Fenris & Mott, page 2
Gorm’s eyebrows knotted in a frown. He took a step toward her. She’d made him mad. He seemed like the wrong kind of person to make mad.
A burst of movement and a flap of feathers drew Mott’s attention to the top of a palm tree. Two large crows took flight with shrill caws that stabbed the inside of Mott’s head. On reflex, she closed her eyes and covered her ears, just for an instant. When she opened her eyes again, the crows were gone.
So was Gorm the Vicious.
Vanished.
Nowhere in sight.
The pup sat on the sidewalk, thumping his little tail.
“Weird,” Mott said.
“Mweep,” agreed the pup.
Mott knelt and scritched him behind his ears.
The pup gazed at her with his startling blue eyes and released a mighty belch.
Mott called the shelter and got transferred to Shelter Guy. “I found him,” she said. “He’s fine. No blood, no cuts, no glass between his toes.”
Shelter Guy sounded relieved and told her to bring him back, but Mott told him no way. “You freaked him out with a leash and made him dive through a glass door. He could have got hit by a car or run off and hid forever. He’s safer with me than with you.”
Shelter Guy had a lot of things to say, but Mott didn’t hear them because she hung up while he was in midsentence.
But Mott wasn’t going to lie to herself. She knew she couldn’t keep Fenris. She’d just hold on to him until the wolf rescue organization got sorted out. Then she’d let him go. She’d promised to take care of him, and she would, even if it broke her heart.
Now it was time for some math.
Pup who’s actually a baby wolf. Plus baby wolf who can dive through a glass door without a scratch. Plus big beardy guy claiming the baby wolf is actually a moon-eating monster.
It added up to a kind of weirdness that Mott couldn’t ignore. She needed answers. So she went to the library.
Normally Mott would have walked right up to the reference desk and told the librarian what she was looking for, but the contraband wolf complicated things. She clutched him to her belly and hunched over as if she had a stomachache and headed for the encyclopedias.
The beardy guy had called the wolf Fenris.
She found an entry for “Fenris” and whispered a summary for the pup. “Your name is from Norse mythology, stuff believed by the ancient Vikings and their even more ancient ancestors. They didn’t write things down, so their myths were recorded hundreds of years later. I bet that means they got some stuff wrong.”
“Mweep,” agreed Fenris.
She read the whole entry.
“Little pup, this is not good,” she whispered when she got to the end. There was a drawing of a full-grown Fenris, red-eyed, bristly-haired, teeth like spikes. He was rearing up on his hind legs, grasping the moon with his front paws, ripping valleys into the lunar surface, about to snap down his jaws.
The caption read, “Fenris eats the moon during Ragnarok.”
Fenris mweeped.
Mott fetched the “R” volume of the encyclopedia and snuck off between the bookshelves. Putting Fenris down, she sat on the carpet and began to read.
Ragnarok was a prophecy that foretold the end of the worlds.
Apparently, there was more than one world. Maybe they were talking about Mars and Jupiter and the rest.
She wrote “Ragnarok” in her root beer journal and started a list:
Three winters, each longer than the last, with no summer between.
Men forget the bonds of kinship.
The golden rooster crows to summon the gods.
The rust-red rooster crows to raise the dead in Helheim.
The Ship of Dead Men’s Nails delivers the dead back to the lands of the living.
The Midgard serpent, venom-spitting, raises the seas.
Surtur, flame-wielding, sets the land on fire.
The wolf Fenris swallows the moon and sun.
An age of axes. An age of swords. And an age of wolves, till the world goes down.
She laid her palm on Fenris’s side and watched it rise and fall. She took a sniff of his clean fur. She cooed at his tiny pink toe beans.
Moon-eater, the beardy man had called him.
World-ender.
Also, chickens were involved.
“This is all pretty far-fetched,” she said to Fenris. “Maybe you’re just small but strong enough to break glass.”
Curled at her feet, Fenris snoozed.
“No dogs allowed,” announced a harsh voice, like the sound of doom. But it was just a teenager pushing a library cart.
Mott gathered up Fenris and reshelved the encyclopedia. The pup wasn’t a myth. He was warm. When he sniffed, his nose vibrated. When she looked at him, he looked back, and she felt they saw each other. He was very real. But she couldn’t escape the feeling that he was somehow even more than that.
She didn’t know what to believe, but she’d promised to take care of the pup, so she took him home.
3
STEAM BILLOWED FROM A KETTLE on the stove top, filling the apartment with smells of garlic and spices and sweet soy sauce. Mott’s mom was home.
“You’re here,” Mott said, trying not to sound like she was hiding a small and possibly mythically destructive wolf cub against her belly beneath her T-shirt.
“Yeah, Sonia at the restaurant had a doctor’s appointment, so I agreed to trade shifts, which means I have to work tonight—sorry—but that gave me the afternoon free, so I figured I’d make you an early dinner—I hope bami goreng is okay—but then I have to catch the ten bus and transfer to the two to get to the museum. . . .”
Mott tried to keep the pup quiet while her mom stirred the pot and rattled off the dizzying details of work schedules and bus routes.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. For the first time since she and Dad had split up, Mom was supposed have one job that paid her enough to buy a car and afford rent on a nice apartment with a big swimming pool and basketball courts and a koi pond. One that allowed dogs.
Lots of broken promises.
“Oh, I got you a root beer at the store,” her mom said, reaching into the fridge. “It’s a Burpenschlitt. Have you reviewed that one yet?”
Mott was happy to talk about root beer all night long if it distracted her mom from the drooling fuzz Mott was carrying.
Her mom turned around with the root beer bottle in her outstretched arm.
“Burpenschlitt, yes!” Mott said, too enthusiastically. “Strong carbonation, leaves a pleasant ginger aftertaste on the tongue. Four bubbles out of five.”
Her mom’s eyes narrowed. “Mott. Why do you have a puppy?”
For one frantic moment, Mott considered claiming that the canine-shaped animal she was carrying was, in fact, a rare and very large breed of hamster. She even got so far into this plan that she decided to name this made-up breed a wolf hamster.
It might have worked, too, if only her mom didn’t have more brains than a potted fern.
So Mott explained. She started with the discovery in the recycling bin behind Mi-T-Mart. She praised herself for taking the pup to the shelter. She performed a dramatic interpretation of the pup’s reaction to the leash and an even more dramatic demonstration of his escape through the glass of the shelter’s door.
But she left out one big part: Gorm the Vicious, the guy in the leathers and furs. Because technically, legally, Mott should have had adult supervision during the day, but it was summer and school wasn’t in session, and the summer school and parks-and-rec programs were all full, and since Mott and her mom were new in town, they didn’t know anybody who could take care of Mott when her mom was at work—not that Mott felt she needed anyone to take care of her, but if her mom knew about people like Gorm, Mott would be spending the summer indoors, gazing wistfully out the window.
Mott also left out the bit about Fenris possibly being a world-ending monster.
Her mom put a hand on Mott’s shoulder when she was done talking. “You, daughter, are a good person.”
“Mweep,” agreed the pup.
“But you know we can’t keep him, right? The apartment policy . . .”
“I know,” Mott said dismally.
She put the pup on the floor, and her mom crouched down to pet him. “So first thing tomorrow morning, we have to . . . OH MY GOD HE IS SO SOFT!” Fenris wiggled happily as she scritched his belly. “HOW IS HE SO SOFT?”
“Mweep,” explained the pup.
Her mom’s face scrunched up. “OH NO THAT WAS A VERY CUTE SOUND.” She went back to scritching him.
Maybe there was hope. If her mom was as smitten with the pup as Mott was, if she fell in love and couldn’t bear the thought of giving him away, and if the apartment manager also fell in love and tore up the no-dogs policy . . .
“Did the shelter say what kind of dog he is?” her mom asked. “He looks like a husky to me. Or maybe Alaskan malamute?”
“Um,” Mott said. “Actually, turns out he’s a wolf.”
Fenris booped Mom’s finger.
“We can’t keep him,” she said.
Shelter Guy came over with some formula and a little bit of pureed organic lamb and talked to Mott’s mom. They agreed that Mott could keep the pup until the wolf rescue organization came the day after tomorrow to take the pup away forever. But under no circumstances, he declared, would Mott be keeping the wolf longer than that, and Mott’s mom was in agreement on that as well.
So after Mott’s mom left for a night shift at the diner, Mott made up her mind to enjoy the remaining time she had with the wolf. They played chase for a full hour, bouncing off the furniture, rolling around on the floor. There was a lot of wrestling and giggling and mweeping. By the time the pup finally ran out of gas, Mott was exhausted.
“Had enough?”
The pup’s eyelids grew heavy. He turned in a circle a few times on the blanket Mott laid down next to her bed.
She sat on the floor with him and showed him pictures on her phone.
“This is our old apartment in Pennsylvania. That’s where I lived until a few weeks ago. It was bigger than this one, but they also had a no-dogs policy. I thought of getting a hamster or a rat, but I’m not a rodent kind of girl. I know some people like them, so I’m not judging.”
Mott scrolled through more pictures.
She paused at one that gave her a flat, lukewarm sadness.
It was a selfie from this past January of her and her dad, the last time she’d seen him, when he’d taken her to North Bowl in Philadelphia for pinball and pizza. There was a half-eaten medium pepperoni-and-spinach pie on the table, two plastic tumblers of root beer, dad’s cup still full, Mott’s almost empty. Mott remembered the crash of bowling pins filling the silences between them. She hadn’t minded the silences. Silence contained no lies.
“How’s the root beer?”
“A strong four of five.”
The root beer was some big mass-produced brand and tasted like corn syrup, worth maybe two bubbles at the most, but Mott was scoring it a four, because lunches with Dad were rare, and the rareness gave the root beer extra value.
“Okay,” Dad said. “So let’s talk about your late Christmas present.”
“It’s okay, Dad, you don’t have to—”
“You don’t want a video camera?”
“I mean, yeah, but—”
“You don’t want studio lights?”
“That would be totally—”
“And you’re still using your mom’s old laptop? If you’re going to keep doing the root beer thing, you’re going to need a machine that’s up to the task, right?”
Mott didn’t really need any of those things. She just needed more times like this with Dad, whether it was pizza places or bowling alleys or just driving somewhere in the car. She just needed him.
Not that new video recording gear wouldn’t be amazing.
“Yeah,” he said, as if they’d just settled the matter. “We’re going to get you set up.”
And then he ruined everything by saying the cursed words: “I promise.” And Mott knew it was all just talk.
The puppy scooched closer to Mott, as if he could tell she was lost in a sad memory, and Mott gently scritched him behind the ear.
He stretched his jaws in a yawn.
A strange sensation overtook Mott. The world was spinning. Or she was. She felt herself pitching forward toward the pup’s yawning mouth.
When Mott and her mom moved west in their rented truck packed with everything they owned, they took a detour to see the Grand Canyon, because if they were going to drive across the country, her mom figured they should actually see the country. Mott remembered standing on a U-shaped observation deck, nothing but a thin pane of glass between her shoes and the bottom of the deep chasm hundreds of feet below. But it wasn’t fear of falling that had made her dizzy, that had made her feel she was outside her own body. It was the canyon’s sheer size. It was too wide. Too far across. Too deep. Too massive. It was too much to take in all at once, like the sight of it was hitting her eyes and her brain didn’t know what to do with all that information.
The puppy’s yawning mouth made her feel the same way.
It was broader than it should have been.
Vast.
Bottomless.
Empty.
The pup closed his mouth and the feeling faded. He curled up, and after a few minutes, he peacefully snored.
“I’m just dehydrated,” Mott decided. “That’s all.”
She fetched a Reitmann’s Old Style from the fridge and returned to her room. After popping open the bottle, she took a sip, let the root beer sit on her tongue before swallowing. She still wanted to post a video, so she got out her phone and recorded a review and posted it to the channel before she lost her nerve.
The comments started coming in fast.
“Was this filmed in a cave? Get some lights!”
“Where’s the other girl?”
“I miss Amanda. Where’s Amanda???”
“I miss her, too, you mean bozo,” she said, deleting the video.
She texted Amanda, even though Amanda probably wouldn’t see it for a long time. They always supported each other when they got mean comments.
She watched the pup sleep. His paws flicked and he made tiny squeaks as he chased rabbits or birds in his dreams, just like any puppy would.
But he was not a dog, Mott reminded herself. He was a wolf. A wolf capable of smashing through a glass door without suffering a scratch. A wolf that had been held captive by a huge, strangely dressed man who completely vanished when Mott turned her head. A wolf that yawned and made Mott feel like she was falling into a black hole.
“Can you really be that Fenris?” she whispered.
The pup let out a tiny snore.
4
THE PUP BOUNDED IN THE damp grass, chasing butterflies and growling at dandelions. Mott hadn’t wanted to spend her remaining time with the pup moping inside and waiting for the wolf rescue organization to call, so she’d taken him to the park.
The sky was covered in a gray blanket that kept in the heat, and the air felt like soup. Los Angeles was supposed to have perfect weather, but Mott was convinced the place was just one continuing natural disaster. In the last week alone she’d seen torrential rain and blasting heat. There’d been brushfires in the Hollywood Hills, and she’d heard about fancy homes in Malibu sliding into the sea. She hadn’t experienced an earthquake yet, but at least that was something to look forward to.
She sat crisscross applesauce while the pup ran circles around her. “You’re going to like the wolf rescue,” she assured him. “You’ll get all the regurgitated meat you want, and when you get bigger, I bet they’ll let you hunt an entire buffalo. I don’t know if they have buffalo in Idaho, so please don’t consider that a promise. But you’ll have plenty of space to roam and a whole pack of buddies. I bet you’ll howl at the moon and . . . it’ll be great.”
Unless he was a moon-eating monster.
She felt silly just thinking about it.
The pup quit bothering butterflies and flowers and curled up in Mott’s lap. Mott scritched his snoot, and he licked her hand. Every time he did something cute like this, the cracks in Mott’s heart deepened.
“I don’t want this to be a sad day,” she declared. “I want to enjoy this.”
“Mweep,” Fenris said with hearty approval.
They walked to the ice cream shop in the strip mall half a mile from home, welcoming the chilled air when they went in.
“Hey, no dogs,” drawled the guy behind the counter. He was standing with a scooper in his hands but looked as though he’d just woken from a nap.
“He’s not a dog. He’s a wolf.”
The scoop guy blinked lazily. “Whoa, gnarly. So what do you want?”
Mott studied the menu board. “Is there such a thing as wolf-safe ice cream?”
“Dunno, I’m not a zoolologist.”
“I think you put an extra ‘lol’ in there.”
“No, I didn’t.”
People who were sure they were right when they were actually wrong weren’t Mott’s favorite people, but since he wasn’t kicking Mott and the pup out, Mott decided not to argue.
“How much is a large root beer float with vanilla ice cream?”
He told her the price.
Mott counted all her money. She’d earned her root beer fund by doing laundry for some of the old folks in the Pennsylvania apartment, but it was already running low.
The door jingled, and in walked a reedy old man in a moth-eaten sweater.
Fenris squirmed in Mott’s arms.
“Hey, I thought I told you,” the guy with the scooper said, “no free ice cream.”
The old man gasped, offended. “But why not?”
“Because we live in a society, and there are rules, and the number one rule is you have to pay for ice cream.”
Mott got the feeling that this wasn’t the first time they’d had this conversation.
The man gave the ice cream guy a keen look with one clear gray eye. His other eye was either missing or hidden in a squint.
