I sensed her about to return to her desk, but I was too curious now. Tamping down my frustration, I turned my attention back to the runes. Was I going crazy? I translated them again in my head. Doodling a wavy line under them, I muttered, “‘Vampíru drottinn…Sonja, ruled by vampires. ’ I don’t see the problem. ”
“The problem is, your runes suck. Maybe you’d have seen that if it weren’t for the fact that your translation sucks even more. ”
“Okay,” I said slowly. I knew the runes weren’t messed up, because Sonja, whoever she was, had written them, not me. And if Sonja was expressing herself runically, then it was a safe freaking assumption she knew what she was doing. “Let’s start with my translation,” I said, my voice flat. “You’re saying it’s wrong?”
She shrugged, acting coy. A snitty little look like triumph pursed her lips.
“What?” I demanded.
Frost made a giggly sound, and not being a giggly girl, it sounded really messed up. Like, menacing almost.
I stared at them, growing angrier by the second, until the treelike shapes started to blur in my vision.
I sounded out, “Vampíru…drottinn…Sonja. Sonja,” I emphasized firmly, “ruled by vampires. ” I shifted in my seat to glare up at her. “Right?”
“Well, what you have there doesn’t say that. ” With a smug look, she leaned over me, resting her hand on my desk, and I fantasized about elbowing her in the gut.
She shifted closer and I got a whiff. Ick. The girl smelled dry and papery, just like Dagursson. I cringed away, ever so subtly. “A little space, please?”
Frost ignored me, getting off on full lecture mode. “If ‘Sonja, ruled by vampires’ is what you want to write, you need to start again from the beginning and rewrite the runes. ”
“Let’s just translate what I have here, shall we?”
She rolled her eyes. “Fine. We can address this gibberish. This doesn’t say ‘ruled by vampires. ’ You’ve confused the verb ‘drottnun’ with the noun ‘drottning. ’ Drottnun means ‘overlording. ’ Here, the usage is feminine. ”
I scooted away, peering up at her. “No, it’s masculine. In Old Norse society, kings were ‘Drottinn. ’”
“Just because the noun is masculine, doesn’t mean it can’t refer to a female. ” She sneered at me like I was the most moronic person on earth. “Duh. ”
“But there are no female vampires,” I snapped. “DUH. ”
She stood—finally, a little space!—and put her hands on her hips. “No need to be rude. You wanted to know what this nonsense is that you’ve written, and I’m just telling you. If you wanted to write ‘Vampires ruled Sonja’ then it would be ‘Vampírur drottnuðu yfir Sonja. ’ You see,” she said with exaggerated patience, “it’s easy to play with the similarity of the word ‘drottnun,’ which means ‘to rule over. ’ And although this passage is confusing, contextually speaking—”
“Jesus. ” I grabbed my hair, ready to pull it out strand by strand. “In English, Frost, please, just tell me whatthehellthissays. ”
She gave me a blank look.
I sucked in a breath. “Please, Frost,” I said more evenly. “Would you please tell me what you think I wrote. These runes. ” I stabbed a finger at the page. “What do they say?”
“This gibberish?” Looking like she had a bad taste in her mouth, she gave a funny little perplexed shrug. “It says, ‘Sonja, ruler of vampires. ’”
And, like that, my world imploded.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
OhmyGodOhmyGodOhmyGod.
Frost had been right about one thing—I had made a mistake. But not like she thought. My error hadn’t been in writing the runes; it’d been transposing active for passive verbs: Sonja ruled by versus Sonja ruler of.
Sonja. Ruler of vampires.
As in:
A woman.
In charge.
Because there was no other way to read that. Sonja. That was a woman’s name. It wasn’t the sort of name that could go either way—not Pat, or Taylor, or Carter. It was so surreal, I’d repeated it in my head over and over, considering it from all angles and all nationalities, until it seemed like an unreal mashup of vowels and consonants. But it was real. Sonja was a name, and it was undeniably feminine.