The Sword of Summer: Chapters 1–13

Dammit, Magnus, I chided myself.

Afterward, my mom had been adamant: We're staying away from your uncles.

I never knew much about the family soap opera, but there was a lot of bad blood between the three kids: Randolph, Frederick, and my mom. After the Great Thanksgiving Schism, we never visited the ancestral homestead again.

If you’re driving a new BMW and you park it in a handicapped spot without a disabled placard, then yeah, I’ve got no problem jimmying your window and taking some change from your cup holder.

If you’re driving a new BMW and you park it in a handicapped spot without a disabled placard, then yeah, I’ve got no problem jimmying your window and taking some change from your cup holder.

At age six, I couldn’t appreciate how expensive all this stuff was, but my general impression of the mansion was the same: dark, oppressive, creepy.

But he had me hooked. I needed to hear this information. Judging from the appraising gleam in his eyes, he knew it.

His imposing bulk, his intense dark eyes, his humorless face and stiff manner...he was the exact opposite of my mom.

“Please, Magnus.” Randolph’s voice quavered. “I lost my own family to those monsters. I lost my wife, my daughters.”

Randolph’s face reminded me of the Man in the Moon from old black-and-white cartoons: pale and rotund, pitted and scarred, with a secretive smile that wasn’t very friendly.

You’d think my uncle and I would be the only ones dumb enough to walk across the bridge in subzero weather, but this being Boston, half a dozen runners were chugging along, looking like emaciated seals in their Lycra bodysuits.

“You should give tours,” I said. “All the rabid Longfellow fans would pay big bucks.”

And as much as I wanted to deny it, Randolph’s words resonated with me. For the first time, I felt like my body was humming at the right frequency, like I’d finally been tuned to match the crappy soundtrack of my life.

I’d always wanted a superpower. I just hadn’t expected mine to entail retrieving garbage from river bottoms.

His long hair was combed back in an immaculate oil slick.

An abandoned Toyota Corolla stood between us. Satan’s fashion consultant walked straight through it, melting a path down the middle of the chassis like a blowtorch through wax.

“Magnus has the sword! Go back to the fires from whence you came.”
Surt didn’t seem intimidated, though personally I found the word whence very intimidating.

For some reason, Blitz had donned a broad-brimmed hat and sunglasses along with his black trench coat, so he looked like a grungy, very short Italian priest.

In his gloved hands he wielded a fearsome wooden dowel with a bright yellow traffic sign that read: MAKE WAY FOR DUCKLINGS.

Blitz’s sunglasses were steaming. The brim of his hat was beginning to smolder.

Down the center of the blade, a wide groove was emblazoned with Viking runes—the same kind I’d seen in Randolph’s office.

His fiery blade dissipated.

Above me, I caught a glimpse of the weird gray apparition—a girl on a horse, circling like a vulture, watching.

His lips were marred by a row of welts all the way around his mouth—maybe piercing holes that had closed over.

She charged through the air on her nebulous horse, pulling me along at her side like I was a sack of laundry.

I was standing in the entry courtyard of an opulent town house, the kind you might see on Beacon Hill—eight stories of imposing white limestone and gray marble jutting into the winter sky.

Then I realized the tree was in full leaf, which shouldn’t have been possible in the winter. Not only that: its leaves glittered gold as if someone had painted them with twenty-four-karat gilt.

“No one brings luggage anymore. Don’t they put anything on your funeral pyre?”

He scowled toward the far corner of the room, where an overturned boat’s keel served as the reception desk.

“Yes, sir. The Hotel Valhalla. Congratulations. You’ve been chosen to join the hosts of Odin. I look forward to hearing about your brave exploits at dinner.”

The perforated sofa mended itself.

Torches burned in iron sconces, but they didn’t seem to make any smoke.

The TV channel list was almost as long, and the hotel map was so convoluted, divided into so many subsections, I couldn’t make sense of it.

She had frizzy red hair, green eyes, and a serrated knife, which she was shaking in the face of a six-foot-seven guy outside the door marked X.

Mallory Keen spoke in a faint Irish brogue.

His skin was the color of a shark's belly, rippling with muscles and stippled with warts.

“Many einherjar are demigods. Many are regular mortals. You’re chosen for Valhalla because of your courage and honor, not your heritage. At least, that’s how it’s supposed to be....” I couldn’t decide if her tone was wistful or resentful.

“Doomsday,” Sam said. “When the Nine Worlds are destroyed in a great conflagration and the armies of gods and giants meet in battle for the last time.”

“Ancestral feud when they were alive. When they died, both made it to Valhalla, but Odin honored Helgi more. He put Helgi in charge of the hotel. Helgi’s first order was that his enemy Hunding would be his servant and do his menial tasks for all time.”

At the high table, the thanes began banging their cups on the table in unison.