River of Shadows (Underworld Gods #1)

“Yeah?” he answers, the sound coming from the trees behind me, the opposite way I thought I came.

“Just checking!” I yell back. Something tells me I shouldn’t yell much in the forest, so I quickly go about collecting as many ferns as I can. There’s nothing about them that seems to warrant the name “flame fern.” In fact, they look similar to the ones I’ve seen growing in the Pacific Northwest. I’ve gathered as much as I can when I finally notice the mushrooms. They’re of all shapes and sizes, including the classic toadstools with the red caps and white dots, growing at the base of cedar trees and on fallen logs. At home they’d probably kill you or get you high as fuck, though here it would be the former.

Thankfully they seem to be asleep and the more I stare at them, the more they seem to move, like they’re all breathing in unison.

Okay, creepy as fuck. Time to move on.

I head back in the direction of Rasmus’ voice and luckily I’m back at camp in no time. He’s been busy, creating beds out of piles of moss and placing cairns of stones around the moss, like he’s creating a giant circle, with a few fallen logs in the very middle.

“Are these the right ferns?” I ask, holding them out. “Because it’s all I found.”

His eyes light up. “Perfect,” he says, taking them from me. He places most of them in the logs and branches, then hands me a few. “Here, stuff them in between the stones I’ve laid out.”

I do as he says, then join him in the middle when he brings a pack of matches out of his backpack and lights one. He drops the match on top of the ferns in the fire pit and it immediately goes up in flames, enough that I have to jump back.

“Whoa!” I cry out, the heat fanning my face.

“Watch,” he says and grabs my arm. “And stay still.”

One part of the fire starts to reach higher in the sky right above us and I want to step back, but Rasmus holds me in place. It slowly starts to curve over us, creating an arc of fire that has me both terrified and mesmerized, the flames so close to our heads. Then the reaching tip of the flame makes contact with one of the fern-stuffed cairns and it lights itself on fire, creating another arc of fire that connects each cairn to each other until all the ferns around us are lit.

The flames then retreat back to a manageable size, the show over.

“Flame ferns,” Rasmus says, clapping his hands together. “One of my favorite things about this place. I’ve brought them back to our world, but they aren’t flammable at all. Here they only burn if they’ve been cut or taken up from the ground, and the fire it creates will only ignite other flame ferns. Watch.”

He suddenly puts his hand straight into the fire and I gasp as he removes it completely unharmed, his sleeve untouched. “It’s hot enough but it’s no danger. You try it.”

“I don’t know…” I muse. Rasmus made it look safe, but every human instinct tells you not to put yourself in a fire.

“Chicken?” Rasmus goads.

I exhale shakily and square my shoulders. “Fine.”

I stick my hand out, palm down, and slowly move it into the flames. It’s hot at first, tickling the undersides of my fingers like burning feathers, but it doesn’t hurt at all.

“Oh man, this can’t be good for you,” I tell him, unable to take my eyes off my entire hand now fully engulfed by the flames.

“See,” he says. “Now take it out.”

I remove my hand.

Except the flames are now growing from my fingertips, as if I was made of a flame fern.

“Um!” I yelp, waving my hand around, the flames not going out. “What the fuck?”

Rasmus just stares at me, dumbfounded, the flames reflected in his eyes.

“How are you doing that?” he whispers harshly. “That shouldn’t be possible.”

“Well it is! A little help? What the hell should I do!?”

He just shakes his head. If anything, he looks a little pissed off.

I grumble at him and go over to a cedar, trying to wipe it off on the rough strips of bark, but the flames don’t go out, and they stay lit when I try smothering it on the moss and in the dirt. The fire isn’t hurting me, and from the looks of it my skin isn’t burned, but still, I don’t want to be a walking flamethrower.

Finally I just inhale deeply and blow on my hand.

And as if they’re a bunch of birthday candles, all the flames go out at once.

“Holy shit,” I say breathlessly, examining my hand up close. It looks the same as always. If anything it looks smoother, like my skin just got exfoliated.

“Is your nail polish flammable?” Rasmus asks.

“I’m not wearing any,” I say, wiggling my fingers at him.

“I don’t understand,” he says, turning his back to me and going through his bag. “It’s never done that with me.”

“Well maybe I’m just that special,” I say jokingly. “Or maybe I just have the feminine touch.”

He grunts in response and brings out a tiny teapot and two wood carved cups from his backpack. I’m not sure why he’s grumpy again, you’d think getting a blow job from a mermaid would cure all your woes for a long time.

But as Rasmus starts preparing dinner, or lunch, whatever time it is, he seems to get in a better mood. I suppose the idea of having actual food when you’re starving will do that to you.

Since it’s not as cold anymore, I take our coats and boots and lay them out around the fire and between the cairns so that they’ll dry, then I scooch myself onto the moss right beside the fire. Too bad the whole lighting my hand on fire can’t be a party trick I can try back home.

Dinner is as mundane and practical as it comes—cans of corned beef, a packet of chicken-flavored potato chips, a few oranges, and a Cliff bar for dessert, but nothing has ever tasted so good. I know reading The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe when I was young made me think fantasy worlds were full of Turkish Delight, but the reality is oatmeal cookie energy bars taste just as heavenly.

After dinner, Rasmus disappears into the forest for a few minutes and when he returns he has a handful of cedar needles and some gooey white substance which he places in the diffuser in the teapot.

“Cedar sap,” he explains. “It will help your body and mind heal. It might make you a bit sleepy though, and your sleep will be deep and restorative.”

“So now you’re drugging me,” I say.

“Drugging us both,” he says. “Unlike you, I didn’t sleep last night. I watched over you instead.”

I have to admit, I’m rather touched. “And if danger comes for us in the night?”

“We’ll spring into action, feeling better than before,” he says.

While the tea steeps he takes a stick and starts poking at the fire and my mind finally has a chance to slow down and wander, going over everything that’s happened. There’s been so much I feel like I haven’t had a chance to catch my breath.

“Vellamo seemed pretty forgiving,” I tell him, holding my hands out in front of the fire. “You know, considering you’ve dicked her around before.”

He raises a shoulder and pokes the stick in the fire. “Gods and shamans have a complicated relationship. On one hand, we’re always getting under their skin in our quest to gain power. On the other hand…we believe in them.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that when humans first began to walk the earth, the Gods made themselves known. It didn’t take a lot of faith to know that the Goddess of the Sea was real when you saw her rise from the deep. People believed in them and worshipped them and you didn’t have to be a priest or a shaman to do that. But in time, more and more people were born, scattered around the globe, and most of the Gods stayed the same. Outnumbered. So some people saw the Gods, others didn’t, and those that didn’t found it hard to believe in them. Over time, they lost their faith, their belief, and the Gods lost their power in the Upper World, in our world. They stayed here in the Underworld. The shamans, which includes witches and wizards, never lost that belief and remain the one true link between the worlds.” He pauses. “Except for Death.”

“No?”