The Morning Flower Read online

  Wade was up, exploring his larged domed birdcage, so I poked my fingers through the bars to scratch his nose and slipped him a treat. I glanced over my shoulder at Pan. “What makes you say he isn’t Omte?”

  “Aren’t the Älvolk supposed to be something else?” he asked. “They’re trolls, sure, but they’re not really from any of the tribes. By our best records, they were once known as álfar.”

  “But the álfar lived in Alfheim,” I reminded him. “The ekkálfar are on earth.”

  “Yeah, but we don’t really even know what that means or how the various álfar differentiate from each other. Álfar could be their way of saying ‘Alfheimian,’ and ekkálfar is their word for ‘Canadian’ or ‘Omte’ or even ‘earthling.’”

  “Whoa. Wait.” I faced Pan and hugged my arms across my chest. “If we’re earthlings, does that make the álfar extraterrestrial?”

  Pan thought for a moment before answering. “In the most literal sense, I would say … yes?” He shook his head. “If they even exist, and if the legends have any truth—which are two really big ifs—then they came from somewhere else. Whether it’s another dimension or afterlife or another planet, it still means they’re not from this world. This earth.”

  “But that’s … ridiculous.” I sat on the floor. I wasn’t paying enough attention, so I missed the cushion and sat on the hard floor with a painful grunt, but I barely even registered it.

  “Is it, though?” he asked thoughtfully. “To suggest that we’re somehow connected or possibly related to otherworldly beings sounds far-fetched. But we’re an ancient race of supernatural beings with a variety of psychokinetic powers, so who are we to throw stones?”

  “Do you think Indu is from Alfheim?” I asked.

  “Maybe. Or maybe he’s someone who worships old stories about long-dead álfar.” He shrugged. “I don’t know if we’ll ever find out the difference.”

  I chewed my lip. “Of course, we can find out. We can check the blood.”

  “The blood?” Pan straightened, his eyes narrowing.

  “I saw Eliana’s blood,” I reminded him. “It wasn’t like mine or even any animal’s I’ve ever seen. It’s darker than normal, like a deep burgundy, and thick like syrup. There was a strangely beautiful shimmer to it, even though it was still blood and therefore super-disgusting.”

  Pan leaned forward, resting his elbows on his legs, and stared off into space as he considered this. “What does your blood look like?”

  “Red, wet, I don’t know. I honestly have never really studied my blood.”

  “It doesn’t look anything like Eliana’s?”

  I had shaken my head. “No, nothing like that. Hers was … dramatically different.”

  He’d rubbed the back of his neck. “I don’t know. There’s a lot of things I could speculate on … but honestly, we don’t have a lot to go on until we find Indu Mattison.”

  It was shortly after that that we picked Rikky up from work. As soon as we got home, Rikky piled her hair up and ducked into her bedroom without saying anything after her brief but incisive commentary about our “long day.”

  “Is she okay?” I whispered to Pan after she’d been in her room for several minutes.

  He shrugged and talked to her door. “Rikky? Is everything all right?”

  “What?” she shouted, her words only slightly muffled by the walls. A few seconds later, she poked her head out—carefully hiding her bare shoulders behind the door. “I’m changing real quick. Do you guys need more time to get ready?”

  “Ready for what?” Pan asked.

  “The bar,” she said, like it should be super-obvious. “You guys are looking for Indu, and we’re all in dire need of a good time. Ergo, the Ugly Vulture.”

  “Oh, right.” I said, pretending I understood that the singular mention of the bar the day before meant that we’d made concrete plans.

  “Oh, okay.” Pan sounded taken aback, and he ran his hand through his hair. “Are we going now? It seems a little early.” His dark eyes bounced up to the sunny skies above the skylight.

  “The Vulture isn’t the kind of place you’d like after dark. Or at least it’s not the kind of place I like.” Rikky laughed loudly—a short burst of a self-satisfied cackle—then she ducked back into her bedroom, this time leaving the door open slightly so she could talk more freely. “They have pretty tasty bar food too, so we can grab supper there if you want.”

  Pan looked to me, and I shrugged, so he answered, “Yeah, sounds good.”

  “I guess I’ll go get ready, then,” I said, already backing away to the “guest room” three-season porch to try to figure out what to wear to a roughneck Omte bar.

  By the time I decided—a knee-length slip dress in a brassy dandelion color paired with nearly all the black and gold jewelry I had (the legends of trinkets completely mesmerizing trolls are only slight exaggerations, and my trio of necklaces, two rows of earrings, and chunky faux-diamond rings would definitely make me more eye-catching and enchanting)—Rikky and Pan were talking and laughing loudly over the Rolling Stones playing on the record player.

  The burgundy liquid sloshing in Rikky’s glass looked an awful lot like the Omte sangria she’d made the other day, and she either didn’t notice or didn’t mind the few droplets that spilled onto the floor as she danced around the living room. Pan was sitting on the couch, laughing at something she said, and he turned back to look at me when he heard the door close.

  His eyes widened slightly, and his smiled faltered, but he quickly corrected it with, “Looks like you’re all ready to go.”

  Rikky spun around in surprise—she’d been so focused on Pan that she hadn’t noticed me—and she laughed and threw a hand to her chest. “Ulla! Come join us for pregaming!”

  “Rikky’s always been big on pregaming,” Pan said with a smile, but it was forced and thin, and his voice had a subtle weariness underneath his usual jovial lightness.

  “It’s a matter of practicality,” she insisted with a dramatic head bob that made her plastic earrings rattle. “They’d charge four times as much for a drink half this size.” She held up her glass as evidence. “My mama always told me: get a buzz before the bar.”

  “This is the same woman who told you to treat a toothache with a drop of honey in a big mug of eldvatten?” Pan asked dryly.

  “The honey was optional. The eldvatten was really the key part,” Rikky clarified and took a quick drink. “She had a lot of good advice.” Then she looked over at me. “So, did you want a drink?”

  I shook my head. “I’ll wait until we’re there.”

  “I’ll finish my drink, then.” As she eagerly downed it, Pan went over and grabbed the keys from off the hook by the door.

  “I’m driving,” he announced.

  “Come on, Panny!” She grabbed his hand for the keys, but he turned and faced her.

  “You know I hated that nickname then, and I definitely hate it now,” he said coolly.

  Hurt flashed across her face, but she hurried to smile through it, even as she dropped his hand and offered an apology. “You’re right. I just forgot, Pan. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s fine. Let’s go have a good night.”

  We loaded up into the boat, with Rikky much more subdued than she had been in the house. That made for a long, quiet ride to the bar, but at least Pan had gotten a better handle on driving. Rikky shouted back directions until we finally arrived at a shanty-style marina that spidered out from several gigantic tree trunks.

  I’d never seen the giant sequoias and redwoods of California, but I thought the thick, towering cypress trees had to be comparable. I couldn’t imagine any tree larger.

  Around the trunks, curved staircases had been built, leading up to a sprawling tree house spreading out through the branches. Even before Pan parked the boat, when the fan was still on, I could hear the music and yelling. The sun hadn’t even set yet, but the place was packed with rowdy Omte.

  13

  Red Room

 
Inside the Ugly Vulture, patrons crowded around the bar—including several ogres lumbering around and ducking under the thick branches that held up the ceiling ten feet above. The space itself was divided into half a dozen large rooms—evidence of various expansions through the years, leading to a definite design clash between the rooms.

  Overgrown vines both inside and out, with branches cutting through rooms with full plumes of leaves, gave it a jungle feel, and the sawdust on the floor and broken beer bottles felt much more rowdy-tavern.

  All of it was held together with rusty nails and water-damaged boards. In most ways, the architecture seemed to mainly be a by-product of opportunity and necessity—like the chicken wire over the windows or the dance floor made of old tires. The different themes in the rooms made for a jarring mash-up: Indiana Jones and the Biker Bar.

  And that didn’t even touch on the disturbing amount of dead birds. Rikky had explained it to me like this: “The way the Egyptians worshipped cats, the Omte revere vultures, particularly their precious bearded vultures.” There were stuffed birds everywhere—on walls, on light fixtures, even perched on the liquor casks. It was honestly a little unnerving, so I decided the best course of action was to avoid looking at them, and I followed Pan and Rikky through the crowd.

  Rikky grabbed us a table near the back of one of the cleaner rooms. I didn’t see any broken bottles on the floor here, but the wooden floorboards did have a suspiciously large splotch of dark red liquid slowly drying.

  The walls were painted a deep violet-red, and dim fairy lights were strung through the branches along the ceiling. Here there were fewer actual birds; it was more of a vulture motif, with black feathers and shimmery black stencils of birds on the wall. Black bows with beautifully feathered arrows were a surprisingly elegant touch of weapons-as-décor.

  We settled in, and as Rikky flagged down a waiter, I made a startling observation—there were a lot of attractive trolls here. Even the ogres, purportedly hideous disfigured giants, were relatively ordinary-looking, though they were definitely huge.

  Sure, some had an asymmetric quality to them, with a few having exaggerated proportions. But most were no more asymmetric than I was, with many even less so.

  All my life, I’d been hearing about how all the Omte were so ugly, and I’d been repeatedly told that I should feel “lucky” for being attractive “by Omte standards.” I’d always thought it was a shitty backhanded compliment to begin with, but now I was seeing that it wasn’t even true. I wasn’t “hot” for an Omte—I was average at best.

  It was the strangest feeling. I should’ve been saddened to learn I was even less attractive than I thought I was, that there were plenty of prettier girls than me, like Rikky and Bekk, but it was actually a relief.

  Even in school, I had been taught that Omte were dumb, ugly, and violent. These were “facts” that had been repeated to me over and over. By teachers, by peers, by nearly every piece of troll literature I’d ever read. I’d been led to believe a negative stereotype about the Omte, my tribe, myself.

  And now I had to wonder, how many other things had I learned about the Omte that weren’t true? About other tribes? About humans?

  “Ulla?” Pan was saying. I’d been so lost in thought I didn’t notice that a waiter had stopped at our table—a lanky ogre with long hair pulled back into a ponytail.

  “Sorry, what?” I asked.

  “What’d you want to drink?” Pan asked.

  “Our fine waiter Donovan here has recommended the Lakkalikööri cocktail,” Rikky told me cheerily.

  “Uh, yeah. That sounds great,” I said, mostly because I didn’t want to make poor Donovan wait around when it was obviously so busy.

  He offered a brief smile and in a gravelly voice he promised to have our drinks right out to us, then left.

  “So.” Rikky drummed her hands on the table and gave me a toothy grin. “What do you wanna do? How do you wanna go about this?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “This place is quite a bit bigger than I expected. I thought we could glance around, and you’d let me know if you spotted Indu. But that seems kinda naïve now that I’m here.”

  “Oh, yeah. The Vulture’s something else.” She leaned back in her chair. “This is called the Red Room. There’s also the Mudhole, the Tree Top, the Dungeon, the Dark Corner, and the Bridge. I figured we’d make the rounds and have a drink in each one.”

  “That sounds like a great plan,” I said.

  “You know what else is an excellent plan?” Rikky said, just as our drinks arrived.

  “What?” Pan asked, but we were left waiting in suspense until after she took a long swig of her Lakkalikööri cocktail.

  “Playing a game of økkspill,” Rikky announced, and rather abruptly she sauntered across the room.

  On the wall hung a big chunk of raw-edged wood with three separate bull’s-eyes on it—a large white one at the top left, a medium-sized black one at the bottom right, and a small gold one positioned roughly in the center.

  The players stood back from the board, maybe fifteen feet, each of them wielding five kasterens. The kasterens were like medium-sized hatchets, but odder looking. They had long, slender handles, and stubby, curved blades with visible hammer marks.

  “What’s that?” Pan asked me, and his eyes followed Rikky as she collected a set of kasterens.

  “Økkspill?” I asked. “You haven’t played before?”

  He shook his head. “No, I don’t think I’ve heard of it.”

  “I guess it is kind of a country troll game, and you probably haven’t played many of those, living with the humans and then in a city like Mimirin,” I realized. “It’s a pretty fun bar game. You stand behind the line, and you throw the kasteren axes, trying to hit certain rings for points.”

  “So, like lumberjack darts?” Pan asked.

  I laughed. “Basically, yeah.”

  His dark eyes held mine. “You know, I didn’t get a chance to tell you earlier, but you look really pretty tonight.”

  I tried to hold his gaze, but I only managed to for a moment before I had to lower my eyes, because I could feel the heat rising in my cheeks. “Well, thank you.”

  “Hey!” Rikky snapped her fingers and stalked back toward us. “Who wants to play with me?” She was theoretically asking both of us, but her eyes were locked on Pan as she grabbed her drink off the table.

  Pan shrugged. “I don’t really know how to play.”

  “The guys back there wanna play doubles, so I gotta find a partner.” She downed her drink, then slammed the mug down on the table. “I can teach you as we play. You’ve always been a quick learner.”

  He laughed. “I can’t say no now.” As he stood up, he looked back at me with a sheepish smile. “Are you gonna be okay here? Or do you wanna join us as the cheering squad?”

  “Nah, I’ll be fine here.” I waved him off. “I’ll keep the table warm.”

  “You wanna order another round of drinks while we’re gone?” Rikky asked with a hopeful twitch of her eyebrow.

  “Yeah, sure, no problem.”

  I watched them walk away—feeling a slight pang of jealousy when Pan put his hand on the small of her back as they weaved through the crowd—then reminded myself that my time here would be better served taking in my surroundings and checking out the other patrons.

  Beyond the vulture décor, there were a few pieces of rustic Nordic art. A sign behind the bar was made of planks of wood and held together with twine. It’d been painted with runic symbols that, when translated, loosely meant, “To drink. To fight. To fuck. To live.”

  On the wall across from me, a candelabra sconce hung on the wall. It appeared to be made of vulture bones and painted bronze. Just beneath it, perfectly backlit by candles, was a glass display box showcasing a broken bottle. Admittedly an oversized bottle, made of semi-opaque jade-green glass about an inch thick. The neck ended in jagged edges.

  Donovan the waiter came back to clear away the empty glasses—Rikky had a
lready finished hers—and I took the opportunity to order more drinks and slip him a hefty tip.

  He smiled when he pocketed the money, and I was once again struck by how much different the Omte looked compared to my imagined version. Donovan was obviously an ogre—his hands were so huge, the big mug looked like a child’s toy cup in his thick mitts; his nose was wide and a bit bulbous; his brow extended slightly; his voice was deep and guttural.

  But he wasn’t angry or dumb or slovenly. He wasn’t even unattractive, not really. His buttoned flannel shirt had to be tailor-made to fit his unique shape, and it did a good job of showing off a physique that landed somewhere between André the Giant and Superman.

  Donovan returned quickly with the drinks and set them down with a smile, and hopefully still carrying a bit of the goodwill that my tip had bought.

  “Is there anything I can do for you?” Donovan asked, and he definitely had a unique way of speaking. His voice was like a bass drum, but he put more emphasis on the first syllable of the words, making it sound a little rhythmic.

  “Do you know what that’s about?” I pointed to the candelabra and the broken bottle display.

  “You know not of the King’s death?” he asked.

  I smiled meekly. “I’m not from around here.”

  “Thor was the very good King, loved by many,” he explained. “The King of the common troll.”

  “He sounds like a very cool guy,” I said.

  “Very,” Donovan agreed solemnly. “He lived among us, and he drank in this bar many nights. Trolls argued over stories of the old heroes slaying monsters, and the King was pulled in. He never backed down from a fight. But the bottle got his throat. Before healers touched him, he died.”

  “That sounds like … a sad day,” I replied hesitantly.

  Donovan spoke of the late King with great reverence, but he also spoke of his death with pride. He seemed happy to display the instrument of the King’s death, so it was mixed signals for me.

  “Very sad,” he agreed. “But we honor him here.”

  “Were you working here that night?”

  “No, that was before my time. I have worked here only seven summers.”