Page 112 of Heart of Mischief

Together, Charlie and Mason slammed the dödssten into the hole at the center of the pedestal.

For a split second, nothing happened.

Then, the cave gave a sudden lurch, causing them to stumble and fall to the side. Henry crowed with surprise as he tumbled from Charlie’s shoulder. When Charlie and Mason’s eyes locked across the platform, she knew with certainty that her brother was thinking the same thing she was:

Did we just make a huge mistake?

Mason’s lips parted, but before he could get any words out, the cave lurched again, tossing them sideways. Charlie braced for impact, for her elbows and knees to catch the stone floor, but it never happened.

Instead…

Instead, she fell through space and time, deep into rainbow-streaked oblivion.

Part

V HELHEIM

37

The being who had oncebeenCharlotte Hudson had no idea where it was. No idea when it was. No idea who or evenwhatit was, as if it had become detached from itself and was nothing but a spirit drifting through a gorgeous, multicolored continuum.

And the surroundingsweregorgeous. They were exactly how the being imagined it would feel to live inside a rainbow: floating carelessly in a sea of brilliant color. It didn’tcarewhere or when or who or what it was. It would live in this ecstasy forever.

Then, as abruptly as paradise swallowed the being, it spat it back out.

Charlotte Hudson hit packed dirt, wind knocking from her lungs. Her eyes squeezed shut, twinkling stars dancing in the black. She groaned, rolling off her impacted shoulder. What the hell had just happened? Did they make it to Helheim?

She cracked one eye open, and the other. Hazy orange light filtered into her vision, thick and clogging, like a sunset-tinted fog. Other colors wavered in the distance, but she couldn’t tell who or what they represented.

“Mason?” she called. “You there?”

“Yeah,” came her brother’s voice from a few feet away. He coughed twice. “Yeah, I’m here.”

“Henry?”

HERE

“What the Helwasthat?” Mason asked.

Charlie blinked, trying to clear her vision. “I think it was the Bifrost. The rainbow bridge that connects all the realms.”

“Yeah, well,” he groaned. “The Bifrost should come with a motion sickness label.”

From her place on the ground (she assumed anyway, unless the souls in Helheim lived on the ceiling or atop giant floating rocks), she saw a blurry orange sky rimmed with dark shapes. She blinked twice more. Gradually, the haze focused and the light sharpened, the colors turning from messy blurs to shapes with clear beginnings and ends. One more blink, and her sight had returned to normal.

Or, at least, as normal as it could feel in a completely different realm.

Above her, the sky was still orange. She was fairly certain it was the sky, given that it was directly above the hard object upon which she was lying, but there were no clouds or stars peppering its face. Instead, it seemed to go up forever, like a sunset with no beginning or end.

With a grunt of effort, she pushed herself up to a seated position.

From there, she got her first real look at hell.

Not hell, she reminded herself.Helheim. The home of the dead—those who weren’t lucky enough to be taken to Valhalla.

Helheim was a desert. That was the closest description Charlie could paste on her strange surroundings. Though she had never visited a desert, she had seen them in photos and movies. She’d seen the hard-packed dirt riddled with cracks and tumbleweeds. She’d seen the dust, the cacti, the mirage of steam rising into the air. And while Helheim didn’texactlymatch those images, it came oddly close.

Charlie, Elias, Henry, and Mason—who was stumbling to his feet—had landed in a clearing. The clearing sat at the center of what appeared to be a forest of cacti. Yet they weren’t the stick figure–shaped cacti that Charlie was accustomed to seeing in movies, thekind that looked like skinny, featureless men waving hello. They seemed to grow in bundles, like bouquets of extremely dangerous long-stemmed flowers. The cacti were uncomfortably close to one another, tall, and so dense that Charlie began to worry they might need to hack their way through. Thankfully, she spotted a small opening on the other side of the clearing that seemed to lead to a path. She exhaled in relief, turning to Mason.