Then we don’t have much time,” Killian said. “It’s the poison. It’s stronger now. The children are the most vulnerable, but there will be more victims, more deaths, if we do not stop this.”
“Ingrid . . . Killian is—”
“I know,” Ingrid said with a brief nod. “I figured it out as well. Remember what I told you about Ragnarok? First the oceans will die? And how the toxin that’s in North Hampton is similar to ones found near Sydney, Greenland, and Reykjavík? They just found one near Vietnam. Bran has been spreading it around the world since he arrived in Fair Haven in January.” She explained how at first she had attempted to trace it to Killian’s travels, but she could not find the Alaskan freighter where he was supposed to have served, nor the Sydney resort where he was supposed to have worked as a scuba instructor. As far as she could see, Killian had never been to any of those places, and with a start she’d realized that the person who had told them that Killian had traveled the world was Bran.
She began to investigate Bran’s background and travels, and she realized her mistake in identifying the brothers as soon as she put together the news clippings about the toxin’s locations with a copy of Bran’s itinerary from the Gardiner Foundation, which was published on their Web site. The dates and places matched exactly. Under the cover of charity work, Bran had traveled to each and every place on the map that the toxin had been found. The explosion in the middle of the summer meant the tree was beginning to collapse inwardly. Her suspicions confirmed, she had done a little more digging on the foundation and discovered that in contrast to all the hype, there was very little good it was actually doing; most of its work seemed to be tied up in endless bureaucratic meetings; the foundation had hardly given any money to any of the causes it supported. It was a tax front, a fraud, a way to hide the Gardiner fortune.
She told all this to Freya and Killian. Now she understood that Bran was Loki all along. Like her sister and mother, she had been fooled; due to the restriction, they had been rusty and blinded and lost without their magic, and had failed to sense his use of a powerful spell. She blushed to think of her dream of Killian the other night. Another of Loki’s tricks, of course, to throw them off his trail.
“I know where he’s headed,” Ingrid said. “Through the secret door in Fair Haven. In the ballroom. Come on.”
“Go,” Killian said to Freya. “He has Odin’s ring; he could be anywhere in the universe by now.”
“I can’t leave you here,” Freya said.
“My leg’s shattered, but I can control the bleeding; don’t worry about me. I’ll only slow you down.”
Freya kissed Killian once more and then joined her sister. “Let’s go. It’s time to end this.”
Ingrid led the way to the ballroom. She cast a spell that shattered the plaster and revealed the ghost door she had found underneath.
“Okay, so how do you open it?” Freya asked.
“Watch.” Ingrid had read about the tree in her father’s book. The language she had been unable to decipher, she now understood, was the language of the dragons and the giants who had come before the gods. She placed her hands on the door and murmured a few words.
The door creaked open to reveal nothing but darkness. Ingrid took Freya’s hand and together they slipped through the portal. As her eyes slowly adjusted to the dark, she saw that a pale blue glow lit the coarse thicket that surrounded them. The space, if it could be called that, smelled of damp earth and wood. There was a path that led forward, deeper into the thicket.
However, before they could walk any farther, they came upon Lionel Horning. He was covered in blood, and they could see that he was rotting from inside out; half of his face was missing and he leered at them with his one good eye. “Stop,” he said in a hoarse voice, raising a hand that was missing two fingers. “You may not enter.” Their friend had been turned into a guard dog, an obstacle to block their way.
“Oh, Lionel . . .” Ingrid sighed. “The toxin. It must have been in his blood, in his system, when he swallowed all that ocean water, which is why the resurrection didn’t take.”
“So I was wrong. He’s not a demon,” Freya said.
“No, definitely zombie,” Ingrid said. “The river underneath their farm . . . it leads to the ocean. The toxin must have been strong there. He’s been breathing it. He swallowed the water and then he was living in a poisoned space. No wonder.”
“Lionel, I’m so sorry but I have to do this,” Ingrid said, raising her wand. White rope appeared from the end of her wand and wrapped tightly around Lionel, creating a straightjacket. “That will hold him. I don’t think we can bring him back, his body is too decayed. But if we stop Loki it will restore Lionel’s spirit and send him to Helda as he was.”
There was a cry from beyond, on the other side of the path that led away from the tree. “It’s Tyler. Ingrid—you get the boy. We’ve got twenty-four hours before the Dead claim him forever.”
“What about you?” Ingrid asked, already turning to the sound of the boy’s cries.
“I’ll take care of Loki,” Freya said, pushing farther into the darkness.