Two seconds later he’s got Issie’s happy face on the screen. She’s in her pajamas, wearing ear buds to listen to us.
“I have to be quiet or my mom will kill me,” she whispers. She uses a finger to make a slicing motion across her neck. “I’m supposed to be in bed.”
Cassidy’s still murmuring some sort of elfish incantation and lighting an incense stick, and for a second I wonder how she even learned elfish—was it on the Web?—but I start talking anyway, trying really hard to ignore Nick, who is glowering in the corner. Guilt about the hug ripples through me even though I really shouldn’t feel guilty at all.
I start off, “The attack came out of nowhere. It was a woman, sort of, she was half normal and half rotting flesh.”
“Like a zombie?” Devyn interrupts, cruising through the Internet on his cell, probably because if he researched on his computer he wouldn’t be able to see Issie.
“Yeah. Half zombie and incredibly tall,” Betty says.
“Tell them what she said to you, Zara,” Astley urges.
He reaches across the couch and touches my arm. I swear tension suddenly fills the entire room. I refuse to look at Nick as Astley quickly moves his hand away. My washcloth falls off, plopping into my lap. I fix it and tell them how the woman said that she didn’t want to kill me, that she was testing me, that she wanted to see what I was made of.
“Oh, you’re the chosen one!” Issie breathes out. “That’s so cool.”
“I am not any sort of chosen one,” I argue. “That’s a cliché anyway. ‘The chosen one.’”
I spit out the phrase pretty disdainfully. Cassidy rests her hand against my shoulder and perches on the couch. She’s so peaceful. It makes me feel a little better.
“She also said that I can’t let him out,” I add.
“Who?” asks Nick. It’s the first word he’s said.
I shrug, meet his eyes. “I don’t know.”
“Well, if it has to do with Ragnarok, it might mean Fenrir, the giant wolf you unleashed in Iceland, but that has already happened,” Betty says.
Astley rubs the back of his hand across his eyes like he’s either tired or trying to wipe the memory away. “Or it could mean Loki. The giant mentioned him too. He was—”
Cassidy interrupts. “I’ve been dreaming about him.”
The conversation in the room stops. Cassidy pulls in a big breath and explains that she’s been dreaming about a man tied up with serpent venom dripping into his mouth. His bindings are intestines that have turned to iron. He is pleading with her to help him get free.
Despite all my aches, I put an arm around Cassidy. “That’s horrible.”
She nods.
“That’s probably it,” Devyn agrees. “And look what I found. Is this the woman who attacked you?”
He passes his phone to me. There’s a picture on the screen of a half-zombie/half-human woman. She’s more skeleton than the one I saw and her flesh isn’t two different colors.
“It’s close,” I say as Betty points out the differences. “Who is it?”
“Hel.” Astley breathes out the word like it’s a curse. Even Betty stops talking.
“Hell is a place,” Nick says after a second of frozen silence.
Devyn directs all his professor-style attention at Nick. “In Norse mythology it is a place and a woman who rules that place. Hel is where people who die of old age and sickness go.”
“As opposed to Valhalla?” I ask, dizzy. “Where you get to go when you die in quote-unquote glorious battle.”
Cassidy blows out the match. “The Vikings thought that dying in battle was the way to go. It’s what they aspired to, but Valhalla versus Hel isn’t anything like heaven versus hell. It’s not a good versus bad thing.”
“Well, they weren’t a society that promoted peace.” Devyn walks across the room, shows the image on his phone to Nick, and says, “If you lived a long and peaceful life, you were destined to spend eternity with a zombie woman. If you killed people, then you were assigned to Valhalla, where you drank beer all day and trained with Valkyries.”
“I think I’d rather go to Hel,” Issie chirps from the computer screen.
“Me too,” says Cassidy, all quippy. “I hate beer.”
Astley looks at me and smiles super sweetly and I swear steam starts to come out of Nick’s corner of the living room. It’s frustrating, but I ignore his crankiness and try to get us all back on track by saying, “Then that is what we have to do.”
Everyone looks at me with mouths hanging open, which usually means that:
1. I have had a massive jump in logical thought that nobody else is following.
2. I’ve had a ridiculously bad idea.
I’ve decided that it’s the first option, so I shift my weight and explain.
“This Hel woman obviously knows what is going on.” I start it out slowly, trying to rationalize it to myself as well as everyone else. “So we need to find her. To find her, we need to find Hel.”
“Hel!” Issie whispers frantically. “We cannot go to Hel.”
“It doesn’t sound all that bad,” I say as Betty harrumphs in the kitchen, where she’s retreated to start making more tea.
“No … I just watched a History Channel special on hell,” Issie insists, leaning closer to her computer screen, so close that I can see the pores in her nose. “And you do not want to go there. It’s all tortured souls and screaming, nine layers of horrible horribleness.”
“That’s the Christian version,” Cassidy says.
“And the Greek!” Issie says. “And the Roman.”
“Issie, you’re yelling,” I tell her. “Your mom is going to hear you.”
She gets terrified eyes and slaps her hand over her mouth. Then she lets go and whispers, “The special said there were gates kind of like in Buffy—hell mouths between here and the underworld.”
“Like Dante,” Devyn says, and then recites:
Through me you pass into the city of woe :Through me you pass into eternal pain :Through me among the people lost for aye.
The words echo in the room, creepy and silent, and Nick is the one who breaks it. “There is no way in hell, uh—”
“Excuse the pun,” Cassidy interjects.