Beginning in May, Finn and I would set up our stall every Saturday morning.

For me, the experience was exhilarating and terrible. Despite having lived in America for two decades, I had never adjusted to being in a crowd—my peripheral vision clogged with bodies, my hearing dampened by ambient chatter, and my breath stifled by perfume and sweat. The farmers’ market was always packed. People jostled me. People startled me. People tapped my shoulder and shouted my name.

Pappa had drilled the habit of vigilance into Finn and me. Even now, some part of my brain was always scanning the world around me for a threat, an enemy. It was second nature to flinch when someone near me made a sudden movement or stepped into my personal space. I was always prepared to defend myself as a Viking should.

But even Pappa would have been stymied by the ceaseless movement and noise of a crowd. Footsteps, laughter, the bump of elbows, the swing of hands. Anyone in the throng could have been carrying a weapon. I could have been stabbed at any moment and would never have seen it coming.

Will you be at the farmers’ market tomorrow? I texted Penny. First one of the season. Help.

She wrote back: I can’t. No explanation given.

I wanted to see her—I always wanted to see her—but I especially wanted her to leave the secret fairyland of her home. By that point I had visited her property several times, ostensibly to check on the bees. More flirting. Gradual intimacy. I had invited her over to my place, but she hadn’t taken me up on it. Mostly we sat on her porch swing and watched the hive.

Her property seemed to be a lovely inversion of the one Pappa had built. Thick forest kept her hidden—an organic, wholesome barrier that grew where it wanted to be, rather than a vicious man-made barricade with rusted metal teeth. Penny cared for her animals; Pappa killed anything he could get his hands on. Bee husbandry was a small overlap in their Venn diagrams, but they differed greatly in the manner of their keeping. Pappa had loved the bees for their warlike possibilities; Penny loved them for their mere existence. She did not even charge them rent in honey, as Pappa had done.

The one thing Penny and Pappa shared completely was their need for extreme isolation. In fact, Penny had my father beat. Pappa had—albeit unwillingly—risked occasional social interaction for the sake of groceries and library books. Penny, on the other hand, ordered her groceries to be packed up at the store and carried outside for her. She interacted with exactly one person there, a bored staff member who handed her a receipt without bothering to look her in the eye. She also had an arrangement with a few restaurants to take their leftovers, which they placed in the alley so she could collect them after hours for her pigs.

I knew the reason for my father’s aloneness. I didn’t yet know Penny’s.

Sometimes, in dark moments, I wondered if she actually existed at all outside her strange refuge. Was Penny something other than human? Could she assume the form of a beguiling, autumn-colored woman only in the enclave of her home? My favorite creature from Swedish fairy tales was the skogsrå, forest ruler. Seen from the front, a skogsrå resembled an ordinary woman, lovely in the classic fair-and-blond Scandinavian way. From behind, however, her magic became eerily apparent. Imagine a torso hollowed out like an old tree trunk, the soft center rotted away to humus, only the sturdy shell of bark remaining. A skogsrå possessed no spinal column, rib cage, stomach, or heart. Her back was a concave husk holding empty air.

There are fairy tales about skogsrådan swapping changeling children for ours. There are stories of Odin chasing down and slaughtering skogsrådan during the Wild Hunt. There are tales of skogsrådan seducing men, which suggests that they can alter their bizarre appearance to look completely human, at least temporarily.

Was that Penny?

She had let me enter her house once—only once—just long enough for me to use the bathroom. She stood outside the bathroom door until I was done and led me directly outside again.

She was just a private person. Probably. She might be recovering from trauma of some kind. She hadn’t even let me kiss her yet, though I’d set the stage several times.

I was content to wait. I was smitten.

—

The farmers’ market started at an unreasonably early hour. The sun was just rising when Finn and I pulled into the parking lot. I sipped coffee from a thermos, trying to find my way to alertness. Customers flocked to the coffee stall first, then the bakery table, then spread out to see what vegetables and flowers and fruits were in season this week. Old Mr. Bendix set up a folding chair and played his guitar for tips, filling the background with a sweet, lackadaisical melody.

Swedish Honey was a popular stall. A queue of people waited as Finn and I darted back and forth, ringing up purchases. In the bustle of the market, Finn worked around his voicelessness fairly well. A stranger to Haven might not even notice that the blond guy at the honey stall never said a word. You could carry on a whole conversation with Finn in silence as he rang up your purchases. He would grin, cock an eyebrow, flash a thumbs-up, point to the cost on the screen, bag your goods, and leave you thinking you’d just had a nice chat.

But some people noticed. Of course they did. A few seemed to think his issue was a mental block or developmental delay rather than a physical inability. They would speak to him in gratingly loud voices, using small, simple words. Finn handled this behavior with a kind of resigned weariness, staring blankly at them until they paid for their honey and left.

Then there were the boors who inquired outright what was wrong with him. In Hávamál, Odin recommended silence with strangers; a wise Viking must speak as little as possible so as to give nothing away. But Americans had no wisdom and no boundaries. “Was he born like this? Or did something happen to him?” people had asked me, often when Finn was standing right there. “What’s his deal?” a teenage girl once drawled, snapping her gum and pointing at Finn.

I always answered these questions the same way: “Why do you need to know?”

If people pushed or blustered, I would say sadly, “You must be so embarrassed to have asked that.”

Nobody ever inquired a second time. Still, each question hurt Finn; I could see it in his posture, the tiniest suggestion of a self-protective hunch.

Our regulars knew the score and let him be.

Honey never spoils, you know. Not if it’s packaged correctly, as ours was. At most it may darken and crystallize over time. The honey we sold each spring had been collected the autumn before. Our customers didn’t need to know that, though; they assumed it was freshly harvested.

Around nine that day, a man leaned out of the line and waved to me. I recognized him—florid cheeks, dark hair, thick beard—though I did not know his name. He was a regular and always waited for me to serve him rather than Finn. In my head I called him Blackbeard. He usually had a joke to tell me, something off-color, beckoning me to lean across the table so he could whisper to me. “I don’t want to upset your brother,” he would laugh. “This one isn’t for innocent ears.”

The line moved. Finn was free before I was, but Blackbeard gallantly waved for the woman behind him to go ahead.

“Liv,” he cried when it was finally his turn, grinning as though we were old friends. “I’ve learned a bit about bees. I’ve been doing some research.”

I kept my face stony. “What can I get you?”

“That accent!” he said. “It’s adorable. ‘What can I yit you.’ ”

I said nothing.

“My usual, please,” he said. “Did you know that the male drones don’t have stingers? Did you know that they live for only a few weeks?”

“Yes, I did know that,” I said. “What’s your usual? I don’t remember.”

This was a lie—he always bought a large jar; Blackbeard had a sweet tooth. Undeterred, he pointed out the one he wanted, then leaned toward me.

“Did you know that the whole purpose of the drones’ lives is to fertilize the queen?” he asked. “That’s all they live for. I was just reading about it. Orgasm rips them in two. A roll in the hay, then death. Short but sweet, eh?”

There was a line forming behind him.

“Come here.” He beckoned me close, closer. Unwillingly, I leaned across the table. He had not yet paid for his goods; I was at his mercy.

Blackbeard reached out and clutched a lock of my hair in his palm. I froze, unsure how to react—it was such a strange thing to do, intimate yet childish. He examined the strands like a scientific specimen, rubbing them between his thick fingers, marveling at the color, the lack of color.

“True blond,” he murmured.

The stall shook with Finn’s footsteps. He had a way of making himself larger, nearly incarnating our father. He shoved Blackbeard’s hand away and the man backed off, stammering out an apology. He threw a few bills down and hurried away, calling over his shoulder that we could keep the change.

34

There is nothing so remarkable or unique to be found in this life as a colony of bees. If Blackbeard had been less offensive, I might have explained the miracle of the hive to him. He had whispered in my ear about randy drones and willing queens, ejaculation followed by death. How little he understood! Sex and death mean something entirely different in the hive.

Bees are more like mammals than other insects. A blowfly or a ladybug has one digestive tract, one reproductive setup, one life cycle, and one death. A bee, however, is not a discrete entity but a part of a greater whole. Each colony is a superorganism: a creature made of smaller creatures. I fell in love with that word the first time I heard it. Superorganism. The way it trips down the tongue.

Finn and I tended millions of bees, but only ninety living things—one superorganism inside each wooden hive.

Are you paying attention?

Every part of a mammal’s body is mirrored weirdly but precisely by the colony. Honeycombs are the bones. Worker bees are the bloodstream. Guards make up the hive’s immune system, keeping disease at bay as effectively as white blood cells. Nectar gatherers and honey-makers are the mouth and digestive tract, chewing, swallowing, and converting raw food to nutrients. The foragers investigate the landscape and bring information back to the superorganism, and they are as effective as my own five senses, cataloging and relaying every physical aspect of the known world.

The hive even maintains homeostasis. A healthy colony measures ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit at its busy core.

And there’s more. These facts do matter, I promise.

The queen and the drones are the female and male genitalia. Most insects mate, lay a batch of fertilized eggs, and take off without a backward glance. Mammals, however, shelter their fetuses in the controlled, protected environment of the womb. And so do bees. The uterus of the hive is a luxurious brood comb where eggs and infant larvae are tended.

Like mammals—like humans, anyway—bees give birth once a year. A fruit fly can live, reproduce, and die within a week, but bee reproduction is a stormy, frenzied thing; they give birth by swarming, one hive separating into two distinct entities. Each daughter colony has its own queen, workers, and drones, every part of the new superorganism vibrating with noisy life.

Even mammalian milk has its parallel in the hive. No other creature in the animal kingdom has mammary glands, which activate after birth and produce a high-calorie, nutrient-rich food specifically calibrated to nourish the growing body of an infant. But bees come close. In the hive, nectar is converted to honey: a high-calorie, nutrient-rich food specifically calibrated to nourish the larvae.

I could have told Blackbeard all this and more. A roll in the hay, then death, he had said, laughing. I could have explained that the demise of a single drone is insignificant; only the life of the superorganism matters.

A hive is an immortal thing.

In this way, bees are superior to every other living creature. They are rarefied, exalted, astonishing. The natural laws of earthly existence do not apply to them.

My mammalian organs will one day fail me, but the components of a hive—its blood and bones, its sensory organs and immune system—are infinitely renewable. One bee dies, but the colony as a whole is constantly replenished. Illness or catastrophe might take down a superorganism, but old age never will. Scouts replace scouts; drones replace drones. Whether an individual bee lives for days or weeks, whether it dies from ejaculation or the use of its stinger or predation or misadventure, there is always another bee to take its place.

The queens have the longest lifespans, a matter of months or even years, but they too are replaceable. In fact, each queen takes an active role in her own destruction. The hive cannot survive for more than a few weeks without a queen. And so, whenever she shows signs of aging or illness or injury, the superorganism springs into action.

First the workers fashion an extra-large cell. The current queen dutifully lays an oversized egg that holds her usurper. Upon hatching, the precious larva is kept clean and healthy by nursery attendants. They feed her only royal jelly, ensuring that she will grow enormous and strong. When she comes of age, she bursts out of the brood comb, hunts down the old queen, and slaughters her without mercy.

And the superorganism lives on.

35

In anticipation of Penny’s first visit, I cleaned the house until the floors shone and the couch was dog-fur-free. I’d never done this for any of my previous lovers. Usually I only bothered to change my sheets; no other part of the house mattered.

Finn watched me sweep the kitchen with his eyebrows raised in amusement. He didn’t offer to help me. He just sat at the table labeling jars of honey, with Hati’s head on his foot.

“Someone’s coming over,” I said as I exchanged the broom for the mop.

He mimed shock, hand over mouth.

“She won’t arrive until pretty late,” I said. “You can stay up if you want to meet her,” I added shyly.

He tilted his head to the side, doglike, considering. Then he tapped his wrist where a watch would have been if he wore one. So—he would go to bed at his usual time. I hadn’t expected him to alter his ironclad schedule, but I would have liked him to see Penny in the flesh—not necessarily to befriend her but simply to lay eyes on her. Some small, childish part of me still wanted corroboration of her existence.

I had never before offered to introduce my brother to any of the women I dated. None of them had stayed in my life long enough to require an introduction. In the past, whenever Finn’s path had crossed with one of my flings—when some random woman had stopped by in the evening or shuffled down the stairs in the morning in search of coffee—Finn had simply drifted off elsewhere. He would spend hours among the hives or take Hati for a walk, staying away long enough that when he returned, she was gone.

I had addressed my sexuality directly with him only once. Years ago, I had officially come out to my family—what remained of my family—which I’d been told was an important rite of passage.

“You know I’m gay, right?” I’d asked over breakfast. Finn had blinked at me, grinned, and made the ASL sign for Yes. Then he’d reached out to pat my shoulder with exaggerated pride, as though I were a small child who had just informed him, with great seriousness, that the sky was blue.

—

Penny arrived after midnight. Her job was complicated, she’d explained, and she kept strange hours.

She called me en route, confused by the lattice of dirt lanes. My house wasn’t as far off the grid as hers, but still, I had to talk her through several wrong turns before she located our driveway. Headlights swept over the city of hives. I threw open the door and found her cast into chiaroscuro by the porch light. She gave her feline smile, flashing sharp incisors. Her pixie cut was freshly shorn and brighter than ever. I was surprised by the force of my own reaction—so eager to touch her that I couldn’t stop myself from gathering her in a hug. Penny laughed against my shoulder.

“Can the pigs get by without you for a few hours?” I asked.

She averted her gaze. “Everybody’s fine over there.”

“Come in, come in.”

As I led her through the house, a grumbling snore penetrated the ceiling like faraway thunder.

“The brother, I presume?” Penny asked.

“Or the dog.”

“Dog,” she repeated, as though cataloging this fact.

I poured us wine and we settled together on the couch. Penny drank half a glass in one gulp.

“Work’s been a beast lately,” she said, sinking back into the cushions. “I told you about my job, right?”

“Boring computer stuff.”

“That’s part of it. I do coding and design, general IT. That’s the day job. But mostly I work with domestic violence shelters. I handle the admin for all the ones in this part of Michigan. Strong firewalls, you know. And in my free time I volunteer as a crisis counselor.”

I sipped my wine. It was the most she’d ever told me about her life. I didn’t want to break the spell.

“That’s why I had to come over so late,” she said. “It was my turn on the night shift.”

“The night shift?”

“The hotline. Domestic violence. Someone always has to be there to answer when they call.”

“Oh.”

She sighed heavily. “It wears you down, you know? I don’t mean to complain. God, I shouldn’t complain. These people…they’re being stalked or beaten or threatened.” She tapped the stem of her wineglass in a restless staccato. Never still. “It’s mostly women. Almost always women. Sometimes they call from pay phones because the guy is monitoring every piece of technology they own. Some of them don’t even understand how bad their situation is. Like, ‘He hits me every day, but he’s so sorry after. He threatened to kill me, but I really can’t use the word abuse, that’s too dramatic. I love him. I think he can change.’ People don’t change.”

I wondered if I should touch her, maybe a reassuring pat on the knee. I decided against it. Her gaze was fixed on something I could not see. I was struck by her expression, so focused, so single-minded. I felt an echo of déjà vu.

“Sorry, I’m not a lot of fun tonight,” Penny said.

“I don’t need fun.”

The corner of her mouth hitched up in a smile. Our eyes locked and stayed there, burning the space between us.

“More wine, please,” she said softly.

She followed me into the kitchen. Our hands bumped as I refilled her glass. Every touch was electric, at least to me. Penny downed her second glass and wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist.

“It’s good,” she said.

“It’s from the farmers’ market. The stall next to ours.”

“I won’t stay the night,” she blurted out. Her cheeks were pink, either from emotion or alcohol.

I laughed. “What was the segue there?”

She went up on tiptoes and kissed me. I nearly dropped my glass, sloshing a stain onto my jeans. Penny sucked gently on my lower lip, flicked her tongue, and let me feel the sharp suggestion of teeth. Everything I liked. As though we’d been lovers all our lives.

36

I heard the news the next morning. I was on my way to the grocery store, singing along with the radio at the top of my lungs. I’m fairly tone-deaf, but there was nobody with me to protest. In the rearview mirror I saw actual color in my wan cheeks. The heat of Penny’s skin, the perfect handfuls of her breasts, freckles I hadn’t noticed from a distance, breathless moans, the way her torso rocked like a ballerina’s under my hands when she came. I could scarcely keep my mind on the road.

Then a burst of static cut off the music, leaving my off-key soprano shamefully alone. A clipped male voice filled the vehicle. The signal was spotty on this particular stretch of country road, and static elided every few words: “—interrupt to bring—just received—breaking news bulletin—”

I pulled onto the shoulder. A truck hauling a horse trailer roared past, casting up dust and gravel that pinged against my SUV. I turned the volume on the radio as high as it would go.

A local man had been murdered in his home that morning. His name had not yet been released to the press. Details were still coming in.

A chill tingled down my spine. The reporter’s crisp voice sputtered from the speakers, and I leaned closer. Surely I had misunderstood. But he went on remorselessly, explaining that a neighbor had dropped by and found the man dead. Sources were saying the weapon had been a knife, though these reports were currently unconfirmed. Stay tuned for more.

—

I burst into the house, laden with grocery bags and news, but Finn wasn’t there. He wasn’t among the beehives either. He must have gone for one of his interminable hikes with Hati.

I put away the perishables and turned on the TV. The newscaster merely rehashed what I’d already learned: unconfirmed reports, probably a knife, no other details yet.

Mórðvíg—murder in Old Norse.

I went into the workroom to keep myself busy. There were online orders to fill. Sheets of beeswax lay in rows to be rolled into candles. Finn and I had fallen behind in labeling our stock of jars. We used preprinted stickers with our logo: the capital S and H of Swedish Honey topped by curlicued bees. I pasted one on an amber-colored jar. I made sure there were no bubbles caught beneath the label and sealed down the edges with my thumbnail.

Someone had been killed today. In his home—killed in his home—

There was a prickle along my nape, vestigial hackles attempting to rise. I got out my laptop and found the department of corrections website already open on the screen from my most recent verification.

Ulf Thorvaldsson, Coldwater Correctional Facility, Tin Hill, Iowa.

Then I donned my bee suit and headed toward the hives. The dozy hum of the bees calmed me immediately; it always did. They circled me, verifying with sight and smell that I was their dear friend. They crawled over the white fabric of my suit in a kind of apian embrace. Soon I could scarcely see through the mesh of the faceplate; their wriggling bodies and silky wings blotted out the sunlight. I held still, letting them greet me in their weird, affectionate way.

Eventually the bees went back to their work and I began mine. I walked among the hives with the seamless glide I had learned from Finn. It had been more than a week since he and I had checked on the health of the back row of our colonies, the ones nearest to the creek. I pried off each lid in turn, peering into the orderly rows of frames. The rising aroma of honey was so potent that I could almost taste it on my tongue.

Most of the hives were healthy. A few were fighting off pests, but the invading army of mites or lice had not yet reached the level where I needed to intervene. The bees were holding their own. Still, I made a mental note to keep watch.

Hive 86 was in the process of usurpation. The old queen had reached the end of her days. Even I, with my feeble human senses, could perceive her advanced age in the tremble of her legs and the filmy coating that diminished the sheen of her bulging compound eyes.

On the other side of the hive, in the brood comb, I located the overlarge cell of the new queen. She had hatched a few days prior but was not yet ready to leave the nursery. The attendants were busy around her. Soon she would be strong enough to commit the necessary regicide that would ensure her ascension to the throne.

I never felt quite as safe as I did among the bees. In their presence, I was both alone and in good company. Most people were terrified of them. No stranger would dare to approach me here, surrounded by thousands of my well-armed friends. Beekeeping was a magic I never took for granted. Each time I donned my gear and walked among the hives, I felt the marvel and strangeness of this work as though for the first time.

37

It was evening when Finn returned. Hati panted across the kitchen and lapped desperately from her water bowl. I had finished my work among the hives hours ago and had been restlessly waiting for my brother ever since. Beyond the window, the treetops caught the amber rays of the sunset while the sky darkened behind them like a bruise. The bees were more active than ever, gathering nectar in an extinction burst before the dying of the light.

I was anxious to tell Finn about the murder in town; I’d been waiting for hours with the news on the tip of my tongue. But before I could speak, he held out a bundle of cloth. His jacket was rolled around something dark. I leaned closer and caught the glint of a jet-black eye and a cruel, curved beak. He had brought home a raven.

“What the hell?” I yelled.

The bird looked to be full-grown and furious. Its head swiveled in the collar of fabric, taking in the lamp, the door, and me. A croaking cry escaped it, followed by a clack of beak: an unmistakable warning. Presumably it was wrapped in Finn’s jacket so it would not attack.

My brother again held the bundle out to me. I backed away.

“Absolutely not!”

He caught my eye and we had a sibling argument of frowns and head shakes. With a combination of pleading and force, Finn won.

“You better hurry back,” I said, taking the jacket gingerly and holding it as far as possible from my body.

Finn strode out of the room, leaving me alone with his malevolent monster, which was surprisingly heavy. I’d always thought of birds as hollow-boned, delicate creatures, but the raven had a granite solidity. It struggled a little, then went still, blinking resentfully at me.

Finn returned with our first-aid kit. He took the swaddled bird from me and laid it on the kitchen table. I gave a shout of protest, but he didn’t react. He unfolded his jacket to reveal a mass of feathers. The bird seemed deconstructed; I could pick out talons, eyes, and beak, but the wings had not yet been assembled.

“What happened to it?”

The raven clambered unsteadily onto its charcoal-colored legs and stood swaying. Then it opened its wings, filling the little kitchen. I stepped back as it attempted to take flight. The wingspan was enormous, nearly the length of our table. I’d never been close enough to a raven to see how massive they were.

Then I noticed the broken feathers and a fresh wound on its scalp. The bird crumpled, wings shuttering. It gave the avian version of a whimper, staggered to the side, and collapsed onto the fabric of Finn’s jacket.

“It’s hurt,” I said.

Finn gave me a look that spoke multitudes about my slowness on the uptake.

He spent the next hour binding the raven’s injuries as I handed him gauze and antibiotic cream like an ER nurse. I wondered what had attacked the bird so savagely—a predator, another raven? The poor thing did not protest Finn’s ministrations. It had slipped into a stupor, accepting whatever fate the Norns had woven for it, even death.

I would have expected Hati to be interested in the proceedings, but she merely lay panting on the kitchen tiles, either so exhausted by their hike or so used to my brother rescuing the fauna of the forest that she couldn’t be bothered. Her enormous body made our work difficult; I kept tripping over her long limbs.

When the raven was sufficiently bandaged, Finn nestled it in a cardboard box with his jacket as padding. He rummaged in the fridge and made a plate of chicken and hard-boiled eggs, which he set down in the makeshift nest along with a cup of water. Then he carried the box to the shed.

I insisted that Finn have a long, scalding shower and put his clothes directly into the washer. I actually asked him to burn them, but he only rolled his eyes. Then I took a shower myself, shuddering at the thought of bird lice.

When I emerged in my pajamas, Finn was on the couch watching the news with a bowl of popcorn in his lap. In the chaos of raven triage, I had completely forgotten about the murder. I sank onto the sofa beside him and took a handful of his popcorn. Hati lay on the rug with her ears at half-mast, hoping for stray kernels.

A photograph of a grinning man dominated the screen. Thick features and rosy cheeks. Blackbeard. Last time I’d seen him, he had fondled my hair.

“Is that…” I trailed off, unable to finish the sentence. I cleared my throat and tried again. “Was he killed? Was he the one?”

Finn nodded.

“Seriously?”

At the urgency in my voice, Hati shifted her gaze from the popcorn in Finn’s palm to my face. Her eyes were deep pools, iced over by age, and I could not interpret her expression.

A male reporter appeared on the screen, seated behind a desk and gazing into the camera with a somber expression. “Robert Ridley, age forty-nine, was killed this morning in his own home. The stabbing occurred—”

I groped for the remote control and muted the TV. I did not want to hear any more, not right this second.

“I can’t believe this,” I said. “Stabbed. Have they caught the guy yet? The killer?”

Pointedly, Finn removed the remote control from my hands and unmuted the TV.

“—urging the community to remain vigilant,” the man was saying. “We have no description of the suspect to circulate yet, but as soon as the police are able—”

“Jävlar,” I said. Fuck.

Finn nudged me. He did not like it when I swore; it reminded him of Pappa.

The reporter began talking about the weapon: a long, straight blade, according to the medical examiner. Probably a steak knife. Police were still investigating whether the killer had brought the weapon or whether it had been improvised from the victim’s own silverware drawer.

I cast a glance over my shoulder at our knife block on the kitchen counter. Finn kept the blades sharp with a whetstone and a leather strop.

“Jävlar,” I repeated. This time my brother did not nudge me.

“For those just joining us,” the reporter said, “a local man, Robert Ridley, was killed in his home this morning—”

The same photograph sprang aggressively onto the screen. Dark bushy beard. Beady little eyes. His smile was a fraction of an inch too wide. The reporter described the blade once more, a commonplace domestic object, present in every home in Haven.

“Change the channel, Finn,” I said.

38

Penny’s house was shabby chic—her term. She gave me the tour: mismatched furniture, female-centric art, and numerous soft lamps rather than overhead lights. A fully stocked pantry suggested she cooked often and well. Her bedroom was a shock of orange, the walls painted a tangy hue, the bedspread butter-colored.

She had kept me outside her walls for so long that I’d begun to worry that she was married or a hoarder or some other dreadful thing. But everything was tidy. While she made dinner I snooped a little, poking around in the medicine cabinets and closets to make sure there was no sign of another woman.

Still, the house was definitely too big for one person. Penny’s bedroom was so enormous that her bed and dresser looked child-sized. The ceilings in the dining room and living room were high and shadowed. There were three bathrooms, two guest bedrooms, and a sunroom that overlooked the chicken coop.

One door was locked. Second floor, down the hall from Penny’s bedroom. I tried the handle and pressed my ear against the wood. Silence inside.

As dinner simmered on the stove, Penny and I went outside to feed the pigs. She handed me a bucket of slop and showed me how to pour it into the trough without spilling. Another bucket. A third. The pigs approached shoulder to shoulder in a surprisingly orderly line. Their tails were corkscrewed just like in cartoons.

“Stay,” Penny said when they were a few feet away. The pigs obediently stopped walking, though their grunts increased in frequency and pitch. Penny heaved another bucket into the trough. I noticed an undersized pig creeping forward on its little cloven hooves. Penny noticed too and snapped, “I see you, Bernice. Back up.”

“They have names?” I asked.

“Of course. They’re practically people.”

She handed me one last bucket. This time I examined the contents. Apple slices, mash, corn, and what appeared to be an uncooked chicken drumstick.

“They eat meat?” I asked, pouring the contents into the trough.

“Now,” Penny said, snapping her fingers. The pigs rushed forward and buried their snouts in the slop. Their tails wagged back and forth, almost in concert. They managed to grunt even with their mouths full. Penny watched them with a pride that seemed almost maternal.

Then she turned to me as though finally registering my question. “Oh, they eat everything. Fruit, vegetables, meat, marrow, bone. There won’t be anything left by the time they’re done.”

“Wow.”

“I only give it to them raw, though. You don’t want sharp cooked bones in there. That would be dangerous.”

I leaned my elbows on the fence, watching the pigs at work. They ate with astonishing swiftness. The trough was almost empty already. I thought I heard, mingled with their gulps and snorts, the crunch of teeth splintering wet bones.

“I don’t feed them pork,” Penny murmured in my ear. “Just so you know. They would definitely eat it if I gave it to them, but…”

She trailed off. I shuddered, turning my back on the pen.

For the first time, I noticed a dusty old pickup truck parked in the shade at the edge of the clearing. There was another vehicle behind it, farther in the shadows, almost hidden against the trees—a bulky machine I couldn’t identify. It looked like a cross between a small forklift, a tractor, and a crane.

“What’s that?” I asked, pointing.

Penny glanced over her shoulder. “Oh, that’s my pig ambulance.”

“What?”

“If one of them gets sick or hurt, I can’t have the vet coming here,” she said, as though this ought to be obvious. “So I transport the pigs to the clinic. But it’s not like I can lift a six-hundred-pound animal. I have a harness in the shed,” she said, warming to her theme. “It’s a kind of belly sling. I wrap it around the pig and attach the hooks to the crane there. Then it lifts them up slowly and gently. Like a big, big hand grabbing them right around the middle. It’s sweet—they always have the most startled look when their little hooves leave the ground. Eyes popping out of their heads.”

I laughed. “Do they think they’re flying?”

“Probably. The pickup is a piece of junk, but I can’t exactly strap a pig to the top of my car. I lift them right into the truck bed.”

It was quite an image. “Do they need to go to the vet a lot?”

“No. I take good care of them.”

After dinner (perfectly spiced), and sex (brisk but satisfying), we lay in her bed listening to the rustle of leaves through the open window. It was May, and the room brimmed with a steamy preview of the summer to come. The ceiling fan did little to wick away my sweat. Penny and I chatted in our usual way—intimate, close, but never asking too much of each other. I still hadn’t told her anything about my childhood. I didn’t know anything about hers either. We stayed in the present moment, the heartbeat of the here and now.

To my amazement, our relationship had transcended the transactional. With Penny, I did not run my usual tally: trading conversation for sex, enduring fond glances for the sake of pleasure, and planning to end things when the costs began to outweigh the benefits—which always happened. They wanted more, more, until I had to move on.

With Penny, though, I traded conversation for conversation. That wasn’t the right word, though—trade. I didn’t know the word I wanted. Not then.

A companionable silence fell. I traced shapes on Penny’s breastbone with my forefinger. This always relaxed her.

“Oh! The murder,” she said suddenly. “Ridley, I mean. His murder.”

“What was the segue there?”

Penny grinned and nudged me. “I heard some news today. The cops brought somebody in for questioning. A person of interest in the case.”

“Really? Who?”

“Ridley’s neighbor. Something about a dispute over a fence, I think. Apparently Ridley was a real dick about the property line. The neighbor made some serious threats.” She nestled deeper into the pillows. “I hear stuff like this through my work. With the shelters, the hotline. We have connections in law enforcement, though they don’t do nearly enough to help us,” she added wearily.

I traced the word help across her chest, scrolling each letter in elaborate cursive.

“So what happened with the neighbor?” I asked.

“Nothing yet. The evidence was circumstantial. They really love that term in law enforcement. They had to let him go.”

“Oh.”

“Ridley wasn’t a nice guy,” Penny said. “That’s what I keep hearing, anyway. I didn’t know him.”

I wondered if I ought to mention his risqué jokes, uncomfortable eye contact, and the way he’d groped my hair. I decided it wasn’t important. Delicately, with my fingertips, I wrote Blackbeard under Penny’s clavicle.

“Do you think they’ll ever find out who murdered him?” I asked.

“I don’t have a lot of faith in cops.”

“That makes sense.”

“Hey.” Penny furrowed her brow. “You don’t need to worry, okay?”

“Hmm?”

“I know people are scared. They think there’s some madman on the loose. But that’s not how violence works.” She was speaking urgently now. “I promise you’re safe. We both are.”

I kept myself from smiling. It was sweet; she was trying to reassure me. And why wouldn’t she? As far as she knew, she was the expert on violent behavior—domestic and otherwise—while I was a gentle beekeeper. As the two of us had grown closer, she had shared stories about cries for help, useless restraining orders, indifferent cops, and broken bones. Justice system was an oxymoron, she had said. She believed she had seen the worst of what one human being could do to another.

I found her innocence charming. She knew nothing about swordplay, homemade graves, and torture rooms.

“You are worried,” she said, misinterpreting my silence.

“I’m okay,” I said. “Really.”

“The thing about violence…” Penny paused, weighing her words. “It’s almost never a random act. It’s a culmination. The endpoint of the curve.” With the flat of her hand, she sculpted a rising arc in midair. “Ridley was suing his neighbor over a goddamn fence post. Suing for a lot. I’m sorry he’s dead, but also, I’m glad I never met the guy, you know?”

I was not sure how to respond, but Penny did not seem to require an answer.

“Somebody killed him for a reason,” she said. “That’s what I’m trying to say. Even if the cops never figure out who did it, you shouldn’t be scared. Nobody’s coming after you or me. Why would they?”

“That’s reassuring,” I said, offering what she seemed to want.

“Oh, I’m glad.”

I let the conversation drop away—Penny yawning, me tickling shapes across the plane of her ribs.

I didn’t specifically care if the killer was ever caught; I just wanted Blackbeard’s case solved because I didn’t like a story cut off in the middle. It was the lack of an ending that bothered me, not the violence itself. I had no doubt that Ridley deserved it. In the good old days of my ancestors, when Vikings could be Vikings, I would have slaughtered him myself for laying hands on me.

Penny kicked me out of her bed around two in the morning. Sleepovers were not yet permitted, it seemed. I shuffled dozily down the dark hallway and paused at the locked door.

I hadn’t asked Penny about it. She had finally let me inside her home; I didn’t want to push my luck by being nosy about an off-limits room. She was entitled to her privacy. I tried the handle one more time, then headed downstairs.

39

My head was pounding, and it took me a moment to register that something else was pounding too. The door. A fist against my bedroom door. I tugged on a pair of sweatpants and yesterday’s T-shirt.

“What?” I yelled, throwing the door open. “What is so goddamn important?”

Finn stood in the hall, flushed with irritation, pointing at his wrist. Then I remembered: it was Saturday and we were late for the farmers’ market.

Finn drove us into town while I attempted to work the tangles out of my hair with my fingers. Finally I gave up and knotted it into a sloppy braid. I wondered what my brother thought of my disheveled appearance, the obvious aftermath of my late night with Penny. He hadn’t given any sign that he’d noticed the love bite on my neck or my sex-matted hair, though he must have.

As far as I knew, Finn had never dated anyone. My brother was a remarkable specimen of manhood—even I could see that. He turned heads, as handsome as Balder, the most beautiful of all the gods. At the farmers’ market, people often approached him on some pretext, complimenting his curls or his T-shirt. They were drawn to him like bees to a nectar-ripe blossom. But I’d never seen him flirt back. My assumption was that, at the age of thirty-six, Finn remained a virgin.

His aloneness ran deeper even than Pappa’s or Penny’s. I had never known anyone as alone as Finn. It wasn’t just a matter of his difference, his disability. He would never be able to participate in society with the unthinking ease of people who had not had their tongues cut out, but there were any number of ways he could have found another kind of voice if he wanted to. He usually carried a notepad and pen in his pocket but almost never used them. I had been badgering him for years to get a cellphone so I could communicate with him at a distance. I had no way of texting him when I was at the pharmacy, for instance, to ask him whether he needed shaving cream or a fresh tube of ointment for his athlete’s foot. More than this, however, cellphones now offered a wealth of apps that could have spoken for him in person. An electronic voice was surely better than no voice at all.

Finn refused. Whenever I broached the subject of a cellphone, he would sign No in ASL, a sharp pinch of the fingers. It was the strongest negative in his arsenal, more severe and final than his usual head shake.

We did not disagree about much—only dogs and cellphones.

The boy I grew up with had been quick to smile, as gentle as sunlight, fierce and focused when learning a new task, and apt to hum in quiet moments. In my company, away from Pappa, he was impish and funny. He wanted to be a vet when he grew up. He wanted to marry a good Swedish woman and have five or six children. He wanted to travel the world, seeing mountains and canyons, campsites and airports, icebergs and deserts, skyscrapers and yurts, all the things he had read about in library books. He wanted to experience every possible incarnation of innangarðr and útangarðr—civilization and the wild. We had talked about all these things in our shared room, whispering across the darkness that separated our beds.

I had loved that boy, and I loved the man I lived with now, but they were not the same person. Some fundamental tether had snapped, and Finn no longer seemed to feel any true connection to the human world. Even with me, he interacted only as needed. We communicated about household matters and honey sales and not much else. Often, when I spoke to him, his attention seemed to drift back to me from some faraway place. We hadn’t had an intimate conversation in years. How could we? Finn had a head full of unspoken thoughts and showed his real self to no one, except the bees and Hati.

That was why he needed me. I was the only remaining bond between Finn and the rest of his own kind. I was the last vestige of a voice he still possessed. Without me, he would abandon all spoken language, retreating into a wasteland of perpetual silence. Without me, he would never leave our land, never even set eyes on another human being. Without me, he would drift further and further away from civilization like a kite on the wind with a broken string. Without me, he would leave innangarðr for útangarðr. He would be lost.

—

The raven lived, by the way. I guess I should have mentioned that earlier. Finn brought it food and water until it began to trust him and accept his help in its healing. I took no part in this. The bird had a way of looking at me as though considering whether or not I might be prey.

Once the raven was strong enough, Finn carried it out of the shed each day and gave it a chance to strut around in the grass. I would watch them from the kitchen window, marveling at the way the bird nuzzled Finn’s hand like an old, dear friend. Every so often it attempted to spread its wings, casting lace-edged shadows on the grass. At first it flapped only briefly, then folded in on itself in obvious pain. After a week, though, it was able to stretch to its full wingspan (four feet from tip to tip—I looked it up). The bird began to take flight in little hops. Whenever it grew tired, it would clamber onto Finn’s forearm so he could return it to the safety of the shed, secure from predators, provided with food and water, able to rest.

It annoyed Finn that I wouldn’t let him bring the raven inside the house, where it would have been truly safe. It annoyed me that he wanted to.

I wasn’t there when the raven flew away for good. I imagine it hopping higher with each bounce, wings beginning to pump against the wind, rising, screaming that hoarse corvid cry. I wonder if it wheeled around Finn’s head to show off its power and strength, the joyful manifestation of a complete recovery. I imagine Finn laughing with pride. Maybe the raven offered some kind of avian goodbye: a glance, a clack of beak, a brush of wings. More likely, though, it soared away without a backward glance. Wild things are like that—unattached and immediate. They have no use for Urth, weaver of the past, or Skuld the prophetess. They live only in Verthandi’s now.

40

The door was still locked.

On my fourth visit, Penny cooked dinner and we lingered over our wine.

I could tell that there would be no sex. She wasn’t in that headspace, and oddly enough I didn’t mind.

“I’m glad you could come over,” she said. “I could use a little light in my life. I don’t need to go into details or anything. I’m just wrung out.”

“What happened?”

Penny stared into her wineglass as though divining the future there. A breeze gusted through the open windows.

“I can’t get too specific,” she said. “Privacy concerns—you understand. There’s a woman who’s been calling the domestic abuse hotline for a few weeks, in fear for her life. Her husband has weapons in the house, explicit threats, the whole deal. We have systems in place for this kind of emergency extraction.” Penny paused. “We were going to get her out yesterday. He was supposed to be at work. She had her bag packed, everything ready, and then—”

She set her wineglass down with a bang, almost hard enough to shatter the stem.

“What happened?” I asked.

Penny was silent for so long that I thought she wasn’t going to answer. Her gaze was locked on something I could not see.

“He shot her three times,” she said at last. “Critical condition.”

“Oh, Penny. How awful.”

“They don’t know if she’ll make it. It doesn’t look good.”

Before I could reply, she sprang to her feet and began to stack the dirty plates.

“Let’s not talk about terrible things,” she said. “I want ice cream.”

“Sounds good.”

I attempted to help her clear the table, but she pushed my hand away. “I have my own system,” she said.

The hiss of the faucet disguised my footsteps on the stairs—at least I hoped so. There was the locked door at the end of the hall. Always locked. I tried the handle and pushed against the wood with my shoulder. I listened for movement inside. Was that a creak, a whisper? No—it was the pipes whooshing as Penny finished the dishes. I hurried back downstairs.

Dessert, a movie, and she ushered me out the front door, saying she had to get up early. She never let me sleep over; she had never slept over at my place either. As I collected my purse and slipped on my sandals, I noticed Penny casting a few quick glances up the stairs.

—

This is the truth: certain things took me right back to my childhood. No, that isn’t quite right—certain things brought me back to the immediate aftermath of the loss of my childhood.

Some people grow up gradually. It must be nice, I’ve always thought, to mature that way, slowly over time. I imagine a child climbing the ladder of years at a steady pace, each rung offering a new stage of development.

My childhood ended the day the battering ram splintered our front door.

Particular experiences—some large, some tiny—chafed against those wounds, leaving me momentarily raw. Sirens. The tramp of boots. A certain kind of male voice: booming and growly.

So it was natural, I suppose, for Penny’s locked door to become a fixation. The look of it: edges sealed shut, a wall that was not a wall. The glint of a knob: a false promise, offering entry while simultaneously preventing it. The withholding. The secrecy.

My preoccupation with that door wasn’t rational. I knew it wasn’t rational. But we cannot choose the wounds we carry.

—

Sunlight flared. The room was dark except for a gap in the curtains that sent a single slash of glow across the bed. It was early, too early. Grumbling, I went to the window, adjusted the curtains, and saw Finn seated outside in the grass.

Two ravens stood in front of him, shuffling back and forth like scraps of night left behind at sunrise. Finn was facing away from me; I could not see his expression. I rubbed my eyes to make sure I was awake. The three of them looked like a strange sort of council, a business meeting at dawn, important negotiations between different species.

One of the ravens hopped toward my brother. It deposited something in the grass, glinting in the early morning light. Finn bowed his head as though in thanks. He picked up the object—metal, maybe a key?—and closed his fingers around it. The raven scraped out a cry and its neighbor imitated the sound.

I watched with my mouth open. Could this be the same bird my brother had rescued? There was no way to tell; they all looked identical. I had heard of ravens and crows behaving this way—bringing paper clips or coins or pebbles to friendly humans. Shiny objects were prized possessions to birds. But I had always assumed these stories were urban legends.

And why was the second raven there? It crossed my sleep-addled mind that the two of them could be Thought and Memory, Odin’s spies, a pair of ravens that flew across the nine realms each day surveilling everyone, then reported back to the Allfather each night.

Perhaps it was an introduction of sorts. The raven Finn had saved might have been telling the other—its mate?—that my brother was a friend. What was the intellectual capacity of these creatures? Clearly I had underestimated what they were capable of.

They took flight. Their twin wingspans dwarfed my brother, who did not move a muscle. It was an explosive launch; I could hear the clatter of feathers through the windowpane. One of them called out and the other answered. Flight transformed them. All birds look silly on the ground, waddling awkwardly with their necks jerking forward and back like marionettes. In the air, however, the ravens were balletic, rising on the wind.

I was no longer sleepy. Still in my pajamas, I hurried down the stairs to meet Finn.

He came inside smiling down at the object in his palm. He did not notice me in the shadows. I watched as he dropped the whatever-it-was with a clink into a little ceramic bowl on the counter.

When Finn left the room, I crept into the kitchen to have a closer look. The bowl was almost full. I saw coins, keys, a single dangly earring, a dry piece of bone, a withered flower, a pebble shot through with quartz, and a dozen other gifts from the raven.

41

Later that week, the storm came. Finn and I were watching TV—a nature documentary, at his insistence—when I felt the first roll of thunder. It was distant enough that the sensation was tactile rather than auditory, a vibration in the floorboards. The day had been warm and sweet, and all the windows were open. A breeze circled the room and the temperature dropped ten degrees in a matter of seconds.

Finn muted the TV as the first droplets smacked the glass. My cellphone suddenly exploded into noise as the red box of a severe weather alert filled the screen. I resisted the urge to lecture Finn for the thousandth time about his refusal to get a phone. What if there was a weather emergency—or any other kind of emergency—and I didn’t happen to be home?

But now wasn’t the time. As one, Finn and I got to work. I ran through the house shutting the windows while he threw on a raincoat and went out to check that all the hives were securely closed. Lightning arced from window to window, turning the clouds salmon pink. By the time Finn returned, it was raining hard enough to drown out the thunder. As he peeled off his jacket, the overhead lights flickered and dimmed. We locked eyes, and the power went out.

“Fan i helvetes jävla skit,” I said. Devil in hell’s fucking shit. One of Pappa’s more colorful curses.

Lightning flared again, briefly illuminating the room—Finn frozen by the back door, raincoat in hand—then darkness, absolute. I groped across the kitchen and found the table. Another flash of lightning showed Finn in motion. He sat beside me and gave me a reassuring pat on the shoulder. Rain battered the glass, interspersed with the crackle of hail.

“Vild,” I said.

Finn grunted agreement.

The storm lasted all night. Finn did his best to comfort Hati, the poor girl trembling from snout to tail. Through the mystery of canine logic, she had decided that the hollow beneath the kitchen table was the only safe place in the house. In her puppyhood she used to sleep there, a makeshift den. Now only her head and shoulders fit fully inside the space, but still, she insisted that Finn remain at her side where it was safe and screamed in fear if he did not comply. (I was expendable, it seemed; she didn’t care if I survived the night.) I dozed on the couch as Finn sat on the floor for hours, hunched and uncomfortable, stroking Hati’s fur.

Around midnight a tree branch fell, detaching from the oak out back with a visceral groan and narrowly missing our car. Every so often Finn went out to make sure that none of the hives had blown over. Hati remained beneath the table, keening desperately until he returned. It rained so much that our entire valley flooded. In the morning Finn and I stepped outside to see our beehives transformed into an archipelago: boxy islands stranded in a gleaming, ankle-deep pool.

—

The dead man in the river came unstuck. The storm flooded valleys, choked gutters, and forced the river to overflow its banks. The roiling current untangled the corpse from the silt and reeds, then carried him through Haven, past the elementary school, under the Main Street bridge, finally depositing him in a shallow bend by the golf course. The body floated there for an hour or two, blue and bloated, staring at the sky with empty eye sockets.

Then a jogger passed the place. Her dog went wild, barking at the river. The police were called, and that evening the story hit the news.

Finn and I were sprawled on the couch, delirious from lack of sleep, sharing our usual bowl of popcorn. Hati, exhausted from her night of fear, lay drooling with her muzzle on Finn’s slipper, too tired even to notice the occasional fallen kernel. When the Breaking News banner crossed the screen, I felt a lurch of alarm in my gut, a residual response left over from my time in the hospital so many years ago.

But the story was brief—not really a story at all. The reporter could not say much about the drowned man except his approximate height and weight (six feet and two hundred pounds, for what it’s worth). Brown hair. Fingerprints nibbled away by fish. Eye color unknown; eyes no longer present. The reporter described the man’s jacket in detail: a neon-green polyester windbreaker, unaffected by tide and time. He rotted, but his jacket remained.

The corpse did not match the description of any missing persons in the area. His teeth suggested he was middle-aged and had poor oral hygiene. Viewers with any information should call the number on the screen.

42

My ninth visit to Penny’s house, and the door was still locked. I tried the handle and pushed with my knee, then my shoulder. No sound from within.

She had invited me over for breakfast. The smell of coffee floated up the stairs as I rattled the handle of the locked door one last time. I heard the pop of the toaster. I was allegedly searching her bedroom for a hoodie I hadn’t actually left there.

A glint of light caught my eye as I passed the window on my way back downstairs. The rising sun reflected off the bumper of Penny’s beat-up old pickup truck—pig ambulance, she’d called it. The vehicle was parked, as usual, at the edge of the glade. I noticed that its wheels were half buried in long grass, which meant that Penny must have mowed right around it as though it were a tree or boulder.

As before, the little forklift stood behind the pickup, so deep in shadow that it seemed two-dimensional from my vantage point. Its crane rose awkwardly into the air, as bony and sharp as a witch’s finger. Oddly, it seemed to have changed position. The pickup had been stationary long enough to watch the grass grow around it, but the forklift was now facing the other way. I wondered vaguely what Penny had been transporting around the grounds.

She and I settled at her sun-painted table, sipping mugs of coffee. She sat with her knees against her chest, toes curled to hold on to the edge of the chair. She always sat like that. There was something endearingly childlike about it.

“So what’s with the locked door?” I blurted out. I hadn’t meant to ask right then—and certainly not so bluntly. But the question had been ricocheting around in my head for so long that I could no longer contain it.

Penny jolted, spilling coffee on her sweatpants. She made a production of dabbing at the wet blotch with a napkin.

“Which door?” she asked, her tone airy.

“The one upstairs at the end of the hall. It’s always locked.”

“You’ve been checking?” Her expression hardened. “Why have you been checking that door?”

I didn’t back down. “I’ve been curious. It’s odd to have a door that’s always locked. Isn’t it?”

“Well, not that it’s any of your business, but that’s my office. I need to keep it private for security reasons.”

“Security.”

“Yes. The hotline, you know. And the websites I design. Confidentiality. My clients…” She trailed off, then rose to her feet and cleared the table, slamming the plates and cups into the sink.

“Can I see your office?” I asked.

She turned toward me, her expression harder still. Something about the impassivity of her eyes seemed familiar, though I knew I had never seen that look on her face before.

“No,” she said. “Like I said, it’s private.”

“I just want to see what it’s like in there.”

“No.”

It was our first disagreement. She seemed calm—icy, even—while I was sweating through my shirt. I couldn’t think straight. There was no way to articulate why I needed her to open that door.

“You should go,” she said.

I went.

—

Back home, I parked under the oak tree to keep the car in the shade. Despite the early hour, many of the hives were bearding. To keep the interior of the box from overheating, the bees crawled outside and pooled around the mouth of the entryway in a goatee of mumbling bodies.

I entered the house to find Finn crouching in the kitchen. There was something at his feet—gray, motionless, prostrate, Hati. Her eyes were open, legs rigid. There was froth around her mouth.

Finn exploded to his feet and snatched the car keys from my hand with such force that he scraped my palm.

He drove twenty miles over the speed limit the whole way to the vet. I clutched the little bar above the door at each sharp turn. Finn’s shoulders were hunched, face flushed. Rage and distress radiated off him in waves. I wondered how long he had been waiting, unable to reach me. It had never been a problem before that we shared a single car. After all, Finn never left the property unless I made him.

Hati whimpered in the back seat. I was reassured by the sound—proof of life—but Finn grimaced and increased his speed.

In the parking lot, he gathered Hati in his arms and kicked open the door of the clinic before I’d even unbuckled my seat belt. At the sight of this six-foot blond Adonis holding out a horse-sized creature with trailing gray fur, the receptionist sat stunned behind her desk as though she’d forgotten what her job entailed.

Later, as the vet examined Hati in a back room, Finn paced the lobby like an expectant father in an old-timey movie. The receptionist tracked his movements from behind her desk, her whole head swiveling. I wondered if she realized she was doing it.

“You need to get a cellphone,” I told Finn.

He gave me a look that meant, Can we have this fight some other time?

“I’m serious,” I said. “If you’d had one today…”

I trailed off, not wanting to rub salt in the wound. Finn collapsed into the chair beside me and buried his head in his hands. I patted his back. He shook me off. We sat for another half an hour before the vet emerged through the swinging doors, pulling off her rubber gloves.

Finn ran to her, causing her to step back in alarm. She was a stocky woman with a cap of gray curls. Next to my brother, she looked as short as a child.

“What’s wrong with Hati?” I asked, assuming my role as Finn’s voice.

“Classic symptoms of stroke.”

Finn groaned.

“One side of her face is paralyzed. She might have suffered a seizure too.”

Finn knotted his fingers in his hair.

“She’s holding steady, but these things can come in clusters. I’d like to keep her here overnight.”

Finn turned away.

“What caused this?” I asked. “Is there anything we could have done to prevent it?”

The vet shrugged. “She’s an old dog.” Her voice was gentle; I wondered how often she’d said these words before. “They can’t live forever.”

43

Penny didn’t call. I didn’t either. I wasn’t sure which of us was giving the other the silent treatment.

To be clear, I didn’t think she was hiding a torture room behind the locked door. I had no reason to doubt her assertion that it was an office. In fact, I could easily picture how she would decorate the space: an antique desk, a chair that didn’t match, numerous soft lamps, and every surface covered with stacks of confidential files. It made sense.

Besides, who would keep a torture chamber upstairs? The whole point of a basement was the concrete floor that sloped downward to a drain in the center. Long ago, Amber Lopez had told me that Ulf kept a pressurized hose in our basement to spray the place clean—blood and bodily fluids sluicing out of sight.

For the record, I didn’t for one moment imagine that Penny would ever hurt anyone. That goes without saying, doesn’t it? She was a vegetarian lesbian who lived in a forest glade and kept animals for the joy of it. The very definition of a pacifist soul.

That night I couldn’t sleep, which had become the norm. In Hávamál, Odin made the excellent point that only an unwise man would lie awake worrying, since his troubles would still be there in the morning but now he would be tired and less capable of coping with them.

I followed the teachings of Odin whenever possible, but some things were beyond my control. So I pottered around the living room and tried in vain to focus on a rerun of my favorite crime show. I could hear Finn snoring through the ceiling. For years, that sound had been the backdrop of my sleepless nights: a tiny, harmless thunderstorm. But I had never before been sure whether Finn or Hati was the source. Now I knew.

Darkness brings out our worst impulses, doesn’t it? Wicked things move under the cover of night, and there are wicked things in all of us. When I opened my laptop, it was late enough that the fireflies had powered down and the cicadas had gone silent.

Ulf Thorvaldsson, Coldwater Correctional Facility, Tin Hill, Iowa.

I thought of Hati, weak and scared, barely alive, in a vet clinic all alone. When was the last time she had slept a night without Finn? Her memoryless puppyhood, surely.

I thought of Blackbeard’s murder, still unsolved. If Penny was right, it would never be solved. Where was his body now? Had it been disposed of—buried or cremated—or was it still in cold storage in the morgue, kept as evidence?

I thought of the corpse torn loose from a net of reeds, floating eyeless down the floodplain of the river toward discovery.

I thought of the man who had vanished from his home, leaving his daughter to return from spring break to empty rooms and a fridge full of spoiled food.

Three men in their prime. Ulf’s preferred prey.

Ulf Thorvaldsson, Coldwater Correctional Facility, Tin Hill, Iowa.

Three was a sacred number to the Vikings. Consider the Norns. Look at Loki’s monstrous children. Count the realms of the dead. And Yggdrasil was anchored to the ground by a triad of roots of unimaginable size and depth.

Stories, too, are built around the number three. Fairy tales are rife with trios: blind mice, little pigs, bears, billy goats Gruff, and my favorite, “The Three Dogs,” a Swedish classic. Even Christians have a holy trinity.

The definition of a serial killer is someone who has killed three or more people.

There at the kitchen table, I took a steadying breath. I gathered up what remained of my logical faculties. Three unrelated events did not make a pattern; the number alone was not enough. I reminded myself that humans are story-making creatures. We see causation where only correlation exists. The randomness of life is unbearable, so we make meaning from static and silence.

A true pattern requires repetition and rhythm. This situation lacked both. One dead man had been overtly, unquestionably murdered and his body displayed for all to see. Another had been lost in the water so long that his cause of death was unknown. And the third might not be dead at all; he was simply gone.

No pattern, no Norns, no serial killer.

In truth, these tragedies had nothing in common except that each man met the specific criteria of Ulf Thorvaldsson’s victim pool. Here, now, in this place, in this time, they had nothing in common except me.

By the same token, the locked door at Penny’s house was inherently meaningless. Ulf had kept a secret room for torture; Penny kept a private room for, well, privacy. Two locked doors with nothing in common except me.

Deep breath.

I am not sure what made me do what I did next. I meant well—I know that much. Americans have an idiom about good intentions and the road to hell (by which they mean Helheim, I believe).

At any rate, I decided to check the missing persons database. I was curious about how the system worked. Would the name of the missing man be there already? What other information might be given about him? The database was a matter of public record, but the website, like most government interfaces, was difficult to navigate. It was ordered around counties, oddly enough. Haven lay within the borders of Milo County, so that was where I conducted my search.

And there he was. Out of 521.4 square miles, thirty-seven towns, and a population of 43,081, exactly one person had gone missing this year.

Good news. Calming down.

I should have stopped there. I wish I had stopped there, while I still could.

I wish many things were different.

You must remember that every single one of Ulf Thorvaldsson’s victims seemed to disappear. He did not simply murder these men; he erased them from their lives and left their loved ones in a permanent state of waiting and wondering.

You must remember that he killed for decades.

So, against my better judgment, almost against my will, I unspun the Wheel of Time. I went back to January and kept scrolling the wrong way through the days, a retrogression of months, the cursor dancing across the screen as the snow of December drifted off the ground in a powdery mesh and melted upward into clouds, then the inverted sleet of November, the damp carpet of October leaves rising and reattaching to the branches of trees, in September a flaming riot of fall foliage gradually greening, the air hotter every day as the dog days of summer exploded backward into August, the chorus of July cicadas, a riotous flowery June with a pollen-rich breeze, May blooms gradually sealing into buds, grasses sinking into the ground, April thunderstorms, a March filled with swarms of bees, February darkening, thaw thickening into freeze, another January, further back, an undoing, the sick swing of time unraveling, the heartache of a cycle without end.

I won’t bore you with the names of the men who disappeared. Their details don’t matter. The names of the towns don’t matter either. They lie strewn across the landscape of Milo County, many miles away from Haven.

Last year, a man of forty-seven. By all accounts, he left home of his own accord, abandoning his wife and children without a backward glance. Reading between the lines of an article published at the time, I deduced that the guy was rumored to have been abusive. Good riddance—that was the general consensus.

Two years ago, a man of fifty-one. He was an avid swimmer who did twenty laps like clockwork every morning in a lake near his home. His towel and sandals were found on the beach where he always placed them before entering the water. The lake was too murky and deep for his body to ever be discovered.

I stared at the screen with aching eyes. When was the last time I had blinked? A screech owl cried out somewhere in the forest: a sobbing, ghastly plea. The sound was so in keeping with my mood that I did not notice it at first.

Three years ago, a man of sixty-two. He was a known gambling addict and this was not his first sudden, unexplained disappearance. In the past, he had returned from his binges once he was broke and broken. This time he didn’t.

Three years ago—a few months earlier—a man of thirty-eight. An elementary school teacher, he drove his car to the edge of a cliff and parked among the trees. The car was found there; he was not. Conclusions were drawn.

The photos of the missing men offered very little. The images had gone through too many transmutations, camera to email attachment to resized image to my laptop screen. Smudgy and pixelated, they could have been anyone.

Four years ago, June, a man of twenty-five. He was a garage mechanic, always on the verge of being fired from his job for lateness and insubordination. When he didn’t turn up for work one day, his boss reported him missing, mostly to avoid the hassle of having to pay unemployment if the guy ever came back.

Six missing persons. All men.

I scrolled further back through time, but the garage mechanic was the last one (the first one) to vanish. There were no other missing persons reported in Milo County, male or female, for two decades prior.

The screech owl called again, scraping the air. I startled so badly that I nearly fell out of my seat. Maybe I was suffering from PTSD. I’d heard the term from time to time, though I didn’t really know what it meant.

Six missing people over a period of years out of a population of tens of thousands of citizens across an entire county was a drop in the bucket. In addition, every disappearance made sense. The missing men had left clues: a towel folded on a beach, a car parked at the edge of a cliff, a history of similar behavior. They had vanished in accordance with their temperaments: a gambling addiction, a rebellious streak, a pattern of abuse. Everything fit.

Ulf Thorvaldsson would have hunted each one of them with the unquenchable bloodlust of a wolf-warrior. He would have tortured them to death in our basement and buried their mangled bodies on our land.

The screech owl shattered the silence once more. It sounded like it was moving away, but I knew the call was meant to be deceptive. Mice and rabbits would believe the owl had flown off. They would creep from their hiding places and die in a bomb blast of talons striking earth.

What was the significance of owls to the Vikings? Hadn’t they belonged to Frigga, Odin’s wife, goddess of strategy and prophecy? Yes, I remembered now. Owls were her totem, renowned for their wisdom because of their connection to her.

And there was more—wasn’t there? Yes, Pappa had once told me that owls could travel between worlds. They could pass between Midgard and Helheim, between the living and the dead.

44

I drove to Penny’s house so fast that I nearly killed myself on the way. It was three a.m. and the roads were mostly deserted, but then, without warning, a minivan pulled out of a gas station into my lane. I slammed on the horn and swerved wildly. We missed each other by inches.

Even at the time, I understood that I had gone insane. The locked door, the locked door—I needed Penny to open it, which made no sense, nothing to do with Ulf, nothing to do with six lost men, nothing nothing nothing, but there I was, driving faster than I’d ever risked before, hoping I didn’t get pulled over, because what could I possibly say? There was no justification for my behavior—I couldn’t even justify it to myself. I had gone beyond logic, beyond explanations. My head rang with a high, frantic keening, the wail of a child too young to possess language. I was going to lose Penny, I might already have lost myself, I had never in my life been this far from reason, and still I couldn’t stop.

Her mailbox looked even lonelier in the dark. I parked outside the gate, realizing with a lurch that I could drive no farther. There were three locks and chains to keep me out. In the past Penny had always walked down her long, green-ceilinged driveway to open the gate for me. Without any clear plan, I approached on foot. Maybe I could climb over it, using the ropy vines of kudzu as leverage.

But the locks were open, the chains hanging loose. I stood stupefied for a moment, trying to verify what I was seeing. I ran my fingers over each lock, touching the empty hole where the pin should have been. They hung from the chain like baubles on a Christmas tree, decorative, without purpose.

Had Penny somehow divined my coming and left the entryway open for me? Not possible. Were the locks always open, a mere pretense of safety? No—I had seen Penny working the keys; I had heard the grind of the tumblers in motion. Had she forgotten to lock the gate tonight of all nights? That didn’t seem possible either. She was meticulous to the point of obsession about her privacy.

I dragged the gate open on its creaking hinges. I drove through, parked again, and pulled the gate shut behind my car. I passed through the tunnel of tangled vines brushing my windshield. When the portal opened into clean air, I finally drew breath.

A few bright rectangles floated against the darkness. Lamps in windows. I had expected this. Penny never turned off all the lights around the house while she slept. The house was too big, too eerie, too unnavigable in total black.

If I banged on her front door and insisted on opening that locked room at three in the morning, she would see how damaged I actually was. She would see the real self I had hidden all these years from everyone but Finn.

But if I didn’t find out the truth, I would lose whatever last vestiges remained of my sanity. There was no right answer.

Before I could decide how to proceed, I heard the whine of her front door opening. The porch light came on and Penny appeared, dressed in jeans rather than pajamas.

“You’re early,” she called. “It’ll be a few minutes.”

I took a step toward her, then faltered. The world, already sideways, turned all the way upside down.

Penny came down the porch stairs, squinting into the dark. “Oh my god, Liv?” she cried. “Is that you?”

“It’s me,” I said in a hoarse voice. Nothing made sense, but this question, at least, I understood.

“Liv,” she moaned. “Oh god, no.”

“How can I be early? I don’t—I was coming here to—How?”

Penny was a featureless silhouette, except for backlit tufts of hair that glowed around her head like the corona of a solar eclipse. I blinked, blinked again, and pinched myself; I had read this was a way to determine whether you were dreaming. It didn’t work.

“You can’t be here.” There was no mistaking the distress in her voice. “What are you doing here?”

“I don’t understand. Were you waiting for me? Who were you waiting for?”

“You have to leave,” she shouted. “Go!”

I took another step toward her. If I could meet the solidity of her gaze, touch her like a talisman, I might find my way back to reality.

“Go!” she repeated, waving me away with a savage gesture. “Get in your car and go.”

Then I heard the last thing I expected. A child’s voice piped up from inside the house. Sweet, high-pitched, a little song. A tiny figure emerged onto the porch, pigtailed, maybe three or four years old, clutching a stuffed animal.

“Is that them?” the girl asked.

“No—no—” Penny was stammering in her agitation. “Honey, it’s nothing. It’s not them, but it’s fine. Go back into the house, okay?”

“Who is it?” the child asked. I caught a note of fear.

“It’s my friend,” Penny said. “Everything is okay. They’re coming soon. It’s okay. It’s okay.”

“What’s happening?” I whispered. I didn’t expect an answer and I did not get one.

The hinges of the front door squeaked and a third figure padded down the front steps, a woman carrying a suitcase that bumped against her thigh.

“Is it time?” she asked.

“Not quite,” Penny said. “It isn’t them. It’s my friend.”

“Who?” the woman gasped out. “A friend? You said nobody—You said—”

“We can trust her, okay? And she’s leaving. She’s leaving.”

Penny hurried toward me, slipping beyond the glow of the porch light and melting into darkness. I felt her hard little hands on my shoulders, shoving me back toward my car. I stumbled and almost fell, but she grabbed my arm like a vise and steered me to the driver’s-side door.

“I can’t believe you did this,” she hissed. “What were you thinking? Why now?” She opened the car door and flung me inside.

“What’s happening?” I tried one last time.

“Go!” Her voice rose. “And don’t you dare tell anybody about this. Not even Finn. You understand? If you tell anyone, I will kill you.” She spat the words between her teeth. “I will kill you. Do you believe me?”

“Yes.”

I turned on the car and the headlights blazed into life. For just a moment I saw the strangers clearly: a woman with her arm in a sling, blond hair dripping down her shoulders, and a little girl at her side, chin lifted, holding a stuffed turtle against her chest with both arms.

I swung the wheel and plunged back into the forest.

On my way toward town, I passed only one car. Its headlights met mine, a quick glance, and then it was gone, heading back the way I had come.

45

The sun rose bloody that morning, in keeping with my mood. I hadn’t slept a wink. In the bathroom mirror, my eyes were red-rimmed, while the rest of my face appeared eerily ashen. Some people needed beauty sleep; I needed sleep to prevent myself from looking like an extra in a horror movie.

The dawn summoned Finn downstairs. It took him a moment to register me sitting at the kitchen table, sipping my coffee, hands trembling with fatigue around the mug. He did an actual double take, his gaze passing over me and then slowly returning to my face. Neither of us could remember the last time I’d been in the kitchen in the morning before him.

“I’m okay,” I said, answering his tacit question. “Really.”

He tilted his head to the side like a dog tracking a faraway sound.

“Really,” I said.

His expression suggested that he was not convinced. Of course he wasn’t—I was a wreck—but before we could discuss it further, my cellphone chimed.

Get back here, Penny had texted. NOW.

“I have to go,” I said, rising to my feet. “I’ll be back in time to get Hati from the vet.”

Finn glared suspiciously.

“I promise,” I said. “They don’t open until ten. I’ll pick you up and we’ll be the first ones through the door.”

He grabbed a notepad from the counter and wrote: If you’re not back in time, I’ll kill you.

I nodded wearily. Everyone I cared about was threatening my life today.

—

Penny hadn’t slept either. Her coppery complexion hid her fatigue better than my pallor, but there were bags under her eyes and her forehead was scored with fine lines. Before I had even turned off the car, she was at the driver’s-side window, cupping her hands around her face to look in. Despite the early hour, the air already brimmed with heat.

Penny took my hand and towed me across the open grass. She pushed me onto the porch swing and sat beside me, knees to chest, toes gripping the edge of the seat. Her expression was a mixture of sleepy and haunted. It sounds cliché—it is cliché—but I felt like I was seeing her for the first time.

Neither of us spoke for a while. Bees droned in the steamy air. Penny wrapped her arms around her legs and laid the plane of her cheek on her knees.

“You can’t tell anyone,” she whispered without looking at me.

“I won’t.”

“You don’t understand. You can’t tell anyone. Not ever.”

“I won’t.”

“People will die if you do. I mean literally die.”

“I understand.”

She wiped her eyes with the heel of her palm. I’d never seen her cry before. “Sometimes they stay just one night,” she said. “Sometimes it’s longer. And they don’t just come from Haven. They come to me from all over Michigan.”

I pointed at her front door. “Safe house?”

“Yes.” The tears were still coming. “Do you see? All this…” She gestured around the sunny glade. “Everything about the way I live…” A sob caught in her throat.

I waited for her to compose herself enough to tell me what she needed to tell me. The chickens clucked and scratched in their coop. The pigs’ stink was pleasant today—the ripe, muddy, full-bodied smell of healthy animals.

“I live like this to keep them safe,” Penny said. “Nobody in Haven knows anything about me. Only ten people, maybe, would even recognize me on the street. That’s intentional. It’s so important, what I do. It’s like witness protection, but without, you know, any help from law enforcement. Without any help.”

“The mailbox on the side of the road,” I said. “The locks on the gate.”

Penny nodded. “When a victim leaves their abuser, that’s the most dangerous time. That’s the time when women—children, children—are killed. We get them out. There’s a network of us. It’s like a CIA extraction.” She wiped her eyes with her fingertips. “Abusers will go to incredible lengths to find their victims. You have no idea.”

I lifted my gaze to the wildflower garden, crowned with glittering bees.

“I thought you just liked your solitude,” I said.

She gave a shaky laugh. “That too. People irritate me. Most people.”

Without warning, she rose to her feet and grabbed my hand again. I stumbled along behind her as she towed me inside and up the stairs. She released me when we reached the all-important door. I noticed for the first time that the knob was ornate brass.

“Open it,” she said.

“Really?”

“It’s unlocked. You need to see for yourself, don’t you?”

The hinges creaked as the door swung wide to reveal a room larger than I’d expected. Three bureaus, two twin beds, and a toy box overflowing with blocks and wooden trains and stuffed animals. I noted a stack of fold-up cots and playpens. The air was stuffy. Blackout curtains kept out any gleam of natural light. The walls were decorated with children’s art: crayon scribbles, finger-painted smears, and intricately rendered pencil sketches.

I didn’t want to go into the room; it felt like a violation. But Penny nudged me gently over the threshold.

“Do you see why I couldn’t tell you?” she asked.

I nodded.

“They can’t go anywhere they could be found,” she said. “No friends or neighbors or anything. Can’t use credit cards or phones or laptops. You’d be amazed how many times the abuser is monitoring everything—email, texts, social media. I’ve seen it all. Cloned phones. Tracking devices.” She sucked in a breath. “Even the shelters aren’t safe. Not really. Abusers know to look there. And the facilities aren’t equipped to handle, you know, some lunatic with an automatic rifle.”

“So the women come here,” I said.

She sank onto the nearest bed. “There are a few of us all over the state. In every state. They call us ‘angels,’ but that seems, I don’t know, over-the-top. We shelter them for as long as they need.” Her eyes were glassy from crying. “Pets too. People stay sometimes because they can’t bear to leave their pet with their abuser.” She spread her hands. “Dogs welcome. Cats. We’ve had gerbils and guinea pigs. Once even a parrot.”

Up close, the drawings on the walls were more intense than I’d realized. Among the traditional childish fare—boxy houses, stick figures, and lollipop flowers—there were images of battle and magic. I saw monsters in cages and knights fighting dragons. One particularly vivid sketch depicted a swimmer fleeing the groping tentacles of a kraken. My long-ago renderings of Ragnarök would have fit right in.

“They don’t just stay in this room,” Penny said. “They’re not prisoners or anything. They eat with me in the kitchen and the kids can play outside and stuff. Feed the chickens and the pigs. If we ever hear the gate—that’s why I never oil the hinges—they go upstairs and lock the door.”

“Are there always people here?” I asked. “Every time I’ve come over, were there little kids hiding in here trying to be quiet?”

Penny shook her head. “I’ve had a couple of adults staying with me when you’ve been here. I always go to your place when there are kids, though. I don’t want them cooped up and trying to be quiet. That’s scary for them, you know?”

“Yeah.”

“But one adult by herself—that’s fine. You can come over, and she can just read and relax in here until you leave.” Penny frowned a little. “That’s why I don’t do sleepovers.”

“Right.”

“It’s not always women. Usually but not always. Men have stayed here. Trans people, genderqueer—there aren’t so many in rural Michigan, but it’s especially tough for them.”

I walked around the room. The bureaus were different heights, one painted blue, two bare wood. Both bed frames had seen better days. The rug was frayed at the edges and a threadbare track down the middle showed the path of feet.

“I never should have let you into my life,” Penny said.

My heart dropped. I had been prepared for this—hoping for the best but expecting the worst.

She must have seen the despair in my face. “I mean that I never should have dated anyone.” She gestured back and forth between us. “Not like this. Not for real.”

There was an ache in my throat. I would have cried if I could.

“Before last night,” Penny said, “or this morning, I guess, only three people knew about my safe house. Me, the coordinator here in Haven, and the head of the shelter in Kalamazoo. A lot of people come to me from there.”

“And now I know too.” I sat on the bed beside her. “I won’t tell anyone. I won’t, Penny.”

She swept me up and down with her gaze. She had never looked at me like that before—dispassionate, analytical, as though assessing my value. A bead of sweat dripped down my chest. Her gaze heated the air between us like sunlight focused through the beam of a magnifying glass.

“Okay,” she said.

“Okay?”

“I believe you.”

I gaped at her. “You do? Just like that?”

She stood up, grabbed my hand, pulled me to my feet, and towed me out of the room. The hallway looked different now—poky, ordinary.

“Shut the door, Liv,” Penny said softly.

My hand was sweaty, making the knob difficult to turn. The door looked better closed.

“You have secrets,” she said. “I can tell. Things you haven’t shared with anybody.”

“Yes.”

“So you know how to do it,” she said. “Keep a secret. Forever.”

Again I felt the tingle of unshed tears. Surely it couldn’t be this easy. I had come prepared to plead, get down on my knees, offer a blood pact, anything she wanted. I had never imagined that her trust could be so freely given.

“Honestly, it’s a relief,” Penny said. “Now I don’t have to be so weird with you.”

She went up on tiptoe and kissed me. We had been a couple for long enough that we could communicate a great deal with a kiss. In this moment, she was telling me that she was calm, adoring, and exhausted. I answered with profound relief, such bone-deep relief that it turned my legs to water.

“You look like shit,” Penny said.

“You too.”

“We both need a nap.”

“I have to leave by nine. The dog—I have to pick up Finn.”

Penny checked her watch. “That’s hours away.”

The adrenaline was shaking loose from my body, leaving me as limp as cooked spaghetti. We climbed beneath her sheets; it was too hot for the quilt. The ceiling fan swung in a dreamy orbit. The hum of bees mingled with the snuffling of the pigs in a strange lullaby.

46

Hati recovered, though she was never the same. Her gait wobbled and she listed to the side when she drank from her bowl. Her face was half immobilized: one eye alert and the other drooping. She seemed to have lost most of her hearing too. I had to call her several times before she glanced my way, and she always seemed surprised to see me there.

Finn and I had named her when he first brought her home from the shelter. I’d thrown out suggestions—Pepper, Smoke, Midnight—all of which Finn vetoed. Finally I offered Hati, after the wolf that chased the moon across the sky. My brother had given me two thumbs up, though I remembered the sly smile he wore, as though indulging a child in a game of pretend. I hadn’t understood the expression then, but I did now.

Hati’s name existed for my benefit only. I was the only one who ever spoke to her. Perhaps Finn had a gesture that functioned like a name, but I suspected it wasn’t necessary. He and Hati communicated in the manner of animals. Names were a human custom. The loss of her hearing didn’t affect her relationship with him in any way. He spoke to her as he had always done, in gestures, in silence, and she understood him perfectly.

—

On a July afternoon, I opened a jar of honey and daubed my bee suit all over with flecks of sticky gold. When I was done, the fabric resembled the pelt of an albino leopard: white fur patterned with flaxen spots. With care, I stepped into the suit and zipped it up. I did not want to smear honey on the floor or my body; I wanted to keep each precious droplet on the outside of the cloth, where it was needed.

Then I walked to the hives with my arms spread. I could only imagine what I looked like, lumbering along in the heat like some bizarre, polka-dotted mummy. As I neared the bees, the ambient drone of their wings increased to an excited thrum. They understood immediately why I was there: I had brought them a snack, offering up my bee suit as a plate. I engaged in this ritual a few times each summer. It was not a part of the work of beekeeping; it served no purpose except to bring me joy and deepen my friendship with the ninety superorganisms I so profoundly adored.

A cloud of bees surrounded me. To the untutored eye it might have looked like a swarm, but there was no urgency to their thronging. They swirled in a slow-motion tornado, landing on the fabric of my suit, piling up in squirmy clots on each precious morsel, investigating even my feet, all of them trying to grab a mouthful of honey before it was gone.

Quickly I lost both sight and hearing. The bees smothered my faceplate and hood, blotting out the light while humming deliriously in my ears, loud enough to obscure any other sound. The sensory overload made me shiver. The weight of them: Was I imagining it? Could I feel the heft of so many tiny bodies heaped on my shoulders, wriggling along my forearms, and cupped in my hands? There seemed to be heat too. Was the robe of bees thick enough—active enough—to generate warmth?

My hope was to offer them a surprise, interrupting their workday with something unexpected and delightful, a snack break in the nonstop labor of their lives. Maybe, in this brief instant, they experienced something akin to fun. I certainly did.

They circled me until there was no more honey to be gathered. My faceplate cleared, and the roar in my ears diminished until I could once more hear the wind. Most of the bees departed, but a few remained on my person for a while longer. I watched them sunbathing on my hands and nestling in the folds of my sleeves before they left me for good.

—

July 30 was my birthday, though I scarcely remembered the fact. Birthdays didn’t matter in Viking tradition. In our adulthood, Finn and I had continued Pappa’s lack of celebrations.

When Penny invited me over for dinner, I didn’t think anything of it until I opened her front door—I had my own set of keys now, a new milestone—and saw balloons and streamers hanging from the ceiling. A banner read Happy Birthday. I wondered briefly whose birthday it was before remembering the date.

Penny had attempted köttbullar, my favorite dish from childhood: meatballs in a creamy gravy, along with egg noodles, lingonberry jam, and pickled cucumbers. She had done her best, but it was a gooey imitation of the meal. I praised it to the skies, of course. After dinner she brought out a cake with pink frosting. It had been my understanding that birthday cakes should bear the same number of candles as the celebrant’s age. But thirty-four was a lot, so Penny had found candles in the shape of each number.

“Close your eyes,” she said. “Make a wish.”

I didn’t—wishes were not a Viking custom either—but I pretended for her benefit.

She also gave me a gift. I unwrapped a small box, surprisingly heavy, to find a tiny onyx wolf ensconced in tissue paper. It fit in my palm, cold and meticulously carved; it even had teeth.

“You talk a lot about wolves,” Penny said shyly. “I know they’re a big deal in—in your culture.”

A flash of memory. A similar figurine on an end table in my childhood home. That long-ago stone wolf—a little larger and less glossy—had been one of only a few relics Pappa had brought with him from Sweden. I remembered now that Finn had packed it in his suitcase during our final visit home.

Where was it now? Did Finn still have it in the back of a closet somewhere? Had he thrown it away?

“I love it,” I said, folding my fingers over the little creature, concealing it from view.

47

The man who had been dredged from the river was identified. Or, rather, his death was explained.

Months earlier, it seemed, a group of friends had been playing darts at Haven Happy Hour, a bar in the newer part of town. As they ordered more rounds and argued about the score, they noticed a stranger hunched in a corner, cap over his eyes, nursing a beer. At closing time, as the group put away the darts and gathered up their things, the stranger left first, alone, visibly staggering in his drunkenness.

Eventually the friends, too, stumbled out into the night. Then they heard a splash. The river was not far off. One woman—presumably the least inebriated—hurried down to the water’s edge and saw a large shape floating on the current. The streetlamps were too far away to offer much light, and the river was high and capped with foam, but she thought it was a human figure, face down, with its arms and legs spread. She waded into the water, where the bottom was squelchy with mud and tangled with reeds, and lost her balance, getting soaked. By the time the others joined her, there was no sign of a drowned person or anything else, only ripples glimmering.

The woman called the police, but between the chattering of her teeth, the slurring of her words, and the drunken interjections of her friends, the cops hung up without coming out to investigate. They did not even make a note of the call.

And so, when the corpse was discovered several months later, there was no police report to connect the body to the woman’s explanation. It took a while for the pieces to come together. Eventually she and her friends heard the news, made the connection, came to the station, and identified the stranger’s neon-green jacket. Case closed. No foul play, just a cautionary tale about the dangers of overindulgence.

Perhaps I should have been relieved. Of all the ways to die, an accident is bad, but almost anything is better than murder.

I was not relieved.

Death is a story. Or perhaps I should say that the moment of death is a story. To a certain extent, its form is always the same: it starts with a person and concludes with a corpse. The middle of the tale is the cause of death—the sole variation, the part that matters. The middle of Robert Ridley’s story was a kitchen knife. For the drowned man, it was a lungful of water. Pappa had hoped that his would be a blade in battle. Every mortal creature can expect to undergo this same narrative structure, more or less.

My point is that the drowned man’s story was now complete. He, like Blackbeard, had been gifted with a beginning, middle, and end. (I would, of course, have preferred to know who murdered Robert Ridley, but at least I knew how, and that was enough.)

You see it, don’t you? You see the same things I saw.

The true pattern had been somewhere else all along. Blackbeard and the drowned man were outliers. They had always been outliers. Behind the dazzling horror of a murder and the icky mystery of a waterlogged corpse, six men were still missing. Through the passage of years, among tens of thousands of busy lives, across hundreds of miles, six living people had slipped into ether and betweenness.

Missing people have no stories.

When a loved one is taken from you, there are two kinds of loss. The first, naturally, is the wrenching absence. But the second is stranger, subtler. You are left with only part of the story. You have the beginning, a person, a living soul, and then—

No middle. No end.

What happened? What happened?

It is the pain of the missing story that lingers the longest. So I have been told, anyway. Given enough time, you can learn to live peacefully alongside grief. You can learn to stop hoping—but you will never stop wondering. The lack of a story is a wound that never heals.

—

On a morning in August, I called Amber Lopez. I waited as long as I could bear it, sipping my coffee at the kitchen table and glaring at the clock on the wall, which was refusing to tick at an acceptable pace. At dawn Finn came downstairs carrying Hati, as she could no longer manage the steps. He settled her gently on her feet; she swayed a little, getting her bearings, then shuffled over to her water bowl and began shlopping away.

Finn was getting used to my newly chaotic schedule—sometimes awake before him, sometimes asleep until noon. He passed me without acknowledgment, opened the back door, and let in a swell of humid air. The sun was just rising, the light touching only the high branches of the tallest trees. Finn slipped on his sneakers. He and Hati typically greeted the sunrise with a walk. She could no longer follow him into the forest, but they could circle the house, Finn strolling slowly to keep pace with her.

I glanced at the clock again: 6:42. It was not a reasonable hour to call someone, but I couldn’t wait any longer. As soon as Finn and Hati were out of earshot, I picked up my phone and scrolled through my contacts.

Right after the raid on our home, back when Finn was in the hospital, Amber Lopez had given me a business card with her private cell number handwritten on the back. She told me to call her anytime. She pressed the card into my palm, telling me she meant it—anytime.

I had taken her at her word. As a teenager, I sometimes found that checking the department of corrections website was not enough to calm me down. What if Ulf had broken out of his cell in the past few hours and nobody had updated the system yet? Surely the guards would be too busy in the wake of such a catastrophe to sign in to the database, fill out the appropriate forms, and change Ulf’s status.

I had read about the phenomenon of light speed in a library book. The distances between celestial bodies were so vast that light took years to cross from one to another. A faraway star might have exploded or contracted into nothingness even as it appeared to twinkle in our night sky. Its true state of being might not become visible to us for decades, even centuries. What if the comfort of my father’s name on the screen was the same kind of illusion?

So, when the racing of my mind got to be too much, I would call Amber Lopez. She always answered, even in a meeting, even at two in the morning. Her voice was as warm and welcome as a fire in the grate on a winter night. She treated my fears seriously. She would briefly end our call, then phone me back a few minutes later to assure me that she’d spoken to the warden of the Coldwater Correctional Facility, who had checked the surveillance cameras personally.

Ulf hadn’t broken out. He would never get out.

Throughout my teenage years, Amber and I went through this cycle every few months. In retrospect, I doubt she ever really called the prison. She understood that what I actually needed was the confident reassurance of a trusted adult.

Eventually I matured enough to accept that Ulf would remain in prison without my anxious vigilance. I was trying to control something that could not be controlled, and I was hurting myself in the process, thinking too much about Pappa, not letting myself move on.

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt the need to call Amber.

I got her voicemail. She was probably asleep, like any other sensible human being. Her outgoing message was an earthy alto, deepened by time.

“This is Liv Ulfsson,” I said, using my full name in case she needed to look me up among her cases, though I doubted she had forgotten my father and me. “Can you give me a call when you have a chance? I just wanted…Anyway, thanks.” I paused a little too long, then hung up.

48

Amber texted me back a few hours later: On assignment. Will call tomorrow. Heart emoji.

I called Penny, who didn’t answer either.

Finn was sitting on the porch with Hati, brushing her fur. Every day she seemed to shed her body weight in fluff. Finn did his best to remove the excess fur outdoors, where the wind would carry it away, but little gray tumbleweeds still constantly drifted across our floors and accumulated in the corners.

Penny texted back in the afternoon: Doing thing.

This was our new code. She was too busy being an angel to see me. Unlike Penny, I enjoyed the term, which seemed theatrical but appropriate.

There was a remarkable symmetry to her presence in my life. My father had murdered people; she saved them. My father kept a locked room to torture his victims to death; Penny kept a locked room to rescue, to protect. I had somehow found my way into a beautiful antithesis of my childhood. Shadows transformed into glow. Dark made bright. Devil into angel, you might say. Poetic redemption.

—

I haven’t told you enough about bees. Don’t laugh—I mean that I haven’t yet talked about the fact that bees are essential to all life on Earth. They are such efficient pollinators that they have cornered the market. Butterflies, wasps, birds, and even the wind contribute to the greater cause, but it is the bees who ensure that every tree, every wildflower, and every crop survives.

If bees die, humans die. That is my point.

I remember a chart Finn once showed me of the food chain, a complex web with plants in the middle, foundational and essential. Everything else depended on them: no fauna without flora. I remember tracing the links in the chain with my fingertip—wolf, snake, rabbit, songbird, all leading back to green.

Bees weren’t mentioned, but they should have been right there at the center of everything. Without bees, each plant on this earth would stand apart, alone, brewing its pollen hopefully, a male stamen feet or yards or miles away from a female pistil, two stationary halves of new life unable to cross the distance.

Finn’s textbooks claimed that plants live on water and sunlight alone. But we know better, you and I. Water, sunlight, and bees.

—

Amber Lopez called back the next morning. I was going over the books for Swedish Honey, with Finn allegedly helping me. Hati sprawled at his feet, panting hard, overmastered by the heat. As I filled in a spreadsheet of expenditures, my brother doodled on the table with his forefinger.

My cellphone buzzed and I grabbed it, hurrying upstairs before Finn could see the name on the screen.

“Your father is in prison,” Amber said.

I climbed cross-legged onto my bed, groped for a pillow, and pressed it against my belly. “For certain?”

“The guard gave him his breakfast tray an hour ago. He’s locked up tight. There’s nothing for you to worry about.”

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

I paused, considering how to phrase my next question. “But did you really talk to someone at the prison? I know sometimes—”

“I promise I really did. Ulf is staring at the wall like he always does, the warden told me. Other lifers do push-ups or read or sleep. But Ulf…Apparently he just sits there. Like he’s listening to music nobody else can hear.”

I glanced at my nightstand. There, next to a box of tissues and a tube of lip balm, lay a copy of The Poetic Edda, the same one I had taken from my childhood home. I hadn’t cracked the book’s spine since packing it in my suitcase twenty years earlier. Still, I kept it in sight, since it evoked an odd nostalgia. Despite everything, there were good memories too.

“The Poetic Edda,” I said.

“Pardon?”

“Nothing. A book. He had it memorized.”

“Really?” Amber sounded skeptical. “Ulf Thorvaldsson, book lover?”

“Just the one. The religious texts of the Vikings.”

“Ah. That makes more sense.”

“He used to read it to me and Finn every night. I bet he’s sitting there saying the poems to himself in his mind. Just repeating them, you know, going through all the stories and sagas over and over again.” As soon as I said it, I was sure I was right. Nothing else could have kept Ulf Thorvaldsson quiet or still.

“Really?” she asked.

I nodded, then remembered she couldn’t see me. “It would take him away from that place. In his mind, you know. He could go into the stories and just stay there. I bet it keeps him—I don’t know—sane. As sane as possible.”

“Not so sane, then,” Amber said wryly.

A silence fell. I could hear her breath. I wondered how old she was now. I wanted her to remain forever as she was in my memories: clear-eyed, spine erect, quick hands, competent and well armed.

“You would tell me if he ever does get out,” I said, all in a rush. My voice seemed higher than normal, the frightened child rising to the surface. “Someone would call me, right?”

Amber laughed. “Oh, kiddo. If Ulf Thorvaldsson ever breaks out of prison, we’re calling everybody.”

49

Finn and Penny met over breakfast. She spent the night for the first time, which I hadn’t expected. It wasn’t planned. She came over late as usual, I fell asleep in her arms as usual, and when I woke I found my bed empty as usual.

The smell of coffee rose from the kitchen. As I threw on yesterday’s clothes, I was thinking about Amber Lopez. Perhaps I should have told her about the six men who had vanished. As soon as the notion crossed my mind, however, I dismissed it. There was nothing to tell. All I had to offer were the paranoid ramblings of an overheated mind. In the clear light of day, I could see the toll that chronic insomnia had begun to take on my grasp of reality. In the future, I would have to find a way to keep myself off the internet after Finn went to bed. The mere fact of his presence kept me tethered to logic and reason.

Then I headed downstairs and stopped in my tracks. My girlfriend and my brother were seated at the table, elbow to elbow, each sipping from a steaming mug.

She was supposed to be gone. She was supposed to have left hours ago. I hadn’t prepared anyone for this encounter, least of all myself.

Penny knew that Finn couldn’t speak—a childhood accident, I’d told her—but she had no instructions for how to handle his silence. As for Finn, he was aware that I was seeing someone but hadn’t shown any interest. I hadn’t even told him her name. Had she introduced herself ? She must have. How had Finn responded?

Feigning casualness, I went to pour myself a mug of coffee, but I was so busy scanning them both for clues that I dropped the cup, splattering my feet and sending ceramic fragments everywhere. Finn and Penny leapt up to help me. She pressed a damp dish towel to my scalded skin as he wiped up the mess and collected the shards.

“And a good morning to you too, Liv,” Penny said.

Finn laughed. I took a steadying breath. They both seemed completely at ease.

“Sit,” Penny instructed me. She poured me a cup and added exactly the right amount of cream. “Do you want a refill, Finn?”

He smiled and held out his mug. She poured until he gestured for her to stop.

“I’ve got to leave in an hour,” she said. “I have to do a thing.”

Finn showed no curiosity. Penny looked relieved.

When we had finished our coffee, he offered to take her out to visit the hives. She pulled my bee suit off the hook and stepped into the folds of fabric, blowing me a kiss before donning the faceplate. I stood at the window and watched them strolling between the hives, two white figures against a backdrop of green like snowmen in the wrong season. Penny worked the smoker, though she didn’t know how to get a good rhythm going. Her cloud of ash was small and thin.

When they came back inside, Finn made a motion as though pulling a delicate thread out of his heart, then pointed to Penny: the ASL sign for I like her. She did not catch the gesture, too busy extricating herself from the bee suit. Finn went upstairs to shower and Penny began gathering her things for work.

“He’s a good man,” she said before she left. I knew it was the highest praise she could offer.

—

Love is storyless. Real love, I mean. It flattens on the page and fades when spoken aloud. It defies retrospection and order—the qualities that any good story requires. I have told you the milestones of my relationship with Penny: first meeting, first kiss, first sex, first sleepover. Stories are built on the connecting of milestones, but love burgeons in the spaces between. It comes from a glance, a laugh, a brush of fingers, tiny revelations, sudden longing.

Beginning, middle, and end—these things don’t apply to love. Did it begin when Penny and I fed the pigs together? Did it begin when she turned up at midnight, stripped me naked as we climbed the stairs, and brought me to echelons of pleasure I didn’t know existed? Was it the time I made her laugh so hard she snorted? Was it the balm of her body beside me in bed, lulling me to sleep like nothing else could?

Even the Norns are baffled by love. It begins without a beginning. It happens fast and slow, gradually and all at once, surprising and inevitable.

Does love end? I’ll keep you posted on that one.

50

Oddly enough, math was my final undoing.

On a late night in September, a dry wind shook the window screens. I should not have been on the internet. Finn had gone to bed hours ago, and the moment I’d heard his bedroom door close, I had instructed myself to shut my laptop.

I had not obeyed. A question had been bubbling at the back of my mind for a while. Perhaps it has been bothering you too.

Six men had gone missing over nearly four and a half years. Sometimes that number seemed massive; it frightened me and kept me up at night. Other times it seemed insignificant. One man over an entire year? And each disappearance so easily explained? My mind was a kaleidoscope, and each shift of perspective shook the beads into a new configuration. Far too many men. Scarcely any men at all.

And so, on that windy night, alone in the dark, I googled the general amount of missing persons per capita.

I am an idiotjävel, a fucking idiot. Pappa’s phrase.

The internet informed me that 7.5 people per every 100,000 vanished in an average year. My mind snagged on the .5—half a person?—before remembering it was merely an average.

Of those 7.5 people, 5.5 were usually found.

In addition, the majority of vanishings happened in metropolises, where the populations were far greater than that of rural Milo County.

According to my math, no one should have gone missing from our county this year.

No one should have gone missing over the past two, or three, or four years.

One person—one!—should, statistically, have vanished sometime in the past five years. And that one person, statistically, ought to have been found.

Numbers were not my forte. I had been homeschooled by Pappa, who had no use for mathematical equations. I checked my figures again, and again, until there was no possibility of doubt.

Ulf Thorvaldsson, Coldwater Correctional Facility, Tin Hill, Iowa.

The next night I was back at my computer. And the night after that. And the next. I followed the same routine each time. First I would check the department of corrections website for Ulf’s name. Then I would visit the missing persons database to verify that the numbers there remained the same too. Then I would run the statistics, calculator in hand, to check my figures. Then I would go to bed, lie awake for hours, finally doze, and wake up screaming from nightmares long before dawn.

Ulf Thorvaldsson, Coldwater Correctional Facility, Tin Hill, Iowa.

It was one of the hottest Septembers on record. Climate change, I suppose—and the will of the gods. Freyr and Thor shared tenancy over the weather. The latter was in charge of storms, while the former brought sunshine and clear skies. Freyr worked overtime that September, keeping Thor at bay for weeks at a time. The bare earth fissured, and lawns withered yellow. Our wildflowers—all native plants—remained unaffected.

If someone had been observing my behavior from the outside, they might have thought I was still functioning well enough. I was able to go to the grocery store, take out the trash, do the books for Swedish Honey, and maintain, at least on the surface, the ordinary rhythms of life. Neither Penny nor Finn appeared to notice anything amiss. She was caught up in some coding crisis—her day job—and he was focused on Hati’s declining health. The old wolfhound seemed to be aging by the day. She ate less and breathed shallowly.

Ulf Thorvaldsson, Coldwater Correctional Facility, Tin Hill, Iowa.

Harvesttime. Finn and I spent our mornings working the extractor. It looked like a miniature rocket ship, silver and cylindrical, standing on a tripod of spindly legs as though poised for takeoff—but in fact it was a simple, humane method of collecting honey. Each of our hives held fifteen rectangular frames, hanging in rows and smothered in bees. Finn and I would pry off the lid and examine the crop of honey, the density of the wax cappings, and the general health of the colony. If all was well, we would remove a frame and shake it in quick bursts to dislodge the workers. The bees were used to this and did not protest. Finn and I would place the frame in the extractor, which spun at top speed, pulling the honey from the combs through centrifugal force, a harmless process that left not even a single waxy hexagon damaged.

When Finn and I replaced the frame, the bees would investigate the newly empty structure, then give the apian equivalent of a shrug and return to their work. Finn and I harvested only a portion of their honey, leaving enough to sustain the colony throughout the winter. The bees had learned to prepare a surplus—enough for themselves and a bit extra for us.

Ulf Thorvaldsson, Coldwater Correctional Facility, Tin Hill, Iowa.

In times of crisis, people turn to faith. On a sweltering afternoon, I walked through the forest on my own, scattering snares. Then, a few days later, I pocketed Vargbett, the knife Pappa had given me so long ago, and hurried into the woods alone. Finn was busy with the extractor and didn’t see me go.

The first two snares were empty, but the third one bore fruit. A half-dead rabbit lay kicking feebly in the dirt. I broke its neck, untangled its limbs from the wire, and carried the limp body to the great white ash, which stood crowned in solemn sunlight as though it had been waiting for me.

I slit the rabbit’s throat and let the blood drain among the roots. I laid the carcass down as an offering. Even now, I did not beg the gods for help. I prayed to Odin, thanking him for his grace, marveling at his wisdom, and pledging my small life to his service. Perhaps he would notice the blót sacrifice of a lost Viking child, observe my plight, and intervene on my behalf.

I didn’t even know what help would look like. Hopefully Odin did.

Ulf Thorvaldsson, Coldwater Correctional Facility, Tin Hill, Iowa.

The line between waking and dreaming became membranous and permeable. In the past I had sometimes been unsure which state I inhabited, but the sensation had been fleeting. Now I dwelled in that surreal, terrifying netherworld all the time. Breakfasting in silence with Finn, I would look up to see a third person in the kitchen with us—not Penny, not anybody, a stain on the air, a column of smoke, gone when I blinked. I sometimes had the feeling that I was not in charge of my own body. Often, at Penny’s house, while she was feeding the chickens or working on her laptop or otherwise distracted, I would find myself compelled to slip upstairs alone. There were whispers coming from the secret door at the end of the hall. What were they saying? Was that Swedish or English? I would try the knob, which turned without resistance. The room was empty.

Ulf Thorvaldsson, Coldwater Correctional Facility, Tin Hill, Iowa.

I never really believed I could escape my father. That is the truth—though I would not admit it to anyone but you. On some level, I always knew that one day, against my will, despite every precaution, I would see him again. The laws of the land did not apply to him; the laws of nature did not apply to him. He was both more and less than human. I had crossed state lines and changed my name, but that could postpone the inevitable for only so long. He had been incarcerated in a maximum-security prison for twenty years, but that was a mere inconvenience, a hiccup in his plans, a way station that one day would no longer be able to contain him.

Ulf Thorvaldsson, Coldwater Correctional Facility, Tin Hill, Iowa.

Hati died. She fell asleep beside the person she loved most in all the world and never woke up.

I fell to the floor when Finn told me. Not quite fainting—my body seemed to decide it no longer felt like supporting itself. Finn did not acknowledge my histrionics. There was the business of death to attend to, and we both knew intimately what to do with a corpse. I curled up on the couch, knees to chest, toes gripping the edge of the cushion, watching through the window as my brother dug a grave.

51

Truth is a perilous thing.

Odin was born wise. His gift for strategy was so subtle and sophisticated that he never lost a battle (and never will—not until Ragnarök comes). But the Allfather wanted greater insight, and so he went to the Well of Knowledge, tended by Mimir, the god of wisdom. Every day Mimir drank from the sacred water to refresh and heighten his own perceptions. Odin asked to drink from the pool and learn all that Mimir knew.

Mimir told him that truth demanded sacrifice. To be granted access to the Well, Odin must cut out his eye with his own blade. The Allfather did not hesitate, slicing the organ from his skull and placing it in the pool as tribute.

With his own eye looking back at him, he drank. At once his mind expanded. Now he could strike his enemies blind. He could speak softly enough to quench a fire, calm the sea, and convince anyone who heard him that his words were true.

But even then he was not satisfied. Yggdrasil was ringed with inscrutable runes that radiated power and whispered to the gods. No one could read them, not even Mimir, and it haunted the Allfather to wonder what secrets they held. The Well had given him wisdom, but surely the runes could offer more.

Knowledge requires sacrifice; Odin knew this now. To prove himself worthy of interpreting the runes, he threw himself on his spear in ritual suicide. Then, bleeding and gasping, he wrapped a noose around a branch of Yggdrasil and hanged himself. For nine days and nights he twisted there in agony with the blade jutting from his flesh.

He died there. His suffering reached a crescendo and the spark of life left him, darkening the whole of the nine realms.

On the stroke of midnight, his spirit returned. Odin awoke from death to find that the runes had revealed their meaning to him. His mind churned with brightness and grace. Now he could cure the sick, turn his enemies’ weapons against them, and make a woman fall in love with a single glance.

Yet even this was not enough. Odin wanted nothing less than complete omniscience. His unending hunger led him to the prophecy of Völuspá, and that was his undoing.

The Allfather had learned the weavings of Urth; he knew how the world had begun. He kept constant watch over Verthandi’s work as well. From his golden throne, he could see the whole of the nine realms, observing everything and everyone, and he sent his ravens to spy out any hidden places beyond his sight.

As you know, there is a third Norn. It is forbidden for any mortal to see what Skuld is weaving. None of us should ever learn how our stories end.

The Allfather believed he was the exception—powerful and wise enough to discover what he should not know. And so he broke the laws that ordered time and death. He dragged a soothsayer from her resting place in Helheim.

Her prophecy, of course, was Pappa’s favorite story. The witch told Odin about the coming of Ragnarök and the end of all things. She spared no detail of his own brutal death, crushed to a pulp in the jaws of Fenrir the wolf.

In that moment, as Odin sat listening with horror to the story he had forced the witch to tell him, Fenrir had not even been born. None of Loki’s monstrous children had yet entered the world. Just a gleam in the trickster’s eye. The World Serpent, the goddess Hel, and the huge black wolf were fragments of the future, both real and unreal. Skuld had woven them into the immutable fabric of the universe, and all Odin could do was wait.

He cast the dead witch back into Helheim, but the damage from her prophecy had already been done. That name—Fenrir, Fenrir—echoed in Odin’s thoughts. He dreamed of the wolf’s teeth closing around him. He dreamed of musky fur, ember eyes, and claws that left gouges scored in the earth. What Shall Be—it tormented him.

As the dead witch had foreseen, Loki left his wife in Asgard and snuck away for a tryst with a giantess. He returned home with a tiny, night-black cub in his arms. The trickster deposited the little wolfling in the care of the other gods and went away again; there was mischief and mayhem to brew elsewhere.

The gods were frightened of this strange animal, the offspring of two magical, unknowable entities. Only Tyr, god of righteousness, was brave and kind enough to feed Fenrir by hand, earning the little cub’s trust. You know this part of the story. The two of them played together, wrestling and rolling through the halls of Asgard until, inevitably, Fenrir pinned Tyr with his massive paws.

Fenrir grew with astonishing speed—the size of a fox, a horse, an elephant, bigger every day. The Allfather watched uneasily from his throne as the wolf’s claws clacked through Asgard’s marble halls. His slavering drool left trails on Odin’s floors. His breath stank of meat and old bones. For now the wolf was tame enough, even friendly, but Odin’s mind burned with the dead witch’s words.

So the Allfather decided to imprison Fenrir while the beast was still young enough that such a thing would be possible. It was the best and only safeguard Odin could think of. He gathered the other gods and told them what to do.

Together they went to the wolf and suggested a game: a test of strength. They would tie him up with iron chains and see if he could break free. Like any child, Fenrir enjoyed showing off. The gods bound his limbs in the strongest shackles they had, which the wolf shattered like glass. The gods forged a thicker chain with heavier manacles, and the wolf splintered those too. Fenrir liked this game, proud of his strength, while Odin fretted and strategized.

At last the Allfather went to the dwarfs, the master craftsmen. At his command, they made a tether out of impossible things: the footfalls of a cat, the breath of a fish, the spittle of a bird, and the roots of a mountain (none of which remain in the world today, as you may have noticed, since the dwarfs used them all up). The result was a gossamer ribbon. It was not what Odin had expected; it looked like something a child might wear in their hair.

When Odin brought the silken thread to Fenrir, the wolf was immediately suspicious. Chains of iron were one thing, but this delicate ribbon suggested magic beyond his understanding. Still, he wanted to win the game. He agreed that the gods could bind him with the strange slip of gauze, but only if one of them placed a hand in his mouth as a hostage and a guarantee that he would be freed.

Tyr volunteered, knowing what would happen.

Do you remember? On each of the Norse holidays, Finn and I would walk into our forest to leave offerings for the gods. I always prayed to Odin. My brother prayed to Tyr, Remnant of the Wolf.

Why did the god offer his sword hand to Fenrir? He could have chosen the other, which would have allowed him to remain a warrior after the deed was done. The cub trusted Tyr as he trusted no one else, and maybe it was as simple as that: Tyr believed that the wolf would not agree to be bound unless his dear friend chose to be his hostage in the most intimate way.

But I suspect that Tyr had deeper motives. I think he made the sacrifice willingly in hopes of righting the scales. He was about to participate in the betrayal of the wolf he had helped raise. Though he had made no explicit oath of fidelity to his friend, there was a bond between them. Maybe Tyr believed that he deserved to suffer for his complicity in Fenrir’s fate. Not quite an oath-breaker, but dishonorable all the same.

The ribbon could not be severed. In a rage, the wolf bit off Tyr’s hand. The gods dragged Fenrir out of Asgard and imprisoned him in a cave. They left him there in darkness, spitting and cursing them, tethered beneath a mountain.

When Ragnarök comes, the World Tree will shake, opening all the doors and breaking all the chains. Fenrir will escape his prison with a howl that will ring through the nine realms. Full-grown now, he will stand so tall that his lower jaw touches the earth while his muzzle scrapes the sky. He will run swifter than the wind to Asgard. Just as the seeress prophesied, he will break the Allfather’s body in his teeth.

But what if Odin had never heard the prophecy of Ragnarök? If he had never discovered that Fenrir was going to kill him, he would never have tricked Fenrir into a life of bondage. Perhaps he could have kept the wolf a friend to the gods, a companion in battle. If Fenrir had been treated with kindness, he might have grown up kind in turn. The prophecy came true because Odin insisted on learning the prophecy in the first place. The world will end because he knew too much.

52

The truth came for me on a wet morning in September. Finn had left the house before I woke up, and the car was absent too. I wondered where my brother had decided to drive off to without me; I could not remember the last time he had done such a thing. Rain smacked the window as I lazed on the couch, flipping through a pamphlet on extractors and waiting for Finn.

My phone rang. Penny’s voice crackled down the line, so thick with static that I couldn’t catch a word. Every few seconds a sharp hiss cut her off completely. I kept thinking the call had dropped, but then her contralto would return, speaking urgently, I thought, but maybe that was just the poor connection.

“What?” I said. “I can’t hear you.”

The call dropped. I tried to ring her back, but it went straight to voicemail.

Then the back door crashed open and Finn entered the house on squelching boots, his raincoat dripping everywhere. He leaned forward and shook out his wet curls like a dog. Tsking, I grabbed a rag and went to wipe up his mess.

As he peeled off his raincoat, I saw something curled in the crook of his elbow. For a moment I thought it was another raven, but no—he was holding a night-black puppy. Exposed to the light, it stretched out its tiny legs, every claw spread. Finn had been hiding it beneath his raincoat, protecting it from the downpour and, perhaps, from me.

“Whose dog is that?” I asked.

Finn scratched the inky creature behind its ears. The puppy mewled, showing a foamy tongue and a jagged row of miniature teeth.

“Whose dog is that, Finn?”

He lifted his chin proudly. Pappa wolf.

“Did you get that thing from the shelter? Did you just adopt a new dog?”

He nodded.

“How could you do something like that? Hati’s barely cold!”

Finn rocked the baby in his arms, smiling contentedly.

“What is wrong with you?” I yelled. “I need to mourn a little longer before just replacing Hati with some random puppy. Don’t you?”

All expression left Finn’s face. Impassive as a mask, eyes like granite, chiding me, correcting me. For a moment he resembled Pappa.

“I know Hati was your dog,” I said, softer now. “You can mourn her however you need to. I just…Can we discuss getting another dog right now? Especially a puppy?”

Finn considered this, then shook his head. He carried the tiny creature up the stairs to his bedroom and slammed the door, sealing me out.

The rain increased. Silvery shapes danced beyond the window, and I massaged my aching temples. How many times had Finn asked for a second dog? How many times had he beckoned me over to his laptop to show me available strays at the shelter? Serene-faced hounds, eager huskies with pale blue eyes like mine, and once another wolfhound, so similar to Hati that they might have come from the same litter. I remembered Finn’s finger touching the computer screen as though he could reach through and pet each wayward mutt. One dog is enough, I’d always told him.

He’d obeyed my wishes. A dog for a dog.

My phone rang again. Penny’s voice was a little clearer now, though the static remained, crackling as though there were lightning in the wires.

“—help—don’t know who else—can you—”

The call dropped. I was alarmed now. I rang her back, but it went straight to voicemail again.

What’s happening? I texted.

The ghost bubble of a reply appeared on the screen. I waited with my heart in my throat, but after a moment the bubble disappeared. Was she outside the range of normal service? Was she wrestling for control of her cellphone, frantically dialing and shouting for help as malevolent hands tried to pry it from her grasp?

I called again. Voicemail again. I paced the living room, sending text after text.

Where are you?

Please answer.

Are you okay?

I’m freaking out.

Finn emerged from his bedroom with the puppy cradled against his chest; it was small enough to fit in one hand. A dribble of urine ran down the fabric of his shirt. With dignity, Finn grabbed a wad of paper towels and returned to his room.

“I’m not helping you take care of it,” I shouted after him. “You’re on your own!”

When my phone jangled again, I lunged so desperately to answer it that I almost declined the call.

“I need you,” Penny said. It wasn’t just the static; her voice was ragged and desperate. “Can you come to the woods? The sharp bend on the way to my house—there’s that little parking lot by the trail. Do you know where I mean?”

“I’ll be right there.”

“Bring a first-aid kit. Can you—do you—”

A sob rose in her throat and swallowed the rest of her words.

53

It began with red.

I don’t remember driving there. I left the house, stepped into the beating rain with no umbrella, instantly drenched, and then I was pulling into the gravel parking lot at the edge of the forest. Dream logic. Somewhere along the way the rain had dwindled into fog. Wet hair clung to my face and throat as I hurtled out of the car.

I didn’t see Penny anywhere. The trees stood craggy in the pooling mist. There was only one other vehicle in the lot, Penny’s sedan, parked at the far end. I thought about shouting for her, but the silence was so absolute that I hesitated to break it. No birdsong, no footfalls in the underbrush. Had I come to the wrong place? This was the only sharp bend in the dirt road, the only parking lot for miles. Had I arrived too late? I pivoted, scanning the woods.

In the distance, a watercolor smear pinked the fog. The peachy hue was so subtle that I couldn’t be sure at first if it was really there. Nothing was solid, the mist changing constantly in density and color, now charcoal gray, now ice white, now opaque as stone, now a translucent mesh. But the reddish stain remained, always in the same place, unmoved by the movement around it. It was not red yet. It was the idea of color rather than color itself.

I watched it darken like ink seeping into paper. There was still no sound. The mist was so thick that it muffled the aural sphere as well as the visual one. Pink deepened into violet. Violet clotted and condensed into Penny.

I almost didn’t recognize her. The red had consumed her, both hands dipped in it, face splotched, clothes spattered, shoes soaked. She staggered toward me as though intending to collapse in my arms. I stepped back, mouth open in shock.

“What happened?” I choked out.

“My hand.”

“What?”

“I hurt my hand.”

I glanced down and flinched. Her palm was sliced so deep that I caught a glimpse of bone. It looked as though someone had traced her heart line with a knife.

I steadied my breathing as Pappa had taught me. I had plenty of experience with traumatic wounds. Panic got people killed. The first order of business was assessment. I circled Penny, checking for any more injuries. She seemed otherwise intact, though she had lost a lot of blood; I could see that in her pallor and the state of her clothes. Even her hair had not escaped the red. Her coppery pixie was now rust brown.

“Are you hurt anywhere else?” I asked.

“No.”

The gash in her hand would not be fatal as long as I stanched the bleeding. I grabbed the first-aid kit from the passenger seat. I wrapped the wound in gauze and applied pressure.

“Should I take you to the hospital?” I asked.

I immediately knew the answer. I didn’t know yet how I knew. Penny stared down at the bandage swaddling her hand, already stained with seeping scarlet. She seemed eerily calm as she shook her head. I wondered if she was going into shock.

It did not take me long to patch her up. Disinfect the area, thread the needle, neat stitches, ignore the whimpers of pain.

“Can you tell me what happened?” I asked when the work was done.

“This way.” She turned on her heel and plunged into the fog. I was surprised by her speed; maybe she hadn’t lost as much blood as I’d thought. She strode with urgency, despite the thorny, whiplike branches of wild rose snagging our clothes. The forest was damp, gleaming, and gray, except for Penny, who wore every possible variation of red somewhere on her person. Crimson beneath her fingernails. A splotch on her cheek. Shoes ruined by it, claimed completely, no hint of the original color left.

“Where are we going?”

“Thank god you came,” she said. “I don’t know what to do.”

“What happened?”

“This way,” she repeated.

We walked for what felt like hours. Every so often Penny would stop, swaying, eyes closed, ashen but determined. She needed to rest and hydrate, but that clearly wasn’t on the table at the moment. The rain returned, a meshy drizzle hissing against the leaves. The mist thickened. Penny led me down a hill, both of us skidding and slipping in the mud. I lost my footing and grabbed a low-hanging branch to steady myself. Penny was too far ahead, nearly vanishing into the fog. I ran to catch up and almost tripped over the corpse lying in the underbrush.

That was my first drink from the Well of Knowledge. Its water is a caustic thing, charring the throat and boiling in the belly. I wonder if it seared Odin’s guts the way it did mine.

I could see at once that the man was dead. He had been stabbed so many times that his chest was a pulpy canyon. Very little of his T-shirt remained. He looked to be about fifty years old, with salt-and-pepper hair. Except for the catastrophic mess of his torso, he seemed more or less intact. Legs akimbo. There were a few defensive wounds on the forearms, but nothing life-threatening. Only one shoe.

A knife lay in the underbrush beside the corpse. The blade and hilt were entirely coated with blood and globs of scarlet flesh. I had the strange instinct to pick it up but restrained myself.

Penny stared blankly down at the body. Her hand lifted to her mouth in an automatic gesture. I could see that she wanted to nibble on her nails, a habit of hers in times of stress, except one hand now wore a mitten of gauze and the other was smeared with blood.

“Can you help me?” she whispered. “Please help me.”

I wanted to gather her into my arms, but the red was everywhere. I couldn’t touch her without being consumed by it too.

54

In Hávamál, Odin said: “The man who stands at a strange threshold should be cautious before he crosses it.”

We have come to the murder at last. You and I have been heading toward this moment from the very beginning of my story.

Are you ready to finally, finally learn what happened?

I was standing at a strange threshold.

—

Buying the shovel seemed to take forever. The fog forced me to drive back into town with soul-grinding slowness. The hardware store was packed with elderly retirees wandering the aisles and chitchatting with the clerk at the counter. I vibrated with impatience as I stood in line. The cash register was an ancient thing with clacking keys and a drawer that exploded open with each purchase. I resisted the urge to scream at the clerk as he laboriously rang up my six-foot shovel—the largest and sturdiest one they had—along with heavy-duty gardening gloves. I paid in cash, just in case.

On the way back to Penny, I pulled over at the sight of a raccoon lying pulped on the shoulder of the two-lane road. I wrapped the deconstructed carcass in the plastic bag from the hardware store and drove on.

A drizzle floated in the air as I hiked back through the forest, using the haft of my shovel as a walking stick. Wet leaves mingled with the rain, flecks of ochre plummeting through the thickening fog. Penny stood exactly where I had left her, knee-deep in the underbrush, staring down at the man’s corpse. His eyes were open. I saw droplets splash against his irises and thought of Odin’s eye, blue and blind, at the bottom of the Well of Knowledge.

“You’re going to bury him?” Penny asked, paler than ever. Her freckles stood out against her skin like chips of sand caught in ice.

“Sit down,” I said. “You lost a lot of blood.”

She collapsed cross-legged in the wet underbrush, hands in her lap. There was something childlike in the motion. For a moment I could see Penny at the age of six, skinny and athletic and clumsy, with scrapes, probably, on both her knees.

“Just rest,” I said.

“I can’t help you dig.” Penny held up her bandaged hand.

“I know. I’ll take care of this.”

A thousand questions flooded my brain, but Pappa had trained me well. There was work to do now. I picked up the shovel, weighing it in my hands to check its balance. I pulled on the leather gardening gloves. Already the forest had begun to claim the dead man. Rain pooled in the gory trench of his torso and damp leaves adhered to his saturated clothing, patching him with cheery colors.

“What’s that smell?” Penny asked, looking around. “Is that him? Already?”

“Dead raccoon.” I pointed to the smeary plastic bag.

“Oh.”

My shovel blade bit into the soaked earth. I shoved it deeper with the heel of my boot and hefted the contents to the side. Dig, heft. Dig, heft. The rain and fog were a gift from the gods. I’d checked my weather app at the hardware store, learning with relief that the drizzle and mist were supposed to last all day, shielding us from prying eyes. We were deep in the forest, far off the beaten path, but it wasn’t impossible that in better weather some intrepid hiker might have stumbled upon us. Thor was watching out for me, it seemed.

Still, the rain was a double-edged sword. The soil was sludgy, slippery, and heavier than it would normally have been. I struggled to find the right pace. I couldn’t work so fast that I exhausted myself, but I couldn’t linger long enough to outlast the mist.

“Sorry I can’t help,” Penny said. There was no emotion in her voice—flat, robotic.

“Just rest,” I repeated.

Pappa had taught me to turn off my internal clock when a situation demanded stamina. Each individual moment of pain was bearable; it was the awareness of how long the pain would continue that could break a person’s will. I kept my attention here, now. Rain puddled in the grave until I was standing in an icy pool and each impact of the shovel sent ripples splashing against the walls. My soaked jeans were as heavy and unwieldy as armor. Even through my gloves, I could feel blisters rising on my palms.

Panting, I climbed out of the hole for a moment of rest. The mound of displaced earth was getting to be a good size. Penny was staring down at her bandaged hand. The blood had almost completely soaked the gauze, but it was coming in a slow seep, not a hemorrhage. I wiped cold rain and stinging sweat from my eyes with my forearm. A pool now filled the cavity in the corpse’s torso too, and droplets splashed there, sending up tiny explosions of red.

A glint of silver caught my attention. The rain had washed the knife somewhat clean where it lay among the leaves, mirroring the fog. Looking closer, I could easily imagine how Penny had hurt her hand so badly. The knife reminded me of the blade Pappa had given me so long ago. In close combat, everything depended on grip and finger positioning. Pappa had taught me how to hold the knife so I could wield it without ever cutting myself, especially after the hilt became slippery with blood. Penny had not been given such vital lessons.

Back to work. Dig, heft. Dig, heft. Mist flowed down the edges of the hole in a slow-motion waterfall. Every part of me was chilled and wet and aching. The walls were slimy with mud and tree roots. I couldn’t see my own feet, sloshing through water topped with a few inches of fog.

I don’t know how long it took me to dig the grave. Pappa would doubtless have managed it much more efficiently, but I did the best I could.

55

Her bath was pink, mine brown. I scrubbed Penny’s shoulders with a loofah as she worked the bristles of a nail brush beneath her fingernails. Blood was easier to remove from skin than the living room floor in my childhood home. Bodywash, not lye. When Penny was clean and dry, I bandaged her hand again, noting with some pride that my stitches were as regular as a train track crossing the valley of her palm.

Then it was my turn. In the sudsy water, mud detached from my skin in whorls of umber. I finally registered the state of my hands. Blisters from the heels of my palms to my fingertips. Blisters on top of blisters. I was going to be left with scars.

“We need to burn everything,” I said. “Anything we touched.”

“Okay.”

There was a fire pit out back. Penny and I had often sat out there toasting vegetarian hot dogs over the flames and drinking wine.

“Our clothes, shoes, everything,” I said.

“Okay.”

The rain had stopped and the mist seemed patchy and less sure of itself. Penny brought me some of the random clothes she kept on hand for the people she rescued. The fire pit was soaked but the logs were not, since Penny always stacked them in the shed. As she erected a tripod of timber, I looked into the pigpen. The animals were sleeping in a pink heap beneath a corrugated tin awning, sheltered from the rain, grunting occasionally in their dreams.

Penny didn’t have kerosene like Pappa did, but nail polish remover worked well enough. The logs caught immediately. Our clothes were too soaked at first to burn, merely smoldering and blackening, but finally they dried out sufficiently and ignited. Our shoes liquified, singeing the air with the stench of melting rubber. Loofah, socks, hair ties, used bandages, panties, Penny’s watch—I splattered each item in acetone and tossed it onto the flames.

It didn’t take as long as I’d expected. Penny’s supply of firewood was plentiful. Nail polish remover burns bright and quick. With a whoosh of heat and light, the evidence of our work was erased.

“Now we need to disinfect the bathtub,” I said. “Use bleach.”

“Okay.”

I was beginning to feel what I’d just done to my body. I could scarcely manage the back stairs and slumped against the kitchen wall. The windows were blind with fog. The oven clock informed me that dawn was only an hour away. Night had come and gone while I’d dug the grave. It was tomorrow already.

Hunger and thirst hit like a tsunami. As Penny scoured the bathroom with bleach, I devoured a chocolate bar in two bites—a jolt of sugar to sustain me until I could slap together a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, then a second one. A cheese stick, a bowl of cereal, an entire package of cookies. I ate everything I could find, then drank a carton of apple juice in one long gulp.

Exhaustion followed satiation. The work had jellied me into mush. Placing my dishes in the sink, I realized I could barely lift my arms. My sore muscles had not yet begun to stiffen, but I could already feel how bad it would be.

Penny entered the kitchen stinking of bleach. Her hair stood up in all directions like hedgehog bristles, and her mouth was chapped and colorless.

“I have to go home,” I said.

Her eyes widened. “You’re leaving me?”

“We need to talk,” I said. “I know that. But this has to happen first. I won’t be able to walk in a few hours. I need to get the car back to Finn. He won’t get a fucking cellphone. I don’t have any way to reach him. I’ve never been gone all night before, and I’m sure he’s worried. You drive behind me and bring me back to your place after. Okay?”

She blinked, processed, nodded. “Right.”

—

My hands were clumsy on the wheel, and my foot trembled with the effort of pushing the pedals. The roads were busy with early risers on their way to work—as close to a traffic jam as Haven was capable of. The clouds were beginning to break apart, showing glints of brightening blue. The last remnants of mist drifted like dreams across the pavement. It was a comfort to see Penny’s car behind me, urging me gently onward.

The Norns had woven her a brutal fate. She had spent more than a decade in Haven constructing a cloistered refuge to protect the innocent and endangered. She had taken every possible measure to save them—and herself. But somehow, I could not imagine how, a monster had found her sanctum. Her greatest fear realized—and mine.

How had he discovered her safe house? How had he made it through the gate, with its three locks and sash of intertwined chains? What had Penny been doing when he came upon her? The thought made my fingertips tingle, wishing for a blade. Had she been feeding the chickens, watching the bees, or leaning on the pigpen’s fence to observe her ridiculous pink charges?

Had she tried to run, to hide?

At least his intended victim had not been in the house. I had not bothered to ask Penny about this; I didn’t need to ask, since every room retained its unbothered normality. No blood spatter, pictures askew, or broken doors.

Small mercies. A gift from the Norns. The only one.

But Penny—he had found Penny. The expression on his face—smile, snarl?—and that long, cruel knife. Had he laid his hands on her or merely brandished the weapon to force her compliance? He must have shoved her into the trunk of her own car, since hers had been the only vehicle in the parking lot. Gritting my teeth, I imagined her curled in the grimy dark of the trunk, feeling every bump and rut in the road with no idea where she was being taken. And then the forced march into the woods, tramping through the wet underbrush, utterly alone, no point in screaming for help in the stifling fog, and anyway he was there behind her, blade at the ready.

His corpse told the rest of the story. Dozens of stab wounds in the gut and between the ribs. Penny had kept on cutting long after he was dead, which made sense to me. Fight, flight, freeze—those were the only options. Fight was primal, beneath consciousness, beyond reason. Animal instinct. It took hold of her, saved her, then drove her into wildness.

Of course we could not go to a hospital. Of course we could not go to the police. Penny’s work had taught her the limits and blind spots of the law. A man in the woods with a torso skewered and churned into sauce: it didn’t look good. The police had trouble discerning between victim and perpetrator when violence was involved, let alone death.

What would I tell Finn?

I heard Pappa’s voice at the back of my mind: Never lie to another Viking.

And then, in an icy whisper: Oath-breaker.

56

I parked the SUV in the shade of the oak tree. The mist was gone, burned away by the rising sun. Everything looked the same, which gutted me. How could my home remain unchanged after what I had just endured? The beehives shone bright as coins in the warm morning light. The house cast a long, sleepy shadow over the prairie. I seemed to be seeing everything from an impossible distance, as though looking through the wrong end of a telescope.

Had my father felt this way when he came home after murdering a man? Was this the moment of transition from Ulf Thorvaldsson back into Pappa? What strange threshold had I crossed during the night? Would I ever come all the way back?

I heard a sound from the front of the house—a voice?—and rounded the corner. Finn was lying in the grass, tussling with the puppy, which was announcing its affection through yips and squeals. There was such unadulterated delight in my brother’s face that it stopped me in my tracks. I hadn’t seen that expression—elated, impish, free—since he was a child. It was the look of a boy who had just climbed so high in a tree that he could see our house on the other side of the forest. I hadn’t known Finn still possessed the capacity to smile like that.

My presence extinguished his light. At the sight of me, he sat up, and the puppy clambered into his lap to chew on his fingers.

“I’m sorry I was gone so long,” I said. “I hope you weren’t too worried about me.”

Finn tilted his head quizzically. The puppy made the same movement at the same time. Father and son.

After a beat, I realized what this expression meant. He hadn’t realized that, for the first time in our shared life, I had spent the night elsewhere.

“Seriously, Finn? I left yesterday morning. It’s been twenty-four whole hours.”

He shrugged.

“I wasn’t here all night.”

Another shrug.

“The car was gone too. You didn’t notice that?” I heard the accusatory sharpness in my voice and checked myself. This was all to the good. I had expected Finn to be fretting and pacing the kitchen as he waited for me. I’d been preparing excuses and explanations in the car the whole way home.

But what did it mean that he hadn’t registered my absence? Had I become so inessential to the rhythm of his days? Was I mere background for the bees and dogs and ravens and squirrels?

Penny’s car rumbled down the drive behind me. She parked at a distance and did not leave the vehicle. Sunlight glinted off the windshield, obscuring her face.

Finn knew me so well that the slightest twitch would give me away. Despite the aching protest of every muscle, I stood as straight as I could as I explained that Penny was sick and needed care. Pancreatitis, I said—she had given me the term. I held my hands at my sides so my wounds weren’t visible. I was wearing Penny’s flip-flops; I had burned my own shoes. Hers were two sizes too small, leaving my heels awkwardly unsupported.

“I’ll be staying at her place for a few days,” I said. “Maybe longer. I’ll go pack a bag. I’m leaving the car here with you, okay?”

Finn didn’t bat an eye. No hint of protest or alarm or even curiosity. He just nodded casually and turned his attention back to the puppy, which was gnawing on his sleeve.

I didn’t have time to think about what his unconcern meant for him—me—us. I limped upstairs, changed into my own shoes, and packed a bag with a few days’ worth of clothes. When I was done gathering the essentials, the suitcase was still half empty, so I added more T-shirts, extra underwear and socks, a second pair of shoes, and my favorite hoodie. I didn’t expect to use most of it, since Penny had a washing machine. Still, there was no harm in being prepared.

Thank the gods I overpacked. I had no way of knowing how important that suitcase would become.

I limped down the driveway and collapsed into the passenger seat of Penny’s car. As she pulled away, I glanced in the side mirror and watched Finn flop into the grass once more, holding the puppy aloft in both hands.

57

I slept. It wasn’t a choice. I fell into Penny’s bed without getting under the sheets or removing my clothes or shoes. It was more like dying than dreaming. I slept for the rest of the day and woke long after sunset. I opened my eyes to see Penny inches away, head on the pillow, blinking dreamily, just beginning to stir. We’d woken at the same moment.

“It’s dark out,” I said.

“We’re nocturnal now,” she said.

She helped me sit up in bed. My muscles had hardened into wood and bark, creaking and groaning like branches in a strong wind. It was raining again, a soft drizzle.

Penny concocted a chaotic but satisfying meal of leftovers that did not belong together. My hands were so damaged that I could not hold a fork or a glass of water. She spoon-fed me in bed and brought each sip to my parched lips. I had never been tended like that, unless maybe Mamma had done so in my memoryless infancy.

The bandages on Penny’s right palm meant that every action required extra planning and care. Somehow she managed to wash the dishes one-handed, while I remained in bed, running through the murder checklist in my mind. The knife was buried with the body. Both lay deep beneath the roadkill in its shallower grave. We’d burned the haft of the shovel and charred the blade beyond recognition. I could not think of any further steps we could possibly take. For an odd moment, I wished I could consult my father.

“Thank god for you,” Penny said. Lost in thought, I hadn’t noticed her climbing the stairs again and settling back on the bed beside me. “I’ll never be able to thank you enough.”

I smiled weakly. Even the muscles of my face were overworked and stiff. “It’s okay,” I said.

“Liv, I put you through hell.”

“I’ll recover,” I said. “It’s just blisters and soreness. I’ll be back to normal in a day or two.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

I met her gaze. Her eyes had carried away the colors of the forest—irises of soil and underbrush ringed by white mist, with swollen capillaries adding a dash of red.

“I did this to you,” she said. “There’s no way to atone for that. I can’t take it back.”

“He did this,” I said. “And I’ll recover,” I repeated.

“It’s trauma. You don’t realize yet how much it’s going to affect you. It isn’t something you just get over. Memories and flashbacks—the people I work with—the trauma they go through—” Penny thumped her fist against her chest. “It’s the last thing I ever wanted for you.”

I was not sure how to respond. Was now the moment to tell her that burying a dead man had not traumatized me in the least? That I was no longer capable of a reaction like that? The only kind of healing I required was that of the body. My mind was untouched; I was worried about her distress, nothing more. She leaned toward me, plumping the pillows behind my back so I could sit up against the headboard.

“You’re traumatized too,” I said at last.

“Can you ever forgive me?” Before I could reply she whispered, “Of course you can’t. That’s a stupid question.”

“It’s not your fault, Penny.”

She sucked in a shaky breath. “It is, though.”

“None of this is your fault.”

“You don’t understand.” She looked down at the gauze swaddling her injured palm. The wound was still seeping, though the splotch of blood grew smaller with each new bandage.

“Can you tell me what happened?” I asked.

“I don’t know how.”

I understood. It is easier to survive the unspeakable if it remains unspoken. Words solidify things, give them shape and sharp edges, bring them fully into being.

“First of all, you were amazing,” Penny said. “Seriously. You didn’t hesitate for a second.”

“Oh,” I said. “Thanks.”

“What was the deal with the raccoon?”

I explained as briefly as possible about cadaver dogs.

“Wow,” she said. “I never would have thought of that. And the fire—burning the clothes—you seemed to know exactly what to do.”

I shrugged as though it had been no big deal. Even this small movement sent a cascade of aches through my torso.

“If you hadn’t been there…” Penny shuddered. “I can’t even imagine what I would have done. I’d be in jail. That’s what would have happened.” She laid her bandaged hand gently on my knee. “You saved me.”

I felt myself blush. I’d never spoken openly about such matters. Burying a body was one thing, but discussing it was something else entirely.

“You saved my life,” Penny said.

“You saved your own life,” I said shyly. “You fought him off. You did what you had to do.”

Her reaction was not what I’d expected. She withdrew her hand from my knee and scooted a few inches away from me. There was a moment of silence. I heard a bird call somewhere in the forest—a raven or an owl, I couldn’t be sure.

“I’m trying to decide whether to lie to you,” Penny said.

“What?” I gasped out.

“I trust you. I’m not saying that I don’t trust you. I just can’t bear to make this situation any worse for you. I’ve already put you through so much—too much. Sometimes telling the truth is the worst thing you can do to somebody.”

The rain picked up. Droplets made a mosaic of the window and fragmented the moonlight into gemstones. Penny shifted her position against the headboard, sitting up a little straighter. Her eyes danced to and fro as though reading something on the opposite wall that I could not see.

“On the other hand…” she began. Then, stronger: “On the other hand, I love you.”

“I love you too.” I had never said this to anyone before, not even Finn. I hadn’t planned to say it now. The words left my mouth before I had decided to speak them.

“That’s lucky,” Penny said.

Is there anything more pivotal in a human life than love? The very word set off a silent explosion, earth cracking, barriers crumbling; it left me unprotected, exposed, in a nearly painful state of revelatory intimacy. I could tell that Penny had never said it to anybody either. Both of us were breathing as though we had just run a marathon. Maybe we had. Though neither of us had moved a muscle, we were so close now—wildly, wonderfully close.

“Don’t lie to me,” I said. “Never lie to another Viking.”

“Are we Vikings?”

I reached for her, groaning with pain, and gathered up her injured hand in mine. Both of us wounded—that was the point of my gesture.

“Vikingabarn,” I said. “My dad used to call Finn and me that. Viking children.”

I watched Penny make up her mind. It wasn’t quite a sacred oath, what passed between us, but there was suffering and love, and maybe that was enough.

“I murdered him,” she said. “That’s the truth.”

“I know that, Penny.”

“It wasn’t self-defense—that’s what I mean. It was murder.”

“No,” I said calmly.

“He put his wife in a coma. I told you about her, remember?”

“His wife?”

“She called the hotline. Death threats, guns in the house. We were supposed to get her out. The network had an extraction plan in place for her. But he got to her first. Remember? He shot her three times. Critical condition, and then life support, and then they pulled the plug.”

“You did tell me.” We had discussed it after dinner with a glass of wine on the night she had told me she needed a little light in her life.

“I visited her in the hospital before they took her off life support. She was hooked up to a hose thing that breathed for her. The sound of that machine—”

I briefly closed my eyes, pushing away memories of my own.

“I’d never seen anyone on life support before.” Penny hunched her shoulders. “There was something about it—the machine, the noise it made, this kind of puffing…It did something to me.”

I realized that she still hadn’t met my gaze. Not even when she’d told me she loved me.

“Before that, I was always able to compartmentalize,” she said. “In this work, you have to. Otherwise you burn out and then you’re no help to anybody. Whenever something awful happened, I knew how to move on.”

“Yeah.”

“I was there when they took her off life support.” Penny paused, head bowed, as though honoring the dead with a moment of silence. I did not want to be the one to break it.

“He was out on bail by then,” she said. “When she died, he was out on bail. He lives—lived—way out in the country. I saw his mug shot and got his address from the police reports. They knew what was happening to her, those fuckers. There was a neighbor not too far down the road who would hear the screaming and call 911, and the cops would show up and see her beaten to a pulp, but she was always too scared to press charges.”

I tried to push myself up higher against the headboard, but my elbows gave out. Penny handled it for me, arranging a plush throne of pillows behind my back.

“Then what happened?” I asked.

“I decided to kill him.” Her voice was steady, though she still did not seem able to look at me. “She died, and I decided to kill him. I made a plan.”

The rain was coming down harder now, tapping at the window like a child asking to be let in. The lamps in Penny’s bedroom had been designed for ambience rather than potency. The corners were swallowed up by shadows.

“What was your plan?” I asked.

“I drove to his house. I put my hood up and pretended to have car trouble. A woman alone on an old country road—I knew it’d be catnip to him. He came right out to help. Didn’t know a thing about cars, just leered at me and tried to get closer.” Her words were coming faster now, tripping over one another. “I had a water bottle ready in the car. Enough sedative to kill him. I gave it to him, you know, to thank him for helping. Nice cold beverage. I thought he drank the whole thing, but I guess he just took a few sips. When I wasn’t looking, he must have tossed it away.”

“A sedative?” I echoed.

“I have it on hand. For the pigs. In case I need to put them in the harness thing. Remember I showed you the little forklift that time? I pick them up with the crane so I can drive them to the vet. Some of them are fine with it, but others get really agitated, and it’s best if they just sleep during the trip.”

“Okay,” I said, trying to keep up.

“Pigs weigh five hundred, six hundred pounds, though. So the amount I need to sedate one of them, if you give a person that amount…or a little more, or a lot more…” Penny smiled—not a smile, a baring of teeth, those feline incisors. “He wasn’t supposed to wake up. Not ever. He was supposed to just drift off to sleep and die there in my trunk.” Her voice deepened into something like a growl. “So I’m on the road and I hear this thumping noise. I was worried he would kick out a taillight or something. Anyway, I didn’t think he’d be much trouble by then. He should have been halfway to dying.” Another gleam of teeth. “I pulled over in that little parking lot and he came flying out of the trunk, just flying out, he went for my throat so I ran, he was right behind me, and I’ve never run that fast, I didn’t even know I could, but he was chasing me, right on my heels, and I didn’t know where I was going or how far I had gone, it was just running running running, until he caught me, he caught hold of me and I had the knife, my knife, he almost got it but we were struggling and he moved to the left”—she swung an arm to demonstrate how he had moved to the left—“and his chest was exposed for a second, so I lunged and it was a lucky shot, just stabbed as hard as I could, and he went down, he was sort of gurgling, and then everything was red. I saw red—I never knew that was a real thing—and I don’t know how many times I stabbed him, but when I looked again he was dead. He was dead. He was dead.”

The glow from the bedside lamp split her in half—one side bathed in warm amber light, the other side a shadow, gray on black, the mere suggestion of a human shape.

“So you called me,” I said.

“Who else?”

Finally she met my gaze, giving me the connection she had been withholding, more intimate than skin on skin.

58

Morning came bright and cloudless. Penny and I had dozed through the remainder of the dark hours, exhausted by disclosures and revelations. She helped me limp down the stairs and out the front door, into air like bathwater. My joints creaked, muscles crackling, a tympani of pain ringing through my body.

Penny went to feed the hens, who thronged in a hilarious muddle of feathers and fluff. From around the corner of the house I heard the wet grunts of pigs snuffling in the dirt. Bees floated on the windless air. In times of strife, animals provide a particular kind of comfort. They know nothing of graves or knife wounds or angels. They bring a perspective that is both wider and smaller than ours. By wider, I mean their sensory awareness, so much more potent than ours. And smaller—I mean the tight, fierce focus on what lies immediately in front of them, unbothered by the interior clamor of human language, the retention of memory, and the making of stories.

Penny and I sat together on the porch swing as she rocked us back and forth with gentle pushes of her toes. Was it possible that I loved her more now than even last night? I certainly understood her better. Her morality—which I had assumed without asking to be the typical American weakness—was more like mine than I could ever have imagined. She had righted a wrong. She had adhered to the principles of the nine noble virtues. She was a part of my tribe.

And then a question occurred to me. “What were you planning to do with the body?”

“Hmm?” Her tone was casual, but she abruptly stopped rocking the swing, jolting us both forward.

“You were driving him somewhere,” I said. “You stopped because he was kicking. You definitely didn’t plan on a knife fight in the woods. So what was your plan? Where were you going to take him after he died in your trunk?”

“Damn,” Penny said softly.

“What?”

She pulled her knees up against her chest. “I was really hoping that question wouldn’t occur to you.”

“Why?”

“Do you want me to lie to you this time? I think it would be better.”

“Never lie to—”

“Another Viking, I know. Vikingabarn,” she added, butchering the pronunciation.

“Tell me,” I said. “Were you going to bury him here on your land? Or dump him in the river? Or…” I stopped myself there.

Penny hid her face in the knobs of her knees and mumbled something I did not catch.

“What?”

“Pigs,” she shouted without lifting her face from the cradle of her knees.

It took me a moment. Gentle pink creatures wagging their tails like dogs—dig a grave in their pen?—that made no sense—but they ate bones. Protein. Only raw, never cooked. Their favorite.

“We eat pigs,” Penny said. “Why shouldn’t they eat us?”

My gorge rose and I leaned forward, gagging.

“See? It’s gross!” she cried out. “I should have lied to you. Is it too late? Let’s pretend I was going to bury him on my land. No—the river, that was my plan. Like that guy who drowned a few months back, remember? They found his body when the river rose?”

I was too busy retching to answer. Penny eased me to my feet and held my hair back as I vomited into the grass. My aching muscles protested so strongly at the unaccustomed effort that I worried I would lose consciousness.

Even in that heightened moment, however, the irony did not escape me. My father tortured dozens of men to death, but Penny’s pigs had undone me.

“I know how it sounds,” she said as I straightened up. “But they love it, they get so excited. It’s Pavlovian at this point—they hear the pop of the trunk opening and the squeak of the harness coming down and they start jumping around and wagging.” She sucked in a breath. “And I don’t, you know, sell them for their meat or anything. Nobody is going to end up eating the pigs that ate people.”

I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. “Stop saying ‘pigs.’ ”

Her face was flushed with emotion. Before my eyes, the color spilled up her forehead and spread down her throat.

“You can leave,” she said.

I spat in the grass, trying to remove the taste from my mouth. “Can you get me some water?” Belatedly I registered what she had said. “Leave? What do you mean?”

She turned and ran into the house, then returned a minute later with a condensation-clouded glass clinking with ice. I swished out my mouth and spat again, then drank the rest.

“What do you mean, leave?” I asked. “What are you talking about?”

“I should have said this last night. Like, right away.” Quick breath. “I’m an idiot. I told you this whole murder story but I didn’t make sure you understood that you’re not trapped here with me. You don’t have your car—I know that—but as soon as you’re well enough, I’ll drive you home. I’ll take you anywhere you want to go.”

“Penny,” I began, but she didn’t let me finish.

“I broke the law,” she shouted. “The law is stupid, but I broke it and I know that. I’ll accept whatever you do. Whatever you need to do. You can hate me. You can tell Finn or anybody else you want. You can go to the”—she found it hard to say the word—“police. I meant to kill him and I made a plan, and the plan went wrong but I still killed him. I deserve whatever’s coming.”

I laughed. The sound burst out of me, a deep rolling belly laugh. Penny stared, her brow crinkled with concern.

“Did you understand what I said?” she asked.

I couldn’t tell her again that I loved her; it was hard enough to have said it aloud the first time.

“Why would I leave you now?” I asked instead.

“I killed him.” Her tone was hesitant.

In the moment, her concern struck me as funny—her faltering voice, her fretful face. She was so worried about my father’s daughter. I laughed until my throat was raw.

“I think I broke something in your brain,” Penny said.

“I’m not leaving you,” I said, getting control of myself.

“I’ve never seen you laugh like that. It must be a trauma response.”

“I’m fine. And I’m not leaving. We need to stay together now.”

“Victims sometimes laugh,” she said. “I haven’t seen it often, but it does happen.”

“Penny, I don’t care that you murdered him. I’m glad you murdered him.”

There was a pulse of silence.

“Glad?” she echoed in a tone of wonder.

“He had no honor. No true warrior would kill a woman—his wife!—like that.” I realized that I had reverted to the language of my childhood, but it was too late to stop now. “He deserved it. Some people need to be killed.”

The ripe odor of the pigs carried to me on the wind. It did not smell any bloodier or more worrisome than it usually did. I took comfort in that.

“He had no honor,” Penny murmured. “That’s for sure.”

“You did a good thing, the right thing. I’m proud of you.”

“I definitely broke your brain,” she said, though I caught a half-smile. She was beginning to believe me.

“No, that happened to me a long time ago,” I said. “Way before you entered the picture.”

She came to me and cupped my face in her hands.

“I’m not leaving you,” I said. “Okay?”

Penny pressed her forehead against mine, and we stood like that in the sunlight for a long time.

59

The night sky was moonless, starless. I was alone—no Penny at my side, no voices or movement in the silent air. I realized slowly that I was back in the forest where I’d dug the grave. The place was just as I had left it: a soupy plot of freshly turned earth stuccoed with autumn leaves and crisscrossed by fallen tree branches. I had gathered them from the underbrush to cover up the raw wound in the soil. I knew how quickly the plant life would swallow up the bare earth. I had even rolled a few mossy rocks over the place—forest headstones.

Now I stood on the grave itself, my heels sinking into the muck. I tried to lift my right leg out of the quagmire, but the movement only plunged my left deeper. The mud swallowed my shin like a hungry mouth.

A scrap of fog drifted toward me through the trees. It was an earthbound cloud, a woman’s dress, a woman. Limp hair screened her face.

“Mamma?” I reached for her, but she was too far away. There was nothing for me to grab on to—nothing to slow my descent. I was knee-deep now and sinking faster.

“Mamma!”

She circled me in silence, a column of white with a ragged hem.

“Can you help me?” I cried. I was asking for her to pull me out of the mud, but as soon as the words were spoken I realized I wanted more—much more. I desperately needed help, I was sure of it, but I couldn’t explain why. Perhaps I had never known why.

“Can you help me?” I asked again. “Please help me.”

“How can I do that?” she murmured, turning to me at last. I remember nothing of her face, just blazing blue eyes, the same color as Finn’s but brighter, lit from within like the noonday sky.

“The wolf is already here,” she said.

—

I woke wrapped in sheets so hot and damp with sweat that for a moment I thought I had wet the bed. Penny lay facing away from me on her side, her shoulder and bandaged hand gleaming milky in the dark room.

“Get up,” I screamed. “Penny, wake up!”

I struggled to untangle myself from the cocoon of bedclothes, ignoring the complaining of my muscles. She rolled to look at me, bleary-eyed.

“What’s wrong?”

“Get up!”

“Okay,” she mumbled. I was finally able to extricate myself and stagger to my feet. Penny came around the bed, reaching for me.

“Are you in pain?” she asked in a sleep-thick voice. “Are you all right?”

“Don’t touch me,” I shouted. She recoiled as though I’d slapped her.

“I need to get out of here,” I said, limping to the door. “Get your keys. I need to get out of here now.”

“Now?” She glanced at the clock on her bedside table. “Honey, it’s four in the morning. Why don’t we wait—”

“Now,” I yelled, loud enough to hurt even my own ears.

She said nothing else, just hurried downstairs to grab her purse. I shuffled after her, wincing with each step.

The Milky Way spilled thick and eerie across the black bowl of the sky. A shock of cold wind brought me all the way awake. Sometime during the night, the temperature had dropped precipitously. Penny started the engine and I climbed in on the passenger side.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“Out of here—out of here. Drive!”

I don’t remember much of the next few minutes, the tunnel back to civilization, the noisy business of opening the gate, the crunch of car wheels on dirt roads. Penny was speaking urgently but I could not hear a word.

It was the story, you see. The story was expanding with explosive, painful force, breaking its borders, bigger every second. My mind could barely contain it, and I could hear nothing over the roar and rending of that violent unfurling.

I could not have articulated at the time what was happening to me, but now, through the lens of retrospection, I understand it all.

I made this story by living it. I organized this story by thinking and thinking about what happened, churning it in my mind, working it like clay until it began to take form. I am solidifying it now, even now, by speaking it aloud to you.

Perhaps you have already figured out the truth. You may have put the pieces together a while ago. That clarity—that distance—is the gift I have given you. Here, now, you and I are in a calm place, a quiet moment. We have the luxury of clearheaded reflection. Listening, listening, you may be able to understand things about my story that I never will.

I hope you never experience anything like it. I hope you never know—really know—know from the inside—my state of mind on that dark road in Penny’s car.

In my sleep, in my dream, with Mamma’s help, I had made the final connection. Penny was a liar. She had spun me a tale, complete, self-contained, with a beginning, middle, and end. It began when a woman was taken off life support. In the middle, Penny made a plan, found an address, and got hold of a sedative. Her tale ended with me digging a grave, a bonfire of bloodstained clothing, and love.

But that was not the real story at all. Penny had told me only a small part. She had done what all skilled liars do: warped truth into half-truth. She had offered me a tiny segment of the tale and pretended it was the whole thing.

I did not yet know the entire story, but I could sense its size and scope now. It was immense, strange, and horrible. It had begun years earlier—long before I even entered Penny’s life. The middle of the tale had been unfolding without my knowledge for as long as she and I had been together. The story did not end with me finding her, digging a grave for her, saving her. The story had not yet ended.

With tremendous effort, I gathered myself as Pappa had taught me. Panic got people killed. Never show fear or pain, much less heartbreak.

Penny was driving with careful slowness down another dirt road. I did not recognize the area—but how could I? At that hour, rural Haven was a landscape of unbroken darkness, no streetlamps or neighboring houses. Penny’s headlights might have been the last lights in all the nine realms.

“Pavlov,” I said.

She startled a little at the sound of my voice. I wondered how long we had been driving in silence.

“I read about him when I was a kid,” I said. “Finn did, I mean. He told me about the experiments with the dogs. They hear a bell, they know it means food, and they start drooling.”

“Right,” Penny said slowly.

“You said it was Pavlovian,” I said. “That’s the word you used. You said the pigs get so excited when they hear the pop of the trunk and the harness squeaking—they jump, they wag. But the experiments—Pavlov—it took a long time for the conditioning—that’s the word, right? Conditioning? The dogs had to hear the bell over and over…”

I broke off. Penny took a quick breath as though preparing to speak. I waited until the stillness stretched out long enough that I realized she wasn’t going to.

“You’ve seen the pigs eat somebody,” I said. “They recognize the sound of the trunk. The harness. They’ve heard it so many times that they learned it means food.”

The words sounded ridiculous as I spoke them aloud. How could pink, curly-tailed creatures in a sty be life-changing? Yet in this moment, there was nothing more important than her answer.

“Yes,” Penny said.

“You fed them a dead person?”

“Yes.”

“You brought the body home in the trunk. You used the crane and the harness to lift it up and put it in the pen. That’s what you did?”

“Yes.”

The image made bile rise in my throat once more. Hooves scuffling. Eager snorts. I had seen the animals gathered around the trough enough times to know the sound of their teeth breaking bone and their grunts of delight.

“The man in the forest wasn’t the first man you killed,” I said. It wasn’t a question, but she answered it anyway.

“Yes.”

That might have been the closest to madness I ever came. The night I had driven to Penny’s house in a fugue, unable to wait one more second to see what lay behind her locked door—that had merely been a little lapse, a quiver in my equilibrium, a practice run for this moment.

Here, now, safe with you, I can see how close I came to breaking. Even the strongest mind can only take so much. I felt the pull of it, the ease of giving up, the peace of drifting, releasing my hold on this reality and traveling on, voyaging to parts unknown, maybe to Helheim, or even farther, past the borders of the nine realms entirely, out of Odin’s sight, beyond the reach of any living creature, even myself.

It was touch and go.

“Liv,” Penny was saying. “Liv, Liv.”

“How did it start? Who was the first person you killed?”

She began to answer, but I cut her off. “Never mind. I won’t believe whatever you tell me.”

She flinched.

“How many?” I asked. “Tell me that at least.”

“More than one.”

“How many? How many?”

“It doesn’t matter, Liv.”

The sound of my name in her mouth. “Stop the car,” I spat.

“What?”

“Stop! Stop the car.”

She braked hard enough that I flung out a hand to brace myself against the dashboard. I threw the door open and stumbled into the chilly autumn air. The moon was tangled in the branches of a half-bare tree.

Penny approached me, reached for me, but I shoved her away. She stumbled but did not fall.

And then she was talking, talking. Standing there on a black road, the engine thrumming behind us, both her door and mine hanging open, she talked so fast that her sentences stumbled over one another.

She told me she had been murdering people for five years. She told me she wasn’t a psychopath, not a serial killer—a vigilante, that was the word. She told me it wasn’t a lie, she hadn’t lied to me about what she had done; it was a lie by omission, sure, yes, but she couldn’t have told me the whole truth, she didn’t think I could handle it, she didn’t think anyone could handle it.

She told me when it began. Honestly, she said, when it actually began. There was a man who raped his preteen son. After calling the hotline several times, the boy killed himself.

“I only saw the boy after he was dead,” Penny said. “When I heard the news, I went to the morgue. I needed to—I don’t know, tuck him in somehow. Put him to bed. His face—he was so young—”

Penny sounded sincere. She sounded as sincere as she had when she’d told me about the woman being taken off life support.

“His dad was the first one I ever killed,” she said. “I gave him the sedative. I put him in the trunk and he died and I drove home and opened the trunk and wrapped him in the harness and lifted him with the crane, right into the sty. The pigs ate everything, even his shoes.”

I did not gag. It’s amazing what you can adapt to—what levels of grotesqueness and horror become normalized, given even a little time.

“He was the first?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Five years ago?”

“I’m being honest this time. I promise.”

The beginning of a story is a powerful thing. It is precedent, not just a marker in time but the first stage in a pattern yet to unfold. If you do not know how a story begins, you will never fully understand what it means. You will only ever see a part of it, a link in the chain rather than the chain itself. An incomplete pattern, lacking its origin point, is no pattern at all.

Her voice shook with emotion. I didn’t believe her, not entirely, but there was a shared kernel of truth in both versions of her story. Whether it was the boy in the morgue or the woman on life support, Penny had, for the first time, come face-to-face with the dead body of a victim she had not been able to save.

The fact of violent death was not new to her, of course. She had accepted the tragic reality that many people never escaped their abusers. In the past, Penny had heard their voices on the hotline, even met some of them in person. If they died afterward, they slipped into the theoretical for Penny. No more voice on the phone, only silence—an intellectual loss rather than a physical one. She had mourned the dead, naturally, but she had always found the wherewithal to move on, focusing her attention on the people she could still help.

However, there is nothing theoretical about a corpse. The boy who died by suicide was Penny’s breaking point. In her own words, it broke her brain.

She told me that everyone she killed had deserved it.

She told me that there was no pleasure in it for her. She was merely god’s eraser, wiping out mistakes and monsters.

She told me she had no regrets.

She told me she had only ever killed men.

“I haven’t felt the need to take out any of the female abusers,” she said. “Not yet. If it comes to that, I definitely would. I do keep an eye on the female ones, that’s for sure. But so far, it’s only been men.”

The bordering forest made a wind tunnel of the road. A shock of breeze blew my hair across my face. Both open car doors creaked a little.

“I’m careful,” Penny said. “I never take more than one or two a year. I spread them out all over the state. Besides, the cops usually have no idea who these guys are. They definitely don’t see any connections between them. The hotline is confidential. I know things nobody else knows.”

She shimmied her shoulders in a convulsion of some powerful emotion. It might have been rage or elation.

“They don’t look like murders,” she went on. “That’s what you have to understand. These men—they just vanish. I take them when they’re alone. Drug them. Quietly into the trunk. Happy pigs. No body, no crime.” She opened her hand like a flower blooming. “I do research. I make sure they disappear in a way that makes sense. Like a swimmer—a drowning, you know? Or—or a gambler. He went on these crazy long binges in between beating his family half to death. Then one day he was gone again. I made sure that nobody could possibly see the pattern.”

“I saw the pattern,” I said. Or did I merely think the words? Did I say it in Swedish? Penny did not seem to register that I’d spoken.

“Now you know all my secrets, Liv,” she said. “You know everything. Really this time,” she added after a moment, trying to drive the point home.

“Take me back to your house.”

She paused, clearly having expected a different reaction. Any reaction at all. But after a moment she obeyed. Her body flared into color briefly as she passed in front of the headlights, then returned to silhouette on her side of the car.

I said nothing as she did a three-point turn and trundled back in the other direction. I watched her surreptitiously out of the corner of my eye. There was no physical resemblance between her and Pappa: one huge, the other lithe; one unmistakably savage, the other seemingly gentle; one with a baritone like thunder, the other with a contralto like rain. They might have been different species. Their sameness lay deep beneath the surface, deeper than bone.

People are drawn to the familiar. We love what we know.

Penny braked hard, and I caught myself on the dashboard again. I looked up to see three deer on the road, their fur washed gray by the headlights, their pupils fluorescing. They stood like statues for a few heartbeats, then turned and bounded into darkness. The raised flaps of their white tails were the last I saw of them.

Deer were malevolent creatures in The Poetic Edda. Four stags stood among the roots of Yggdrasil, nibbling unceasingly at its bark, causing pain beyond reckoning.

“Do you know what you’re going to do?” Penny asked, keeping her foot on the brake.

“What do you mean?”

“You said you wouldn’t leave me. You said you wouldn’t turn me in. But that was when—”

“When I thought the story was different.”

“So what will you do?”

There was no oath between us. Penny had shattered any semblance of our burgeoning, implicit bond when she had lied to me. Lied by omission, she had said, but a betrayal was a betrayal no matter how she tried to justify it.

Now, without fear, unmoved by loyalty, I could decide whether Penny would share Pappa’s fate.

She was looking at me, looking at me.

I understood the story at last. In the beginning, Urth had woven a child on a morgue table. In the middle, Verthandi had spun a series of corpses tossed into a pigsty. But Skuld had not yet begun her work. What Shall Be—that was the question that now hung in the balance. The end of the story was up to me.

What Shall Be

60

Entry into the prison was a multistep process. First they had to check that I was on the approved visitation list. Then I had to fill out a form stating that I had never been convicted of a crime. There followed an exhausting interview with a wispy young member of staff. He asked me the same things over and over—Social Security number, criminal history, relationship to the prisoner—as though by springing each question on me with slightly different wording, he might startle me into a different response. The interview room was sweltering.

“You changed your last name,” the man said for the fifth time.

“I did.”

“And why was that again?”

I was starting to lose my temper. “It isn’t a crime, is it?”

He picked up my driver’s license and peered at it, rotating it in the light and scraping his thumbnail over the lettering as if he expected it to flake away. Finally, grudgingly, he let me go.

Another man took away my keys, cellphone, and belt buckle. I endured a body search by a female member of staff—clothes on but every inch of skin palpated through the fabric. The woman investigated my hair, lifting the silvery strands and letting them fall. I wondered if she thought I had somehow hidden a knife among my limp tresses.

At last, a guard beckoned me into the hallway. There were cameras everywhere, glinting from corners and grinding audibly as they tracked my movements. The guard buzzed me through a series of doors, each thicker than the last.

I was numb. That’s the only way to describe it. There is a place beyond anxiety, beyond sorrow, beyond pain, and I had found my way there over the past hours and days. My body was stone-heavy and ghost-weightless at the same time.

The visiting room was the saddest place I’d ever seen. Fluorescent lights flickered. A guard stood against the wall, arms folded, with a holster at his hip that held a truncheon. The room was as long and thin as a train car. Each visitor was relegated to a plastic chair in front of a scratched, filmy window. I had expected to sit in a private booth like an old-fashioned phone box, insulated from other people, but the only barrier that separated each chair from the next one was a thin partition. The visitors were screened from seeing one another, but their voices carried clearly. I supposed that the seats were arranged this way so the guard could watch everyone from his vantage point at the back wall.

Three other women were already there: one elderly and gray-haired, one bottle blond, and one tattooed, with a buzzed scalp. They had staggered themselves across the room, keeping an empty chair or two between them, sitting as far apart as they could manage. I could not see the prisoners on the other side of the glass, just the shadows their visitors cast on the pane under the harsh lighting. Deadened, anesthetized, I observed the three women dispassionately. Mother, sister, and girlfriend, I decided. Their murmurs rose from their separate chairs and mingled into blur. Someone was crying, but I could not tell which of them it was.

The guard pointed me to the chair at the far end of the row. The room seemed to elongate as I walked; the back wall remained the same distance away, the floor distending with each step I took. It felt like hours, though it could only have been seconds, before I bumped awkwardly into the plastic chair and collapsed into the seat.

The window in front of me was empty. There was a humming in the air, either the vibration of the fluorescent lights or the tremor of my overwrought nervous system. I poked at the contraption embedded in the glass. Not quite a phone—the cord was too thick, the handset too boxy. Visitors could not touch the prisoners or share the same air, no smell of familiar sweat, no contact between fingertips. Only two out of the five senses were permitted here—hearing and vision—and even these were curtailed and constrained. A face mottled by glass. A voice thinned by wires.

Was that why the chairs were plastic? I imagined a visitor picking one up and swinging it in an attempt to shatter the window. Elsewhere in the room, the gentle weeping continued. The guard cleared his throat behind me. My heart was thumping louder than I’d ever heard it before. Then I realized the sound was the clock ticking.

A door opened on the other side of my window. There was an electronic buzz and a thump muted by the heavy glass. Fight, flight, freeze—those were my only options now. Fight was the life of a Viking, flight the choice of a coward. Until this moment, I had never really considered what the last alternative entailed. Rabbits went rigid when a hawk soared overhead. I’d seen bees do it, hardening into motionlessness beneath the shadow of a possible predator. Freeze was the response of prey—but in this moment, I could not move a single muscle. If a predator came for me, I would be helpless. I couldn’t even blink.

Something shifted on the other side of the glass.

Flicker.

Shadow.

Pappa.

He filled the window with his bulk. Even through the pane, I heard the chair creak beneath his weight. White hair fell below his shoulders—even paler than mine now. Long beard. Deep grooves between his eyebrows. Somehow I had not realized that he would age. I had grown and changed, of course, but surely Pappa would stay the same as always, kept forever in his prime by Idun’s apples of immortality.

Strangest of all, he was smaller than I’d expected. I had last seen him when I was thirteen. He had towered above me then; I had been eye level with his midriff, and he’d been strong enough to pick me up with one arm.

And yes, the man before me was unusually tall, powerfully built, his height unaffected by the years, his shoulders as wide as the window. But he was human. I had never truly understood that until now.

I met his gaze. Electric blue. The jolt of the connection between us made me gasp. The color of his eyes, at least, remained unaffected by time.

He did not smile. I didn’t either. Neither of us reached for the handset. We just looked, drinking in the sight of each other. I had missed him. I had not realized that I’d missed him. The longing had been so powerful that it didn’t register—less like an emotion and more like a fundamental aspect of reality. Gravity, sunlight, and homesickness.

His eyes brimmed. I had never seen him cry before. I hadn’t known he could. At once, to my own astonishment, I felt the prickle of answering tears. The sensation was odd but pleasant—a kind of deep, wrenching release. Pappa did not wipe away his tears; he let them spill in a quiet waterfall, and I did the same, tasting salt on my tongue.

The guard called my name. I turned, seeing the last of the other women—the elderly one, gray-haired, her back bowed—shuffling out the door. I could tell by the guard’s irritated posture that he had called me more than once.

“You need to leave,” he said. “Visitation ends at three.”

I got to my feet. There was a guard on the other side of the glass too, guiding my father away. I caught his gaze one last time. I didn’t need to tell him I would come back tomorrow. He didn’t need to tell me how long he had been waiting for me.

61

The soreness caught up with me as I climbed the stairs of the motel. For the first time in my life, I had resorted to painkillers. The bus ride would have been unendurable without them. They were more effective than I could have imagined. I didn’t quite understand how tablets the size of pebbles could work such miracles, but I was able to walk erect now and even use my scabby hands to hold a sandwich and brush my teeth. Magic from the gods.

Back in the motel room, I swallowed two pills with a glass of sulfur-tinged water from the tap. I sat on the bed’s greasy comforter. The guard at the prison had made me turn off my phone. I hesitated to power it back up.

As I’d feared, there were twenty-six missed calls from Penny, fourteen voicemails, and thirty-one texts. I scrolled through the latter without reading them, merely registering the size of each missive, too long to fit inside the screen.

I deleted everything. I considered blocking her, but that didn’t feel right. Nothing felt right.

There were two additional texts from an unknown number. They didn’t appear to be spam—no links to websites. I opened the first one.

It’s Finn.

I laughed aloud. So he had finally gotten a cellphone; my extended absence had done what years of nagging hadn’t managed. I wondered how he was adapting to this strange new device.

Fairly well, it seemed. His second text was a photo of a tufted black shape in his bed, head on the pillow, eyes shut, paws tucked over its snout. Objectively adorable.

The caption read, This is Skoll.

Good name, I texted back. Hati and Skoll were the wolves who chased the sun and moon through the sky, nipping at their heels to keep them on schedule. The name seemed rather aggressive for such a tiny creature, but I supposed the puppy would grow into it.

I thought about what to say next, my thumbs hovering over the screen. At last I typed: Listen, I don’t know when I’ll be home. Many things are happening.

He answered with a thumbs-up, which seemed to end the conversation for now.

I hadn’t told him where I was going. Presumably he still thought I was at Penny’s place, tending to her as she recovered from pancreatitis.

I had left while she was sleeping. After our middle-of the-night drive, I let her make me an early breakfast. I watched her begin to yawn. She drifted to bed again and dozed off almost at once, overcome by the intensity of what she had just revealed to me. The relief had left her serene and spent. An untold story is a burden, and Penny had been carrying hers alone for five years.

As soon as I heard her snoring, I grabbed my suitcase and the bottle of ibuprofen in Penny’s medicine cabinet. I took her car keys, drove into town, and parked outside the bus station. I texted her to let her know where to find the vehicle—north side of the street, unlocked, with the keys under the passenger side floor mat. I didn’t care how she would navigate the retrieval of her car. She could walk the long miles to downtown Haven for all I cared.

The ride to the Coldwater Correctional Facility, Tin Hill, Iowa, took six hours. The gods had traveled from one realm to another by means of the Bifröst, a burning rainbow bridge that would scorch the feet and blind the eyes of any mortal who tried to cross it. At the back of a Greyhound bus, I endured a journey of similar peril and extremity, bringing me to the other side scarred and transformed.

—

When I woke the following morning, I had no idea where I was. The motel room had sallow wallpaper and a pervasive smell of damp. The pillow was insubstantial; my head sank into it without resistance.

There was only one motel in Tin Hill. All the other visitors to the prison were presumably staying here too. I wondered if I would meet the same mother, sister, or girlfriend from yesterday in the lobby over our meager continental breakfasts.

Sixteen calls from Penny. Forty texts. Eleven voicemails. Three emails. Delete, delete, delete.

Finn had texted too. Penny came by near midnight. Said she doesn’t know where you are. Where are you?

It was fun texting him. We’d never had walkie-talkies as kids—I hadn’t known they existed then—but this seemed like the next best thing.

I wrote, Penny and I had a fight. Need to clear my head. Don’t worry about me.

Finn texted back immediately. I watched the ellipsis pulse in and out of being before the words appeared: Did you leave because of Skoll?

I began to type a reassuring response—of course not, this had nothing to do with Finn, let alone the new puppy—before I realized he was joking. Text messages were devoid of tone. My typical interactions with Finn consisted only of tone: frown, raised eyebrows, smirk. Bare words on a screen were a new experience for us both.

Yes, I wrote. I hate puppies, lollipops, and joy.

I waited. Finn replied with a photograph of the dog attempting to climb up onto the couch, his front paws scarcely able to reach the bottom of the cushion, one back leg braced against the floor, the other scrabbling for purchase. I imagined my brother following Skoll around with his brand-new phone, capturing every nuzzle and yawn, thrilled by the convenience of the camera and the ease of disseminating important snapshots like this one.

Another text appeared: You’re sure I shouldn’t worry?

Before I could answer, he wrote again: I’m worried, Liv.

I considered whether I ought to lie, deflect, or make a joke. Finally I texted back: You can worry a little. But not too much. Give Skoll a kiss for me.

I waited a few minutes for an answer, but my phone did not chime again.

62

Pappa was already there when I took a seat. A different guard stood against the back wall of the visiting room today, taller and sterner, curdling the air with pungent cologne. There was only one other visitor, a young man with a mop of black curls. He sat with his shoulders hunched at the window on the far end of the narrow room.

This time, Pappa lifted the handset as soon as he saw me. I did the same, though my hand was shaking so much that I nearly dropped it. Would his voice have changed? I had never forgotten the sound of it, that gravel-in-the-throat growl. It rang through my head in dreams.

“Vargunge,” he said. Wolf cub.

His voice, like his eyes, remained unaltered by the years. A laugh burbled up from my gut. I heard the guard shift his weight behind me, his holster squeaking. It was probably unusual for people to laugh in here.

“Hej,” I said. Hi. My mother tongue.

“I speak much better the English now,” Pappa said proudly. His accent was so thick I didn’t realize at first that he was, in fact, speaking English. Was this what I sounded like to the people of Haven?

Reverting to Swedish, Pappa leaned forward and said, “But I prefer my own language. I only use English to frighten the guards.” He wiggled his eyebrows. “They fear me.”

“Everyone fears you,” I said in Swedish.

“Úlfhéðn,” he said, smacking his chest with his free hand. The Norse word for wolf-warrior.

I caught a shift of movement behind my father. There was a guard on that side of the window too. I hadn’t noticed him at first; I had been focused entirely on Pappa’s overwhelming presence. When Pappa had struck his chest, the guard behind him had flinched, his hand reaching for his truncheon.

For some reason, this made my eyes prickle with tears again. Even now, white-haired and wrinkled, my father held life and death in his hands, and I was his little wolf cub.

“You grew up well,” he said in Swedish. “You have the look of a Viking woman.”

“You look the same as always.”

He shook his head, his braided beard waggling in concert. His hairline hadn’t receded an inch.

“I have aged,” he said. “The Wheel of Time never stops spinning.”

I began to tell him I was sorry that I hadn’t visited him before now. I bit back the words. Pappa would not accept a false apology.

“Can we talk about Mamma?” I asked instead.

There was a silence. His stillness gave nothing away.

“You look like her,” he said.

“I do?”

He made a motion as though cupping my chin in his fingers. “The eyes,” he said. “Your nose. You have my mouth, but most of you is hers.”

The glass was thicker than his palm. I suspected it was bulletproof.

“How did she die?” I asked.

Pappa frowned. I worried he would hang up, push his chair back, and leave me.

“You said she was weak,” I said. “That’s all you ever told me. Is she back home, Pappa? Was she buried with—with all the others?”

“No.” His voice was unexpectedly gentle. “I should have spoken more carefully to you. I should have explained. She was strong, your mother. Beautiful. A gift from the gods. It was her body that was weak.” He closed his eyes, as though even now it was difficult for him to talk about her. “I hoped that somehow you would remember, Vikingabarn. But you were too little.”

I remembered his bed—long and lean, made for one tall person. He could not have shared it with anyone; no one else would have fit. Had he built a new bed after her death? He must have.

“Her heart gave out,” he said. “A defect. She was young—too young. I didn’t bury her in a grave. I couldn’t bear to think of her rotting there. I burned her body. Both you and—and—” Pappa broke off, his face twisting. “We will not speak of the oath-breaker. I don’t want to hear his name. You understand?”

I nodded, that obedient bob of the head a reflex from childhood.

“You both were there with me for the funeral,” Pappa said. “I wanted you to say goodbye. You liked the fire.” He sighed, a little puff. “We watched her burn all the way down until there was nothing left.”

I imagined my mother on a pyre, eyes closed, a pale figure ringed by logs, the flames licking upward, her long tresses rising on the heat of the blaze, the silvery strands indistinguishable from smoke.

“How old was I?” I asked.

“Not even a year.”

A lump in my throat. Eyes brimming with fresh tears. I had never cried this much in my life. Pain—physical or mental—could not move me to weeping. It seemed that love was another matter entirely.

“Was Mamma Swedish?” I asked.

I didn’t expect an answer. Pappa had never countenanced any of my questions before, but to my surprise he did not hesitate this time. “First-generation,” he said. “She spoke both languages fluently.”

“Did she have parents?” I flinched at my own stupidity and rephrased the question: “Do I have any family on her side?”

I wasn’t sure if I wanted him to say yes or no.

“All dead,” he said. “Dead before I met her.”

“Oh. Okay. How did you meet her?”

“Why does that matter? I met her. I loved her.”

His features were etched with pain. I knew better than to push him further. He had already given me more than I’d expected, anyway.

I stayed until the end of visiting hours. Pappa wanted to know everything about my life—everything. The conversation flowed only one way: from me to him. I sat there in the white-hot glow of his full attention, as thrilling and dangerous as ever. Pappa asked question after question. He made it clear with frowns and silences that he had no interest in discussing anything about his own life after his arrest. Prison was off-limits. He wanted to know about me, only me, and no detail was too small for him.

I did not speak Finn’s name, which sometimes led to confusing syntax. I didn’t want to call him “the oath-breaker,” which seemed cruel and reductionist, condensing all of his complicated self into a single act. Pappa and I settled on “the other one.”

I explained that the other one and I still celebrated the Viking holidays. We prayed to the old gods, the true gods. I told Pappa about my recent blót sacrifice. I told him about Hati and the new puppy, Skoll. He nodded approvingly.

“Sol and Mani,” he said. Sun and Moon.

Footsteps scuffled behind me, and I turned to see the guard at my elbow. His cologne swirled around him in a hurricane of stench.

“Ms. Ulfsson,” he said. “It’s time.”

Someone spoke on Pappa’s side of the glass too. I couldn’t hear the words, just the tone, an emotionless rumble. My father began to rise, then abruptly turned back to me as though struck by a thought. He picked up the handset again. I hadn’t yet hung up on my end.

“Ulfsson?” Pappa asked. “Liv Ulfsson? You changed your last name?”

A twinge of panic. Was he angry? I scooted my chair back from the window in case he broke through the glass.

“We thought—” I began. “After everything, it seemed…”

But Pappa was smiling. “Children of the wolf. Wonderful.”

63

In the motel room, I lay on top of the comforter and closed my eyes. Seeing my father had unlocked something. My own Yggdrasil, the verdant core of my being, had begun to tremble.

It is not a simple thing to survive a childhood like mine. On a level beneath consciousness, I had always understood that if I ever faced the truth about my father, it would break me apart. There was the knowing and the not-knowing. When bad things had happened, I hid them away where I could not see them. These are the tactics we devise as little children. Before the onset of rational thought, we create coping mechanisms to endure unendurable things.

And so I had pushed away my incipient understanding that the red on the floor—my first memory—was not paint at all. I shook off the terror of the graves that appeared on our land. I hid the implications of Pappa’s ecstatic face when he drowned a baby rabbit in a bucket in front of me. I accepted what I could bear and shoved the rest into dark rooms. I grew up with a mind full of locked doors.

To be clear, I didn’t know I was doing this. The strategy worked only because I was unaware of the strategy itself.

When Yggdrasil shakes, every door will open, releasing Fenrir and the dead from Helheim. There in the motel, I felt the tremble of memories beginning to slide and shift, and then—suddenly, explosively—my own doors swung wide. Lying on the bed, I wept again, tears leaking from the corners of my eyes and pooling in my ears. Until the doors opened, I hadn’t remembered they were there at all. I hadn’t registered the phenomenal effort it had taken me to hold them shut for so many years.

Isn’t that always the way? The strategies of little children are maladaptive by their very nature—functional in the moment but catastrophic in the long run.

Now the memories tumbled into the light without sense or pattern, only bright flashes of disconnected moments. The first time Pappa forced me to break a bird’s neck with my bare hands. A gash in Finn’s leg, knee to mid-thigh, and the fifty-three stitches it took me to sew it up, counting each one aloud. The sound, that terrible sound, I once heard through the living room floor. It came from the basement, a cry so primal that I couldn’t recognize it as male or female, human or animal. I left the house immediately and didn’t return for hours.

Until this moment, I had not remembered falling from the highest branch of my favorite pine tree, slamming my body against every splintery limb on the way down, and landing with a sickening collision that broke both bones in my right shin. Finn had splinted the leg and I’d stayed off it until Pappa deemed me ready to limp around the house, wincing with each step. No doctors—not ever.

Until this moment, I had not remembered that Finn once got an ear infection so bad that he could not stand. Pappa treated it with over-the-counter drops from the pharmacy. Finn’s hearing was permanently damaged, I realized now. He always turned his head to the left when I spoke to him.

Until this moment, I had not remembered my first period. Crimson in my underwear, blood without context. Nobody had told me to prepare for menstruation; Pappa was not the sort to arrange a matter-of-fact father-daughter chat. When I went to Finn in a panic, he explained that I wasn’t dying and would merely need to use wads of toilet paper to soak up the bleeding until our next trip to town. Pappa never acknowledged the tampons and pads I added to our grocery cart.

Now I walked through the rooms of my mind, picking up scattered recollections like the gleaming shards of a broken mosaic. I turned each one over in my hands. I could already sense the effort it would require to reassemble them. It was going to take months and years for me to make any semblance of a story out of this mess. For now, I was content merely to roam, gathering up stray reminiscences, sharp as glass, blistering like flame.

Until this moment, I had not understood that my brother and I grew up in different families. If there was Pappa and there was Ulf Thorvaldsson, Finn knew from the beginning that they were the same person. He knew where Pappa went when he left us alone. He knew what Pappa did in the basement. He knew why graves proliferated across our land. He loved Pappa, I think—his love mixed with fear and hatred. He obeyed our father’s rules and whims as a matter of survival. He understood that Pappa might kill either of us.

My family, on the other hand, had been a close-knit tribe. Wild, wonderful Pappa. Sweet, patient Finn. I adored our father beyond measure. Finn and I spent every day in each other’s company, and his company was everything I wanted.

Until now, I had never grasped the extent to which he had been protecting me, always protecting me. My brother told me stories to enchant me and draw my attention away from unpleasant realizations. He understood what I did not: that willful ignorance was my survival mechanism. He watched me forgetting, smiling, walking proudly at Pappa’s side to check our borders, learning to cook, fiercely wielding my bow and arrow, and listening to the Eddas every night with my eyes wide. Finn saw me wetting the bed. He soothed me when I woke up shaking from nightmares. Whenever Pappa was gone, Finn cared for me, fed me, and let me shadow him and fret.

Until now, I had not understood what I had really been afraid of when Pappa left us. It wasn’t his absence; it was his other self. The wolf is already here, Mamma told me in my dream. Ulf Thorvaldsson was already there, always there.

Finn coped by planning to cage the wolf. He reached out to anyone who would listen, pleading for help, telling the story until someone believed him. I coped by scattering the fear into stories and nightmares. I worried about Fenrir or Ragnarök, not Pappa.

Now, as I walked through the rooms of my mind, I did not find Mamma anywhere. How could I? I had not even been a year old when she had left this mortal realm.

But Finn. Oh, Finn. Of course he had always refused to talk about our mother.

In this moment, after so many years, his voice came back to me: Real fire. Out on the prairie. A child’s voice, husky with sleep. Almost two decades ago, on a cold autumn night, in a dozy stupor, Finn and I had watched Bröderna Lejonhjärta. Pappa was away. I had wet the bed, and my brother had helped me wash my pajamas and sheets. As we lay on the couch, the fire on the TV screen had prompted Finn to share the only information about Mamma he had ever given me: That’s my first memory.

I’d never known he’d been talking about Mamma. I had forgotten that conversation until this moment, hidden behind one of the doors.

Finn remembered the pyre. I was certain of it, as certain as I had ever been of anything. My first memory was red; his was Mamma burning.

He had protected me from this too.

—

There were no messages from Penny that night. I wasn’t sure why she had gone silent, but I was glad for the reprieve.

64

The taxi smelled of artificial pine. The driver spent the whole ride hollering into a cellphone in a language I did not recognize. Tin Hill was a bleak place. We drove past boarded-up buildings and houses sagging into disrepair. Few people on the streets. The prison was the cold heart of the town and the source of all employment. Without its monolithic presence, Tin Hill would have withered into a ghost town and vanished off the map.

As the cab passed an abandoned grocery store, I texted Finn: How are the bees?

Keeping me busy, he replied.

Another message followed: dozens of bee emojis.

I smiled. The wide world of electronic communication was opening up before Finn—the glory of apps and filters and GIFs.

He texted again: Are you okay out there? Wherever you are.

Yes.

I wondered if Finn would probe further. A phantom ellipsis appeared on the screen as he typed a reply.

He sent a photo of the puppy panting at the camera, inches away. The dog’s eyes were black as marbles; no glint of white showed. His proximity to the lens removed all sense of scale. I could see what Skoll would look like when he was no longer tiny. He was going to grow into a fearsome predator, the kind of dog people would cross the street to avoid, even when leashed.

Finn wrote: This baby wakes me up every two hours. I’m losing my mind.

Your own fault, I replied.

He texted back: It’s a torture technique, right? Pretty sure Skoll works for the CIA.

I burst out laughing. The taxi driver glared at me in the rearview mirror. I had forgotten how funny Finn could be. LMAO, I wrote.

Googling what that means, he replied. I began to type an explanation, then realized he was joking again.

The driver continued to bawl into his cellphone. The prison appeared on the horizon, a gray, featureless box stamped against the clouds.

Talk later, I wrote. Finn answered with a thumbs-up.

I pictured him slipping on his bee suit. He would stroll among the hives to make sure each wooden structure was sturdy enough to last the coming winter—no pests trying to sneak in ahead of the cold, no discoloration of the cedar that might indicate mildew or rot. The bees foraged less in September; there was too much work to do indoors in preparation for their long hibernation.

Did Skoll whine and scratch at the back door like Hati had when Finn left her behind for the sake of his bees? Did my brother find it difficult to work the extractor without me? Upon consideration, I was sure he could handle it just fine alone. I struggled with the weight of the thing and couldn’t lift it without his help, while he could carry it around on his own with ease. After the mechanism had worked its magic, spinning at a fantastic speed and siphoning the honey from the comb, I found it daunting to remove the frame. The waxy sheets often distended a little, warped by the intensity of the centrifugal pull. I always worried I would damage them, but Finn had a way of jiggling them loose with a deft flick of the wrist.

At that moment, an idea occurred to me. I had always imagined that Pappa loved his bees because he saw them as representations of himself: tiny Vikings, always armed and armored. They flung themselves into battle without hesitation or fear, sacrificing their lives for the glory of cutting down an enemy.

But Pappa was wrong. His worldview was distorted by his own inherent savagery. Bees were not like him at all. They were like Finn.

By any metric, my brother was a dangerous man. He was proficient in every possible kind of combat, from archery to swordplay to fisticuffs. Though he hadn’t practiced these skills in decades, it would come back to him like riding a bike, as Americans say. Hand Finn a blade, and he could cut down anyone who opposed him.

Yet he was gentler than anyone else I’d ever known. Finn kept no weapons. He radiated calm. All he wanted was a peaceful life: isolation, the forest, and the companionship of wild things. The bees wanted the same. They used their stingers only in extremis. They carried in their tiny bodies the possibility of harm, but they did not want to be warriors. They wanted to sip nectar from flowers, forage for pollen, build new honeycombs, tend their larvae, and thrive.

65

I waited a few minutes at Pappa’s empty window. The visiting room was packed today; nearly every chair was taken. A mother struggled through the door with a child attached to each hand. The smaller one bounced eagerly—too young, I figured, to understand the full context of what was happening. The older child moved with a funereal gait.

I investigated the state of my hands. Both palms had hardened into sticky maroon scabs that continued up the underside of each finger. I wondered what the guards who searched me every day thought about my injuries. Probably I wasn’t the only visitor to show up at the prison with wounds.

When I looked back up at the window, Pappa was there. I jumped a little. He had never been a silent man—too huge to move on little cat feet—but the thick glass had muted the noise of his arrival. His beard was loose today, hair loose too: an elderly lion. He did not smile at the sight of me—not with his mouth—but I knew him well enough to catch the slight crinkling at the corners of his eyes.

We picked up the handsets in unison. Pappa spoke first in his thick, garbled English. “They tell me you visit too much,” he said. “There are rules for the often amount. But I talk to—” He broke off, searching for the word. “The boss. I tell him no such rules for me. I have only one visitor all my years. He agrees. You and I talk as much hours as we want.”

Pappa shot a glance over his shoulder at the guard behind him. I assumed he was using English to drive the point home for everyone who might be listening. Whether they could understand his accent was another matter.

“You’ve never had another visitor?” I asked in Swedish. “You’ve been here twenty years, Pappa.”

“I get to decide who comes to see me. I have only one name on my list.”

“Me?”

“Ja, hönshjärna,” he said. Hen brain.

I ducked my head, smiling. It was a silly insult from my early childhood.

In Swedish, Pappa went on. “Many people have asked to visit me. I used to get letters almost every day, but not so much anymore. Mostly they were threats.” He snorted. “Only cowards threaten. A warrior does not broadcast his intention; he simply acts.”

“Yes, Pappa.”

“Some have been love letters. Can you imagine? There are American women who want to marry me.”

“Seriously?” I blurted out.

He could have bristled. He snickered instead. “I used to read these letters. I was curious. They were lonely women, pathetic. They sent photos of themselves.” He raised an eyebrow suggestively. I laughed.

“Even now I still get letters from people who want to interview me. Reporters, journalists. I don’t reply.”

“You never gave any interviews,” I said.

“I did what I did. Why would I talk about it?”

I took a deep breath, preparing for today’s big question. “Can you…Will you tell me?”

“What do you want to know, Vikingabarn?” he asked softly.

I had practiced today’s conversation in the motel bathroom mirror, but Pappa wasn’t following the script I’d imagined for him. I had expected anger; I always expected anger. Apparently prison had changed him—or maybe it was my presence after our long separation. He had not flared up once.

“I need to know about your—your work,” I said. “I need to know everything.”

A particular kind of stillness came over him sometimes: a predator preparing to pounce, every muscle tensed but motionless.

“I will tell you,” he said. “Only you.”

“Thank you, Pappa.”

He waved this away with a swipe of his hand.

“You were a hit man,” I began.

“Yes.”

“You killed for money,” I said, to drive the point home.

“Our ancestors killed for plunder. No difference.”

“Right.”

“I only killed men,” he said. “You know this?”

I nodded.

“Honor is one of the nine noble virtues,” he said. “To kill a woman or a child would have been dishonorable. The people I worked for understood this. I told them: men only. And even among men, I would not take the very young or the very old.”

“Who did you work for?”

A growl escaped him. “Be careful what you ask of me. I am no oath-breaker.”

“Sorry, Pappa.”

He glared at me a moment longer, then resumed his story as though nothing had happened. “The people I worked for—they would tell me a name and a place. The rest was up to me: how to do it and where to do it. It was good to hunt. I took my victims alone. I carried a syringe of lugnande.”

“Lugnande?” I didn’t recognize the word.

He furrowed his brow, then snapped his fingers. “Sedative,” he said in English.

“What?” It was almost a shout. I heard the guard shift behind me.

“I injected them with a drug that made them go to sleep,” Pappa said in Swedish, explaining as though to a child.

“You did that? Are you sure?” An idiotic question, but I could not seem to gather my wits. “You drugged them, Pappa?”

“Yes.”

“Was it—was it an animal tranquilizer? For pigs and horses and things?”

“Why does that matter?”

I was stammering in my agitation. I was showing weakness, and Pappa’s expression shifted accordingly toward disgust.

“I’m just surprised,” I said, getting ahold of myself. “I didn’t think you would kill them that way. With a drug.”

Pappa frowned. “Of course I didn’t kill them that way. I only gave them enough to make them sleep. I drugged them so I could take them quietly—take them elsewhere.” His frown deepened. “Do you really imagine I would kill a man with a sleep drug? With poison? Som en jävla fegis?” Like a fucking coward.

“No, Pappa.”

“A woman would kill that way.”

“A woman,” I echoed faintly.

“What could be more dishonorable than forcing a man into an easy death? The sedative was only the first part. While they slept, I put them in the trunk of our car. Do you remember our old gray car?” His voice was suddenly nostalgic.

“I remember.”

“I brought them to a lonely place. When they woke up, I gave them time. I gave them food and water. I made sure they were well enough to engage in battle. There is no honor in defeating an enemy weakened by hunger or the effects of a drug.”

“Okay. Yeah.”

“I brought a great many weapons with me,” Pappa said. “Sword, axe, every kind of knife. I would let my enemy choose.”

I remembered lying in my childhood bed, trying to fall asleep while listening to my father, downstairs, pack for one of his work trips. The squeak of dresser drawers. The tremor of footsteps. The clatter and clang as he gathered his blades from their mounts on his wall.

“The rules were simple,” Pappa said. “Kill or be killed.”

“You fought every one of them?” I said, beginning to understand.

“No. I offered every one of them the chance to fight. I gave them each the opportunity of a good death. When they were ready, I told them to pick a weapon and take their chances.”

I imagined a man in a dark field regaining consciousness, climbing from the trunk of a car, and shaking off a drugged stupor only to find himself confronted by a seven-foot behemoth with elaborately braided hair and a sword.

“What if they got the best of you, Pappa?”

“Ha!” A bark of mirth. “Only a few of them even drew blood before I slaughtered them.” Sobering, he added, “I look forward to my death, Vikingabarn. To die with a weapon in hand…I would have been happy.”

His face was aglow with pride. He truly believed he had done a good thing by handing each victim a weapon. He had offered them what he considered to be a rare and wonderful opportunity. Where else in Midgard could a man fight to the death, unless Pappa kidnapped him and gave him a blade? How else could an American man ever have the slightest chance of finding his way to Valhalla?

“But no,” he said. “In answer to your first question, I didn’t fight all my victims. Many refused. Those cowards would not take a weapon. They begged for their lives. They offered me money. They cried like little children.”

I registered suddenly that a child was crying somewhere in the visiting room. The mother was murmuring, trying in vain to shush the warbling wail.

“What did you do if they wouldn’t fight you?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes. That was a different matter. If they died in battle, I brought their bodies home and buried them with honor. But for the cowards—I would inject them with another dose of the sedative. I would bring them home alive. Do you remember how I sometimes worked in the basement? When you were a little girl, I would spend a few days there every now and then. You might not remember.”

“I remember,” I said in a faltering voice.

“I have the Viking taste for blood. I crave the suffering of others, you understand? If I could burn down a village, if I could execute my enemies…” His fingers tightened on the handset. “A wolf-warrior must satisfy his desires. So I took the cowards into my basement, and I did what I wanted there.”

His gaze was no longer focused on me. His mind had turned inward, away, slipping back to the vicious days of his lost freedom.

“The stories of Loki,” he murmured. “The wisdom of the gods. Such inspiration for me! They sewed the trickster’s lips shut. They broke his bones. They tied him to a goat that pulled off his genitals. Yes, I found great inspiration in the stories of the gods.”

My mouth was dry. Pappa seemed as unruffled as though he were telling me about the humdrum requirements of the work of a teacher or shopkeeper.

“My victims died slowly,” he said. “It was good.”

“And then you buried them on our land.”

He smiled. “What was left of them.”

66

I could not bear to spend another minute in my grimy motel room. As evening fell, I took my laptop to the twenty-four-hour diner on the corner, ostensibly to do a bit of bookkeeping for Swedish Honey, though I doubted I would be able to focus. The place was pleasant enough: gentle lighting, upholstered booths, and tables that were only slightly sticky. The cheese-and-sugar smell in the air was practically a meal in itself.

I wondered what Finn was having for dinner. In my prolonged absence from my brother—an unprecedented event—I was beginning to understand that he had become a mere backdrop to my life. I had changed substantially over the past few months. Finn, beneath the cover of his silence, might have been changing for much longer. He probably hadn’t fallen in love with a serial killer, as I had, but he surely had wants and insights I knew nothing about. The man texting me now was as funny and quick-witted as the boy I’d grown up with. I had not realized the extent to which that imp was still inside him. What else had I failed to discern about who Finn was? When I returned to Haven, I would take the time to reconnect with him, introducing the sister I had become to the brother I had taken for granted.

I checked my email. None from Penny. She had officially stopped texting and calling. I pushed her out of my mind: her throaty murmur, the feathery brush of her fingertips, and her crooked catlike grin. If I knew how to do anything in this life, it was to forget the things that mattered most.

On a whim, I typed Valhalla into the search bar. I visualized Pappa’s valiant victims, the ones who fought back, the ones who died in battle and ended up in Odin’s golden halls. I pictured them lined up in a proud row, standing shoulder to shoulder in blood-spattered clothes with their weapons on display.

The internet offered the usual American nonsense: a superhero movie, a convention of cosplaying wannabes, and a TV show about bearded men in anachronistic helmets crowned with silly horns.

But one headline caught my eye: The Women of Valhalla. I stared for a moment, then clicked on the link.

The first paragraph was about Valkyries. Of course. I sighed. Most American interpretations of the Eddas depicted Valkyries as mighty warriors, riding into battle in gleaming armor, sometimes on the backs of winged horses. (There were no such animals in Norse lore, only Odin’s eight-legged steed.) In reality, Valkyrja meant chooser of the slain. Whenever war broke out among mortals, Odin would wait until the bloodshed was over, then send in his Valkyries to walk among the dead and determine which warriors were worthy to join the Allfather in his sacred chamber. In Valhalla, the Valkyries then served as hostesses for the einherjar and waited on them during meals—a soothing female presence in an afterlife of constant warfare.

The next paragraph of the article was more intriguing. It began with a definition of a Norse word I didn’t know. Skjoldmø: shield maidens. I double-checked the provenance of the website. Historical, not fan fiction, thank goodness.

Apparently the existence of shield maidens had only recently come to light. As a rule, Viking warriors had been buried with the equipment they would need in the afterlife: sword, shield, and armor. A barrow in Birka, Sweden, had been excavated by archaeologists not long ago. A single grave among the many warriors held a female skeleton. She had been buried with honor and gifted with the sword, shield, and armor that befitted a Viking warrior who had fallen in battle, weapon in hand. All the evidence suggested that she had joined her male comrades in Valhalla.

I tapped my fingers on the tabletop. Had Pappa known about shield maidens? Was he a sexist pig who had chosen not to share the possibility of glory with me? As soon as this thought crossed my mind, I dismissed it. Pappa would never have intentionally shirked any of his ancestors’ customs. Shield maidens were a relatively new idea; they had been lost to time until archaeologists had gone digging among the dead. Pappa’s replication of Viking life had not been chauvinistic, merely incomplete.

In addition, one of the great sorrows of my father’s life was the inevitable parting that awaited him and me after death. He and Finn would be together—or so he had once believed and hoped for—but I would languish in the wasteland of Helheim. If Pappa had been aware that I, too, could join him in Valhalla, I would have spent my youth learning swordplay alongside Finn.

The next paragraph of the article began with a name I recognized: Freydis Eriksdottir had been the daughter of Erik Thorvaldsson. My direct ancestor. Pappa had often told Finn and me about the exploits of Erik the Red. After being banished from Norway for the crime of murdering other Vikings, he and his family had fled across the ocean to the shores of North America and set up a colony there. His children were the famed Leif Eriksson and the less-well-known Freydis Eriksdottir.

A clatter roused me from my reading. The waitress was setting down my order: a plate of gooey pasta with a side of congealed peas. I gave her the obligatory closed-mouth half-smile, then returned my attention to the screen.

Freydis, it seemed, had been renowned for her bravery. In fact, her courage and savagery had outshone that of the men under her father’s command. In one memorable anecdote, Erik the Red had lost control of a bull that belonged to his crew. The animal ran bellowing through the forest, and the native peoples of the area mistook the bull’s roar for a Viking battle cry. They had long been preparing for such an eventuality; there was no mystery about the sort of people who had invaded their homeland. So they armed themselves and set upon Erik the Red’s tribe, hoping to strike first and claim the element of surprise.

The Vikings ran. They fled into the forest, leaving their camp deserted. Freydis, appalled by their cowardice, shouted at them to stand and fight. When they did not heed her command, she decided she would handle the situation herself.

The incoming army reached the encampment to find Freydis alone. She tore open her clothing to expose her breasts, screamed at the strangers in Old Norse, and brandished her sword. This long-haired, wild-eyed, half-naked apparition was bizarre and frightening enough to send her opposition packing.

There in the diner, I laughed aloud. The old man at the next table looked at me curiously. I checked the time—nearly midnight—and gathered my things to return to the motel.

The air was so damp and cold that each breath required effort. I half-walked, half-swam down the block. I decided I wouldn’t tell Pappa about the existence of shield maidens. He was proud of the Viking woman I had become. He was happy with the way things turned out. He would have been crushed to know that I could have joined him in Valhalla if things had been different. It would break his heart, if he had one.

67

I didn’t dream at all that night. I pulled up the covers, plumped the thin pillow, blinked, and it was morning. I hadn’t moved an inch in my sleep.

When I got out of the shower, my hair turbaned in a towel, there was a text from Finn: You don’t have to come home.

I took a fresh pair of underwear from the suitcase and pulled on my jeans. There was comfort in the stack of folded T-shirts and the pile of clean socks—my own things from my faraway sanctuary, still smelling of my lavender laundry soap. Dressed, I sat on the bed and reread Finn’s message.

You don’t have to come home.

I chewed on my thumbnail, trying to understand. Had he guessed where I was? Did he see my visit to the prison as such a betrayal that he didn’t want me in his life anymore?

No—that was not Finn’s nature. My brother would have forgiven me any transgression, no matter how much it hurt him. As the lost memories from my childhood continued to come back to me, I could see with bracing clarity that Finn had accepted every version of me: the helpless toddler, the clingy little girl, and the dream-dazzled teenager wandering through life with blinders on.

I decided then that I would never tell him about my visit to Pappa. Finn had protected me from so much. Too much. I would protect him from this.

I wrote back: What does that mean? Of course I’m going to come home.

I’ve been thinking, he answered.

Okay. About what?

There was a pause as the text bubble came and went, the ellipsis phasing in and out of being. It seemed that he was having trouble finding the words.

Skoll and I are doing fine, he wrote.

Good.

Again it took him a long time to reply. I sat up straighter on the bed, pushing my wet hair out of my eyes.

You don’t have to live with me forever, he wrote at last. You know that, right?

The idea hit like an arrow to the chest. Believe it or not, this possibility had never once occurred to me. We were going to grow old together, Finn and me, two Vikingabarn and their bees. Our shared future was almost a prophecy—unspoken but binding all the same.

Wasn’t it?

Before I could reply, a series of messages came.

You could live with Penny. Unless you already broke up.

You could live on your own.

You don’t even have to stay in Haven.

My thumbs hovered over the screen. All my life I had been troubled by a lonely ache that my brother’s presence could assuage but not answer. (Penny had been the answer. I put that thought away.) I had always assumed Finn felt the same about our relationship. For him, as for me, our shared home was a panacea but not a cure.

Finally I wrote: Do you want to live alone?

His next few texts were a series of links. I clicked on each one and began to laugh. Photo after photo of adoptable dogs. A mottled mutt with a wonky ear. A proud purebred German shepherd. A tiny Chihuahua with crazy eyes.

I wrote back: Oh god, the shedding.

He responded with another link: an ad for a Roomba.

I replied with a link of my own, an article detailing the prevalence of ticks and the tendency of dogs to carry these pests home to attach to their unaware owners.

He sent back an ad for an insect-repellent spray for pets.

It occurred to me that it was nice to talk to Finn. For the first time in twenty years, he was offering me the privilege of real conversation. Apparently his prerequisite for true, open communication was time and distance apart.

Do you miss me? I wrote.

Again the text bubble began to vanish and reappear on the screen.

No, he wrote finally.

I tried to type that he was a rövhål—asshole—but the phone’s autocorrect feature kept changing the word to Rhonda. Finally I resorted to English.

Asshole.

I waited for Finn to respond with a quip of his own. He didn’t. Radio silence.

All right, all right, I’ll move out, I wrote.

I meant it as a joke. I thought we were joking with each other.

His answer came quickly this time. No rush. When you’re ready.

My hand lifted involuntarily to my throat. Finn was drawing a hard line. Had he ever done that before?

Seriously? I wrote.

Yes.

No equivocation. No room for misunderstanding. His certainty was strange but bracing, like a shock of winter wind after hours in a room that was too warm.

I typed several possible responses and deleted them all. My breath seemed unsteady, but there was something pleasant about this internal shuddering. I had an image of a raven’s wings opening in my chest.

I wrote: How long have you wanted me to move out?

Before he could reply, I added: You could have told me.

My phone chimed a moment later, almost impossibly fast. I didn’t know I wanted to live alone. Not until you weren’t here.

Through the wall of the motel, a muffled alarm clock blared. Another visitor was getting ready for the morning trek to the prison. I glanced at the clock. I would need to call a taxi soon if I wanted to maximize my time with Pappa. I turned off my phone, ran a comb through my hair, and hurried into the autumn breeze.

68

The visiting room was empty except for the guard. I hadn’t seen this one before—a beanpole of a man with an ill-advised mustache. Pappa would have made mincemeat of him. When I sat down at the window, my father wasn’t there yet. I took the opportunity to yawn and rub the sleep from my eyes. I tried to remember what day it was. I couldn’t.

Pappa loomed into the frame and took his seat. He picked up his handset, and I did the same. Both my palms were now wrapped in gauzy mittens. Holding the receiver for hours each day had begun to irritate my ravaged skin. It was bizarre to realize that I had dug that grave mere days ago.

“Tell me why you came to this place, Liv,” Pappa said. “Tell me why you came to see me after all these years.”

His voice was so gentle I almost didn’t recognize it. He had so rarely called me by my name.

“You need to ask me a question,” he said. “Why else would you be here?”

I nodded helplessly. “I can’t ask anyone else.”

“I’m here.”

I glanced at the guard behind me. My conversations with Pappa were being recorded; I had been told as much when I’d first entered the prison. I doubted any of the wardens or guards spoke Swedish, much less Old Norse, but it would be a simple matter for them to find a translator. I was the first visitor Pappa had ever had. People would want to know what we were saying to each other.

“Jeg aner ugler i mosen,” I began cautiously. It was one of my favorite Swedish idioms. Literal translation: I suspect there are owls in the bog. Actual meaning: Something isn’t quite right. I was trying to tell my father that we couldn’t speak openly.

Quick as ever, he answered with an idiom of his own: “Även små grytor har öron.” The kids might hear.

I’d forgotten the unerring swiftness of his intelligence. He did not skip a beat or ask for clarification. He immediately grasped what I meant: that we needed to create a private code if we wanted to communicate safely about the things that mattered.

I had fallen in love with Penny.

Penny was a serial killer.

But I hadn’t known that. She had hidden her true self from me—from everyone. She had split herself into two people: the vengeful spirit that stalked the streets of small Michigan towns and the woman I wanted to spend my life with.

I had seen only what she’d shown me. I fell in love with the woman, not the wolf-warrior.

But that wasn’t entirely true. Of course it wasn’t. Of all the thousands of available women in the world, she was the only one who had ever captivated me like this. The only one I’d ever loved. After everything, I still loved her. Sitting there in the visiting room, I ached for her as though I hadn’t seen her in years.

What should I do?

What could I possibly do?

There was no way I could talk to Finn. If he learned the truth about Penny, he would try to save me from her. No matter how I explained our relationship to him, he would be able to see it only one way: the threat and the victim. Predator and baby sister. He had sacrificed so much—too much—to put Pappa in prison. What might he give up to protect me from Penny?

Pappa was the only person I could ask. No one else in the nine realms would understand.

“You are a wolf-warrior,” I said carefully.

“That is so.”

“You killed many men.”

“Yes.” He was watching me intently, taking in my posture and the beads of sweat on my brow.

“Did you love Mamma?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“It was a happy marriage?”

The ghost of a frown crossed his face. “Yes.”

“Was Mamma like me?”

“You remind me of her.”

“I mean that she wasn’t like you. I’m not like you either.”

“Few people are.”

That wasn’t what I’d been asking. I couldn’t seem to get the conversation to go where I needed it to.

“Did Mamma know about your work?” I asked, trying a new tack.

“Yes,” he said without hesitation.

“Really?”

He considered this. “Not everything. She knew who I was, she knew what my work entailed, but she didn’t ask for details.”

“And she loved you anyway?”

“She was a good woman,” he growled. “The best of women.”

He seemed to think I was casting aspersions on my mother’s character. Picking my words with such care, under the blazing spotlight of my father’s gaze, with hidden recording devices capturing everything I said, was an overwhelming task. The last thing I wanted to do was make Pappa angry.

I tried to clarify. “What I mean is, Mamma stayed with you. She found out the truth about you, and she stayed with you. With us.”

“She was a good woman,” he repeated. “To say otherwise…”

I knew that expression so well: face darkening, temper mounting, the storm rolling in.

“You don’t understand, Pappa. I’m trying to say something else.”

“Oh?”

“Let me start again.” I took a deep breath. “I’m like Mamma. Mamma knew you and loved you. How did—How can a marriage like that work?”

His rage dissipated as quickly as it had come. He focused his gaze on me as though he could burn a hole through the glass between us.

“Ah!” he said suddenly. “I understand.”

“You do?”

“Your mother. My work.”

Had I finally made myself clear? Pappa noticed everything, vividly present in his senses and perceptions. He had always been able to read the minutest of expressions on my face. It was one of the things that made him so frightening.

“You are a good Viking woman,” he said. “Like your mother. Your mother who loved an úlfhéðn.”

“Yes,” I said, hope rising.

Pappa gave a shout of mirth and slammed his fist on the counter, making the window tremble in its frame. Both guards—the one behind me and the one behind Pappa—took a step toward him.

“I see why you need my wisdom,” he said, grinning. “Only mine. Marriage with an úlfhéðn. Can such a marriage be happy? Can it be a true partnership?”

I closed my eyes with relief. “Yes, Pappa.”

“Who else could answer these questions? That’s why you came.”

“Yes, Pappa.” Had I ever truly appreciated how brilliant he was? No wonder he had killed with such success for so many decades.

Úlfhéðn was a word in Old Norse, a dead language. It was unlikely a Swedish translator would recognize the term. And even if they looked it up, they would not be able to grasp the full context of what it meant to Pappa and me. Literal translation: wolf-warrior. Actual meaning: serial killer.

“I’m so glad you understand,” I said.

Pappa was looking at me with fierce pride. Like Mamma, I loved a serial killer. And he was delighted to hear it.

But we weren’t yet out of the woods. I needed to find a way to ask about my future while continuing to talk about Pappa’s past. How could I still love Penny? Could I stay with her? Why did I want to? What would happen to her if I did? To me? To both of us? I had to ask all these things without asking any of them.

“What do you think it means to be an úlfhéðn?” Pappa asked. Translation: Tell me about the serial killer you’re dating.

“Brave,” I said. “Honorable. A savage nature.”

“It is good to have a hjarta, is it not?” Old Norse again. Soulmate. In Swedish the word meant heart. Hopefully a translator would take it at face value. It is good to have a heart was an innocuous, if weird, thing for Pappa to say.

Actual meaning: I’m happy you found someone to love.

“I’m glad you met Mamma,” I said. I’m glad I found love too.

“Wolf-warriors should fight together on the battlefield,” Pappa said. “Do you agree?”

This was more difficult to interpret. I wish I could meet your serial killer, he seemed to be saying. Or even: It would be fun to kill with somebody else for once.

“Úlfhéðnar are the strongest warriors,” I said, avoiding a direct answer.

“So we are.” He smiled wistfully. “I wish things were different. I will live out the rest of my days here. I will never meet another úlfhéðn.”

For a brief moment, I imagined him and Penny sitting at her kitchen table with mugs of coffee, discussing the pros and cons of weapon selection and corpse disposal.

I had decided to avoid pronouns. Now wasn’t the time to come out to my father. I wasn’t even sure he knew that queerness was an option in this life.

“The oath-breaker took so much from us,” Pappa said. “It was a beautiful life, wasn’t it, before he betrayed us? Everything should have taken another path. A better path.”

This was the opening I needed. “If Finn—”

Pappa flinched at the name.

“The other one,” I amended quickly. “If the other one hadn’t done what he did, you would have…you would have kept killing forever?”

“Of course.” No hesitation.

“And if Mamma hadn’t died…”

Another flinch.

“She would have accepted it?” I said. “She would have loved you and stayed?”

I braced myself for anger; he had flared up the last time I’d pushed the conversation in this direction. But he only nodded. We were on the same page now, sharing the same code.

“Yes,” he said. “These are the two great sorrows of my life. The death of my wife and the betrayal by—” He broke off with a snarl.

“Would Mamma have been happy?” I asked. “That’s what I need to know.”

It came out as a child’s plea. Can I be happy with Penny?

“Yes,” he said with certainty.

“Is love enough? How can a person—a Viking woman—how can I—”

There were too many questions. Our code was falling apart. What if Penny keeps killing? I don’t think she’s going to stop. I don’t know if she should.

“A wolf-warrior cannot change his nature,” Pappa said, rescuing me from my stammering confusion. “Your mother knew I would never change. She loved me for who I was. What I was.”

He lifted his hand to the window, pressing his fingertips so hard against the glass that they blanched white. I mimicked the gesture on my side. My fingers scarcely reached the first knuckle of his.

“You came here for my wisdom,” he said. “So I will tell you this: ett liv utan kärlek är som ett år utan sommar.”

One final proverb. A life without love is a year without summer.

—

That was the end of our conversation—the real end. We had said everything we needed to say to each other, but I stayed with him until visiting hours were over. We talked about baking semla, about beekeeping, about the changing seasons, about nothing at all. I etched my father’s image on my memory. The limestone cliffs of his cheekbones, weathered by the years. Snowdrift hair. Icicle beard. Sky eyes. Age had not diminished him; it had transmuted him into stone, frost, air.

I did not tell him that I loved him.

He knew that already.

I didn’t tell him that he would never see me again.

He knew that too.

69

Rain streaked the windows of the bus, mottling the world outside. Lightning flared, briefly illuminating a barn, a telephone pole, and a tree. The downpour splattered the windshield with such intensity that the wipers were nearly overwhelmed. The bus crawled along, almost blind, the driver cursing and braking without warning.

Visiting hours at the prison had ended at three. The look on Pappa’s face remained with me: a little smile, a kind of contented finality.

Whatever he felt for me, it was the closest he could come to love.

I hadn’t cried as I’d made my way back to the motel. I hadn’t cried as I’d packed my suitcase and called a cab to take me to the bus depot. I had used up all my tears in the visiting room at the prison. I would never cry again.

According to my phone, it was now ten-thirty p.m. Down the aisle, a teenager was watching TV on a tablet without headphones. Tinny voices squeaked beneath rolls of thunder. The storm seemed to be intensifying. The lightning came with such frequency that it was never fully dark. The windshield wipers offered tiny glimpses: a shard of pavement, a red taillight, a road sign welcoming us to Michigan.

The journey was supposed to take six hours. We’d already been on the road that long and we were nowhere near Haven.

My phone jangled to life. The screen read Amber Lopez. I had been expecting her call, though not this soon. Pappa had wasted no time.

“Hello,” I said at the same time that a clap of thunder split the air open. It sounded like the bus itself had been hit by lightning. I dropped my phone and pressed my palms over my ears. The driver slammed on the brakes again, and my phone skittered away under the seat in front of me.

“Hello? Liv? What’s going on? Are you there?” Amber was yelling when I finally got hold of the phone again and put it to my ear.

“I’m here.”

“I have some bad—I have some news,” she said.

There was a pause. I could have spared her the difficulty of figuring out how to say it. I already knew why she was calling. Still, I was curious to see how she would frame it.

“There was an incident at the prison,” she said.

“Oh?”

“Your father was involved.”

The downpour drummed on the roof of the bus with such intensity that I had to stick my finger in my free ear. “My father?” I repeated.

“Apparently he found some way to make a shiv,” she said. “His room was routinely checked, and they do body and cavity searches there, so the warden isn’t sure how he managed it.”

Another pause. Lightning pulsed erratically.

“Who did Pappa kill?” I asked.

“Three guards.”

“Three?”

“It happened fast. He stabbed the first one—well, a lot of times, very quickly. The other two tried to restrain him and get him back in his cell. They don’t carry guns, apparently. I didn’t realize that. The guards on the tower have rifles and shotguns, but not the guards who actually work in the prison. Just truncheons.”

She was stalling. I waited.

“I saw the video,” she said. “It’s…I don’t recommend you watch it.”

Still I waited.

“So he killed those three guards, and then he critically injured two more. They probably won’t make it.” She cleared her throat. “Another four guards are in the hospital with minor injuries. Relatively minor.”

“How did they finally stop him?” I asked.

“There’s an armory,” she said. “They shot him—they shot him multiple times—but he just kept coming.”

I stifled a laugh behind my fingers.

“Your father died at the scene,” Amber said.

“Good. He had a weapon in his hand?”

There was a small silence. “The shiv, yes,” she said, a note of doubt creeping into her voice. “You heard what I said? He’s gone.”

“Hjältar välkomnas upp till Valhall,” I said. Heroes are welcomed in Valhalla.

“Was that Swedish? Are you okay?”

Another laugh shook my shoulders. I couldn’t contain it.

“It’s okay to cry,” Amber said gently, mistaking the sound. “He was a complicated man. I know this is a shock. Whatever he did, he was still your father.”

“I’m fine,” I said.

“I hope this brings you some peace. You know, eventually. Think of it this way: you never have to call me again to make sure you’re still safe. He’s gone. You’re always going to be safe now.”

I let her offer a few more platitudes, then hung up. The rain had eased during the call. I hadn’t noticed the storm dissipating. A light drizzle dusted the windshield. The driver sped up, leaving the thunder in our wake.

And still, laughter rose out of me, irrepressible. I could not seem to squelch it down. Men had died—I tried to remember that. Multiple guards, presumably innocent men, had perished in violence and fear, leaving behind loved ones, families, children. In this moment, however, the murdered men—Pappa’s final victims—did not seem real. They were mere footnotes in the Norse saga of my father’s life and death.

I had been the only name on his visitor list. If not for me, he would have left this mortal realm for Valhalla years ago. Now his waiting was over.

70

It was the witching hour when I rang Penny’s doorbell. I had told the taxi driver to drop me off on a stretch of dark road a mile from her house. I didn’t want to bring a stranger any closer than that to her secret glade. The man had looked at me dubiously, scanned the black forest, and asked several times if I was okay. I gave him an enormous tip. He did a rapid three-point turn and fled back to civilization.

Penny flung the door open and launched herself at me in an embrace so full-bodied that we connected from knees to shoulders. Sobbing, she grabbed my hand and towed me through her front door. She shoved me onto the couch, hiccuping and choking, her mouth wide, her face red.

It took her a while to compose herself. She wept uncontrollably, sometimes quietly and sometimes intensely, wrapping her arms around her waist and keening as she rocked back and forth. I sat next to her for a few minutes, then realized I still smelled like the bus and went to change. There was only one clean outfit left in the suitcase. I stood there for a moment with a T-shirt in one hand and a ball of socks in the other. Without meaning to, I had brought exactly the right amount of clothes for my journey. The Norns were being sly again.

Penny followed me into the bedroom as though unwilling to let me out of her sight. She’d seen me naked dozens of times, but I didn’t want that now. I went into the bathroom alone, changed, and examined my weary face and tangled hair in the mirror. Penny was waiting right outside the door when I emerged.

“Come on,” I said, leading her back downstairs, to the sofa. “Sit with me.”

I told her the story I have just told you. I told her everything.

—

So that was how Penny and I commemorated our love; we exchanged not rings but stories. I don’t know how long we sat there. We may have talked for hours. It may have been days. Time is a little thing, a meaningless construct, compared to the power of a story.

Sandwiches were made and reduced to crumbs, ice water in sweating glasses, coffee, more coffee, Penny’s mud-and-moss eyes, our elbows making contact, knees overlapping, my leg slung across hers, her palm curled around my foot. Closer and closer. My fingers danced, sketching illustrations in midair: the bristling coils of barbed wire, the bedroom Finn and I had shared, the swing of a blade. Penny answered in kind. We went back to her first memory, which was as significant and prophetic as mine had been. Not to be dramatic, but we might as well have been tearing out pieces of our hearts and passing them back and forth across the sofa cushions.

I won’t tell you Penny’s story. It isn’t mine to tell. I will only say that there was a reason she went into her line of work, helping the victims of unspeakable abuse. There was a reason she lived in seclusion, cutting herself off from the rest of humanity for the sole purpose of sheltering endangered innocents. And there was a reason she eventually could not bear the suffering of others anymore and began killing.

We are drawn to the familiar. We love what we know. It happens at an elemental level, this searching. The unconscious mind senses a reverberation, the call of recognition. This awareness is fundamental, bone-deep, too primal for the thinking mind to perceive it. Love brings us all back home. The patterns of childhood are printed indelibly on every human heart.

We all do it. We grow up and say goodbye to the life we have always known. We travel away into the wide world, away, away, with our eyes on the horizon. We seek out novel experiences, unfamiliar places, and the strangeness of strangers. We leave behind the old and search for the new.

In Penny, I believed I had found it. She was unique, electric, a mystery; she was nothing like anyone I had ever encountered. It really seemed that way. My conscious self, my thinking mind, had a thousand reasons why I fell for her. I did not see—I could not yet see—the profound, complex interactions happening under the surface, the wordless resonance between her real self and mine. As we’d drunk wine at my place or cut back the wildflowers in her garden or sat on her porch swing chatting in the sunshine, elemental echoes had reverberated between us. I had felt a recognition I could not explain; she felt the same. That is the human condition, I suppose. Our families shape us, and we remain shaped that way.

Some people end up replicating the patterns of childhood exactly. They leave home, travel into the unknown, create what seems to be a different kind of existence, and accidentally fall for someone who shares the same destructive flaws as the family they left behind. They end up right where they began.

Other unfortunate souls build their adult lives around worse versions of the problematic guardians or hostile siblings of their youth. They grow up with a benignly neglectful father and marry a cold, unloving man. A judgmental mother leads them to a contemptuous spouse. They spend their childhood with bullies and their adulthood with abusers.

I’m one of the lucky ones. Few of us are fortunate enough to find our way to a better version of home.

My father killed for sport. Any victim would do, as long as they were strong enough to make the hunt worth his while. He killed without conscience or compunction. Pain fed him. Quick or slow—it didn’t matter to him as long as there was blood on his blade.

But Penny’s kills are honorable. I’ve started calling her my shield maiden. She blushes every time I say it.

It was inevitable, I suppose, that she and I would end up here. The bees were our matchmakers. Few strangers had ever been invited into Penny’s fairy-tale realm, but on our very first meeting she guided me through the greenwood so I could bring a newborn colony for her to raise. In lieu of flowers, I brought her thirty thousand bees. How could we help but fall in love?

—

When I had finished my story and Penny had finished hers, we climbed into her bed, shaking with weariness and dazed with devotion. We took up our customary pose: me on my back with Penny’s whole body curled against mine, her head in the hollow of my throat, her arm on my belly, leg over my thigh.

I yawned. She yawned. I had begun to drift into sleep when a thought occurred to me. “Did I tell you about the bees?”

“Hmm?”

“My father’s bees.”

“Nine hives,” she murmured into my chest. “Sacred number. You told me.”

“They died,” I said. “All of them. Every single one. Did I tell you that part of the story? When Finn and I went back to the house, we found this—this massacre.”

Penny pushed herself up on her elbow to look at me. “Really?”

“I never knew why they died,” I said. “I never understood it. It was honestly the strangest thing in a very—in an incredibly strange life.”

Penny did the last thing I expected. She laughed.

“It isn’t funny,” I said. “It was terrible!”

She reached out and tapped my nose. “Can this be?” she asked, grinning in the dark. “Is it possible that I know something about bees that you don’t?”

I propped myself up on my elbows too. “What are you talking about?”

“You have to tell the bees,” she said.

“Tell them what?”

She laughed again, bright and clear. “You have to tell the bees, Liv. If a beekeeper leaves his hives, if he dies or doesn’t come back, you have to tell the bees what happened to him. You have to explain where he went or they’ll die without him.”

“That’s not true,” I said, but my voice sounded uncertain even to me. “Where did you learn that?”

“My grandmother told me. She was Irish. She had this beautiful lilt, I remember. I was over at her house one day and got stung by a bee. First time. I was crying so hard, and she told me this old family legend about bees to distract me. It stayed in my mind because of the sting, you know. Pain makes you remember.”

“I never heard that,” I said. “Bees aren’t like that. It can’t be real.”

Penny lay down again, nuzzling against my chest. “Sometimes stories are true,” she said.

71

So here I am, telling the bees. I have reached the end of my goodbye to you, my ninety beautiful superorganisms. For years I have walked among you, reveling in your airy dance and unquenchable hum. I have cleaned mildew from your hives and safeguarded your hatchlings from invading ants and curious birds. I have gathered up your daughter colonies and transported them to new homes. I have patched myself with honey, offering you a midday snack on my own body and summoning you to me in joyful, whirling clouds.

But this is our last day together. This October afternoon, unseasonably warm. Your hives are painted in sunlight and roofed by autumn leaves. Your foragers are collecting the last morsels of nectar from the last wildflowers of the season. Tomorrow I will no longer be your keeper.

I doubt Swedish Honey will survive my going. Finn never cared about the business. In retrospect, I am not sure I did either. I created it in the first place as an attempt to seem normal, to be normal, and to bring Finn into the human world for his own sake. But his state of being is no longer my concern—if it ever was. He can make his own choices. Like Penny, he loves you for the mere fact of your existence. I imagine him gathering just enough honey each year for his own consumption, caring for you as a family member rather than a landlord, and letting your swarms travel freely into útangarðr, where they belong.

Why do bees die without their keepers? I suppose I’ll never know for certain. A life without love is a year without summer, Pappa said. Soon you will begin your winter hibernation. Even now, as your foragers hover among the late-blooming goldenrods, you must feel the pull of the long sleep, an aching desire for true rest.

What do you dream about? Do you worry that summer will never come again?

Maybe that’s why Pappa’s bees died without him. Maybe that’s why I must say goodbye to you now. I need you to remember that love—that summer—is not gone from the world forever.

Nearly a month has passed since that night with Penny. It didn’t take me long to pack my things. The habits of a spartan childhood are hard to break; I have never been one for stuffed dresser drawers and overfilled bookshelves. I brought The Poetic Edda and the little stone wolf Penny gave me. She already owns every piece of furniture and kitchen appliance I could ever need.

There are two new dogs in my house—Finn’s house, I should say. He chose the mutt with a wonky ear, too old and ugly to be adopted by any normal person, and a purebred German shepherd he’d shown me, which spent a year in the shelter because of her willfulness. She knows every command in the book but obeys only when she has the inclination to do so. All three dogs became best friends overnight. Animals have that capacity. The German shepherd is the boss, the elderly mutt is the obedient second-in-command, and Skoll is their lunatic toddler. I’ve seen the shepherd pick up the little wolfhound and carry him around by the scruff of his neck.

Finn is happier than I’ve ever seen him. Every object I packed seemed to lighten the load he’s been carrying. I never thought of myself as a burden to him until I wasn’t there and he blossomed, unfurling into his full self without me.

I have begun assisting Penny in her work. Some of her work, anyway. I am a good Viking woman, not a wolf-warrior. The skills I learned for Swedish Honey overlap with the management of victim support. I possess an ideal disposition to interact with people who have lived through terrible things. No act of savagery fazes me, and I will never burn out; I wouldn’t know how. I can liaise with shelters and make schedules. Victim extraction requires a great deal of logistical coordination. And, of course, the visitors to our home need more than just a safe house. I can arrange food, new clothes, burner phones, and toys for the children.

Penny has begun planning her next murder. It is never too early to start vetting candidates, though she does not intend to take action for several months at least. She will wait for the disappearance of her latest victim to drop through the consciousness of Milo County like a stone into a river, drifting down among the reeds and settling into the silt. As she told me, she limits herself to only a kill or two per year.

That may change, however, now that I have entered her life. With me here to hold down the fort (an odd American idiom), Penny can travel farther afield. I can tend the chickens and bees as she roams past the borders of our county, even our state. I can answer calls on the hotline and deal with administrative issues as she hunts and snares her prey.

Perhaps this coming year she will murder three men. It is a sacred number, after all.

Penny and I discussed these things on our porch swing in the crisp autumn air as she rocked us back and forth with pushes of her toes. The trees surged in the breeze, releasing torrents of flame-bright leaves. The chickens huddled in the heated interior of their coop. The pigs, insulated by layers of blubber, grunted happily away, unaffected by the chill.

Penny didn’t kill Blackbeard, in case you were wondering. Not her MO. I did ask once, just to be sure. She laughed and said, “Straight-up murder? Right out in the open? No. No. His neighbor did it. The fence post guy. The police just couldn’t make the case. Circumstantial evidence, and all that.” She flashed her feline grin. “Of course it wasn’t me. I can’t keep on murdering men if people start realizing men are being murdered. And so many men need to be murdered, don’t they?”

I am no longer afraid of Ragnarök.

At Penny’s request, I have begun to read The Poetic Edda aloud before bed. It has been amazing to see her reactions. I know these stories as well as the rhythm of my own heartbeat, but they are entirely new to her. Tyr’s fate brought tears to her eyes, while Lokasenna left her breathless with laughter. She gasped in wonder at the descriptions of Loki’s monstrous children.

A few days ago, I decided it was time for Völuspá. To my shock, I discovered that Pappa had never shared the entirety of the prophecy with Finn and me. Can you believe it? He read that poem a thousand times, but he always skipped the last few stanzas. I never knew they existed. I guess they didn’t interest him.

Ragnarök will come, yes, we all know that, but the prophecy doesn’t end there. When the nine realms have crumbled, the World Tree will remain. After the gods are dead, there will come a period of calm—not quite peace but silence.

And then Midgard will be reborn. The innocent will rise out of Helheim, including a few of the gods; Ragnarök will not claim them all. Beautiful Balder will survive the apocalypse, along with Odin’s nephews, gentler and wiser than their uncle. Suffering will burn away like mist under the morning sun. A new race of humans will populate this mortal realm, a strong and honorable people, brave as Vikings but perhaps a bit more prudent. Even without Sif’s grace, their harvests will bear fruit. Even without Odin’s guidance, joy will return to a battered world.

But wickedness will endure too. Good cannot exist without evil; each of them gives meaning to the other. Nidhogg, a vile dragon, will survive the wreckage of Ragnarök. Spectral hounds will linger in shadowy corners. Giants are difficult to kill. As a new race of humanity finds its footing, as the gods of the new pantheon discover their power, sinister creatures will proliferate in the darkness. One day, Nidhogg will grow strong enough to leave its foul den. The dragon will hurtle toward Midgard, bloodthirsty and slavering, carrying corpses and their stench under its loathsome wings.

And that is where the prophecy stops. Mid-action, almost in mid-sentence.

The final stanzas of Völuspá soon became Penny’s favorite part of the Eddas—and mine. Don’t you want to know the rest of the tale? That is the question that drives every story, after all: What happens next? The dead witch who narrated this one did the bravest, most shocking thing she could: she never gave an answer.

Odin expected her prophecy to conclude with his death, but she showed him that the story would continue without him. She could have finished her tale with the fires of Ragnarök or the rebirth of a vibrant world—both natural endpoints—but she kept going. The story doesn’t end in tragedy. The story doesn’t end with a happily-ever-after. The story doesn’t end—that is the true meaning of the witch’s prophecy.

The Wheel of Time is always spinning, the Norns never stop their weaving, and the story is greater than all of us. We each hold only a part: the length of a prophecy, the length of a life. Asgard burns, shackles break, Fenrir howls, and Odin closes his one eye for the last time. After tragedy, redemption. After redemption, dragons. What happens next? None of us will ever know the complete story.

Except for you.

Only bees have the gift of immortality. No other entity in the nine realms, not your keepers, not even the gods, can live forever. A single worker bee or queen may perish, but the hive is an everlasting miracle. You can survive my absence. You can outlast all us mortal creatures, the humans and animals, the ravens and witches, the wolves and deities—and, yes, even Finn. When winter deepens, remember that the return of spring is an inevitability. When the loss of love darkens the world, remember that the light always comes again. Gather your nectar, make your honey, tend your nurseries, hibernate, wake, replenish your workers, defend your tribe, and birth your daughters in wild swarms.

My story has ended, but yours never will.

Author’s Note

I find my characters through their passions. By studying what they care about—by learning what they know—I discover who they are.

Children of the Wolf began with a simple premise: a savage father and his two feral children. At the start, I knew Ulf, Liv, and Finn on a surface level, but I did not yet understand their deepest selves, their inner lives.

Then I stumbled upon a book about beekeeping.

As a research junkie, there are few things sweeter than discovering that your worldview is incomplete. Until I studied bees, I thought I knew the difference between mammal and insect. Between one and many. Between life and death. Bees taught me that the world is stranger and more marvelous than I’d ever imagined.

And through this research, I found the truth of my beloved Finn: a character as unique and wonderful as the bees he tends with such grace.

But, still, I did not know Ulf or Liv as well as I wanted to.

Then I came upon a documentary about Vikings.

Ulf’s work—his very essence—is that of a predator. And, make no mistake, the Vikings were predators. They did not think in terms of right and wrong, but strong and weak. They were fiercely loyal to their own tribe, but everyone else was prey. The more I researched the culture of the Vikings, the more clearly I understood my wolf-warrior. I anchored Ulf in their unabashed savagery.

And Liv? She is a creature of stories. From the Eddas, from the weavings of the Norns, from the chronicles of her ancestors, from dreams of Fenrir, from sketches of Yggdrasil, from prayers in the forest, and from the legends of beekeepers, Liv spun into being. In fact, an early working title for the novel was “Telling the Bees.”

Through my research, I learned many fascinating tidbits that never made it onto the page. Here are a few favorites:

Loki is not just the father of monsters, but the mother of an eight-legged horse. As part of a prank, the trickster transformed into a mare and seduced a magical stallion.

Easter falls on a different date each year because it is scheduled around the lunar cycle. The first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox—that’s Easter. What could be more pagan?

The practitioners of sex magic (whom I mention briefly in the book) would penetrate themselves with sacred staffs to achieve trancelike states of ecstatic knowledge. This magic was almost always practiced by women. But Odin was a fan too.

Tolkien plucked many of the names of his characters from Norse lore, including Bifur, Bofur, Bombur, Glóin, and Gandalf.

Bees don’t build their honeycombs in that complicated six-sided shape. At the proper temperature, the wax crystalizes into hexagons on its own.

I am already deep in research for my next novel. The characters in this new book are vivid in my mind, but nascent, not yet fully realized. So now I must find them through their passions. Fortunately, I have stumbled upon a captivating new topic, and to my great delight, there is still so much to learn.

Acknowledgments

My life has been enriched by so many people—far too many to list here—but I must in particular thank the following:

Scott: You gave me back the laugh I thought I had lost forever. You assisted in the creation of the most wonderful child. You remind me about spark plugs and engines. Whenever any music plays, you are compelled to dance. You tell random strangers that we’re in love, no matter how many times I have asked you not to. You meet me on the playground and in D.C. You are the only one who saw the pattern; you saw where I was going, and you led me out into the light. I don’t have the words to say what you mean to me. And I’m a writer.

Milo: Is it a megalodon? Best scrambled eggs ever! We are definitely not making fun of Dad. Jesus take the wheel! It’s time for everybody’s favorite game show: Where’s Mom’s Phone? We are definitely not making fun of any of the masterpieces in the modern art wing. I’m going to throw you out the window. Best applesauce muffins ever! What is Mr. Baddums up to? We are definitely not making fun of the dogs. I know where you live. Best chocolate chip cookies ever! I’m going to tell you how much I love you, and there’s nothing you can do to stop me. I love you. I win this round! But seriously: Is it a megalodon?

Dad: You taught me that the world is infinitely interesting. You taught me that life becomes richer as we age. You taught me that there is always more to explore and learn.

Patsy: You carry with you a magic that can only be likened to walking the streets of Paris. I am grateful for your magic during every one of our lunches, in every phone call, and every time you cross my mind.

Joe: Life would be much less interesting if I did not receive near daily texts about dinosaur feathers, astronomical phenomena, the inevitable supremacy of jellyfish, and/or hilarious typos found in keynote speeches. Also, remember Stickosaurus?

Bendix: It’s amazing how deep a friendship can become when it exists almost entirely in a text thread. You and I have the Emergency Mishigas Hotline, the Best Memes of All Time, Psychic Senses (100 Percent Guaranteed), and the Longest and Most Wonderful Friendship of My Life.

Lorraine: My bodymind is grateful for your bodymind. As soon as both of us are feeling well enough at the same time, we will master witchcraft and take over the world.

Laurie: I did not know there were people like you in the world. Without you, I might have survived, but I would never have thrived.

Jennifer and Kate: Your insight as editors is a remarkable force. Every single comment and question, from something as minor as a syntax issue to something as monumental as changing the book’s opening, felt right to me. It is a remarkable thing as an author to receive feedback so profound, and so true, that it seems to be coming from inside the work itself, rather than from any external observation. Special thanks to Kate for falling in love with the book and then bugging Jennifer (your words!) until she read it, and special thanks to Jennifer for falling in love with it too (also your words!). I will never forget what you both have given my book, and me.

All the amazing people at Ballantine Books: Like bees, you seem to have created a unique and brilliant hive. Like bees, you have enhanced my life immeasurably.

Laura Langlie: I can’t imagine my career, or my life, without your wise, supportive, and affectionate presence. You have been my champion from the beginning, and all my friends are jealous of my dynamic with my agent.

Dan Smetanka: We caught lighting in a bottle when we worked together on The Lightkeepers, and the sparks have been with me ever since.

My dogs: I love you, but the office door stays closed when I am writing, so you must decide whether you would like to be inside with me or outside in the hall to guard me. Your decision to constantly scratch at the door is not working out well for any of us.

Mom: You knew my writing so well that you could tell from a single sentence that it was my work. You loved my writing so much that you believed every single sentence was beautiful. This is the first of my books to enter the world without your having read a single sentence of it. I wish you were here.

Bertil and Ängla: It is good to have a hjarta, is it not?

About the Author

Abby Geni is the author of The Body Farm, long-listed for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize and the Story Prize; The Lightkeepers, winner of the inaugural Chicago Review of Books Award for Fiction; The Wildlands, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and The Last Animal, an Indies Introduce Debut Authors selection and a finalist for the Orion Book Award. Geni is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a recipient of the Iowa Fellowship.

abbygeni.com

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