Verena's Whistle: Varangian Descendants Book I by K. Panikian (essential reading txt) 📗

bones creaked. I can’t remember his face, but in my memory, he had mean, angry eyes. He started to pull me toward a white truck that I abruptly noticed beside us and Theo yelled out. I had a moment of pure fear and then I whistled, peculiar and harsh.

The man staggered and let go of me, and then he crashed to the ground. Theo and I stared at him, and the blood trickling from his nose, and then we ran all the way back to the campsite, the bathroom forgotten. I was breathing so hard I thought I was going to be sick and Theo’s face was white as his t-shirt.

“We thought you’d killed him,” Theo said. “Remember? We decided not to tell the parents. Later, when we saw the ambulance pull up, we hid.” I nodded.

“I think about him sometimes,” I confessed. “I have a feeling that I did kill him, but it never made sense to me. I thought maybe I was remembering it wrong.”

“I didn’t remember it at all until recently. I had a dream about you and when I woke up, I remembered. Then I saw the book at my campus bookstore and I knew I needed to give it to you.”

“There’s also this,” he said and pulled out a long knife with a bird on the hilt. “This is from my family’s share of Aunt Irene’s weapon stash the lawyers mailed over after she died.” It had a 10-inch stainless-steel blade, a cast-metal handle, and a scabbard with a blackened finish. The handle and scabbard were decorated with a scale-like texture and intricate floral patterns in gold. On the hilt near the blade was a stylized nightingale and the same carving was on the flat pommel of the handle.

It was not a historic weapon, which would have been made from some other material, such as iron or bronze. Still, it was beautiful. And sharp.

“I don’t know where she found it or why she kept it. But after my dream and finding the book, I remembered seeing this in the basement and knew it was yours.”

“So, wait, what are you saying? You think I’m a monster like in this old Russian folktale?” I asked Theo. “And this is my robbing-people-knife?”

“No, of course not. You’re a human and you’re not a thief. But I do think you have powers similar to the Nightingale in the story. The portal that knocked our ancestors to the other world and the portal that exploded on our family were both located in Russia. There are a lot of pagan and Slavic monsters and gods in those old folktales. Maybe they carry some grains of truth.”

Theo was making sense. Still, I’d never heard anyone in the family mention magic that involved whistling. Really, the whole thing sounded a little too juvenile. Theo saw my uncertainty and said, “Okay, when you were whistling at that dog outside, it didn’t sound like a normal dog whistle. It sounded like you were talking to it. Your tone changed, the melody changed, and the dog definitely responded to you in a specific way. Did you notice any of that?”

“Not really,” I shrugged.

“How about with the bear? Were you trying to scare it away?”

I thought about it. I remembered being scared for the dog, but not any specific action that caused the piercing whistle. It just came out of me. “Sorry, no.”

“Okay, well, let’s not get discouraged. I absolutely think this is your magic and like any skill, you’re going to have to practice.”

He was probably right, but I wasn’t sure how to practice something that I couldn’t seem to control. “Let’s go talk to Uncle Alex.”

Chapter 4

On the shores of frozen Lake Chebarkul, on the slopes of the southern Urals, Russian Federal Space Agency Scientist John Kuznetsov paced behind the police barrier. His toes were frozen in his sneakers and he was going to be late for a meeting with the university’s astronomy department. He wanted to use their lab for a couple of weeks while he was in town, but if he missed this meeting the department head would likely ignore his request.

On the other side of the barrier, he could see the circular hole in the lake ice where the meteorite fragment hit; it was more than 20 feet across and the blue sky reflected off the black water like a mirror. A local fisherman found it a few hours after the main explosion over Chelyabinsk.

The police barrier was holding back a hundred or so spectators from walking onto the ice to peer into the hole. John tried waving his Roscosmos badge at the officer in charge when he arrived but had been turned away. They weren’t sure if the ice was stable enough to walk on or if the heat from the blast had thinned it. Come back tomorrow, he was told.

There were a handful of islands on the lake and he could see some smoke plumes in the distance, meaning some of them were inhabited in the winter months. Maybe he could rent a snowmobile and go knock on some doors, see if anyone managed to get a video of the flaming meteor hitting the lake.

For now, he turned to head back to the parking lot. He would send one of the junior staffers out to talk to the police tomorrow. He wanted his team to have first dibs at whatever meteorite fragments survived the blast in the mud on the bottom of the lake. They would likely need to borrow a dive team from the university as well.

As he drove out of the parking lot and headed for the highway back to Chelyabinsk, John made some decisions about priorities. His team needed to help with the fragment recovery efforts at the lake and also search the surrounding area for more meteorite pieces. It was likely that the locals were already doing the same and anything they found would end up for sale on the internet instead of being studied