Elsker Read online

  ELSKER

  ST Bende

  Elsker

  Copyright © 2013, ST Bende

  All rights reserved. Ebooks are not transferable. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage system without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Edited by Eden Plantz

  Cover Art by Suzannah Safi

  Book design by Ashley Christman

  Publisher’s Note:

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  First Entranced Publishing, LLC electronic publication: 2013

  Entranced Publishing, LLC

  Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States of America

  www.entrancedpublishing.com

  Table of Contents

  Back Cover Copy

  Dedication

  The Prophecy of Ragnarok

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  About the Author

  Back Cover Copy

  Kristia Tostenson prefers Earl Grey to Grey Goose and book clubs to nightclubs, but when she transfers from her one-stoplight town to Cardiff University in Wales she falls in love with Ull Myhr. Her new boyfriend isn’t exactly what she was expecting. He’s an honest-to-goodness Norse God — an immortal assassin fated to die at Ragnarok, the battle destined to destroy Asgard and Earth. Kristia’s crazy visions are the only thing that can save their realms.

  Her orderly life just got very messy.

  Dedication

  To my three boys --

  I wished for you upon a star, and all my dreams came true.

  Acknowledgements:

  An enormous thank you to my husband -- for choosing me, and being my perfect teammate. Jeg elsker det.

  Mange takk to my amazing boys, the greatest blessings we could have hoped for. Your unconditional love inspires me daily.

  Much appreciation to the talented Jacqueline Gardner. We both know this story would never have left my computer without your encouragement. And to Gary Rubin, for your kind feedback on my very, very rough drafts.

  To my inspirational teachers, Dr. Carnicke and Olaug -- thank you for sharing your names.

  Thanks to my incredible editor at Entranced Publishing, Eden Plantz, who shaped my words with such finesse.

  And eternal gratitude to MorMorMa, for making me a part of your family and introducing me to Norsk Waffles. Tusen takk.

  The Prophecy of Ragnarok

  With the death of Balder, the powers of darkness will burst from their tethers. Jotunheim shall crack open; a terrible frost shall suffocate all things good. The great beast will attack, the wicked ship sail, and the light of Asgard will dim evermore. Fire shall consume the earth and Darkness shall swallow the sky. No one, God or Mortal, can survive the travesty of Ragnarok.

  -Prophecy of The Norns

  Chapter One

  Travel

  I MOVED FASTER THAN a salmon down a chute in bear season. I had to. If the giant wolf biting at my heels didn’t kill me, then the tree-trunk of a snake twining between my feet was going to finish the job. I pumped my legs harder, exerting every modicum of strength I had left, and in the process, I stepped on the snake’s head. It hissed, a guttural reverberation bouncing around the darkness. I pushed harder. My chest burned, but I’d managed to put a little space between my attackers and me. I could hear the wolf’s angry growl, but I didn’t look back. I couldn’t spare the movement.

  Since it was pitch black, I couldn’t see what I was running towards, and I certainly didn’t see the fissures beginning to form in the dirt beneath my Nikes. My size six sneaker slid into one and I could hear the crack of my ankle breaking before I hit the damp earth. The chasm was getting bigger and soon my whole leg slipped through. My fingernails clung to the soil as it separated from itself, and I felt the chill creep over the ground as the terrible frost settled like a blanket onto everything it could reach. I started to shake -- it would be death by freezing, then. But I knew chilled human wouldn’t be the worst thing the wolf and snake had eaten that day.

  “Earth to Kristia! Hello? Are you even listening?” I rubbed my eyes and focused on the frowning face of my best friend since kindergarten. A sprightly brunette, Ardis was everything I wasn’t -- adventurous, perky, self-confident. And at the moment, highly irritated.

  “Sorry,” I shook off the remnants of last night’s bad dream. Ardis Behrman didn’t often grace our hometown of Nehalem, Oregon. Three hundred residents and a solitary stoplight didn’t hold much excitement for a girl studying acting at NYU. I treasured any conversation we had that didn’t require text or Skype.

  “Vision?” She cocked her head.

  “Hardly. Just tired. Nightmare last night.”

  “The weird one about the animals hunting you down?” Ardis wrinkled her nose.

  “That’s the one.” My favorite grandmother’s dark stories from the North were never far from my subconscious. I never understood how any woman in her right mind could lovingly recount the end of the mythological Norse world to an eight-year-old girl. Mormor always had a wicked sense of humor, so I liked to think her intentions were good. Or maybe she suffered from a touch of the crazy. The fact that, at twenty, I still had vivid nightmares about Ragnarok; well, that spoke more about my own sensitivities than anything else. They were just stories.

  “That dream’s just creepy, Kristia.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “So.” Ardis rested her hands on the table. The metallic blue sparkles on her nails caught the light of the coffee shop where we’d had countless heart-to-hearts. “What’s new in Nehalem?”

  I stopped just short of rolling my eyes. “Good one Ardis.” Nothing changed around here but the weather, and even that was freakishly consistent.

  “And the University of the Pacific Northwest?”

  “You mean High School, Part Deux?”

  “C’mon, it can’t be that bad.”

  “You do realize you’re the only member of our graduating class who doesn’t go there, right? The only one who isn’t going to end up married to someone they’ve known since kindergarten. And spend eternity working in the boring log mill or tourist traps.” It would be the latter for me. My parents’ antique shop was popular with the summer crowd and I was expected to begin full time work when I graduated. Not exactly the stuff of dreams.

  “If you’re that bored, don’t just sit around waiting for something to happen to you -- go out and grab it.”

  “It’s not that easy,” I mumbled. Ardis was one of those people to whom good things came naturally. She didn’t understand that life didn’t just fall into place for the rest of us.

  I glanced up as our waitress set two steaming mugs on our table with a little too much force. I raised my eyebrows. “Is everything all right today, Susan?” My voice strained with the effort of false nicety. In our twelve years of school together, Susan had always treated me like a social pariah. Clearly nothing had changed since graduation. I may n
ot have been well bred, but I was well raised. I pasted on my best fake smile, though after enduring a lifetime of whispers and stares I had a very low tolerance for rudeness. It was my absolute pet peeve.

  I held Susan’s glare with my own pleasant look until she scurried back to the kitchen, obviously uncomfortable. Well, I was used to that.

  “Sorry, what were you saying? You don’t think it’s easy to change your life? You only think that because you’ve never tried.” Ardis sipped impatiently at her latte, the unofficial beverage of our rain-drenched town. “Look, Kristia, you’re my best friend and I think you rock. But is sitting around Nehalem for the rest of your life really going to make you happy? Really?” Score one, Behrman.

  The minute she said it I was transported from the rainy- small-town coffee shop to a dreary house on the edge of Nehalem.

  Rain was falling outside the thin windows and the air was damp with the faint scent of mildew. A cleaning caddy was at my feet -- I must have just scrubbed the toilets, judging from the smell of bleach, and I was folding laundry while the television droned in the background. When the boredom consumed me, I crossed to a coffee table where I idly fingered my one indulgence in an otherwise uneventful life: my subscription to Travel Magazine. The cover boasted an Irish castle sitting in a brilliant green field of clovers.

  My heart tugged -- in my vision I was thirty years old and I’d never even been on an airplane. I forced myself back to the coffee shop, where Ardis was watching me closely.

  “What did you see?”

  “Absolutely nothing,” I shook my head. I was resolute. My life was not going to turn out that way. It was one vision that could never come true. I drew a breath. I was twenty years old. Time to choose the path I wanted my life to take. There was a whole world out there -- what was keeping me from living in it? From living, period? “I still have one year of college left. I’m not spending it here. Not anymore.”

  “Awesome,” Ardis nodded her approval. “So what are you gonna do?”

  “I’m…” I was at a loss. I hadn’t thought that far ahead. “Well…” Then it came to me. “Got it! UPN has study abroad. The deadline isn’t for another three weeks. I’ll spend senior year somewhere totally different -- somewhere people don’t know anything about me.”

  “Bravo,” Ardis clapped loudly, to Susan’s chagrin. She glared at us from behind the counter. “So where do you want to go?”

  I had to think. Now that I’d made the decision to leave the country, where should I go? I thought about the book on my nightstand -- a Jane Austen classic. Those ladies seemed to be enjoying themselves, in their own angsty way. They certainly had a good time romping through the English Countryside. I had my answer. Once I’d made up my mind, I pictured something altogether different.

  I was on a big fancy jet, flying towards Europe. A flight attendant was handing me a coke with a lemon wedge and I was staring out the window at the endless, green meadows passing beneath. The businessman to my left was reading the Wall Street Journal, and the one across the aisle was immersed in the London Times.

  Oh, crimeney. What had I gotten into now?

  “So where are you going?” Like always, Ardis glossed right over my little mind trip. Bless her heart.

  “England. No, Wales.” A few miles closer to home might make it seem a little less scary. I dropped my head in my hands. Darned hallucinations. I hadn’t had one in months, and I’d just had two in as many minutes. It was with no small amount of pleasure that I took the visions back.

  The three hundred townsfolk of Nehalem whispered about my “handicap” when they thoughtink I wasn’t’m not listening -- actually, it wa’s a mental problem. It wa’s generally accepted that I was’m two trees short of a forest. Thanks to some glitch in my brain, I sawee random flashes of the future against my will. I’dve been in two minor car accidents, failed four midterm exams, and had to avoid competitive sports entirely, all because I sawee stuff at lousy times. This wouldn’t have been so much of a disability if I could have seen the winning lotto numbers, or even just the location of the radar-cops whothat hide along the 101. But to date, my premonitions hadve yielded zero useful tidbits. I sawee the mundane, ranging from my mom doing a load of laundry to Ardis painting her toes fire-engine red. I was am the world’s most useless psychic.

  “Wales it is then,” Ardis nodded her head firmly. “Now we just have to make sure you actually get on that plane.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Oh, let me think Miss Art History major -- because that’s not the perfect degree to take over the family antique shop or anything.” Ardis jabbed me with a sparkly fingernail.

  “It just so happens that I like art.” I did.

  “True or false? You come home every weekend to study instead of staying on campus and actually having a good time.”

  “I have a good time at home!” My protest fell on deaf ears.

  “True or false? You’ve literally never been more than ninety miles from the spot you were born.”

  “Well that’s just because--”

  “Buzz, time’s up!” Ardis giggled. “Kristia Homebody Tostenson, you win one personal escort to the airport to make sure you actually do something exciting for once in your life!”

  “Fine,” I nudged her with my boot. “But you’re going to miss me when I’m gone.”

  “You know it.”

  ****

  Nine months and one very bumpy plane ride later, I was seriously questioning this whole big- adventure plan. I was thousands of miles from home, hurtling through the air in a bouncing box. How exactly was this a good idea?

  “Fasten your seatbelts and return your seats and tray tables to their full and upright positions as we begin our descent into London, Heathrow. Weather is a pleasant fifty-five degrees with a light rain.” Thank heavens. The turbulent flight was almost over. “Seat up, Miss,” tusked the flight attendant as I adjusted my chair guiltily.

  “Sorry Ma’am,” I murmured to her retreating back, small-town manners a compulsive response. I leaned over to peer at the approaching countryside. Green pastures dotted with tiny sheep stretched as far as I could see, with farmhouses lining the landscape at sporadic intervals. The green was a stark contrast to the gray of the sky. I was staring down the barrel of a very soggy year.

  This suited me just fine. I liked rain. The summer sun did not favor the pale. Besides, cold weather gave me an excuse to sit in my favorite reading chair with my beverage of choice -- Earl Grey, one milk, two sugars. As we bounced through the sky I tried to focus on what kinds of tea they’d have at my home for the next nine months, Cardiff University in Wales. Lots of fancy ones, I was sure. If I survived this flight, I’d graduate in nine months time. Hopefully, my History of Art degree would earn me a spot as junior curator at a museum. For the first time in my life, I was about to step into the great unknown. The best thing about the unknown was that nobody knew me there -- at Cardiff I wouldn’t be Crazy Kristia, the poor, weird girl who sawees things. Maybe for once, I could just be another coed. It was my fervent wish to blend into the scenery.

  I took a deep breath to soothe my sudden panic as the flight attendants opened the doors and my fellow passengers rose to exit the airplane. The great unknown suddenly seemed very scary.

  ****

  I stood across the street from the Heathrow bus queue and glanced at the paper in my hand. According to the very detailed notes I’d written back at my desk in Nehalem, I had thirty-three hours until I boarded a train bound for Cardiff via Paddington Station. Thirty-three hours to see the British Museum, Buckingham Palace, the Tower of London and Shakespeare’s Globe. To eat bangers and mash, whatever those were. To mind the gap. I jumped back onto the curb as a truck careened past, honking its horn -- to avoid getting killed by the traffic driving on the other side of the road.

  Oops. My cheeks flushed as I looked down, now seeing the bold letters painted on the street directing me to LOOK RIGHT. Oh well, at least I wasn’t the first tou
rist to make that mistake. I crossed the street with care and boarded the bus headed into town, practically pressing my nose to the window until the bus stopped three blocks from my hotel.

  With thirty-two hours to go, I dropped my one suitcase in the modest hotel room and ran a brush through the tangled mess formerly known as my hair. I tied a charcoal scarf around my neck and raced downstairs into the brisk fall air. Outside, I breathed in the unfamiliar scent of exhaust fumes. It was the first new smell I could remember in a long time, and I fell instantly in love.

  The buildings were so tall, the sidewalks so busy. Vendors pushed their carts and big, black taxicabs paused to pick up passengers. The men had serious faces and the women were so glamorous, sashaying in their stylish heels, with big handbags swinging at their sides. People rushed past the storefronts without seeing the take-out restaurants, Internet cafes, and coffee shops. The caffeine trade was thriving here, too. This tiny bit of familiarity was comforting.

  With thirty-one hours and forty-five minutes to go, I climbed onto the double-decker bus touting FULL CITY TOUR in block letters. My scarf caught on the door and I tugged until I set it free.

  “Welcome, love. Ticket?” the bus driver asked. I fumbled in my purse until my fingers grasped the paper I’d printed out back home. “Excellent. Have a nice one, love.” I climbed the spiral staircase to the top of the bus and sat in the open-top. The air was just cool enough that I was glad I’d worn my heavier coat. I tried to listen to the tour guide, but I was too excited to focus. I was riding on a double-decker bus. In London. This was surreal.