Page 108 of Heart of Mischief

“Maybe we should take him to the Vikings,” Mason suggested. “Or the askafroa. They might know of something we can do.”

“They’re too far away. Plus, we’ve both been drinking. Even if we somehow managed to steal one of the buses, we couldn’t make it safely back to Silver Shores. We couldn’t make it anywhere. Not even…”

Her voice trailed off.

“Charlie?” Mason waved a hand in front of her face. “Hello? What’s going on?”

“I know what we have to do,” she said suddenly, sitting up taller. She stuck her hands under Elias’s armpits and lifted him gently up from her lap, setting him down on the ground instead. “Or, rather, where we have to go.”

“But you just said we can’t drive anywhere.”

“We aren’t driving anywhere.”

For a long moment, Charlie stared at Elias’s pale face. His jaw slack, curly hair flopped over one eye. Breath pulled in and out of his lips, but it was dangerously shallow. She needed to get the cure for him, and she needed to get it now. She didn’t care that what she was doing would likely place her in mortal danger. That it might even get her killed. Abigail had said that Charlie “obsessed” when she was panicked, and she knew that her friend had been right.Partially, anyway. What Charlie felt right then didn’t feel like obsession; it felt likepossession, like her body had been completely taken over by a drive to complete one goal: save Elias Everhart’s life.

Somewhere far above, the universe was laughing at her.

At last, she tore her eyes from Elias’s face, looking up to meet Mason’s eyes. “It’s time I pay our father a visit.”

“Teleportation?” Mason practically yelled. “What do you mean,teleportation?”

“I mean exactly what I said.” Charlie was digging through Elias’s various pockets.

“You canteleport?”

“Wecan teleport,” she corrected him. “And technically, I’m not sure if that’s one of our powers or not. Elias and I didn’t try to do it.” She stuck her hand into Elias’s back left pocket, her fingers closing around something cold and hard.

Bingo.

When her hand reemerged, it was clutching the shimmering green dödssten—the key to unlocking the entrance to Helheim.

“Whoa,” said Mason. “How did you know that would be there?”

“I didn’t. I just really, really hoped it would be.”

“Right. And if you didn’t train in teleportation, ishopehow you’re going to do that, too?”

“Nope. For that, I’ll use confidence.”

Mason blinked. “That,” he said, “is a horrible plan. Imagine if you got onto an airplane and the pilot told you he was going to fly you from Detroit to LaGuardia with no training butconfidence.”

Charlie took Elias’s right hand. “Good thing we aren’t flying an airplane.”

“No. We’re just traveling through the fabric of space and time. That’s much simpler.”

“Exactly.”

Keeping Elias’s hand clutched tightly in hers, Charlie closed her eyes.

They had decided to leave without telling Lou and Abigail what they were doing. Her friends would be pissed, no doubt, but Charlie and Mason couldn’t afford to waste time searching the forest for them. Charlie had no idea how quickly Rattatosk’s venom reached its victim’s heart, or how long they would have after that before Elias was dead. It could be days. It could be minutes. She didn’t want to stick around to find out.

Not to mention the danger she would face once she reached the underworld. She had no interest in risking her friends’ lives, too.

To be frank, she’d prefer to be doing this entirely alone. Last time she’d enlisted Mason’s help in a task, she’d almost gotten him killed. So, when he’d told her he was coming with her, she’d fought it as hard as she could.

“Charlie,” he’d finally said. “No more secrets. No more working by yourself.” He’d reached out and squeezed her hand. “I’m coming with you.”

At last, she’d relented.