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LOCKED OUT OF HEAVEN

From the Diary of Molly Overbrook

Dear Diary,

That’s how these things usually start, right? “Dear Diary”? I’m only asking because it seems kind of strange to pretend that I’m writing a diary, which should be, you know, private, when what I’m really writing is a “therapy assignment” that’s going to be read by Dr. Mésomier and my dad and aunts and Odin-knows-who-else. But since right now I’m not really speaking to any of those people, I’m just going to pretend that none of them are going to see this, because if I think of them reading these words, then I’m never going to be able to write down what happened this summer. And although I want to make it clear that I think this is a totally lame assignment and it’s not really anybody’s business but mine and Mardi’s, I do actually want to write it down. Because, well, it was pretty freaking strange, and maybe writing it down will help me figure out how the Hel, I mean, the Underworld, things could have gotten so messed up between me and my sister.

And since maybe this is going to be read by people who have never met me, I suppose I should catch you up on a few things that happened before summer even started.

So:

Most people know me as Molly Overbrook, but in certain very select circles, I’m also known as Mooi, and my twin sister, Mardi, is called Magdi. Most people see us as two fairly normal seventeen-year-olds, albeit ones from privileged backgrounds: Mardi’s normal ride is a vintage Ferrari, while I usually go for something with a chauffeur (I like a chauffeured Navigator or Escalade preferably, but a Town Car will do, or even a taxi—although as I learned this summer, nothing beats a Maybach), so I can sip on some bubbly and check my social media feeds while someone else does the driving. Shopping means department stores and individual designers (although in our case, the department stores are Barneys and Jeffrey and the designers are 5:31 Jérôme and Kim Haller). Good hair is an obsession, and we own approximately one hundred different hair care products between us; of course mine gets a little assistance from the Frédéric Fekkai salon. Like everyone our age, we sweated over the SATs, and we’ll soon be waiting on pins and needles to see which colleges will let us in.

HOWEVER:

Despite the outward appearance of quasi-normality, we are in fact the daughters of Thor, a.k.a. the god of thunder. No, not the one played by Chris Hemsworth. Our dad doesn’t wear a red cape and silver armor, although he does have a hammer, which he doesn’t swing around as much; he keeps it hanging on a couple of hooks above the mantel in the living room of our Park Avenue penthouse while he jets around the world buying and selling skyscrapers and companies and, I don’t know, islands. By which I mean that, yes, our father’s a genuine Norse god, which makes us goddesses—Mardi’s the goddess of rage and I’m the goddess of strength. But we’re a little different from our dad and his ex, Ingrid, a.k.a. Erda, the goddess of the earth, and her sister Freya, the goddess of love. They were all born thousands of years ago in Asgard, which is our real home and where we’re supposed to live, coming to Midgard (the place humans call Earth) only when they mess things up and need our help.

But Thor (whom we call Troy, when we’re not just calling him Dad) and Ingrid and Freya and a few other Aesir and Vanir (which is what the gods call themselves in Asgard) ended up getting trapped here after the rainbow bridge that connected Asgard to the rest of the nine worlds was destroyed almost five hundred years ago, leaving them pretty much stuck here. Like, forever.

Literally.

Despite the fact that Thor and Tyr—the god of war (a.k.a. Trent, whom we’ll meet later)—and Ingrid and Erda and about a half dozen other gods have been trapped here for so long, none of them ever had any children—that is, until Mardi and I came along seventeen years ago.

To be sure, our births were prophesied a long time ago, but that was before the Bofrir was destroyed, and everyone figured those prophecies had been canceled when the link between the nine worlds was cut—especially because in the legends our mother is supposed to be a Jotun (a giant) from Jotunheim, a world that was also cut off from Midgard by the destruction of the rainbow bridge. And as far as everyone knows, there aren’t any giants here on Earth. But then one day our dad showed up with a cute little bundle of joy in each arm (so we’re told anyway; we may be goddesses, but you can’t expect us to remember things from when we were a couple of months old, let alone a couple of days), and judging by the way glass shattered when we cried for our bottles and the trays on our high chairs would break into a million pieces when we threw temper tantrums, it was pretty clear we were the goddesses from the ancient prophecies. Needless to say, our appearance on the scene raised a lot of questions, but one of them was kind of more important than all the others:

Where was our mother? And who was she?

Well, we’ll get to that, but first I want to tell you about this dream I had around the start of the summer. Not once, but every night for more than a week. I know, it’s the twenty-first century and no one really cares about dreams anymore besides Jungian analysts—and how can you take someone seriously when their job is to sit on a couch and listen to people talk? Except gods’ dreams aren’t like humans’ dreams—our unconscious is plugged into the magical currents that govern time itself, as in, they’re prophetic. (How do you think they came up with the prophecy about Mardi and me all those thousands of years ago? It wasn’t from gazing into a crystal ball. It was a dream.)

So:

In the dream, I’m at Fair Haven, which is this beautiful colonial-era mansion on Gardiners Island, just off the East End, where Mardi’s boyfriend, Trent, lives. Besides being the Gardiners’ ancestral home, Fair Haven also happens to sit on what’s called a “seam” between our world and the Land of the Dead, also known as Niflheim, the most fearsome and inhospitable of the nine worlds, with a cold white sun that’s not even as bright as the full moon and covered in endless sheets of ice—including Hel, the vast city where dead Vikings are banished if they fail to die a heroic death.

The reason why I’m telling you all this background stuff is because I didn’t know it in my waking life—I found it out in the dream. And only after I did a little digging around did I realize it was all true. Which is why I knew this dream was important.

Important, and terrifying.

In the dream, I’m walking toward Fair Haven across the front lawn. In real life, that lawn is as flat and manicured as a croquet pitch or tennis court, every single blade of grass perfectly trimmed to 1.5 inches. But in the dream, the yard is a swampy, cratered mess, alternating puddles of sludge and muddy mounds the size of muskrat nests. Plus, it’s raining. Plus, the puddles of water are freezing cold.

Now, I’m a serious shoe girl, and a muddy lawn is not my normal habitat. (Not good for the Zanottis!) Yet in the dream, I’m barefoot and wading right into this vast field of sludge like it’s the Mediterranean lapping on the Côte d’Azur, plopping one foot into six inches of ice-cold muck and then the other, as I charge toward Fair Haven. I don’t know why, but I have to get to the mansion, and I have to get there soon, or it’ll be too late. And so I’m splashing through the mud as fast as I can, slipping every other step and falling on my hands and knees and splashing my face with brown goo. I don’t even care what my hair looks like—so you know I must be completely out of my mind.

I’m so caught up with just trying to get across the lawn that I’m not really paying attention to my destination. But then, after what seems like hours, I manage to climb onto one of those muddy but still comparatively dry mounds, and when I pause to catch my breath, I look up for the first time, to see how far I am from my destination.

That’s when I see the mansion—which just last year was described by Architectural Digest as “not only the most beautiful, but the most elegant home on the whole of the East End.” Except in my dream it’s not beautiful at all, let alone elegant. It’s a ruin. Every single pane of glass in every single window has been smashed, and two out of every three of the thousands upon thousands of cedar shingles that normally cover the house have been blown off, and the simple white Ionic pilasters and window frames have been ripped away or hang in splinters from the walls—and that’s only what I can see of the house, because the whole enormous building is covered in dark, droopy tangled vines that look more like seaweed than ivy or creeper. The vines cling to the house not like they’re growing up its walls but like they’re trying to pull them down, and there are big holes in the roof with tree branches growing through them, as if the house had been abandoned for a hundred years or more. Which is impossible. I was there just last summer. The house was in perfect condition. I played croquet with Mardi on this very lawn.

And I mean, I know it was a dream, so the normal rules of reality don’t apply. But the thing is, I knew I was dreaming, and in the dream I wasn’t surprised to see Fair Haven looking like this. It was exactly what I expected to see. It was only the part of me that was watching myself dream that was confused. Was I seeing the future? Or maybe some alternate version of the past? And if so, how? Though it was said that the Aesir possessed magical artifacts that allowed them to change time itself, all those were trapped on the other side of the destroyed rainbow bridge. So how was I seeing this vision?

But before the not-dreaming part of my brain could ask the dreaming part of my brain for the answer to this question, I noticed something off to my right, in the east wing of the mansion. The east wing was built in the early seventeenth century, and Trent always said it was the strongest part of the house. Its posts and beams had been cut from solid tree trunks two feet thick and had stood for nearly four hundred years. But now the whole wing swayed like a poorly built tent in a hurricane, and much of the roof had caved in, and some kind of vast . . . mound rose from the hole, like one of those creepy termites’ nests in Africa, but a hundred times bigger. But it was only when it flashed a second time that I realized it wasn’t the mound that had caught my eye, but a pulse of light somewhere deep within the crumbling walls of the east wing: a thick greenish-yellowish glow that pulsed on and off. And each time it shone on, it cast a shadow that, though monstrously distended, was still recognizable as human, and female.

And even though I didn’t know who this woman was, I knew I had to get to her, I had to save her.