River of Shadows (Underworld Gods #1)(13)

Well that felt like a slap to the face. “No. That’s not fair. That’s not fair at all. You know I would do anything for him. But not…nothing you told me is real.”

“But if you could pretend it was,” he says, “like how you were humoring me earlier. Pretend it was. Would you still do anything for Torben? Would you go to the Realm of the Dead, as Eero and Noora fear you will?”

“And do what?”

“Find him. Save your father.”

“But if he’s…” I don’t know how to reason with nonsense. “Can I save him? Is he still alive? Can I bring him back?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it?”

Rasmus suddenly reaches out for my ears and I take a step back, putting my hands over them.

“What are you doing?” I whisper. “Don’t touch me.”

“Your earrings,” he says, looking mildly rebuked. “Your father gave you those. When you were eighteen, right?”

I run my fingers over the small stud earrings. They feel frozen to touch, though they’ve always felt cold.

“Yeah,” I say uneasily. My father sent them to me in the mail as a birthday present. I haven’t taken them off since.

“Do you know what stone that is?” he asks, and then walks off into the living room.

“I don’t know,” I say. Actually, I collect stones and crystals, and it’s always bothered me that I could never figure out what the earrings were made from. In the end I just assumed green-colored cubic zirconia and called it a day.

He pulls a large crystal off a shelf and comes over to me, holding it out. At first glance it resembles a fist-sized chunk of quartz, a translucent glowing green in color, the same color as my earrings. Then the green starts to shift, turning purple, then blue, while tiny sparkles form and disappear. The crystal seems alive.

“Your earrings are from this,” he says. “The aurora stone. Very, very rare. Your father brought it back from his travels once. It is said that if you give the stone to someone else, the aurora will always be inside, as long as you are both alive. He took the other piece of this stone with him. This is what tells me he’s still alive.”

He places it in my hand. It’s shockingly heavy, cold, and almost feels sentient, like there’s a universe inside of it. My ears start to grow warm, a strange buzzing sensation running through my lobes and down my neck.

“So now that we know he’s alive, for now,” Rasmus continues, his voice deepening, “are you still willing to do anything for him?” He takes a step closer to me. “Hanna, are you willing to go to the Land of the Dead?”





Chapter 4





The Waterfall





I turn the stone over in my hands, mesmerized by the changing light. It really is like holding the northern lights in your hands.

“Yes,” I say, transfixed by the stone. Then some sense comes into my head. “And by the Land of the Dead, you mean the police, because that’s exactly what my father would expect me to do. And he’d want me to go now.”

Rasmus exhales loudly and gestures to the pot. “I was going to heat up some hapankaalikeitto, that’s sour cabbage soup. It’s not a close journey to anywhere. You need to get your strength up. Then we’ll set out. I promise.”

I sigh, and while Rasmus attends to the soup again, I go back into the living room. I gently place the aurora stone on a shelf and start going through everything I can get my hands on, from journals to field diaries and photobooks. Maybe there’s something in them that the police will want, some type of evidence. I don’t even know what exactly I’m going to say to them, but I’ll say whatever it takes so that I get them to pick up my passport and luggage from the hotel, and then tell them that my father’s body is missing and his funeral was faked. There’s a tiny little voice in my head that tells me that maybe Eero and Noora have gotten to the cops and they won’t be on my side, but that’s just paranoia brought on by all the delusional nonsense I’ve been subjected to for the last twenty-hour hours.

So far though, the notebooks aren’t providing me with much I can use. There are decades worth of my father’s work in here, jotted down in tiny handwriting. It’s all in Finnish, so I have no idea what it says, but occasionally there will either be some piece of dried foliage taped to the page, or a quick sketch of an animal. Except the animals aren’t quite right, like he’s sketching them in a decomposing form, half-skin, half-bones. I flip through page after page of a reindeer, a raven, a bear, a wolf, a fox, an eagle, an elk, and even what looks like a dinosaur, all of them drawn in various states of decay. What puts my teeth on edge is the fact that none of them are drawn in death. They’re all alert or moving, and if they happened to have an eyeball intact, the eye looks gleaming and alive.

Papa, that’s creepy, I think and quickly shut the book. What else are you hiding?

I pick up the one next to it, one of those ones meant for painting, with the thick textured pages, and tentatively open it, expecting to see more half-dead creatures.

And I do. On the first page there are three white reindeer. One is mostly bone, a standing skeleton with molting antlers, the others are intact but with milky eyes. They’re standing in front of a river, black as ink, and there are ripples on the surface that make me think there are large snakes slithering just below. There’s something so visceral about the image, like he’s captured a moment in real time, like there’s life in the painting, and if I stared at it long enough I could enter it.