Foretold. Rinda Elliott

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      I ran my hands through my hair, absently scrunched the short spikes on top. Kat and Coral would probably never cut their hair but I’d grown sick of messing with it and chopped mine off. Mom said it made me look like a fairy sprite.

      The black color came more from our Native American Arapaho ancestors—Iñunaina—than from our Norse ones. We looked Indian, but our Scandinavian heritage raged strong. As if aware of my thoughts, that presence in me, that thing, shifted and stretched like a sharp-clawed cat waking from a nap.

      It creeped me the hell out each and every time since it first happened. Nothing like growing up knowing that one of the three norn goddesses lived in your body. That she was there for one reason.

      It hit me then. The terror. Something more than the usual fear and the constant anxiety that the norn could take over. That she could just wipe off my personality like words on a whiteboard.

      Could this really be it? The end of the world?

      Horror curled through my insides, thick and rolling like waves of sticky, oozing oil. It flowed into my limbs and made them sting. I fisted my hands and sat back as the room swirled around me. Terrified the norn’s seidr magic would kick in, I squeezed my eyes closed and held my breath.

      I came out of it to find Kat stroking my shoulder, holding my hand. “It’s okay,” she whispered over and over. “Come on. You’re the one who never loses it. Don’t wig out on me now, Raven.”

      My fear was reflected in her eyes. “Kat, it’s true. All of it. Ragnarok.” I whispered the last word.

      “I know.” She closed her eyes. “I’ve spent my entire life ignoring Dru’s stupid stories and here I am scared to death, too. But we can’t let her do whatever it is she’s planning for those boys. We just can’t.”

      Kat never called her Mom. Her resentment for the woman raged like a never-ending storm. She hated her for dragging us from town to town, from one campsite to another. Out of the three of us, the most forgiving of Mom was Coral, who padded into the room pulling on a fat, purple sweater.

      “Where’s Mom?” Her loose hair was longer than her black skirt, which ended halfway down her thighs, above a pair of thick, trendy, hot-pink socks that stretched over her knees. They went well with the pajama top...and the pink feather she’d clipped into her hair. Her style was definitely her own. Kind of funky, fashion-conscious hippie.

      “You didn’t see her outside?” Mom would have passed Coral on the front porch when she left.

      “No. I was talking to Mr. Bennings next door.” She tried to smile. “He’s going to his sister’s in South Carolina. Not sure why he thinks that will help. It’s snowing there, too.”

      “Mom couldn’t have gone through the backyard.” I frowned, bit my lip. The fence panels were tall, the gate had rusted shut and we’d had an exterminator out less than a week before to deal with a huge, creepy nest of snakes. “Coral, is there some spell she could have used to travel? Like disappear or transport?”

      Kat snorted. “Beam Dru up.”

      I glared at her. She hated the old Star Trek: The Next Generation reruns I loved and she never missed a chance to pick on me.

      Coral shook her head. “Mom’s getting pretty good, but not that good. I don’t know anyone who can travel outside the bounds of reality.”

      Faint heat filled my cheeks. Yeah, it was a dumb question. “She must have crawled through the window.”

      She pointed to the white petals. “I want to know what she did with the datura. It’s poison.” Coral used a tissue to wrap the flowers and toss them in the trash. “Don’t know why I’m surprised. Yesterday, she hacked away all my solstice orange snapdragons.”

      My mouth dropped open. They were Coral’s favorite flower. She’d worked her butt off to grow those and we’d carted the pots around for years. “Oh, Coral, I’m so sorry. Why would she do that?”

      “They detect spells,” Kat murmured. She only made that pinched-mouth, evasive-eye expression when she was hiding information.

      “Kat, did you know?”

      “Know what?”

      I lifted one eyebrow. We both jumped when Coral smacked Kat’s shoulder.

      “Hey!” Kat yelled, eyes narrowing, hand balling into a fist.

      I scrambled to my feet to stop Kat from hitting her back. “We don’t have time for this.” I turned Kat toward me, feeling the frailness of her shoulders. We were all built small, but she felt thinner, like she’d been stressing more than usual lately. “Do you know something or not?”

      Fury built in my stomach when she stared at the floor. “You got something, didn’t you?” I whispered.

      Kat jerked from my hands and stomped from the room. She came back with her favorite yellow chenille throw bunched under her arm. She snapped it open and laid it on the floor. We all squatted around it, but I winced when I saw the perfect rune-shaped holes—obviously cut with scissors. When the norn’s magic hit during sleep, our subconscious found any way to get the messages across.

      We’d been carving, writing and even burning these symbols in seidr magical trances since our ninth birthdays.

      “‘Mother berserker,’” I translated. “Yeah, I see why you didn’t say anything. Stupid, cryptic shit.”

      “Dru was already certifiable.” Kat lifted her eyebrows, shrugged. “I didn’t think the runes meant all that much different. But then she fell off that ladder and I figured the snakes had startled her.”

      “The ones from the backyard?” Coral asked.

      A few weeks ago, our mother had fallen off a ladder painting the outside of the house. She was unconscious for three days. I’d found her. Also found some snakeskins in a sort of circle at the base of the ladder. I’d trashed them before Coral could see them and think they were a sign. “Yeah, that exterminator sucks. The ‘berserker’ thing could have meant that. It would be nice if this dumb magic came with instructions.”

      We had tons of books and countless Xeroxed copies of old writings—we’d collected everything we could find on our heritage, trying to figure out what was truth and what wasn’t. We had some kind of trance magic, a version of the Norse seidr magic inherited from our father’s side, but none of us had any control over it or even understood it.

      Our mother’s abilities were different. She was an earth witch. Eyeing the iron skillet, I shuddered. If she was doing something with dark magic, this could be bad. Really bad.

      I picked up the stack of papers and handed a section to each sister. “We have to figure out which boy she went after.” I stared from one to the other. If I’d been wrong all this time, the warrior was important—so, so much more important than we were. Gods, we’d spent our lives snickering over the idea of the young warrior killing one of us...but now, I didn’t know. Maybe it was real. Maybe one of us would change the prophecies and save one of the warriors carrying the gods’ souls. Maybe we could help stop the end of the world, crazy as that sounded.

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