only that I did it. An’ I’ll never say any more than that on the subject.”
He didn’t, and they barely shared more than a stray word during the remainder of their circumnavigation of the house.
Though the season of perpetual night hadn’t yet arrived, Niflheim saw no more than a few hours of full sunlight in the day. The presiding twilight, darker than what was commonly referred to as the gloaming in Britain but just as magical, silhouetted the mountain peaks and the steep walls of the fjords, while spreading a dusky cloak of almost-colour over the lake and sloping countryside below the Sorensen Estate. A niggling breeze spread the scents of awakened flowers over the now empty garden. Guests had retired inside, no doubt overcome by the shocking events.
As they passed the servants clearing the supper buffet from the circular tracks in the centre of the garden, Sonja stopped. Hunched her shoulders. She hooked Meredith and William by the arms and hurried them to one side. “Quick, hide! It’s Father...and the professor. They’re on the hunt.”
“Those bushes at the far end, behind the fountain.” William pointed the way, while Meredith and Sonja hiked their dresses a few inches in order to run with him. It felt absurd to be fleeing from the inevitable, but Sonja giggled in her brash, infectious manner, and it was suddenly the perfect capper to an altogether satisfying evening. Hiding from the finger pointing and wagging tongues. Ha! Let them cluck.
They’d almost descended the shallow slope which led to the fountain and the site of phase one—had only minutes passed since then?—when a strong gust hit her full in the face. A few specks of dust lodged in Meredith’s eyes. Sharp, annoying. She stopped to rub them out. Vinegary tears leaked down her cheeks as she blinked and rubbed and then peeled at her eyelids.
“What...what on Earth is that?”
“Eh?” Meredith heard only the high-pitched caws of seabirds over a distant rumble. She blinked like crazy, finally accepting William’s handkerchief to gouge the pesky bits out once and for all. “Much obliged. Thank you.” She went to hand it back but he wasn’t there. He’d stepped away and now appeared transfixed by...something out to sea. They both did.
Another gust hit as Meredith looked. She shielded her face, but through her fingers the population of stars began to diminish...rapidly, as though they were being swallowed from beneath.
What in God’s name?
The rumble grew to a bellowing roar—partly a ferocious wind, partly the crashing of terrific waves thrust up by the sea. She shouted to her sister but the words were lost to the furore. All at once a dark swell lifted behind the walls of the fjord and continued to rise, as though the ocean bed itself was being flung up from its roots, toward the heavens.
The wind threw her off her feet, the impact kicking her head back, enough to see the projection screen ripped from its tethers and thrashed away by vicious gusts into the night sky. She looked ahead and instantly froze on the grass, mouth open to the blasts of sea air.
Her gaze lifted with the colossal surge that scaled the fjord walls. But it hadn’t reached land yet. The monstrous wave was still out to sea and gaining height! She thought she saw someone fall out of a tree to her left. She crabbed backward up the slope. The urge to escape blanked every other thought from her mind.
Father plucked her up and squeezed her against him as he made back for the house. She peered over his shoulder in horror as the giant wave piled above the highest peak. It blackened all twilight and moonlight from the bay. A thousand feet and more and still it rose, finally crashing over the shoulders of the fjord cliffs and wiping out unreachable forests at high altitude.
It climbed higher yet as it approached shore, its spumy summit curling tonnes with the teetering promise of an avalanche. The black wall summoned all remaining water before it to feed a final towering surge of Biblical proportions. It dragged a fishing fleet from its berth before dashing the vessels to kindling. The wave leaned and toppled and collapsed—an incalculable explosion of breaking water—onto the village.
The crash shook the ground, forced Meredith to slap her palms against her ears. Niflheim burst into a cloud of roaring white. Its watery shrapnel bombarded the hillside and the garden. Father set her down and shielded her from the onslaught. William rushed to her