Free Underworlds #4: The Ice Dragon by Tony Abbott

M Y NAME IS O WEN B ROWN .
    Normally, I live in Pinewood Bluffs with my friends Jon Doyle, Dana Runson, and Sydney Lamberti. But normal wasn’t normal anymore, and hadn’t been for weeks. Take right now, for example. We were clinging to giant mythical horses, flying a hundred miles an hour across the freezing skies to Iceland.
    Iceland!
    And since we’d never been encased in ancient Norse war armor or ridden flying horses, we didn’t know that cold wind whistles into iron helmets and freezes your eyeballs.
    But we were finding out.
    “Stopppppp!” I screamed.
    “No time!” shouted Miss Hilda, the armor-clad lady flying ahead of us. In her mythological life, Miss Hilda was Doom Rider, one of the famous Valkyries from Norse mythology. They were the three daughters of the supreme Norse god, Odin, and they chose which heroes died in battle. So far, they hadn’t chosen us.
    Oh, yeah — in their other lives, the Valkyries were the lunch ladies at Pinewood Bluffs Elementary.
    “Look there!” said Miss Marge through her silver helmet, pointing to the earth below.
    Blinking the icicles from our eyes, we saw a white island in a frozen sea.
    “Iceland!” said the third warrior lady, Miss Lillian. “Land of the Norse gods!”
    The Valkyries sang their favorite tagline — “Ho yo -To ho !” — and all seven horses dove like missilesseeking a target. Hanging on for dear life, my eyes shut as tight as I could make them, my mind spun with the events of the last few days. They weren’t pretty.
    First, the evil Norse god Loki stole Dana away to the Greek Underworld. Then Sydney, Jon, and I snatched the famous Lyre of Orpheus from a museum and rescued Dana. Next, Loki brought the giant, one-eyed Cyclopes to the power plant in Pinewood Bluffs to make him a suit of magic armor. Once his armor was complete, he stole a half-dozen fire monsters from the Babylonian Underworld and set them loose to burn up our planet. Oh, and then he turned around and had Dana’s parents kidnapped, sent them to the Norse Underworld, and started searching for something called the Crystal Rune.
    All so he could overthrow Odin and take power for himself.
    Miss Marge’s booming voice cut through my thoughts. “Odin’s messengers approach. We fly to them!”
    As the Valkyries urged their giant horses to fly faster, the air echoed with a long, eerie call. Two ravens —one white, one black — circled out of the sky and joined us.
    “What news do you bring us?” Miss Hilda asked the birds.
    The ravens fluttered alongside her, chattering and clacking their beaks. A moment later, they flew back into the clouds.
    “Loki has left the Babylonian fire monsters to complete their task in Pinewood Bluffs and beyond,” said Miss Lillian. “He has come here to the north. Alone.”
    “This is good, right?” said Jon. “I mean, not the fire monsters part, but the fact that Loki’s still up here?”
    It was good. Ever since Loki’s ghostly Draug warriors had kidnapped Dana’s parents, Dana had worried about her parents being trapped in the Norse land of the dead, a creepy place called Niflheim. The upside was that the Crystal Rune was still in our world somewhere — and apparently, only Dana knew where. So Loki wasn’t about to harm Dana’s parents. He needed them as leverage.
    At least we hoped so.
    “We need to find the Crystal Rune as fast as we can,” said Sydney. “Those fire monsters will burn our world to ash.”
    The horses leaped forward, making a beeline for the coast of Iceland.
    “There’s an old legend about the Crystal Rune being buried near the island’s northernmost volcano,” Dana said. “We’ll only be able to bargain with Loki if we have the rune.”
    So we knew what we had to do.
    Find the Crystal Rune.
    Stop Loki.
    Rescue Dana’s parents.
    Oh. And stay alive, too.
    That was a big one.
    Just as we began to make out the shape of Iceland’s mountains below, the air fluttered behind us.
    “More birds from Odin?” asked