The Ship of the Dead by Rick Riordan

“HOW DOyou want to handle this?” I asked.

From his belt loops, Alex pulled the golden wire that served triple duty as fashion accessory, ceramic-cutting tool, and melee weapon. “I was thinking we should kill it.”

The wolf growled and clawed at the hatch. Magical runes glowed on the Plexiglas. The beast’s facial fur was already smoking and charred from previous attempts to bust in.

I wondered how long the wolf had been on the roof, and why it hadn’t tried to gain access another way. Maybe it didn’t want to end up dead like its friend downstairs. Or maybe it was single-mindedly focused on this particular room.

“It wants something,” I guessed.

“To kill us,” Alex said. “Which is why we should kill it first. You want to open the hatch or—?”

“Wait.” Normally I would’ve been all in favor of killing a glowing blue wolf, but something about this animal bothered me…the way its cold dark eyes seemed to be looking past us, as if searching for different prey. “What if we let it in?”

Alex stared at me like I was crazy. He did that a lot. “You want to offer it a cup of tea? Maybe lend it a book?”

“It has to be here on a mission,” I persisted. “Somebody sent those wolves to retrieve something—maybe the same something I’m looking for.”

Alex considered. “You think Loki sent the wolves.”

I shrugged. “Loki’s gonna Loki.”

“And if we let the wolf in, you think it might make a beeline for whatever it’s hunting.”

“I’m pretty sure it isn’t here for the irritable bowel medicine.”

Alex loosened his checkered tie even more. “Okay. We open the hatch, watch where the wolf goes, and then we kill it.”

“Right.” I pulled the runestone pendant off my neck chain. Jack grew into sword form, though he felt heavier than usual, like a kid having a meltdown on the floor of a department store.

“What is it now?” He sighed. “Can’t you see I’m dying of a broken heart?”

I could have pointed out that he was incapable of dying, and he had no actual heart, but I thought that would be mean. “Sorry, Jack. We have a wolf to deal with.”

I explained to him what was going on.

Jack’s blade glowed violet. “But Riptide’s razor-sharp edges,” he said dreamily. “Did you see her edges?”

“Yeah. Great edges. Now how about we prevent Loki from launching his mighty death ship and starting Ragnarok? Then maybe we can arrange a second date for you and Riptide.”

Another heavy sigh. “Wolf. Roof. Hatch. Got it.”

I glanced at Alex and stifled a shriek. While I wasn’t looking, he’d transformed into a large timber wolf.

“Do you have to turn into animals behind my back?” I asked.

Alex bared his fangs in a canine grin. He snout-pointed toward the top of the stairs like What are you waiting for? I’m a wolf. I can’t open that hatch.

I climbed to the top of the stairs. The temperature was like the inside of a greenhouse. On the other side of the hatch, the wolf snuffled and chewed at the Plexiglas, leaving drool smears and fang marks. Those protective-barrier runes must have tasted great. Being this close to an enemy wolf made the hairs on the back of my neck do corkscrews.

What would happen if I opened the hatch? Would the runes kill me? Would they kill the wolf? Or would they deactivate if I let the wolf in of my own free will, since that was literally the stupidest thing I could do?

The wolf slavered at the Plexiglas.

“Hey, buddy,” I said.

Jack buzzed in my hand. “What?”

“Not you, Jack. I’m talking to the wolf.” I smiled at the beast, then remembered that showing teeth meant aggression to canines. I pouted instead. “I’m going to let you in. Won’t that be nice? Then you can get whatever you came for, since I know you’re not here to kill me, right?”

The wolf’s snarl was not reassuring.

“Okay, then,” I said. “One, two, three!”

I pushed against the hatch with all my einherji strength, shoving the wolf back as I surged onto the roof deck. I had time to register a barbecue grill, some planters overflowing with hibiscus, and two lounge chairs overlooking an amazing view of the Charles River. I wanted to slap Uncle Randolph for never telling me he had such a cool party spot.

The wolf stepped from behind the hatch and growled, its hackles raised like a shaggy dorsal fin. One of its eyes was swollen shut, the eyelid burned from contact with my uncle’s rune trap.

“Now?” Jack asked with no particular enthusiasm.

“Not yet.” I flexed my knees, ready to spring into action if necessary. I would show this wolf how well I could fight…or, you know, how fast I could run away, depending on what the situation called for.

The wolf regarded me with its one good eye. It snorted dismissively and bolted down the stairwell into the town house.

I wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or insulted.

I ran after it. By the time I reached the bottom of the stairs, Alex and the other wolf were having a snarl-off in the middle of the library. They bared their teeth and circled one another, looking for any signs of fear or weakness. The blue wolf was much larger. The neon wisps glowing in its fur gave it a certain cool factor. But it was also half-blind and wincing in pain. Alex, being Alex, showed no sign of being intimidated. He stood his ground as the other wolf edged around him.

Once our glowing blue visitor was confident Alex wasn’t going to attack, it raised its snout and sniffed the air. I expected it to run toward the bookshelves and chomp some secret book of nautical maps, or maybe a copy of How to Stop Loki’s Ship of Death in Three Easy Steps! Instead, the wolf lunged toward the fireplace, jumped at the mantel, and grabbed the mead horn in its mouth.

Some sluggish part of my brain thought, Hey, I should probably stop it.

Alex was way ahead of me. In one fluid movement, he morphed back into human form, stepped forward, and lashed out with his garrote like he was throwing a bowling ball. (Actually, it was a lot more graceful than that. I’d seen Alex bowl, and it wasn’t pretty.) The golden cord wrapped around the wolf’s neck. With one yank backward, Alex cured the wolf of any future headache problems.

The decapitated carcass flopped against the carpet. It began to sizzle, disintegrating until only the drinking horn and a few tufts of fur remained.

Jack’s blade turned heavier in my grip. “Well, fine,” he said. “I guess you didn’t need me after all. I’ll just go write some love poetry and cry a lot.” He shrank back into a runestone pendant.

Alex crouched next to the mead horn. “Any idea why a wolf would want a decorative drinking vessel?”

I knelt next to him, picked up the horn, and looked inside. Rolled up and crammed into the horn was a small leather book like a diary. I pulled it out and fanned the pages: drawings of Viking runes, interspersed with paragraphs written in Uncle Randolph’s cramped cursive.

“I think,” I said, “we’ve found the right dead white male author.”

We reclined in the lounge chairs on the roof deck.

While I flipped through my uncle’s notebook, trying to make sense of his frenzied rune drawings and cursive crazy talk, Alex relaxed and sipped guava juice from the mead horn.

Why Uncle Randolph kept guava juice in his library’s mini fridge, I couldn’t tell you.

Every so often, just to annoy me, Alex slurped with exaggerated gusto and smacked his lips. “Ahhhh.”

“Are you sure it’s safe to drink from that horn?” I asked. “It could be cursed or something.”

Alex grabbed his throat and pretended to choke. “Oh, no! I’m turning into a frog!”

“Please don’t.”

He pointed at the diary. “Any luck with that?”

I stared at the pages. Runes swam in front of my eyes. The notations were in a mix of languages: Old Norse, Swedish, and some I couldn’t begin to guess. Even the passages in English made little sense. I felt like I was trying to read an advanced quantum physics textbook backward in a mirror.

“Most of it’s over my head,” I admitted. “The earlier pages look like they’re about Randolph’s search for the Sword of Summer. I recognize some of the references. But here at the end…”

The last few pages were more hastily written. Randolph’s writing turned shaky and frantic. Splotches of dried blood freckled the paper. I remembered that, in the tomb of the Viking zombies in Provincetown, Randolph had gotten several of his fingers lopped off. These pages might have been written after that, with his nondominant hand. The watery cursive reminded me of the way I used to write back in elementary school, when my teacher forced me to use my right hand.

On the last page, Randolph had scratched my name: Magnus.

Under that, he’d sketched two serpents interlocking in a figure eight. The quality of the drawing was terrible, but I recognized the symbol. Alex had the same thing tattooed on the nape of his neck: the sign of Loki.

Below that was a term in what I assumed was Old Norse: mjöð. Then some notes in English: Might stop L. Whetstone of Bolverk > guards. Where?

That last word trailed downward, the question mark a desperate scrawl.

“What do you make of this?” I passed the book to Alex.

He frowned. “That’s my mom’s symbol, obviously.”

(You heard right. Loki was normally a male god, but he happened to be Alex’s mother. Long story.)

“And the rest of it?” I asked.

“This word looks like moo with a j. Perhaps Scandinavian cows have an accent?”

“I take it you don’t read Old Norse, then, or whatever that language is?”

“Magnus, it may shock you to learn that I do not have every talent in the world. Just most of the important ones.”

He squinted at the page. When he concentrated, the left corner of his mouth twitched like he was enjoying a secret joke. I found that tic distracting. I wanted to know what he found so funny.

“‘Might stop L,’” Alex read. “Let’s assume that’s Loki. ‘Whetstone of Bolverk.’ You think that’s the same thing as the Skofnung Stone?”

I shuddered. We’d lost the Skofnung Stone and Skofnung Sword during a wedding party in Loki’s cavern, when he’d escaped the bindings that had held him for a thousand years. (Oops. Our bad.) I never wanted to see that particular whetstone again.

“I hope not,” I said. “Ever heard the name Bolverk?”

“Nope.” Alex finished his guava juice. “I’m kind of digging this mead horn, though. You mind if I keep it?”

“All yours.” I found the idea of Alex taking a souvenir from my family mansion strangely pleasing. “So if Randolph wanted me to find that book, and Loki sent the wolves to get it before I could—”

Alex tossed the journal back to me. “Assuming what you just said is true, and assuming it’s not a trap, and assuming those notes aren’t the ramblings of a madman?”

“Uh…yeah.”

“Then best-case scenario: Your uncle came up with an idea to stop Loki. It wasn’t something he could do himself, but he hoped you could. It involves a whetstone, a Bolverk, and possibly a Scandinavian cow.”

“When you put it like that, it doesn’t sound so promising.”

Alex poked the tip of the mead horn. “Sorry to burst your bubble, but most plans to stop Loki fail. We know this.”

The bitter edge in his voice surprised me.

“You’re thinking about your training sessions with Sam,” I guessed. “How are they going?”

Alex’s face told me the answer.

Among Loki’s many disturbing qualities, he could command his children to do whatever he wanted whenever they were in his presence, which made family reunions a real drag.

Alex was the exception. He’d somehow learned to resist Loki’s power, and for the past six weeks, he’d been trying to teach his half sister Samirah al-Abbas to do the same. The fact that neither of them talked much about their training suggested that it hadn’t been a rousing success.

“She’s trying,” Alex said. “It doesn’t make it easier that she’s…” He stopped himself.

“What?”

“Never mind. I promised not to talk about it.”

“Now I’m really curious. Is everything okay with her and Amir?”

Alex snorted. “Oh, yeah. They’re still head over heels, dreaming of the day when they can get married. I swear, if those two didn’t have me to chaperone them, they’d do something crazy like hold hands.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

Alex waved off my question. “All I’m saying is that you shouldn’t trust anything you get from your Uncle Randolph. Not the advice in that book. Not this house. Anything you inherit from family…it always comes with strings attached.”

That seemed a strange thing for him to say, considering he’d been enjoying the view from Randolph’s magnificent roof deck while sipping chilled guava juice from his Viking mead horn, but I got the feeling Alex wasn’t really thinking about my dysfunctional uncle.

“You never talk much about your family,” I noted. “I mean your mortal family.”

He stared at me darkly. “And I’m not going to start now. If you knew half the—”

BRAWK!In a flutter of black feathers, a raven landed on the tip of Alex’s boot.

You don’t see a lot of wild ravens in Boston. Canadian geese, seagulls, ducks, pigeons, even hawks, sure. But when a huge black raptor lands on your foot, that can only mean one thing: a message from Valhalla.

Alex held out his hand. (Not normally recommended with ravens. They have a vicious bite.) The bird hopped on his wrist, barfed up a hard pellet the size of a pecan right into Alex’s palm, and then flew away, its mission accomplished.

Yes, our ravens deliver messages via barf-mail. Ravens have a natural ability to regurgitate inedible substances like bones and fur, so they have no qualms about swallowing a message capsule, flying it across the Nine Worlds, and vomiting it to the correct recipient. It wouldn’t have been my chosen career, but hey, no judgment.

Alex cracked open the pellet. He unfolded the letter and began to read, the corner of his mouth starting to twitch again. “It’s from T.J.,” he said. “Looks like we’re leaving today. Right now, in fact.”

“What?” I sat up in my recliner. “Why?”

Of course, I’d known we were running out of time. We had to leave soon in order to reach Loki’s ship before Midsummer. But there was a big difference between soon and right now. I wasn’t a big fan of right now.

Alex kept reading. “Something about the tide? I dunno. I’d better go bust Samirah out of school. She’ll be in Calculus. She’s not going to be happy about leaving.”

He rose and offered me a hand.

I didn’t want to get up. I wanted to stay there on that deck with Alex and watch the afternoon sunlight change the color of the river from blue to amber. Maybe we could read some of Randolph’s old paperbacks. We could drink all his guava juice. But the raven had barfed up our orders. You couldn’t argue with raven barf.

I took Alex’s hand and got to my feet. “You want me to come with you?”

Alex frowned. “No, dummy. You’ve got to get back to Valhalla. You’re the one with the boat. Speaking of which, have you warned the others about—?”

“No,” I said, my face burning. “Not yet.”

Alex laughed. “That should be interesting. Don’t wait for Sam and me. We’ll catch up with you somewhere along the way!”

Before I could ask what he meant by that, Alex turned into a flamingo and launched himself into the sky, making it a banner day for Boston bird-watchers.