As I settle into a leather chair I say, “Not at all.”
The flames in the fireplace flare and give off the most beautiful heat in the entire universe. For a second, I let myself close my eyes and just breathe in the warmth.
“So, why did you come to Hel, Zara White?” Her question and voice are suddenly formal. When I open my eyes, I can tell that her posture is more rigid as well. She stands by the fire, waiting.
“We wanted—We wanted to know how to stop the apocalypse.” It sounds stupid when I say it like that.
“And you thought I would just tell you?”
I smile. “Um … yeah. We were hoping.”
She laughs. A slow-walking woman with hair like straw shuffles into the room carrying a tray of what looks like hot cider. I take one and thank her. One sip and I’m instantly warmed. Standing up, I investigate the room. We’re alone, but the mirrors show dozens of us. My hair is dripping onto my coat. It must have been frozen and it’s thawing now.
“I shall give you a choice,” Hel says, placing her own porcelain cup onto a silver tray.
I wait.
“You may either know how to stop the end or you may see your father again.”
My heart stops.
“My father or my stepfather?” I clarify because I have a biological father who died in the jaws of Fenrir, and I have a real father—the one who raised me. He died of a heart attack on our kitchen floor.
“Your stepfather.”
In the mirrors my face has paled. My eyes widen with shock and want. I want to yell that’s not a fair choice, stomp my feet, and demand both, but instead I say, “That is cruel.”
“I can only give one. I want you to have the choice.”
“Another test?” I ask.
She shrugs slightly. That’s all the answer she’ll give me, I know.
“Pick one. Your father or the world.”
There are little gold figurines on a side table. They shine in the light and I can’t resist the urge to pick one up. It’s the form of a deer lying down, legs tucked under her body. The weight of it in my hand is soothing and I stare at it so I don’t have to look at a mirror, don’t have to look at Hel.
In the past year, I’ve lost two people that I’ve loved so totally. The first was my dad. The second was Nick. And when you lose someone like that, it’s hard to describe, but it’s like something gets ripped out of your chest and you’d do anything—even turn pixie—to fix that hole in the center of you, to get them back, to see them, to talk to them. Before all this happened, I believed in God in the Judeo-Christian or Muslim sense but I still felt that incredible loss when they both died, and Mrs. Nix too. And there was doubt. There was this big doubt inside of me even though I believed in God. I was worried that they had just stopped existing. Not so much with Nick because I saw the Valkyrie take him away, but with my dad and Mrs. Nix nobody came. They were just gone, forever gone, and now—now I have the chance to speak to my dad, to see him again because he’s here, right here.
“I thought he’d be in heaven,” I mutter, examining the underside of the deer like it has all the answers. “Is there even a heaven? Or are you gods it? The ultimate?”
Hel gently takes the deer from my hand and places it back on the table. She sighs and her hands move to the sides of my face. “We are not all there is. Even Odin, who knows more than the rest of us, does not know everything, despite all the myths that say he does. There is power above us, yes.”
I cock my head a little, moving my cheek closer to her rotten hand. “Promise?”
She smiles, and even though there is jaw bone and teeth revealed in half that smile, it’s still beautiful. “I promise.”
A moment passes and then she drops her hands from my face and she turns away, giving me room.
I love my dad. He was the one who taught me to think, to write about human-rights violations, to care about people’s feelings, to memorize Booker T. Washington quotes. There would be nothing better than seeing him, hugging him one more time, smelling his dad smell and feeling his bristly skin where his beard grows in too fast.
But he wouldn’t want me to do this.
Not if it meant the world could end, although let’s face it, the world has issues. Big issues like sex slaves and genocide, racism, poverty, homophobia and wars, religious conflicts and environmental disasters—but the world is also worth saving because it has writers like Foucault and people like Issie and Grandma Betty. I know it’s not all cuddly puppies and rainbows and ice-cream sundaes, but it needs a chance, as many chances as it can get to survive.
“Tell me what I need to do,” I say.
The moment the words leave my mouth, the loss of not seeing my dad again hiccups through my chest, knives my heart into two. I bend forward from the pain of it.
Hel’s hand touches my shoulder. “Are you sure?”
I nod because I can’t trust my voice not to break. It’s hard for the words to come out of my throat. It’s like they have to push past something big and solid to make themselves heard. “I want to know how to stop the end.”
That’s what he’d want me to do, because it’s the right thing to do. Still, it feels so wrong. My legs crumple beneath me, and I sit down on the ornate couch without really realizing it. Hel reaches out a hand and gently touches my arm, and that’s when I realize that gods don’t work like people do. They barely speak our language. And they rarely make decisions out of empathy. Instead, they force choices upon us, always testing our character, always seeing what we are made of. Gods know that you can’t stop hurt. Gods know that you can’t stop endings and choices and pain, but people keep trying to do exactly those things.
I hide my face in my hands so she won’t be able to look into my eyes, won’t be able to see how much this decision hurts me, but I am sure she already knows.
She seems to understand and becomes brusque, no-nonsense, as if intuiting that any extra kindness will break my will, change my mind.
“I am sorry,” she says, and in those three words I can tell that maybe she doesn’t have a choice either. Maybe the rules are older than either of us, and stronger than I can ever imagine. Or maybe not, but I don’t think she can change the rules she must play by.
I grab her hand, the rotting one, and squeeze a little bit. “Tell me what I need to know, please.”