“Sam, you’ll be ready,” I said at last. “You’ll beat Loki this time.”
She turned to gaze at the sunset. I wondered if she was waiting for dusk, when she could eat and drink and, most important, curse again.
“The thing about that,” she said, “is I won’t know until I actually face Loki. Alex’s training is all about loosening me up, getting me more comfortable with shape-shifting, but…” She swallowed. “I don’t know that I want to be more comfortable with it. I’m not like Alex.”
That was undeniable.
When Sam had first told me about her shape-changing abilities, she’d explained that she hated to use them. She saw it as giving in to Loki, becoming more like her father.
Alex believed in claiming Loki’s power as his own. Sam saw her jotun heritage as poison that had to be expelled. She relied on discipline and structure: Pray more. Give up food and drink. Whatever it took. But shape-shifting, being fluid the way Alex and Loki were…that was alien to her, even though it was part of her blood.
“You’ll find a way,” I said. “A way that works for you.”
She studied my face, perhaps trying to gauge whether I believed what I was saying. “I appreciate that. But in the meantime, we have other things to worry about. Alex told me what happened at your uncle’s place.”
Despite the warm evening, I shivered. Thinking about wolves does that to me. “You have any thoughts about what my uncle’s notes meant? Mead? Bolverk?”
Sam shook her head. “We can ask Hearthstone and Blitzen when we pick them up. They’ve been traveling, doing a lot of—what did they call it?—long-range reconnaissance.”
That sounded impressive. Maybe they’d been networking with their contacts in Mimir’s strange interdimensional mafia, trying to find us the safest course through the seas of the Nine Worlds. But the image that kept coming to my mind was Blitzen shopping for new outfits while Hearthstone stood idly nearby, arranging runes into various spells to make time go faster.
I’d missed those guys.
“Where exactly are we meeting them?” I asked.
Sam pointed ahead. “Deer Island Lighthouse. They promised they’d be there at sunset today. Which is now.”
Dozens of islands dotted the coastline off Boston. I could never keep them all straight, but the lighthouse Sam was talking about was easy enough to distinguish—a squat building with a mast thing on top, jutting out of the waves like the conning tower of a concrete submarine.
As we got closer, I waited to spot the glinting chain mail waistcoat of a fashionable dwarf, or an elf in black waving a candy-striped scarf.
“I don’t see them,” I muttered. I glanced up at T.J. “Hey, you see anything?”
Our lookout seemed paralyzed. His mouth hung open, his eyes wide in an expression I’d never associated with Thomas Jefferson Jr.—pure terror.
Next to me, Sam made a strangled sound. She backed away from the prow and pointed to the water between us and the lighthouse.
In front of us, the sea had started to churn, swirling into a downward funnel like someone had pulled the bathtub plug out of Massachusetts Bay. Rising from the maelstrom were the giant watery forms of women—nine in all, each as large as our ship, with dresses of foam and ice, and blue-green faces contorted with rage.
I just had time to think: Percy didn’t cover this in basic seamanship.
Then the giant women fell on us like a vengeful tsunami, plunging our glorious yellow warship into the abyss.
HURTLING TO the bottom of the sea was bad enough.
I didn’t need the singing, too.
As our ship tumbled, free-falling through the eye of a saltwater cyclone, the nine giant maidens spiraled around us, weaving in and out of the tempest so they appeared to drown over and over again. Their faces contorted in anger and glee. Their long hair lashed us with icy spray. Each time they emerged, they wailed and shrieked, but it wasn’t just random noise. Their screams had a tonal quality, like a chorus of whale songs played through heavy feedback. I even caught snippets of lyrics: boiling mead…wave daughters…death for you! It reminded me of the first time Halfborn Gunderson played Norwegian black metal for me. After a few bars, it dawned on me…Oh, wait. That’s supposed to be music!
Sam and I locked arms on the rigging. T.J. straddled the top of the mast, screaming like he was riding the world’s most terrifying carousel pony. Halfborn wrestled the rudder, though I didn’t see what good that would do in a downward plunge. Belowdecks, I heard Mallory and Alex getting thrown around, KA-FLUMP, KA-FLUMP, KA-FLUMP, like a pair of human dice.
The ship spun. With a cry of despair, T.J. lost his grip and hurtled into the maelstrom. Sam zoomed after him. Thank goodness for Valkyrie powers of flight. She tackled T.J. around the waist and zigzagged back to the ship with him, dodging the grasping hands of the sea giantesses and various pieces of luggage we were shedding like ballast.
As soon as she reached the deck—BLOOOSH! Our ship splash-landed and then sank.
The biggest shock was the heat. I’d been expecting a freezing death. Instead, I felt like I’d been dunked in a scalding bathtub. My back arched. My muscles contracted. I managed not to inhale any liquid, but when I blinked, trying to see which way was up, the water was a strange cloudy golden color.
That can’t be good, I thought.
The deck surged beneath me. The Big Banana broke the surface of…wherever we were. The storm had vanished. The nine giantesses were nowhere to be seen. Our ship bobbed and creaked on the placid golden water that bubbled around the hull, exuding a smell like exotic spices, flowers, and baked goods. In every direction rose sheer brown cliffs—a perfect ring about a mile in diameter. My first thought was that we’d been dropped in the middle of a volcanic lake.
Our ship seemed to be in one piece, at least. The wet yellow sail flapped against the mast. The rigging glistened and steamed.
Samirah and T.J. got to their feet first. They slipped and staggered aft, where Halfborn Gunderson was slumped over the rudder, blood dripping from an ugly gash on his forehead.
For a moment, I thought, Eh, Halfborn gets killed that way all the time. Then I remembered we were not in Valhalla anymore. Wherever this was, if we died here, we would not get a do-over.
“He’s alive!” Sam announced. “Knocked out cold, though!”
My ears still rang from the weird music. My thoughts moved sluggishly. I wondered why T.J. and Sam were looking at me.
Then I realized, Oh, right. I’m the healer.
I ran over to help. I channeled Frey-power to heal Gunderson’s head wound as Mallory and Alex, both battered and bleeding, staggered out from belowdecks.
“What are you fools doing up here?” Mallory demanded.
As if in answer, a storm cloud rolled overhead, obscuring half the sky. A voice boomed from above:
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN MY CAULDRON?”
The storm cloud descended, and I realized it was a face—a face that did not look happy to see us.
From my previous dealings with giants, I’d learned that the only way to process their immense size was to focus on one thing at a time: a nose the size of an oil tanker, a beard as thick and vast as a redwood forest, round gold-rimmed glasses that looked like crop circles. And on the giant’s head, what I’d taken for a storm front was the rim of the universe’s largest panama hat.
The way his voice echoed in the basin, pinging off the cliffs with tinny reverberations, made me realize we were not, in fact, in a volcanic crater. Those cliffs were the metal rim of a huge pot. The steaming lake was some kind of brew. And we’d just become the secret ingredient.
My friends stood with their mouths open, trying to make sense of what they were seeing—all except for Halfborn Gunderson, who wisely remained unconscious.
I was the first to regain my wits. I hate it when that happens.
“Hello,” I said to the giant.
I’m diplomatic that way, always knowing the right greeting.
Frowny McHugeface furrowed his brow, giving me flashbacks to my sixth-grade science lesson on plate tectonics. He glanced to either side and called out, “Daughters! Get over here!”
More gigantic faces popped up around the rim of the pot: the nine women from the maelstrom, but much larger now, their frothy hair floating about their faces, their smiles a little too manic, their eyes bright with excitement or hunger. (I hoped it wasn’t hunger….It was probably hunger.)