Page 118 of Heart of Mischief

He exchanged a look with a few of the other guards, then looked back and nodded.

“Good.” With a rough swipe of her hand, Charlie lifted Elias’s body into the air. In her state of heightened urgency, however, she must have summoned a littletoomuch magic, because she accidentally picked up Mason and the helhest, too.

“Holy—” Mason dove forward, grabbing the horse’s neck. “Charlie, what the Hel are youdoing?”

From Charlie’s shoulder, Henry made a noise that sounded a bit like an evil giggle.

Charlie ignored her brother, stalking past the guards and up the stone steps, Elias, Mason, and the helhest in elevated tow.

“You should know before you enter the palace,” said the mare guard, who was hurrying up the stairs behind her and her floating companions, “Loki doesn’t…”

“I don’t care,” she said flatly.

At the top, the gigantic double doors were wide open. Charlie walked through them without asking permission. She wasn’t even holding up a hand to ensure that she could feel a current carrying her companions; she could just feel that they were there behind her, still safe and suspended in the air.

Charlie took in nothing about the grand lobby other than the five possible directions one could take once inside: the double doors directly in front of her—impossibly huge and shut tight against intruders—the two corridors leading off to either side, or the twin spiral staircases that wound up toward the ceiling.

“Which way?” she asked.

The guard nodded toward the double doors.

Without a word, Charlie stalked across the lobby. Her footsteps echoed on the marble floor. When she reached the double doors, she shoved out with a burst of magic, and the doors swung inward.

39

The hall they entered waspure chaos.

Its structure was much like what she had always imagined a castle’s great hall would be: one enormous room made of stone, towering pillars surrounding the open space, a sky-high ceiling carved with arches and gargoyles, and high stained-glass windows filtering in hazy orange light from outside. But inside that grand space…

A circus.

Hoops and silks, glitter and spinning plates. Contortionists bent into impossible shapes. Lithe, graceful beings with pointed ears twirled about on delicate fabric dangling from the ceiling. Banquet tables lined the edges, piled high with colorful delicacies Charlie had never seen before. Moose and wildcats roamed freely among the guests. A man with reindeer antlers on his head did a triple backflip through a flaming hoop. A trapeze wrapped in black-and-purple vines stretched right over the center of the room. Bark-covered women resembling the ash wives Charlie knew from the forest took turns grabbing hold of the trapeze and tossing each other through the air. There was no net to catch them if they fell, but they didn’t seem to mind.

Among the performers, partygoers milled about. They plucked shimmering sweets from the banquet tables and sipped from emerald goblets, laughing so loudly it was as if they were a part of the show. At the very center of the room, a group danced in anelaborate circle, alternately joining hands or swinging from elbows or clapping in time with the dizzying music.

As the huge doors groaned open and a human marched inside with a gnome on her shoulder and two bodies and a horse floating behind her, however, the party drew to a sudden halt. Music wilted. Voices died. Performers stopped midact to stare at the scene that had entered the hall.

Charlie came to a halt at the edge of the wide, rectangular platform that formed the entry to the hall. Just in front of her was a short staircase that led down to the main floor. If she hadn’t been so focused on the task at hand, she might have been overwhelmed, unsure of where to look first: At the goblin bathing in a fountain of mead? At the ethereal beauty of the pointy-eared creatures who, moments before, had been dancing in languid circles? At the three tiny men with long beards who had paused their eating midbite and now had chicken bones in hand, fleshy bits of meat hanging from their mouths?

Charlie spared them no more than a glance. She had one purpose. One mission. Her eyes moved with singular focus until, at last, they landed on what they sought:

The throne.

There were two thrones, actually. Both were carved of worn wood that looked as if it had recently washed ashore outside the castle. The chairs themselves were regularly shaped, but their arms and backs were something terrifying: gnarled twigs and branches that twisted around themselves and bent in strange directions, like the trees of a dark fairy tale. The effect was that of two enormous wooden crowns that hovered above the heads of those seated on the thrones.

Of Loki and Hel.

A part of Charlie had thought that she’d imagined it. That surely her mindmusthave exaggerated the similarities between her face and Loki’s. Memory was unreliable, right? We rememberedwhat we wanted to remember. So surely the Loki she saw in the cave hadn’tactuallyhad her same eyes, hadn’tactuallyshared the nose that belonged to all three Hudson children, the nose that they had always laughed about because it was so different from their mother’s.

She had been wrong.

Loki was right there, on display before everyone, and he looked exactly as she remembered.

He and Hel were the only two not staring at the newcomers. Their heads were bent together in casual conversation, Loki swirling a goblet of mead beside his knee. After a few noticeably silent seconds, however, they seemed to finally realize that something was amiss.

“What happened?” Loki asked, rising from his throne as he looked out over the party. With his face turned outward, Charlie could better see the salt-and-pepper stubble on his jaw, the friendly creases at the sides of his eyes. He grinned cheekily at the party, a smile so eerily similar to Mason’s that she almost gasped. “Did we run out of mead? Because—”

His voice died the moment his eyes landed on Charlie.