Foretold
Foretold
Rinda Elliott
It is written that three Sisters of Fate have the power to change the world’s destiny. But only if they survive….The Lockwood triplets have had the prophecy drummed into their heads since birth. Still, Raven, the eldest of the sisters, can’t believe it’s really happening. She’s the reincarnation of a Norse goddess? One of the sisters is destined to die? When it starts snowing in summer in Florida, the sisters fear the worst has come to pass. Ragnarok, the Norse end of the world, has begun.Raven finds herself the secret protector of Vanir, a boy with two wolves, a knowledge of Norse magic, and a sense of destiny he can’t quite explain. He’s intense, sexy, and equally determined to save her when it becomes clear someone is endangering them. Raven doesn’t know if getting closer to him will make a difference in the coming battle, but her heart isn't giving her a choice.Ahead of the sisters is the possibility of death at the hand of a warrior, death by snow, death by water, or death by fire…Or even from something else…Sisters of Fate: The prophecy doesn't lie: One is doomed to die.
It is written that three Sisters of Fate have the power to change the world’s destiny. But only if they survive…
The Lockwood triplets have had the prophecy drummed into their heads since birth. Still, Raven, the eldest of the sisters, can’t believe it’s really happening. She’s the reincarnation of a Norse goddess? One of the sisters is destined to die? When it starts snowing in summer in Florida, the sisters fear the worst has come to pass. Ragnarok, the Norse end of the world, has begun.
Raven finds herself the secret protector of Vanir, a boy with two wolves, a knowledge of Norse magic and a sense of destiny he can’t quite explain. He’s intense, sexy and equally determined to save her when it becomes clear someone is endangering them. Raven doesn’t know if getting closer to him will make a difference in the coming battle, but her heart isn’t giving her a choice.
Ahead of the sisters is the possibility of death at the hand of a warrior, death by snow, death by water or death by fire.
Or even from something else…
Sisters of Fate
The prophecy doesn’t lie: one is doomed to die.
Praise for Rinda Elliott
“Vivid characters and an action-packed apocalyptic adventure!”
—New York Times bestselling author Rachel Vincent on Foretold
“With a fresh and original take on Norse mythology, Foretold is a breathtaking tale that will leave you crying out for more!”
—Jenna Black, author of Glimmerglass
“Not only did I want to run through my town telling everyone about [Dweller on the Threshold], I wanted to run down the highway and go to the nearest city! This is an excellent urban fantasy debut.”
—Yummy Men & Kick Ass Chicks
“From its unusual title, to its diverse characters, to their unique abilities, to the dark and disturbing world, I just knew that this book would set itself apart from the crowd. And it did that and so much more. Rinda Elliott’s new series is definitely one I’m adding to my ‘must reads’ list.”
—Fiktshun on Dweller on the Threshold
Foretold
Rinda Elliott
www.miraink.co.uk (http://www.miraink.co.uk)
Dedication
This book is dedicated to Robert, Alex, and Mason. You guys have never stopped believing in me. I couldn’t have hoped for a better family.
It’s also dedicated to Haley Burger.
You were my first teen reader, Haley, and your enthusiasm meant everything. Thank you!
Author Note
I’ve always had a fascination with Norse mythology—long before I learned that my real first name came from it. Rind/Rindr/Rinda was a giantess whose marriage to Odin was no storybook union, but she did give birth to a warrior who is supposed to survive the end of the world, Ragnarok. I love nothing more than to thread bits of Norse mythology into stories.
As for the setting in Foretold, some of it is very real and some has been embellished. I used a few real landmarks from this gorgeous area of eastern Oklahoma, but fictionalized some. However, one thing that is very real is the Heavener Runestone. It’s a true Norse mystery, right here in the middle of the United States. We may never know the truth of the runestone’s origin, but it’s so very, very fun to speculate about the possibility of early exploring Vikings.
The Norns
Thence come the maidens
Mighty in wisdom,
Three from the dwelling
Down ’neath the tree;
Urd is one named,
Verthandi the next,
On the wood they scored,
And Skuld the third.
Laws they made there,
And life allotted
To the sons of men,
And set their fates.
—The Norse Poetic Edda
The Prophecy
It is written that the kynkvísl, Norse descendants, will one day house the souls of the gods. True heroes who know their sad fate in the coming battles but fight nonetheless. Their time begins with the portents of Ragnarok. Three years of winter, roaring seas that lash the land and an all-consuming fire. The destruction of the world.
There is another prophecy, one never written and held secretly by the giants of Niflheim, the lowest region of the Norse underworld. The sisters of fate have the power to change the heroes’ destinies. Change the world’s destiny. But only if they survive to their nineteenth birthday.
The odds aren’t good according to this unwritten prophecy:
Born of two magical clans that share life’s spiral. Light of head, dark of eyes, the young warrior will herald the beginning of Ragnarok. His hand to the death of a norn.
Contents
Chapter One (#ua54dca74-f81e-5a1a-9586-d3ca814a5833)
Chapter Two (#ue77f3447-9ff6-5298-8a35-7a3723c52a6f)
Chapter Three (#u73bef52d-8489-569c-a0ea-06e3cef1fd62)
Chapter Four (#u90b54588-4b3a-522a-9b20-c5f805bc63db)
Chapter Five (#u4a27bc18-e9b8-5186-85b9-20373b868870)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One
Three days after the end of the world began I had two choices—drive into a river or hit a deer. The light of the full moon reflected off the snow; the white stuff falling from the sky came in thick, noisy sheets that slammed the roof of my Honda Civic and coated the windshield.
Snow, in my experience, had always been soft. This version was pissed, spitting at the world with a vengeance. It made clear vision impossible.
Didn’t do much for traction, either.
I had to go so slowly. Exhaustion burned my eyes, dragged at my lungs. I’d lost hope of finding a cheap hotel. The last one had been so full; people had actually been sharing rooms with strangers. I’d had two offers while scurrying back to my car in the parking lot. Hadn’t taken them. If I’d learned one thing on this long trip, it was that people turned into complete freaks when they were scared and a sudden Earth-wide snowstorm made for one wicked fear catalyst. I’d seen fights in grocery stores, fights in snowdrifts on the sides of highways and had even watched one lady jump into a car and drive off while the owner stood holding the gas pump nozzle.
And the directions I’d printed sucked.
It had taken me three days longer than expected to get here from Florida. I’d always wanted to come to this supposed place of great magic nestled on the edge of the Ouachita Mountains in eastern Oklahoma, but Mom freaked every time I brought it up. Too much magic, she said. Plus, the rumors of a real gloaming meadow upset her. As far as the Norse knew, there were only a couple in the United States. My two sisters and I had been conceived in the one up north. Nothing like knowing exactly where your mother had sex with a stranger.
The snow let up slightly and I leaned forward like that would help me see well. I slowed even more, the car going barely faster than a crawl. I’d known what this snow was all about the second it had started.
When my sisters and I were kids, my mother’s idea of a bedtime story had been a creepy Norse rendition of the end of the world. Ragnarok. Three years of winter, a great tidal wave and then fire burning across the land. And during all this, there would be battles between warriors who carried the souls of the old gods. Blood and death—my mother’s idea of a nurturing bedtime story.
Kat, Coral and I hadn’t believed her until the souls of the norns inside us made themselves known. I was nine the first time I felt mine. Triplets like us, the norns had been goddess sisters, similar to the Greek fates, but they hadn’t woven threads of prophecy as some stories told; they’d carved runes into wood. The Norse called them the Wyrd Sisters. Kat, Coral and I preferred to think of them as the sisters of fate because the whole damned situation was weird enough.
The car swerved, causing my hands to sweat as my hold on the steering wheel turned to a death grip. My cell phone buzzed in the front pocket of my jeans but I ignored it, too scared to reach for it because I was pretty sure I’d left actual road at some point.
Plus, every time the thing rang lately it was bad news. Especially three days before.
“You need to come home. Now.” My sister Kat’s voice barked out flat and hard.
Scurrying into the short hall by the diner’s restrooms, I growled into the phone. “You know I’m not supposed to have my cell out at work!” I peeked around the corner at my boss, Daddy Mac, still transfixed on the television.
“Have you been outside? Coral thinks it’s happening. She’s pretty freaked out.”
So was I. Like all the people stuffed into booths in the diner, I’d been watching that approaching storm blob on the news, my stomach in knots. “I thought you didn’t believe in it.”
“You gotta come home. Dru’s worse today. She took an iron skillet into her room and spelled the door closed. We can’t get in.”
I didn’t know as much about regular magic as Mom and my sister Coral but even I knew that iron was used in hexing spells. My magic came with the norn inside me.
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath of oily air. “Do you smell lavender?”
Kat snorted. “House reeks of it.”
A woman passed me on the way to the restroom. I clasped the phone closer and turned toward the corner to whisper. “Then she’s doing spells. Has Coral tried a counter for the door?”
“Yeah. The backlash gave her a headache.”
“Look, I’ll try to get off work. Turn on the news and see if all the channels are using the same storm image. Maybe this is only a freak snowstorm.”
“Raven, it’s Florida. It’s August. And we turn nineteen in three months.” Her voice held a thread of fear I’d never heard from Kat, who thought all the prophecies were a load of bunk. She sighed in that loud I’m-totally-put-out way of hers—the one that never failed to get my back up. “I hope the rest of what our crazy progenitor has said is wrong,” she continued. “But it looks like she got this part right.”
“Gods, Kat.” I shut my eyes again, and rubbed them until they hurt.
“Just come home.” Her voice had lost the attitude. “Sometimes our mother listens to you.”
More like she relied on me. As the oldest of the triplets, I guess she thought I would be the most responsible. Like a few extra minutes on my time line gave me a maturity my sisters lacked. Unfortunately, it kind of had. Not that I’d had much of a choice.
Thinking about my mom made me sick because of the last time I’d seen her. The cruel curl of her lip after she’d shoved me. Shoved me. The past few years had been bad, but she’d never hurt me before. She used to be a pretty cool mother but our bond had cracked over the years, and something in her eyes before she disappeared had ripped my heart to shreds. She’d looked right through me—like the loving mother who’d sacrificed a regular life to keep us safe had finally been swallowed by years of fear.
And madness.
“Where did she go?” Kat had placed her palm against the window of Mom’s empty room. Mom had always been off but the past month or so things had been worse than usual. She’d lost her job—which had made me extra glad I’d taken a second one.
“Who knows? But look at this!” I crouched next to the papers scattered all over the floor. No wonder we ran out of printer supplies so often. The winter mix outside sent a cold draft along the carpet, like frigid fingers burrowing past skin and muscle and into bone. I tried not to think about the snow. Of the ramifications.
I sifted through the papers, my stomach aching. Something caught my attention, and I started stacking the papers, glancing at each one. Mom had been printing online newspapers from...everywhere. It didn’t take long for the pattern to become clear. “Oh, gods, oh, man, Kat. She’s looking for him.”
“Who?”
I shoved one of Mom’s graphs toward her. It had names, ages...towns. “The young warrior.”
The sheet crinkled noisily as Kat snatched it. Her ponytail slid around her shoulder to brush the paper as she stared at it.
I ran my hands through my hair, absently scrunched the short spikes on top. Kat and Coral would probably never cut their hair but I’d grown sick of messing with it and chopped mine off. Mom said it made me look like a fairy sprite.
The black color came more from our Native American Arapaho ancestors—Iñunaina—than from our Norse ones. We looked Indian, but our Scandinavian heritage raged strong. As if aware of my thoughts, that presence in me, that thing, shifted and stretched like a sharp-clawed cat waking from a nap.
It creeped me the hell out each and every time since it first happened. Nothing like growing up knowing that one of the three norn goddesses lived in your body. That she was there for one reason.
It hit me then. The terror. Something more than the usual fear and the constant anxiety that the norn could take over. That she could just wipe off my personality like words on a whiteboard.
Could this really be it? The end of the world?
Horror curled through my insides, thick and rolling like waves of sticky, oozing oil. It flowed into my limbs and made them sting. I fisted my hands and sat back as the room swirled around me. Terrified the norn’s seidr magic would kick in, I squeezed my eyes closed and held my breath.
I came out of it to find Kat stroking my shoulder, holding my hand. “It’s okay,” she whispered over and over. “Come on. You’re the one who never loses it. Don’t wig out on me now, Raven.”
My fear was reflected in her eyes. “Kat, it’s true. All of it. Ragnarok.” I whispered the last word.
“I know.” She closed her eyes. “I’ve spent my entire life ignoring Dru’s stupid stories and here I am scared to death, too. But we can’t let her do whatever it is she’s planning for those boys. We just can’t.”
Kat never called her Mom. Her resentment for the woman raged like a never-ending storm. She hated her for dragging us from town to town, from one campsite to another. Out of the three of us, the most forgiving of Mom was Coral, who padded into the room pulling on a fat, purple sweater.
“Where’s Mom?” Her loose hair was longer than her black skirt, which ended halfway down her thighs, above a pair of thick, trendy, hot-pink socks that stretched over her knees. They went well with the pajama top...and the pink feather she’d clipped into her hair. Her style was definitely her own. Kind of funky, fashion-conscious hippie.
“You didn’t see her outside?” Mom would have passed Coral on the front porch when she left.
“No. I was talking to Mr. Bennings next door.” She tried to smile. “He’s going to his sister’s in South Carolina. Not sure why he thinks that will help. It’s snowing there, too.”
“Mom couldn’t have gone through the backyard.” I frowned, bit my lip. The fence panels were tall, the gate had rusted shut and we’d had an exterminator out less than a week before to deal with a huge, creepy nest of snakes. “Coral, is there some spell she could have used to travel? Like disappear or transport?”
Kat snorted. “Beam Dru up.”
I glared at her. She hated the old Star Trek: The Next Generation reruns I loved and she never missed a chance to pick on me.
Coral shook her head. “Mom’s getting pretty good, but not that good. I don’t know anyone who can travel outside the bounds of reality.”
Faint heat filled my cheeks. Yeah, it was a dumb question. “She must have crawled through the window.”
She pointed to the white petals. “I want to know what she did with the datura. It’s poison.” Coral used a tissue to wrap the flowers and toss them in the trash. “Don’t know why I’m surprised. Yesterday, she hacked away all my solstice orange snapdragons.”
My mouth dropped open. They were Coral’s favorite flower. She’d worked her butt off to grow those and we’d carted the pots around for years. “Oh, Coral, I’m so sorry. Why would she do that?”
“They detect spells,” Kat murmured. She only made that pinched-mouth, evasive-eye expression when she was hiding information.
“Kat, did you know?”
“Know what?”
I lifted one eyebrow. We both jumped when Coral smacked Kat’s shoulder.
“Hey!” Kat yelled, eyes narrowing, hand balling into a fist.
I scrambled to my feet to stop Kat from hitting her back. “We don’t have time for this.” I turned Kat toward me, feeling the frailness of her shoulders. We were all built small, but she felt thinner, like she’d been stressing more than usual lately. “Do you know something or not?”
Fury built in my stomach when she stared at the floor. “You got something, didn’t you?” I whispered.
Kat jerked from my hands and stomped from the room. She came back with her favorite yellow chenille throw bunched under her arm. She snapped it open and laid it on the floor. We all squatted around it, but I winced when I saw the perfect rune-shaped holes—obviously cut with scissors. When the norn’s magic hit during sleep, our subconscious found any way to get the messages across.
We’d been carving, writing and even burning these symbols in seidr magical trances since our ninth birthdays.
“‘Mother berserker,’” I translated. “Yeah, I see why you didn’t say anything. Stupid, cryptic shit.”
“Dru was already certifiable.” Kat lifted her eyebrows, shrugged. “I didn’t think the runes meant all that much different. But then she fell off that ladder and I figured the snakes had startled her.”
“The ones from the backyard?” Coral asked.
A few weeks ago, our mother had fallen off a ladder painting the outside of the house. She was unconscious for three days. I’d found her. Also found some snakeskins in a sort of circle at the base of the ladder. I’d trashed them before Coral could see them and think they were a sign. “Yeah, that exterminator sucks. The ‘berserker’ thing could have meant that. It would be nice if this dumb magic came with instructions.”
We had tons of books and countless Xeroxed copies of old writings—we’d collected everything we could find on our heritage, trying to figure out what was truth and what wasn’t. We had some kind of trance magic, a version of the Norse seidr magic inherited from our father’s side, but none of us had any control over it or even understood it.
Our mother’s abilities were different. She was an earth witch. Eyeing the iron skillet, I shuddered. If she was doing something with dark magic, this could be bad. Really bad.
I picked up the stack of papers and handed a section to each sister. “We have to figure out which boy she went after.” I stared from one to the other. If I’d been wrong all this time, the warrior was important—so, so much more important than we were. Gods, we’d spent our lives snickering over the idea of the young warrior killing one of us...but now, I didn’t know. Maybe it was real. Maybe one of us would change the prophecies and save one of the warriors carrying the gods’ souls. Maybe we could help stop the end of the world, crazy as that sounded.
All I knew was that I wasn’t willing for any of us to die. Mom running off to interfere probably altered all of it—even the prophecy we’d grown up fearing.
A tear slid down Coral’s cheek. I felt her pain in that strange way twins and triplets have of knowing when a sibling is hurting. She lifted her gaze to me, gray eyes shiny. “I can’t believe this is happening.”
Neither could I, but my tongue felt thick and the words stuck in my throat. I pulled my gaze from her and shuffled through the pages, finding story after story about boys with strange abilities or affinities with animals. Mom must have hardly slept recently, must have spent night after night searching the Net. Looking for the boy who would kill one of her daughters.
Going silently mad.
What did she plan to do to him?
I knew when I found the one I was supposed to because the norn inside me shifted again. She was getting more potent. This time she scraped and clawed.
Holding my breath, I worked hard to ignore her and stared at the grainy black-and-white photo of a boy, his longish, light hair in midswing, covering one eye. The photographer had obviously been more interested in the two wolves staring from the forest, half-hidden by the trees. The boy was pointing them back into the woods.
Light of hair. Wolves.
Odin, the Allfather God, had two wolves.
My hands started sweating and I rubbed them on my shorts, noticing that the temperature in the room had dropped enough to make my toes numb. I blew out air, watched it mist. Scrambling to my feet, I shot to the window.
The snow fell in sheets now. White smothered the still-blooming trees and flowers. Would be killing them fast at this rate.
I turned to find both sisters behind me, knew they’d found potential warriors, which could mean the norns wanted us to stop this.
Coral handed me her page and I stared at the picture of a tall guy with crazy-short hair so pale it looked gray in the black-and-white photo. Temper blazed in his eyes, but the hammer in the corner of the piece stilled my heart.
Kat’s boy looked a lot friendlier with an easy smile stretching his lips. This picture was in color. Sunlight sparkled on his light hair—the article was from one of those stupid tabloids and said something about a boy who called rain and made crops grow.
A shiver crawled up my spine when I looked back at the one I’d found. The story was several years old—about a boy and the wolf pups that had followed him home after the accident that killed his parents. I could see they were creatures of magic and that the boy held something powerful. It was there, in the eye not covered by his hair. Vanir McConnell, it said. Norse and Irish.
“Born of two magical clans,” I whispered, thinking of the swirled symbol shared by both.
“That share life’s spiral,” followed Kat.
Coral took her paper back, stared at it as her bottom lip quivered. “Light of head, dark of eyes.”
We didn’t say the rest aloud. We’d always thought it was so stupid.
The young warrior will herald the beginning of Ragnarok. His hand to the death of a norn.
The resulting silence was broken by the sudden violence of the snowstorm. It battered the windows and roof, causing me to clench my teeth.
“We don’t have much time,” I said. “It’ll be hard to travel soon.” I met Kat’s eyes. “We’ll have to use the college money.” They’d been saving, too. None of us wanted to believe our mother’s stories about one of us dying.
Kat crossed her arms, bit her lip. “Probably won’t need it, anyway.”
“We’ll need it,” I insisted. “I won’t accept that. We’ve worked too hard for it—a better life. We’ll just have to replace the money when we can. We’ll still go to college. If this really is Ragnarok and we’re in for three years of winter, it’ll just be cold. Life goes on.”
None of us said what we were probably all thinking. Yes, life would go on, but it was going to be different. Even if the prophecy was wrong and none of us died, the world would be very unlike what it had been. According to the writings on Ragnarok, there would only be one short summer break in those three years of winter. After that? I couldn’t form images in my mind. They all froze my blood. Tidal waves and earth-consuming fire. Even with the magic in my veins, I’d never, ever taken the stories of warring gods seriously. It was too big.
Too scary.
I looked down at the boy in the picture, at his one eye staring at me in an absurd parody of Odin and his one eye. “I’m pretty sure our mother went to find the guy who’s supposed to kill us. But which one?”
Kat voiced my biggest question. “You don’t think she’d actually hurt them, do you?”
Hot tears burned the corners of my eyes but I held them back. “You guys know we can’t let her. If they live to fight and we play our part, one of them could survive and there will be no end of the world.”
Coral sniffed. Tears streaked her cheeks. “We have to stop her. No matter what it could mean.”
We stared silently at one another, each of us knowing what the others were thinking.
I couldn’t worry about dying or losing one of my sisters. We’d never been apart. We fought, sure—all sisters do—but we shared a deeper bond, one forged through years of only having one another in the weirdest of living situations. Out of the three of us, only Coral had braved a date. It was hard to date when your mother thought every potential boyfriend could be a killer. Other than that, only our jobs separated us.
Pathetic? Maybe.
But our purpose had been drilled into us from birth. We carried the norns’ souls, making us the new sisters of fate. We carved the old words in seidr trances and revealed secrets, lies and hopes. And now, we had to find all three potential world-saving warriors because we didn’t know which one Mom had gone after first.
Or what she’d do once she found him.
I risked one hand off the wheel long enough to rub my temple. This anxiety was eating me alive. I’d been driving too long and my head had ached the past twenty-four hours. I missed my sisters. We’d never been apart this long before.
So when the flash of brown stepped in front of my car, I panicked and swerved. The car hit a patch of ice, glanced off a tree and sailed with a groaning, metallic cry right over a ravine and into fast-moving, icy water.
The jarring crash rattled every bone in my body.
Shock froze me for a second or two. Then the terror hit. I screamed as the car floated down the river, slamming into boulders and tree limbs like some tricked-out carnival water slide. My suitcase flew between the bucket seats and hit my shoulder, knocking me into the steering wheel.
Blinking, I wrapped my cold fingers around the wheel until they cramped. I couldn’t see crap! Ride it out or abandon ship? The decision was ripped from me when everything came to a jarring stop.
The car had lodged into...a fallen tree. I took a deep breath. But then the vehicle tilted and my head slammed into the driver’s side window. Metal groaned again. The weight of the car pushed into limbs, causing shrill, screeching noises as they scraped the door.
Freezing water soaked into my jeans and through my T-shirt, ribbed turtleneck and my favorite jean jacket.
Fear, pain and panic create a mess of stupid.
I chucked my ego into the river and started scrambling. Everything was slippery and cold. I shivered, slid and gasped as I tried to right myself in the tilted front seat without standing on the driver’s side window. With teeth chattering and water dripping into my eyes, I searched out a dry spot on my jacket sleeve to wipe them. Water dribbled into my mouth. I caught the metallic taste of blood.
I climbed over the side of the driver’s seat and into the back, trying to brace my feet on anything.
Wrapping my fingers around the metal casing of the broken rear side window, I held on, dangling. Dizziness swept over me and I closed my eyes, trying to wrestle my panic into submission.
I held my eyes tightly closed. Took several deep breaths. When it felt as if the world would stay still again, I opened one eye and pulled myself partly up through the window. The snow pounded, feeling more like ice pellets. They stung my cold cheeks. My breath caught on a sob as the car suddenly lurched, slid a foot or two, then settled into another tree.
That’s when I saw him. Crouch-crawling along that tree. A man. A really big man in a black parka with the hood pulled over his face.
Chapter Two
My heart slammed against my rib cage.
It could have been the cold, or the terror, screwing with my head...or my penchant for scary B movies, but all I could think about were stories about girls who disappear when they’re alone out on the road.
Honestly, facing my death by drowning scared me, but being raped and murdered and left to freeze in the growing piles of snow wasn’t the way I wanted to go, either. My adrenaline spiked. I kept one eye on him and yanked the upper half of my body through the window.
Hell with the tree! I’d jump in the river and swim for it.
“Hang on,” he yelled. “I’ll pull you out!”
“No, thanks,” I shouted back. “I’m good!” I opened my mouth to repeat but choked as a surge of icy river water swept over the car and into my mouth. I spat it out, along with a twig and—oh, gross—something slippery that moved against my tongue. Gagging, I spat again and held on as the flood tried to push me back into the car.
“You’re bleeding a lot, so be still.” The deep voice was right by my head.
Gasping, I turned, swallowing the acid in my throat, not sure where to go. What to do. I was losing it. Hadn’t even realized he’d crawled that close.
“Hey, kid, if I can see the blood in this dark, with all this water, you’ve got a problem. Just stop wiggling so I can get ahold of you.”
“Who’s got ahold of you?” My words slurred and that scared me to death, even as the “kid” thing relieved me a bit. With my black hair cropped close to my head and wet, I probably looked like a twelve-year-old boy who’d stolen his parents’ car. With nasty river water choking me, I probably sounded like one, too.
“I’ve got my boots braced, don’t worry.”
Strong hands wrapped around my upper arms and he tugged me through the window opening. He slid one arm behind my knees. The other went around my shoulders. I stared into the darkness under the hood. It was creepy, like gazing into a black hollow where a face should be.
I felt the effort he put into staying on that huge limb. Every step he took was carefully thought out, strategically placed. “I heard your car go in. Noise travels well out here at night. And with the crazy weather, that little creek isn’t a creek anymore. It’s running deeper and stronger than normal. Does anything feel broken?”
“No. I just hit my head.”
“You were lucky.”
By the time he’d carried me back to solid ground, I felt the cold full-force. Violent shivers racked my body. My head pounded like it had been split. I couldn’t tell if water, snow or blood dripped down my face and I hoped it was the former. It was hard to see, to even keep my eyes open with all the wet stuff gumming them up or slamming into my eyeballs when I left them open. He didn’t stop once we reached the trees. In fact, he picked up the pace.
“My car,” I croaked, my hands sliding on the slippery material of his coat as I tried to clutch it. His jostling made me want to hurl. “Gods! Can you slow down?”
“Sorry. It’s too cold, you’re too wet and your head looks ugly.”
“Thanks.” Sarcasm. I was still capable of sarcasm.
Laughter shook his chest. “I meant the wound. As for the car, we’ll send someone for it after the snow sto—” He broke off. “Someone will come get it later.”
I narrowed my eyes even more with that abrupt cutoff. Did he know it probably wouldn’t stop? I wanted to ask, but my words were taking on separate life, buzzing unsteadily about my brain like furious, drunken bees. I closed my eyes, swallowed and concentrated on staying awake and aware.
He stopped and went quiet.
I gasped and managed to finally grab the slick parka. “Hey—” I snapped my mouth shut as the very wrongness of the moment hit me.
His caution crept into and around me until I could nearly taste the thickness of it on the air. Then I realized it wasn’t caution. It was magic. And with that, my surreal sort of dreamy state crumbled away like burning paper. I fully felt the cold in my lungs. The ache from their effort to continue working. The throbbing in my head. And the panic at the slide of that magic into my pores. Reality returned, as did my adrenaline.
I began to struggle.
He let me slide to my feet, facing away from him, but when my legs wobbled, he pulled me back against him and put one hand gently over my mouth. “Shh,” he whispered into my ear. The thick canopy of leaves over our heads slowed the fall of snow. His breath brushed hot over my cheek, down my neck. I shivered. He tightened his arms. “Someone’s out here. I was looking for a friend of mine who didn’t show at my house. I thought I heard Steven yell right before I heard your crash, so I’m worried someone else is out here, too.”
With his hand over my mouth, I couldn’t ask questions, wasn’t sure I wanted to, anyway. I nodded to let him know I wasn’t panicked now. He removed his hand, but kept his mouth close. I shivered when his breath tickled my ear. “Listen,” he said, more breath than voice.
And I did.
The forest around us joined in the silence, the only noise the patter of snow hitting snow. The occasional moan of wind through the foliage. My gaze swung right and left, the view the same no matter where I looked. Trees, bushes and a vast white that reflected the moon and lit up the night around us.
Standing there, under the treetops, with the forest silent and funereal, was like being cocooned in a world void of wildlife. I knew animals instinctively burrowed in the cold, but to hear nothing moving? This hush combined with the thick stink of magic was anything but ordinary. The air carried the smell of dark things, of twisted fury and evil intent.
And...lavender.
Slumping against him, I closed my eyes and concentrated. A faint humming sounded, a kind of mechanical whine, and it was far enough away not to alarm me much. But the responding thumping of feet hitting ground did. And the fact I could hear this when the ground was padded in snow sent something screaming up my back.
Someone was running hard, and the more attention I paid, the more I could pick out other noises. The runner’s harsh panting, a soft whimper of terror. My eyes flew open. I didn’t understand. Was it really my mom out there? Trying to hurt someone?
I tried to push away from the guy holding me. He merely tightened his arms. “Stop it,” he whispered. “You’re going to pass out. I’ll let you go, but you gotta sit down. There’s a boulder here.” He used one gloved hand to brush snow off the top of the huge rock, then gently lowered me toward it. “I’m Vanir.”
My butt thunked the last foot to the rock. Hard.
What were the odds? Odds, hell! There was no way this was a coincidence. I went light-headed. Nearly lost control of my legs, so I grabbed on to the rock. My wet jeans were already chafing my icy skin, so adding more cold against my butt made me wince.
He squatted in front of me. I sucked in a startled breath when he peeled the wet hood from his head. Scant moonlight touched his features. He wasn’t really a man. I mean, yeah, he was male, but younger than a man yet too old to be a boy. His size and deep voice had fooled me. He had to be at least six feet tall, and even crouched like this he made me feel small.
Not that that was hard considering my five-foot-one height.
But the face that met mine was around my age. Eighteen, maybe. He’d matured since that grainy newspaper photo. Sharp featured in his cheekbones, nose and chin, his face revealed a mixed heritage—like me. His eyes looked dark, though the color was hard to pinpoint in this light. His hair, swept off his forehead, reflected the light of the moon, and what hadn’t been visible in that black-and-white newspaper was the dark gold color.
He stared just as hard at me and those eyes held a maturity his face didn’t.
He smiled and I knew he did it to reassure me, because tension rolled off his body in choking waves. Suddenly, I wasn’t afraid of him. New warmth filled my gut. No, not afraid.
Just. Something. Else.
When he spoke, his voice was barely above a whisper. “My friend Steven was supposed to be at my house earlier. He never showed. His mom said he left a while ago, so I came out here to make sure he was okay.” He pulled off one thick glove and tilted my face into the moonlight, his fingers gentle on my chin.
The heat in his hand made me lean into his touch.
“You okay?” he whispered. Those eyes focused on my wound, but his thumb stroked softly over my chin, close to my bottom lip. “We need to get you looked at. My aunt is a doctor.” He dropped his hands to pull off the other glove before putting the gloves on my hands. That small bit of warmth was so welcome, I shut my eyes to enjoy it.
My eyes flew back open wide when he wrapped his coat around me and pulled my arms through the sleeves.
Some of his body heat was still in the coat, and while that felt good, the pressing of cold wet clothes into my skin didn’t. I said nothing about that. “I can hear your friend running. He sounds scared.”
His hoodie looked thick and mostly dry, though it wouldn’t stay that way long in this snow. I felt bad for taking his coat, but knew without doubt that he wouldn’t take it back.
Vanir stood and whistled softly. “I hate to leave you, but I have to help him and you can’t run. You’ll be okay if we can keep you warm.”
We? I saw the glowing, yellow eyes lock on me before two gray wolves stepped from the trees. They stopped on either side of Vanir. He bent to rub the head of one and a strand of his wheat-colored hair slid forward. His hair was long, shoulder-length at least.
In that instant, I knew I was right where I was supposed to be. Mom had been right about who he was. Right about the prophecies... Was she right about my possible death?
Was Vanir destined to kill me?
That humming filtered through the trees again, and this time the runner did more than whimper—he screamed. One of the wolves growled low in its throat.
Vanir’s hair caught the slivers of moonlight through the leaves as he whipped his head toward that sound. “I have to go. The one with the bent ear is Geri and this one is Freak—they’ll protect you.” He knelt and looked into the eyes of each wolf. “Keep her warm,” he said before loping into the woods.
Somewhere along the way he’d figured out I was a girl. I stared at the wolves, my tongue tied in knots. This was too much of a coincidence. The gods had to have a hand in this. My norn twisted behind my ribs as if she answered.
“Thanks,” I finally whispered. “The trick with the deer sucked. I know you probably hate the creatures because they munched on Yggdrasil and all, but I need my car.”
Vanir had disappeared into the forest, but I heard the slap of his feet on the snow. The wolves stalked toward me. My heart pounded so loud I knew they could hear it, could smell my fear.
One of them looked toward the place where Vanir had gone.
Geri and Freak, he’d said. Odin had run with two wolf companions, Geri and Freki.
Shivers hit me then, and before I could huddle into a ball, both animals crowded around me. Real fear froze me in place and it felt like my eyes were going to pop out of my head. These creatures listened to Vanir, but I was a stranger, nicely marinated in river water. I managed not to whimper when they crushed close, still watching the woods. Despite the pungent odor of wet fur and the absolute terror I had at the thought of relying on wild animals for heat, I sighed at the relief that warmth brought.
I couldn’t stay there, though. “Don’t worry about your friend,” I whispered to the wolves, my voice catching on the pain. Not only the physical, but the mental anguish I barely held tethered. That stupid lavender told me it was really my mother out there.
Scaring someone. Possible hurting them.
I pushed away from the wolves, though the loss of warmth made me clench my teeth. Staring into the trees, I called upon every reserve of strength I had before following.
Chapter Three
I remembered my cell phone as I stepped into the forest. I pulled off Vanir’s too-big gloves and shoved them into the pocket of his coat.
“Please, please...” I muttered, digging the phone out of the front pocket of my wet jeans. Why did jeans always shrink so tightly when wet? My fingers stung they were so cold.
The phone was damp, but the screen came on when I pushed a button. Coral answered on the third ring. “You’re hurt.”
We always knew with one another. I stumbled over something hidden in the snow and caught my hand on the rough bark of a tree. Wincing, I got my balance and curled my sore hand into a fist and pushed it into a pocket. “Gods, Coral, it’s crazy here! I’m in a forest, wet and cold, and get this, I’m walking with wolves.”
“Come again?” Her voice came across tinny—like she was in a tunnel.
I held the phone closer to my ear. “Yeah, wolves. I crashed into a stupid river and now I’m following Vanir—”
“You found him already? Is he it? Can you tell? Does he look like a warrior?” She paused. “Wait, you crashed?”
“Coral, I’m freaking freezing here. I’ll have to call back, but I think Mom is here.” I tripped over a stump this time. I knew it was a stump because my toe hit it hard. My knees crashed into snow just as one of the wolves nudged me and I dropped the phone. The snow stung my hands as I dug for it.
“Raven!”
My fingers were so stiff I could barely hold the phone, but I got it back to my ear as I leaned on a tree to catch my breath. Wet snow on the phone pricked my cheek. “I’m here. Dropped my cell.”
“Why do you think Mom’s there?”
“Because I smell lavender out in the woods in Oklahoma during Snowmageddon.” I took a deep breath. It hurt my lungs. “I’m also lost. I gotta go.”
“But if you smell lavender that means she’s—”
I closed my eyes, squeezed them to try and generate warmth and missed whatever else she said. One of the wolves nudged my side and I jumped. “Yeah, she’s doing some kind of spell. And it’s a doozy if I can smell it when I can’t even hear her.” The wolf poked me with its nose again. “I really do have to go. So cold.”
“Call me back soon, okay?” She sighed loudly. “Just let me know you’re okay. I’ll call Kat.”
“’Kay.” I flipped the phone closed and jammed it back into my jeans.
I wanted to get to Vanir before Mom did, though I still couldn’t believe she’d actually hurt him.
Fury got me moving again. One of the wolves stayed close to my side. It was so tall that I didn’t have to bend to bury my fingers in the warm fur. I should have been more scared of the huge animal, but I wasn’t. Not right then, anyway. “I don’t know if you’re Geri or Freak—which is a really mean name to give such a beauty, by the way—but you guys have to help me. Can you take me to Vanir?”
Yeah, rationally, I knew they couldn’t understand me. The weird, glowing eyes made them supernatural creatures of some sort, but wolves with the ability to decipher human speech? Nah. Still, one bounded a few feet ahead and went stiff, tail straight and horizontal to the ground. It sniffed, so I took a cautious breath, trying not to pull it too deep since my breaths felt more like they pulled in razors rather than air.
I gagged when lavender-tainted magic filled my lungs.
That wolf took off and the other stayed close by my side, surprising me with the amount of warmth it generated every time it brushed my hand or leg. I was glad the other one stopped every so often to turn those glowing eyes in our direction because I couldn’t move very fast now. Exhaustion made my limbs feel like anchors and the pillowy drifts of snow were starting to look more bedlike with each drag of my feet. And though I could smell my mother’s magic, I couldn’t follow it to the source—not even if I wasn’t already disoriented as hell from the bump on my head and the cold.
I wished then that I hadn’t cut my hair—at least it would have kept my ears warm.
Soon, my thoughts turned into jumbled mush as I focused on getting one foot in front of the other. Most of the images tumbling through my mind were of my mother and sisters during a few of the happier times, like the summer we’d crossed a couple of states with a group of people who called themselves Travelers. Took us a while to figure out they were mostly thieves, but the gatherings at night with music and good food had been cool. Or the time we’d stopped at an RV camp and I’d dived off the edge of a small waterfall and hit my head in shallow water. Mom had kept me up all night, afraid I wouldn’t wake if I fell asleep.
She’d always had problems and my sisters and I believed it was because of the prophecy, the running...maybe even our father, who’d abandoned her after their one night together. But I couldn’t wrap my mind around her behavior now. Crazy or not, she’d never left us, and as far as I knew, she’d never hurt anyone. I had such a bad feeling that she was trying to hurt Vanir.
I stumbled again and worked to focus on the problem now. The snow wasn’t that deep here since the trees were close together and their canopies were catching most of it before dumping chunks that created drifts here and there. Every now and then, I heard it spill in heavy thumps to the ground. The lavender smell wafted by again and I stopped, tried to pinpoint its origin. If only I could sniff her out, follow the strength of the nasty flower scent to its source.
A sudden, low cry of anguish pulled me from my lull and I gave up trying to snag a ride on my mother’s magic. Instead, I shot forward, running as fast as I could manage with my body ready to shut down. That sound had come from Vanir. I knew it.
I spotted glowing canine eyes before I realized the wolf had stopped in a clearing. I burst from the trees and promptly tripped over another stump and went right through at least a foot of snow.
This time, the dizziness hit me so hard I could only roll onto my spine and shut my eyes. My back stung as the snow seeped under Vanir’s coat. The world spun around me like I was caught in the center of a tornado and I moaned when one of the wolves nudged my leg off the stump or log or whatever.
Then I realized it was too soft for a log.
I reached down, feeling around until my hands closed over denim—wet, freezing denim that obviously covered a human form.
“Oh, no,” I whispered on a choked sob. “Oh, please, no.” I rolled over and got onto my hands and knees. “Hey. Are you okay?” The dark coat had me nearly freaking out until I realized it wasn’t a sweatshirt with a hood.
It wasn’t Vanir.
But my heart caught for whoever this was. Moonlight reflected in the empty gaze of one dark eye, in the strands of snow-dusted blond bangs over his other eye. A boy who favored Vanir only in coloring. I looked for a wound, anything, but it was too dark to tell what had happened to him. Everything was too wet.
CPR! He needed CPR. My hands shook so hard I could barely get them on his chest.
I didn’t hear Vanir approach. When his palm rested on my shoulder, I sucked in a breath, my head jerking up.
“It’s too late.” His voice broke, the sound of grief gravelly on his tongue. “I already tried that.” He fell to his knees next to me. “Whoever killed him is long gone or the wolves would be running after him.”
Or her. Oh, gods, or her! I sagged back to the ground. Killed him? A roaring filled my ears. Blackness edged my vision and I squeezed my eyes shut tight. The urge to scream my own grief raged in my throat. I couldn’t understand.
Cold that had nothing to do with my surroundings swamped my body like an arctic wave. The world swirled around me much like it did during my rune tempus, but this was something entirely different. This was me, dealing with the soul-changing second, the slicing knowledge that nothing would ever be the same now.
I blinked into the darkness of the forest as I bit down hard on my lip to keep in the keening wail flooding my throat.
If I’d driven down here sooner... If I’d searched out Vanir before the idea had come to her...
Opening my eyes, I stared at the boy on the ground. Steven, Vanir had called him. His life was over and I was scared to death that my mother might have been the one to take it.
Vanir stared at his friend, face slack with shock. “I don’t see a mark on him. I need my cell phone.”
“Maybe he fell and hit his head?” Even as I said it, the cold, black heartbreak crawling through my chest branded me a liar. I sat up and dug into my pants for the cell phone. The sharp stinging in my fingers and the icy tight jeans had me blinking back frustrated tears. “You can call 9-1-1 from my phone.”
He took it. “Thanks. I’ll call...” His voice trailed off and his face crumbled. “We’ve been friends since the first grade.”
“I’m so sorry.”
He blinked at me as if trying to bring me into focus. “I’ll call my uncle. He’s the sheriff.” Vanir dialed, then cursed and looked at the phone. “No signal. I always get a signal up here.”
“I just called my sister. It worked then.” I took the phone, looked at the lack of signal bars. I didn’t know what to say. Didn’t matter. Nothing I said would help him or make this any easier. Everything took on a surreal flavor again, like I floated outside of the situation, watching it from a place where I could deal with the tangled emotions ripping me up. I looked at my hands, surprised they’d stopped shaking.
Funny, I was still cold.
When I went suddenly airborne, I yelped, “Hey! I can walk.” I grabbed his shoulder with one hand, the other clutching my phone.
He’d taken two steps, but he stopped to look down at me. “You’ve had it. Adrenaline is probably all that’s keeping you going. I’m scared hypothermia is setting in. Your hands were shaking—then they stopped. That’s bad. Where’d you put those gloves?”
“I forgot. Stuck them in the pockets.” Stretching my neck to see over his shoulder, I stared in the direction of his friend. I didn’t want to leave him alone in the woods. On the wet ground with snow covering him. It seemed so wrong.
And the guilt eating at me should have been my mother’s.
“What about him?” I whispered.
“We can’t move him. It’s a crime scene, which means we don’t want to be out here, anyway. I’ll get the sheriff, come back here—” He broke off, his arms tightening around me almost painfully.
His anguish tore through my heart. “Why don’t I wait by him? The wolves can keep me warm again. You can get the authorities and I could make noise to lead you back.”
The moonlight showed me the slight upward tilt of his mouth. A smile that tried to break through his grief and failed. “I know exactly where he is. Spent most of my life running this forest with Geri and Freak. And Steven.”
I shivered. Took that as a good sign.
He tightened his arms. Heat poured from him. Pain and cold had scrambled my brain, but I could swear something else seeped into me. A hint of relief from the pain in my head, like a sneaky narcotic attached to his warmth.
Nerves zinged with the effort it took to hold in my grief. I’d really hoped we’d been wrong—that Mom hadn’t come here to hurt someone.
Kat and Coral were going to be devastated. Pain washed over me again and I didn’t say anything else. Couldn’t. I still didn’t know for sure. Maybe I’d hallucinated the lavender scent.
He didn’t talk, either, as he carried me to his house. His anger and confusion was so thick I could taste it. I had nothing to offer him, not when I was such a mess myself. We passed through a few more thick stands of trees, crossed a clearing, and once he had to turn and take a new route. I kept my eyes closed throughout most of it, trying hard to conserve what little warmth I had left without sucking all his away.
“My house is up this driveway. It’s just me and my brothers.”
I felt the moonlight on my face before I opened my eyes to see we’d cleared the trees and were now on a gravel road. I turned my head to get my first glimpse of his home. It was hard to make out the exact shape of the house since it was nestled deep into the trees, but I could tell it was two-story and either white or some light tan color. A porch ran the length of the first floor with an old-fashioned white railing. The eight front-facing windows all blazed yellow. Smoke poured from the chimney and television noise blared through the screen door as the front door opened.
Vanir’s shoes made very little sound as he climbed the four steps leading to the porch.
“Wait,” I said, pushing on his chest and wiggling my legs so he’d let me go. He did, keeping his hands on my arms until I could stand. The dizziness was thankfully gone, though the throbbing in my head still blazed strong. My teeth had started chattering again.
Some of the light streaming from the house cut off as a tall body filled the doorway. “Vanir? Did you find Steven?”
Vanir nodded, lips pinched. His grief cut into me so strongly I couldn’t stop the breathy moan that escaped my throat.
The screen door creaked when Vanir pulled it open. “Come on,” he said to me. “We need to get you warm. This is my brother Ari.”
Ari stepped onto the porch and the light fell on his face. He favored Vanir in the shape of his mouth, nose and chin, but he had hair like mine, so dark a brown it was nearly black. He had more of it, though, from what I could tell with it tied back from his face. I wondered if, like my branch of Norse ancestors, his had settled in to mix with the locals. He didn’t look much older than Vanir.
Vanir touched his brother’s arm. “She’s hurt and needs to see Sarah.”
“She?” Ari chuckled and stepped to the side so I could pass. “Only you would find a girl in the woods.”
“Her car’s in the new river.”
“New river?” One black eyebrow lifted high.
“The crazy weather changed things up a bit around here.”
Ari leaned close, his gaze zeroing in on the throbbing part of my head. I was guessing there was a nice, fat lump there now. “Better get her inside,” he murmured.
Vanir held out his hand for me.
I didn’t hesitate, just placed my cold hand in his. This time, it wasn’t my imagination. Comfort flowed along my skin, seeped into my pores.
He tugged on my hand, pulled me toward the front door. “You haven’t told me your name.”
Vanir rubbed his thumb over my wrist. The fluttering in my gut went wild. I followed as he pulled me through the door into a brightly lit room that made me squint after being in the dark so long. Instant heat nearly sent me to the floor in relief, the smell of wood smoke strong, welcome.
Another man who looked a lot like Ari, but older, sat on a red plaid couch, his cast-clad foot propped on a battered wood coffee table. He looked up when I came in, eyes narrowing.
“Your name?” Vanir prompted.
“Sorry. It’s Raven. Raven Lockwood.”
The brother on the couch sat up; his cast-clad foot hit the floor. Hard. Vanir stopped abruptly and I ran into him before he turned and grabbed my shoulders. “Did you really just say your name is Raven?”
Startled, I didn’t answer at first.
Ari stepped past us and carefully set his brother’s cast back on the scarred surface of the coffee table, which looked like it had been dragged behind a pickup. “So...not only did little brother find himself a girl, but a trickster, too.”
Chapter Four
Despite the promise of more bone-chilling cold, I stepped back toward the door. In my world, magic was reality, so even though I’d never encountered any, mind readers could exist. That was the last thing I needed—for these guys to know how not completely honest I was being.
Vanir glared at Ari. “Don’t mind him—he’s taken one knock too many playing football.”
“What?” Chuckling, Ari plopped onto the couch. “You’ve never heard the stories about the bird? Like the one about the raven who stole the sun?”
“Yeah, I’ve heard them. Didn’t that raven end up sharing the light with the world?” I wasn’t sure it was the same story, but didn’t really care. The cold had reached bone depth at this point and the effort to keep my teeth from clacking loudly made my jaw ache. Crossing my arms, I winced when my freezing, wet clothes made a loud sploshing sound. I looked at Vanir. “Why are you reacting to my name like that? It’s not like you don’t have weird names yourselves.”
He gave me a rueful smile that pursed the lips to one side. “Our mother was Scandinavian. The brother on the couch? He’s the oldest and he got the worst name, Hallur.”
Hallur lifted an eyebrow, but then he shrugged and nodded in agreement.
Vanir grabbed a huge blue towel from a pile of unfolded laundry on a red ottoman in front of the fireplace and handed it to me.
I buried my face in the warm cotton, glad it was a dark color so the blood from my head wouldn’t stain it. The heat felt so good I wanted to jump into that pile of fire-warmed laundry. Then I was happy my face was covered because Vanir took a deep breath and I knew what he was about to tell them.
“Something happened to Steven. I think someone was chasing him—I got distracted when I heard Raven’s car crash, but when I finally caught up to him, it was too late.”
The cast thumped to the floor again. “What do you mean, too late?” Hallur demanded.
“I mean, he’s dead.” Vanir’s voice shook on the last word.
I lowered the towel even though the last thing I wanted was to be in this room and seeing their expressions right now.
Hallur tried pulling himself up. Sweat broke on his face with the effort and I wondered how fresh his break was. He smacked the arm Ari used to push him back down. “Dead? What do you mean, dead? How?”
“I don’t know how, but we need to call Uncle Willy now. I’ll change into dry clothes and take him back there.” Vanir pulled off his wet sweatshirt and threw it onto the brick hearth. He didn’t seem to care that I was watching as he hauled up a clean red towel and wiped his chest. He had those intriguing lines along his ribs, defined abs. But his expression kept my attention. Now that we were out of the cold—temporarily—and not fighting snow, the truth about his friend had to be hitting him hard. He kept his gaze off me, but his grief was there in the cut of his lips, the lift of his eyebrows.
Swallowing the hard lump of sympathy clogging my throat, I forced myself to look down, dismay filling me when I saw the puddle I was making on the floor. I immediately knelt with the towel.
“I’ll get that. Here are some dry clothes you can use.” Vanir stood over me with a pair of black sweatpants and a white long-johns top. He turned back to his brothers. “I tried CPR, didn’t know what else to do.” The raw torment that passed through his eyes brought that lump back into my throat. He was holding off his misery with barely leashed control. “I hated leaving him there, but I had to get her out of the cold.”
Hallur scraped his hand along his jaw. A log in the fireplace crackled loudly as he winced and shifted, a confused frown darkening his tanned face. “Did it look like he fell? Hit his head? Was there blood?”
Vanir shook his head. “He was just lying there, staring at the sky. But I heard him running—I’m sure someone was after him.”
“But who...and in this weather? Hell, most of the town has shut down. People are hibernating—they put off opening the school. We got the call tonight.” He shut his eyes. “I don’t believe this. Steven was only seventeen.”
Ari abruptly stood and strode past me to open the closet next to the front door, his lips pinched. He pulled out a thick coat, grabbed two flashlights and handed one to Vanir. Hallur picked up the cell phone next to him and started dialing.
“Call Sarah, too.” Vanir set the flashlight on the coffee table and pulled a blue sweatshirt from the pile of clothes. “Raven needs her head checked.”
I cleared my throat and carefully did not look at any of them too long. I didn’t really think they could read my mind, but I knew I couldn’t keep the guilt off my face. My mother might have done this played liked a jammed track in my mind. “I don’t need a doctor. If it would be okay, can I borrow these clothes and maybe have someone drive me to—” I broke off. To where? I had no money, nothing. Everything was in my car.
Vanir tucked a strand of hair behind his ear in a gesture that should have looked feminine, yet didn’t. He still held his sweatshirt bunched in his hand. “Bet your purse or wallet is somewhere in the river. You can stay here. We’ll try to get your stuff tomorrow.”
Ari stood by the door, expression grim. “Take me to Steven, Vanir.”
“No.” All our attention snapped back to the oldest brother when he barked out the order. One word and everything came to a stop. “Wait for the sheriff before you go back.” He pointed to Vanir. “I want to talk to you. Alone.”
He started pushing himself to his feet and his grimace, sweaty face and relatively clean cast told me the break was new. I stood, clutched the towel. “Please. Stay. I’ll go change.” I lifted an eyebrow at Vanir. My hands shook with cold again and I wanted the wet stuff off. But I also desperately needed a couple of minutes to myself, away from prying eyes. I was swallowing back so many emotions—fear, worry, shock...not to mention the squirm-inducing embarrassment of being completely helpless here without my money, clothes and car—they all had my stomach cramping.
He tilted his head to get me to follow, placed his hand on my lower back as I passed. Again, I felt that strange comfort seep from his touch and I raised startled, wide eyes to him only to find his narrowing at me.
The slight drop in temperature when we reached the hall started up my shivering again. Warmth seeped slowly from Vanir’s hand before he reached into the bathroom to flip on the light. He held the door open.
“Do you want to take a shower?” he asked.
I did, but not here. Not in this strange house full of men. “Just the dry clothes will be enough. Thanks.”
I locked the door behind him with my cold, shaking fingers before all my pent-up emotion rushed to the surface. I sagged over the black counter, my knuckles hurting with the effort it took to hang on to the edge. Eyes closed, I fought off panic.
Summer snow.
Mom’s hexing spell.
Murder.
I couldn’t stop the acid as it rushed up my throat. I turned, saw the lid was already up on the toilet and fell to my knees as I lost the peanut butter sandwich I’d eaten in my car earlier.
Resting there a moment, I worked to get myself under control, taking deep breaths, gagging on my own nasty saliva. I needed more than a few stolen moments alone in a bathroom so badly. I flushed the toilet, lurched back to the sink and hoped they wouldn’t mind that I opened a drawer and borrowed some toothpaste. I was not going out there with vomit breath.
I spat, ran water in the sink and lifted my gaze to the mirror. Despite the new scratches on my skin, I looked like me. Same narrow face, same gray eyes, same short, black hair. But everything, everything, felt different. Nothing about my life would ever be the same again and Mom...
The norn moved in my chest and instead of the usual shift or stretch, this felt like a swoop. I choked and the room started a slow spin around me. The white walls and black countertop smeared and lengthened, turning to zebra stripes. Still nauseated, I closed my eyes, flattened my palm over my stomach.
And then I realized what was happening and my wide, freaked-out gray eyes showed in the melting mirror.
“Oh, gods!” I whispered. “Not now, not here!”
I don’t know which gods I sent the plea to—which one was responsible for this stupid curse, which one had put this...this being inside me, but he or she didn’t listen. Never listened.
Everything spun faster and faster, until the bathroom’s stark color scheme became one swirling mass of spirals. It was like being in the center of a target sign. I didn’t have the strength for this. Not now. A loud sob escaped my throat, my face jerking toward Vanir’s voice as he pounded on the bathroom door.
That couldn’t be right. Alone, my sisters and I always went into our rune tempus alone!
Normally, I only heard my heart pounding like a base drum in my head, my blood rushing through my veins, pumping life around my eardrums. Coral described it once as being inside a seashell. It was hell on earth. I was never more aware of the fragility of life than in the beginning and end of my rune tempus. And the worst part? The helplessness. The complete inability to resist whatever power overtook me and made me write, or carve...or burn.
Vanir grunted outside the door and must have slumped against it because it rattled hard.
Exhausted, I collapsed to the floor.
The spinning shuttered to a halt. In here nothing looked different. But out there, the McConnells would be living statues, men frozen in time along with the rest of the world. The first time this had happened to me, I’d been standing at a chalkboard when the green had suddenly looked like it had turned soft, melting into goo before sweeping to the side. I’d clutched the chalk tray with frantic fingers and held on throughout. When it stopped, I’d turned to find all the other kids in class staring, locked into place. They’d looked dead. All I remember after that was whimpering, crawling under the teacher’s desk, and the hellacious fight later when Mom caught that teacher digging her sharp fingernails into my shoulders while shaking me in the hallway.
It was why Mom homeschooled us after that. If one of us went into the rune tempus and moved before we came out, others would only see me or one of my sisters blink from one spot to another. The world stopped only for the sister who went into it. Mom had never hidden the fact we carried norn souls from us, but even she hadn’t known about this weird time-stopping thing that forced us to write prophetic runes. Kat’s showed the future, Coral’s the present and mine, which came from the oldest of the norn sisters, shared the past. Mine was pretty much useless. It explained a few things sometimes, but mostly showed me things I couldn’t change.
That day in school, I’d revealed my teacher’s past affair with the principal. She wouldn’t have known it if Kat hadn’t marched into the class and read the Norse runes out loud.
Groaning, I blinked away the awful memory and moved my hand, encountering fuzz. I stared, confused by the blur of black fluff in front of my eyes before wrinkling my nose at a sudden tickle. I sneezed. When the world came back into focus, I realized I was lying on my side, on a thick, black bath rug. I never knew how much time I’d get—I didn’t control this, she did. And she wasn’t patient. So I grabbed the brass cabinet knob. I opened the door and used it for leverage.
“Please don’t break, please don’t break,” I murmured before grasping the lip of the counter and pulling myself to my feet. I reached into my back pocket for my notebook with its attached short pen. That’s when I remembered. I’d set it on the seat next to me.
In. My. Car.
Thick fear tightened my chest. My heart pounded hard. Visions of my rune-filled, purple notebook floating down that river went through my head right before the burning in my hands started.
“No.” Fingers tingling, I yanked open the drawer and pawed through the contents. A pen and paper in the bathroom would be the norm at my home—we stashed them everywhere—but most people didn’t think of a bathroom for writing. There was a packet of razors but no shaving cream, which would have worked. There were nail clippers, extra toothbrushes, and I frowned in confusion at the huge pack of batteries. None of this would help me. The sting in my fingers grew worse, so I grabbed the toothpaste again. It would work. The rune tempus stopped for nothing, and if I didn’t have something to write with, it would make me burn the symbols into the wall behind me. With my fingers. It had happened that way for Kat once. She had no fingerprints on two fingers now.
Hands shaking, I twisted off the lid and squirted a huge glob on the counter. I swooped up some onto my finger and held it to the mirror just as my muscles went rigid and she took over my body. I hated this, hated the acrid resentment that tasted like rust on my tongue, hated the loss of control...hated the constant fear that one day she’d just decide to keep me. My back snapped straight, my legs locked so hard my knees made a loud cracking sound. I stood inflexible and unable to function on my own. Every fiber of my being was under her control as I watched her raise my toothpaste-covered fingers to the mirror.
This was why Mom had yanked us from school.
The reason we got fired from more jobs than I could count.
The reason Coral was fragile, Kat always pissed.
The reason I was afraid to date.
My hand moved of its own volition and I became the messenger. The passenger. The witness.
The freaking tool.
The toothpaste oozed down the mirror, but the norn wanted the runes completely legible. My hand shook with exhaustion, yet it went down for more paste, then up to draw. Down, then up to fill in the symbols more, over and over until tears streaked down my cheeks. She couldn’t control those and I couldn’t stop them—they were the only sort of release I could get during this. I was finishing the last symbol when there was a thud against the bathroom door. It flew open and slammed into the wall.
Vanir came barreling through the door and the utter shock that ripped through me did what I’d never been able to do before. It stopped me from making the symbols. Rigid muscles went suddenly loose and I sagged. Vanir caught me, but he wasn’t looking at me. He was staring at the symbols on the mirror.
“‘In violence conceived,’” he breathed, hands tightening on my arms.
“You—” My voice caught. I choked. The rune tempus not only wore me out, it sucked me dry. It used every resource I had and left me needing a refill. I tried to work up some spit, had to talk.
His face was pale, brown eyes wide with shock, red streaking the white part. He looked over his shoulder and I wanted to close my eyes at the utter panic and terror that had pulled his features tight. “Something’s really wrong with my brothers.”
Outside, Geri and Freak howled, the sound raising all the fine hairs on my body. My eyes flew open wide and I clutched at him. The wolves shouldn’t be moving, either. Shouldn’t be able to make sound. I looked up at Vanir, who stared at me like I was something he’d found crawling on his shoe. Pain slashed into my chest.
I’d always, always, been alone for this—not even my sisters shared this space with me. I swallowed again, bit my cheek, hoping for moisture. “Give your brothers a couple of minutes—they’ll be okay.”
His gaze slid back to the mirror. “What’s going on?” He lifted me and set me on the counter. I winced when the toothpaste glob squished under my still-wet clothes. He pointed to the symbols on the mirror. “How do you know those words?
I flinched when he brought his face even with mine, eyes narrowed, nostrils flaring—his mouth in a tight, furious line.
“You know my people’s words,” he repeated, voice low. “You know the runes. Why? And what the hell have you done to my brothers?”
Chapter Five
Shock kept me silent for a few seconds. All I heard was the harsh pounding of my racing heart echoed by the howl of agitated wolves. I latched on to his arms, fingers tight on hard biceps. It had taken me forever to get those words right with gloppy toothpaste. “Where were you standing when this happened? We’ve only got a few minutes!” Yeah, I yelled, sounded crazy frantic, but I didn’t care in that moment.
He flinched in surprise, blinked at me. He’d been all about the intimidation and here I was. Screaming in his face.
I shook him. Or tried to. He was built like a tree. Instead, I dug my fingernails into tight muscle and skin, probably drawing blood because he hadn’t put on a shirt yet. “Dammit, tell me where you were standing when the room started spinning! You have to go back there now! Time will go back to normal—your brothers’ll see you’ve moved!”
“Stop yelling!” Vanir grabbed my hands. “I was in the hall, out of sight. Heard you getting sick, so I was going to offer you some water.”
Relief swamped me. I sagged, nearly falling off the counter. He steadied me, leaving his hands on my shoulders. Big, heavy, warm. That weird comfort came from his palms, his touch. I narrowed my eyes. “What are you doing with your hands?”
He didn’t answer immediately, wasting the precious few seconds we had before the worst part of the rune tempus hit. His hands tightened. “You can feel that? I knew something was different about you.” He nodded toward the toothpaste runes, his hair sliding across his chin. “I’m not entirely sure what I’m doing, but I want to know what those—”
He broke off as the room began the slow spin, his dark eyes widening, his nostrils flaring...his hands tightening even more. “Not again,” he muttered, broken suffering giving his tone a low, gravelly sound.
Streams of pain slithered into my shoulders beneath each of his fingers. I put my hands on him, not even thinking about where. My palms slid over his bare stomach. A part of me, the part grasping for anything normal in this surreal situation, took note of how warm he was, how smooth his skin felt under my fingertips.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “There’s no time to explain, but you can’t say anything to your brothers. Promise me!”
Vanir swayed, closed his eyes. His groan vibrated under my hands.
“Promise me!” I screamed as the blood began to pulse in my ears.
“Okay, okay! Hell!” He gritted his teeth, eyes slitting open as they started to roll back in his head.
I cupped his cheeks to get him to look at me. “Hold on to the door or the counter or something. Focus on something else. Anything! It’ll help.” Not that he could. I mean, how could he? He had no idea what was going on and the rune tempus was scary as hell.
Shock lashed through my heart when his arms slid around me. He pulled me close, sliding my butt along the counter until our upper bodies were plastered together.
I didn’t mean me. I’d meant something sturdy.
But it was too late.
The room picked up speed. I closed my eyes and wrapped my arms around his back, smashing my cheek against the hot, hard muscles of his chest. I only had enough time to wish I could enjoy the way he felt before the world took off.
Faster. And faster. Black counters, shower curtain and rug blurring into the rest of the white room, slimming into lines. A swirling of dark and light that spun around and around until it felt like it pulled at limbs, tried to tug me into the abyss. And for the first time in my life, I wasn’t going through this alone. I hated that he felt this terror, but some small part of me reveled in having someone to hold on to.
I pressed into his chest. His hands dug into my back. He bowed his head, burying his face in my hair—the moan that rumbled from his throat slid under my skin to scrape my conscience raw. “I’m so sorry, so sorry,” I whispered, repeating the words over and over, my lips against his skin. I knew what he was feeling.
The effort it took to stand still.
The painful grip as you held on to something for dear life.
And in every single breath, the sucking, sickening terror that if you let go, you’d go flying into the surrounding vortex, screaming like a banshee as the world disappeared.
He swayed again. I was used to this and it nearly killed me every time. He started to sag and I squeezed him hard. He grunted, though I couldn’t have caused much pain. I wrapped my legs around him to help keep him steady on his feet.
It didn’t occur to me what this would do to our lower bodies.
I went hot. Everywhere. His back went rigid. He pulled back to look down at me and I realized I’d picked the only sure way to distract a guy. His mouth was a heartbeat from mine, his breath caressing my face.
Fire crawled up my neck. I bit my lip when I saw the answering flare of heat in his dark eyes. I gasped, my mouth falling open.
He swooped in and I let him.
Anticipation fluttered in my belly as his lips pressed mine. His hands flattened on my spine before sliding down to grip my waist. He pulled away, glittering eyes staring at me, one of his hands gliding up to wrap the back of my neck. Warm fingers slipped into my short hair. I tilted my head and this time he opened my lips with his, slipping his tongue inside my mouth. I had a second to be glad I’d swished some toothpaste in my mouth when the world around us literally jerked to a stop.
Vanir wrenched away, his hands coming up to make sure I didn’t fall even as he did. His legs wobbled as he took one step back and then another before he fell through the open doorway.
His slam into the wall rattled the entire hallway. He sagged to the floor, his face pasty, sweat in a fine sheen over his cheeks and forehead. I scrambled off the counter, followed and shut the bathroom door so nobody saw the runes before I could clean them off. I knelt beside him. He stared at me through barely cracked lids, his features slack with disorientation. “Pointy,” he slurred. “When I first came in...your face...was pointy.”
“Huh?”
He frowned and reached up to touch my chin.
Ari hustled into the hall. Hallur cursed loudly from the other room. “What happened?” he yelled. There was a thunderous groan, a thump. More curses.
“He fell,” I croaked. I bent over Vanir, hiding my shaking hands by slipping them under his head to adjust his neck to a better angle. “I got sick,” I added, looking up at Ari. I hoped that explained the dry croak of my voice. “I think he was checking on me and must have tripped.”
“Probably on his own feet since he’s not done growing into them yet.” Ari squatted next to me and I glanced up to find his gaze on my arms because I was unable to mask their trembling. “Let me take care of him. You’re still wet and need to get into dry clothes. I hear Aunt Sarah pulling up now.
So could I, now that he’d pointed it out. With the fire crackling, the brothers talking and snow pelting the window of the kitchen just down the hall, I was surprised I could hear the engine.
“Diesel,” he said as if he could read my mind. “She’s a doctor, does a lot of house calls for the family, so she needed a four-wheel drive—good thing now with all that snow, isn’t it?”
I started to nod and pain reminded me of the lump on my head. The episode in the bathroom had completely distracted me from all the discomfort, but the rune tempus had soaked up the last of my energy and the aches came roaring back to life. It felt like someone had stuffed me in a giant hamster ball and tossed me down a rocky incline. A long one.
Glancing one more time at Vanir, I saw that he was more awake than before, anger simmering in his gaze, fueling questions I would have to come up with a way to answer. I let go, wincing with him when I dropped his head back onto the hardwood floor.
“Sorry,” I murmured. Looked like I would be saying that to him a lot.
Ari pulled me to my feet and I offered him a quick smile before opening the door to the bathroom just enough to slide quickly through. On the mirror, the runes were thick—I’d used the entire large tube of toothpaste.
“‘In violence conceived,’” I whispered, finally focusing on the actual words now that the shock of Vanir joining my rune tempus wasn’t in my face. Digging through my exhaustion, I tried to find a memory that would explain this. My rune tempus hardly ever gave me anything useful, but this...this felt infinitely important. Probably because my churning gut was telling me this was about me and my sisters. But wrapping my mind around the horrific explanation buzzing about my subconscious couldn’t happen right now.
A noise outside the bathroom only proved that true. I shoved it aside for later, and as quietly as possible I opened drawers until I found one with towels.
But how would I explain squirting all their toothpaste into a towel?
Instead, I opened the cabinet under the sink and snatched a new toilet paper roll. I started tearing off paper and swiping the drying paste. I had to wet a lot of the paper and the streaks left on the mirror panicked me until I remembered a bottle of Windex next to the toilet paper stash.
With the Windex, it went faster. Sort of. Toilet paper left little annoying flakes. When the mirror finally sparkled, I flushed some of the paper down the toilet, then crumpled the rest as small as I could and pushed it down into the trash.
I looked at the scratches covering my face. I’d barely realized they were there because the main wound was so painful. The cold probably numbed me because I hadn’t even felt them. Running my finger along a particularly nasty cut across my forehead, I winced when it ended at the most tender spot on my head. A lump raised the skin slightly.
My hair was something else. I liked the gelled, spiky look I usually wore, but this? Looked like I’d given up shampoo altogether. Stubby tangles twisted together on my head like a nest of dirty snakes. Stubby, growth-challenged snakes.
Hard to believe Vanir wanted to kiss this.
I touched my lips, stunned again over how he’d felt. Tasted. Squirming at the memory, I pulled off my jacket, turtleneck and T-shirt. Even my plain white bra was stained from the nasty river water. But I left it on. Going braless in a thin top was so not happening.
Getting my jeans off took a lot longer. They’d stuck to my body. By the time I slid into the huge drawstring sweatpants and long white shirt, all I wanted to do was curl up on the bath rug and sleep. Shut this world out for a little while, because exhaustion tugged at my every muscle and bone, threatening to shut me down.
Glancing around the bathroom, I gathered the still-wet clothes into a ball and tiptoed into the hall. The hardwood froze my bare feet. The legs of the sweats flopped over my toes as I stood indecisive in the hall.
I heard them in the kitchen, whisper-arguing.
Holding my breath, I took a few steps closer, as silently as I could. Should have felt bad for eavesdropping, but I didn’t. I was going to have to come clean. Tell them about my mother. I couldn’t let that boy’s family deal with years of unanswered questions on top of their grief.
But...she was still my mother. Still the same woman who used to squeeze me tight and sing silly, made-up lullabies. The one who’d become so enraged by a teacher daring to hurt one of her daughters, she’d studied schoolwork right along with us so she could teach us well. There’d been good times between all the manic ones. She deserved for me to make sure I was certain before throwing her in front of the bus.
I stepped closer to the door opening, gripping the clothes so hard the wet material soaked into my borrowed clothes.
Vanir suddenly snapped in a fierce undertone. “Think about it! The raven is sacred. My birthday is two days away and she shows up now?”
“That’s just it.” Hallur’s voice was nearly a growl. “We don’t even know what’s supposed to happen on your birthday and now a boy is dead. He won’t be the first and you know it. So a distraction right now—”
“She’s a girl, not a distraction.”
The humor in the next tone let me know it was Ari. “All girls are distractions.”
There was a loud thump. Sounded like the cast again. Hallur’s anger coated his voice like molasses, making it slow, the words heavy. “The raven is a sign of war. They come to feed upon the dead.”
Vanir sighed. “So do the wolves, Hallur.”
“Yes, and the time of the wolves could be here. We’ve known this from the moment Geri and Freak followed you home as puppies. And now someone has been killed? Snow is swallowing the world? You think this is coincidence?”
“I don’t know.” Vanir’s voice, heavy with grief and indecision, burned my already roiling stomach.
“Listen, Vanir.” This from Hallur again. “Something about this girl makes the hair on my neck stand up. I want her gone.”
“I can’t.” Vanir’s voice was so low I barely heard the two words.
“What do you mean, you can’t?” Hallur’s tone turned even more fierce and guttural.
There was a long silence in the room.
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Rinda Elliott
It is written that three Sisters of Fate have the power to change the world’s destiny. But only if they survive….The Lockwood triplets have had the prophecy drummed into their heads since birth. Still, Raven, the eldest of the sisters, can’t believe it’s really happening. She’s the reincarnation of a Norse goddess? One of the sisters is destined to die? When it starts snowing in summer in Florida, the sisters fear the worst has come to pass. Ragnarok, the Norse end of the world, has begun.Raven finds herself the secret protector of Vanir, a boy with two wolves, a knowledge of Norse magic, and a sense of destiny he can’t quite explain. He’s intense, sexy, and equally determined to save her when it becomes clear someone is endangering them. Raven doesn’t know if getting closer to him will make a difference in the coming battle, but her heart isn't giving her a choice.Ahead of the sisters is the possibility of death at the hand of a warrior, death by snow, death by water, or death by fire…Or even from something else…Sisters of Fate: The prophecy doesn't lie: One is doomed to die.
It is written that three Sisters of Fate have the power to change the world’s destiny. But only if they survive…
The Lockwood triplets have had the prophecy drummed into their heads since birth. Still, Raven, the eldest of the sisters, can’t believe it’s really happening. She’s the reincarnation of a Norse goddess? One of the sisters is destined to die? When it starts snowing in summer in Florida, the sisters fear the worst has come to pass. Ragnarok, the Norse end of the world, has begun.
Raven finds herself the secret protector of Vanir, a boy with two wolves, a knowledge of Norse magic and a sense of destiny he can’t quite explain. He’s intense, sexy and equally determined to save her when it becomes clear someone is endangering them. Raven doesn’t know if getting closer to him will make a difference in the coming battle, but her heart isn’t giving her a choice.
Ahead of the sisters is the possibility of death at the hand of a warrior, death by snow, death by water or death by fire.
Or even from something else…
Sisters of Fate
The prophecy doesn’t lie: one is doomed to die.
Praise for Rinda Elliott
“Vivid characters and an action-packed apocalyptic adventure!”
—New York Times bestselling author Rachel Vincent on Foretold
“With a fresh and original take on Norse mythology, Foretold is a breathtaking tale that will leave you crying out for more!”
—Jenna Black, author of Glimmerglass
“Not only did I want to run through my town telling everyone about [Dweller on the Threshold], I wanted to run down the highway and go to the nearest city! This is an excellent urban fantasy debut.”
—Yummy Men & Kick Ass Chicks
“From its unusual title, to its diverse characters, to their unique abilities, to the dark and disturbing world, I just knew that this book would set itself apart from the crowd. And it did that and so much more. Rinda Elliott’s new series is definitely one I’m adding to my ‘must reads’ list.”
—Fiktshun on Dweller on the Threshold
Foretold
Rinda Elliott
www.miraink.co.uk (http://www.miraink.co.uk)
Dedication
This book is dedicated to Robert, Alex, and Mason. You guys have never stopped believing in me. I couldn’t have hoped for a better family.
It’s also dedicated to Haley Burger.
You were my first teen reader, Haley, and your enthusiasm meant everything. Thank you!
Author Note
I’ve always had a fascination with Norse mythology—long before I learned that my real first name came from it. Rind/Rindr/Rinda was a giantess whose marriage to Odin was no storybook union, but she did give birth to a warrior who is supposed to survive the end of the world, Ragnarok. I love nothing more than to thread bits of Norse mythology into stories.
As for the setting in Foretold, some of it is very real and some has been embellished. I used a few real landmarks from this gorgeous area of eastern Oklahoma, but fictionalized some. However, one thing that is very real is the Heavener Runestone. It’s a true Norse mystery, right here in the middle of the United States. We may never know the truth of the runestone’s origin, but it’s so very, very fun to speculate about the possibility of early exploring Vikings.
The Norns
Thence come the maidens
Mighty in wisdom,
Three from the dwelling
Down ’neath the tree;
Urd is one named,
Verthandi the next,
On the wood they scored,
And Skuld the third.
Laws they made there,
And life allotted
To the sons of men,
And set their fates.
—The Norse Poetic Edda
The Prophecy
It is written that the kynkvísl, Norse descendants, will one day house the souls of the gods. True heroes who know their sad fate in the coming battles but fight nonetheless. Their time begins with the portents of Ragnarok. Three years of winter, roaring seas that lash the land and an all-consuming fire. The destruction of the world.
There is another prophecy, one never written and held secretly by the giants of Niflheim, the lowest region of the Norse underworld. The sisters of fate have the power to change the heroes’ destinies. Change the world’s destiny. But only if they survive to their nineteenth birthday.
The odds aren’t good according to this unwritten prophecy:
Born of two magical clans that share life’s spiral. Light of head, dark of eyes, the young warrior will herald the beginning of Ragnarok. His hand to the death of a norn.
Contents
Chapter One (#ua54dca74-f81e-5a1a-9586-d3ca814a5833)
Chapter Two (#ue77f3447-9ff6-5298-8a35-7a3723c52a6f)
Chapter Three (#u73bef52d-8489-569c-a0ea-06e3cef1fd62)
Chapter Four (#u90b54588-4b3a-522a-9b20-c5f805bc63db)
Chapter Five (#u4a27bc18-e9b8-5186-85b9-20373b868870)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One
Three days after the end of the world began I had two choices—drive into a river or hit a deer. The light of the full moon reflected off the snow; the white stuff falling from the sky came in thick, noisy sheets that slammed the roof of my Honda Civic and coated the windshield.
Snow, in my experience, had always been soft. This version was pissed, spitting at the world with a vengeance. It made clear vision impossible.
Didn’t do much for traction, either.
I had to go so slowly. Exhaustion burned my eyes, dragged at my lungs. I’d lost hope of finding a cheap hotel. The last one had been so full; people had actually been sharing rooms with strangers. I’d had two offers while scurrying back to my car in the parking lot. Hadn’t taken them. If I’d learned one thing on this long trip, it was that people turned into complete freaks when they were scared and a sudden Earth-wide snowstorm made for one wicked fear catalyst. I’d seen fights in grocery stores, fights in snowdrifts on the sides of highways and had even watched one lady jump into a car and drive off while the owner stood holding the gas pump nozzle.
And the directions I’d printed sucked.
It had taken me three days longer than expected to get here from Florida. I’d always wanted to come to this supposed place of great magic nestled on the edge of the Ouachita Mountains in eastern Oklahoma, but Mom freaked every time I brought it up. Too much magic, she said. Plus, the rumors of a real gloaming meadow upset her. As far as the Norse knew, there were only a couple in the United States. My two sisters and I had been conceived in the one up north. Nothing like knowing exactly where your mother had sex with a stranger.
The snow let up slightly and I leaned forward like that would help me see well. I slowed even more, the car going barely faster than a crawl. I’d known what this snow was all about the second it had started.
When my sisters and I were kids, my mother’s idea of a bedtime story had been a creepy Norse rendition of the end of the world. Ragnarok. Three years of winter, a great tidal wave and then fire burning across the land. And during all this, there would be battles between warriors who carried the souls of the old gods. Blood and death—my mother’s idea of a nurturing bedtime story.
Kat, Coral and I hadn’t believed her until the souls of the norns inside us made themselves known. I was nine the first time I felt mine. Triplets like us, the norns had been goddess sisters, similar to the Greek fates, but they hadn’t woven threads of prophecy as some stories told; they’d carved runes into wood. The Norse called them the Wyrd Sisters. Kat, Coral and I preferred to think of them as the sisters of fate because the whole damned situation was weird enough.
The car swerved, causing my hands to sweat as my hold on the steering wheel turned to a death grip. My cell phone buzzed in the front pocket of my jeans but I ignored it, too scared to reach for it because I was pretty sure I’d left actual road at some point.
Plus, every time the thing rang lately it was bad news. Especially three days before.
“You need to come home. Now.” My sister Kat’s voice barked out flat and hard.
Scurrying into the short hall by the diner’s restrooms, I growled into the phone. “You know I’m not supposed to have my cell out at work!” I peeked around the corner at my boss, Daddy Mac, still transfixed on the television.
“Have you been outside? Coral thinks it’s happening. She’s pretty freaked out.”
So was I. Like all the people stuffed into booths in the diner, I’d been watching that approaching storm blob on the news, my stomach in knots. “I thought you didn’t believe in it.”
“You gotta come home. Dru’s worse today. She took an iron skillet into her room and spelled the door closed. We can’t get in.”
I didn’t know as much about regular magic as Mom and my sister Coral but even I knew that iron was used in hexing spells. My magic came with the norn inside me.
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath of oily air. “Do you smell lavender?”
Kat snorted. “House reeks of it.”
A woman passed me on the way to the restroom. I clasped the phone closer and turned toward the corner to whisper. “Then she’s doing spells. Has Coral tried a counter for the door?”
“Yeah. The backlash gave her a headache.”
“Look, I’ll try to get off work. Turn on the news and see if all the channels are using the same storm image. Maybe this is only a freak snowstorm.”
“Raven, it’s Florida. It’s August. And we turn nineteen in three months.” Her voice held a thread of fear I’d never heard from Kat, who thought all the prophecies were a load of bunk. She sighed in that loud I’m-totally-put-out way of hers—the one that never failed to get my back up. “I hope the rest of what our crazy progenitor has said is wrong,” she continued. “But it looks like she got this part right.”
“Gods, Kat.” I shut my eyes again, and rubbed them until they hurt.
“Just come home.” Her voice had lost the attitude. “Sometimes our mother listens to you.”
More like she relied on me. As the oldest of the triplets, I guess she thought I would be the most responsible. Like a few extra minutes on my time line gave me a maturity my sisters lacked. Unfortunately, it kind of had. Not that I’d had much of a choice.
Thinking about my mom made me sick because of the last time I’d seen her. The cruel curl of her lip after she’d shoved me. Shoved me. The past few years had been bad, but she’d never hurt me before. She used to be a pretty cool mother but our bond had cracked over the years, and something in her eyes before she disappeared had ripped my heart to shreds. She’d looked right through me—like the loving mother who’d sacrificed a regular life to keep us safe had finally been swallowed by years of fear.
And madness.
“Where did she go?” Kat had placed her palm against the window of Mom’s empty room. Mom had always been off but the past month or so things had been worse than usual. She’d lost her job—which had made me extra glad I’d taken a second one.
“Who knows? But look at this!” I crouched next to the papers scattered all over the floor. No wonder we ran out of printer supplies so often. The winter mix outside sent a cold draft along the carpet, like frigid fingers burrowing past skin and muscle and into bone. I tried not to think about the snow. Of the ramifications.
I sifted through the papers, my stomach aching. Something caught my attention, and I started stacking the papers, glancing at each one. Mom had been printing online newspapers from...everywhere. It didn’t take long for the pattern to become clear. “Oh, gods, oh, man, Kat. She’s looking for him.”
“Who?”
I shoved one of Mom’s graphs toward her. It had names, ages...towns. “The young warrior.”
The sheet crinkled noisily as Kat snatched it. Her ponytail slid around her shoulder to brush the paper as she stared at it.
I ran my hands through my hair, absently scrunched the short spikes on top. Kat and Coral would probably never cut their hair but I’d grown sick of messing with it and chopped mine off. Mom said it made me look like a fairy sprite.
The black color came more from our Native American Arapaho ancestors—Iñunaina—than from our Norse ones. We looked Indian, but our Scandinavian heritage raged strong. As if aware of my thoughts, that presence in me, that thing, shifted and stretched like a sharp-clawed cat waking from a nap.
It creeped me the hell out each and every time since it first happened. Nothing like growing up knowing that one of the three norn goddesses lived in your body. That she was there for one reason.
It hit me then. The terror. Something more than the usual fear and the constant anxiety that the norn could take over. That she could just wipe off my personality like words on a whiteboard.
Could this really be it? The end of the world?
Horror curled through my insides, thick and rolling like waves of sticky, oozing oil. It flowed into my limbs and made them sting. I fisted my hands and sat back as the room swirled around me. Terrified the norn’s seidr magic would kick in, I squeezed my eyes closed and held my breath.
I came out of it to find Kat stroking my shoulder, holding my hand. “It’s okay,” she whispered over and over. “Come on. You’re the one who never loses it. Don’t wig out on me now, Raven.”
My fear was reflected in her eyes. “Kat, it’s true. All of it. Ragnarok.” I whispered the last word.
“I know.” She closed her eyes. “I’ve spent my entire life ignoring Dru’s stupid stories and here I am scared to death, too. But we can’t let her do whatever it is she’s planning for those boys. We just can’t.”
Kat never called her Mom. Her resentment for the woman raged like a never-ending storm. She hated her for dragging us from town to town, from one campsite to another. Out of the three of us, the most forgiving of Mom was Coral, who padded into the room pulling on a fat, purple sweater.
“Where’s Mom?” Her loose hair was longer than her black skirt, which ended halfway down her thighs, above a pair of thick, trendy, hot-pink socks that stretched over her knees. They went well with the pajama top...and the pink feather she’d clipped into her hair. Her style was definitely her own. Kind of funky, fashion-conscious hippie.
“You didn’t see her outside?” Mom would have passed Coral on the front porch when she left.
“No. I was talking to Mr. Bennings next door.” She tried to smile. “He’s going to his sister’s in South Carolina. Not sure why he thinks that will help. It’s snowing there, too.”
“Mom couldn’t have gone through the backyard.” I frowned, bit my lip. The fence panels were tall, the gate had rusted shut and we’d had an exterminator out less than a week before to deal with a huge, creepy nest of snakes. “Coral, is there some spell she could have used to travel? Like disappear or transport?”
Kat snorted. “Beam Dru up.”
I glared at her. She hated the old Star Trek: The Next Generation reruns I loved and she never missed a chance to pick on me.
Coral shook her head. “Mom’s getting pretty good, but not that good. I don’t know anyone who can travel outside the bounds of reality.”
Faint heat filled my cheeks. Yeah, it was a dumb question. “She must have crawled through the window.”
She pointed to the white petals. “I want to know what she did with the datura. It’s poison.” Coral used a tissue to wrap the flowers and toss them in the trash. “Don’t know why I’m surprised. Yesterday, she hacked away all my solstice orange snapdragons.”
My mouth dropped open. They were Coral’s favorite flower. She’d worked her butt off to grow those and we’d carted the pots around for years. “Oh, Coral, I’m so sorry. Why would she do that?”
“They detect spells,” Kat murmured. She only made that pinched-mouth, evasive-eye expression when she was hiding information.
“Kat, did you know?”
“Know what?”
I lifted one eyebrow. We both jumped when Coral smacked Kat’s shoulder.
“Hey!” Kat yelled, eyes narrowing, hand balling into a fist.
I scrambled to my feet to stop Kat from hitting her back. “We don’t have time for this.” I turned Kat toward me, feeling the frailness of her shoulders. We were all built small, but she felt thinner, like she’d been stressing more than usual lately. “Do you know something or not?”
Fury built in my stomach when she stared at the floor. “You got something, didn’t you?” I whispered.
Kat jerked from my hands and stomped from the room. She came back with her favorite yellow chenille throw bunched under her arm. She snapped it open and laid it on the floor. We all squatted around it, but I winced when I saw the perfect rune-shaped holes—obviously cut with scissors. When the norn’s magic hit during sleep, our subconscious found any way to get the messages across.
We’d been carving, writing and even burning these symbols in seidr magical trances since our ninth birthdays.
“‘Mother berserker,’” I translated. “Yeah, I see why you didn’t say anything. Stupid, cryptic shit.”
“Dru was already certifiable.” Kat lifted her eyebrows, shrugged. “I didn’t think the runes meant all that much different. But then she fell off that ladder and I figured the snakes had startled her.”
“The ones from the backyard?” Coral asked.
A few weeks ago, our mother had fallen off a ladder painting the outside of the house. She was unconscious for three days. I’d found her. Also found some snakeskins in a sort of circle at the base of the ladder. I’d trashed them before Coral could see them and think they were a sign. “Yeah, that exterminator sucks. The ‘berserker’ thing could have meant that. It would be nice if this dumb magic came with instructions.”
We had tons of books and countless Xeroxed copies of old writings—we’d collected everything we could find on our heritage, trying to figure out what was truth and what wasn’t. We had some kind of trance magic, a version of the Norse seidr magic inherited from our father’s side, but none of us had any control over it or even understood it.
Our mother’s abilities were different. She was an earth witch. Eyeing the iron skillet, I shuddered. If she was doing something with dark magic, this could be bad. Really bad.
I picked up the stack of papers and handed a section to each sister. “We have to figure out which boy she went after.” I stared from one to the other. If I’d been wrong all this time, the warrior was important—so, so much more important than we were. Gods, we’d spent our lives snickering over the idea of the young warrior killing one of us...but now, I didn’t know. Maybe it was real. Maybe one of us would change the prophecies and save one of the warriors carrying the gods’ souls. Maybe we could help stop the end of the world, crazy as that sounded.
All I knew was that I wasn’t willing for any of us to die. Mom running off to interfere probably altered all of it—even the prophecy we’d grown up fearing.
A tear slid down Coral’s cheek. I felt her pain in that strange way twins and triplets have of knowing when a sibling is hurting. She lifted her gaze to me, gray eyes shiny. “I can’t believe this is happening.”
Neither could I, but my tongue felt thick and the words stuck in my throat. I pulled my gaze from her and shuffled through the pages, finding story after story about boys with strange abilities or affinities with animals. Mom must have hardly slept recently, must have spent night after night searching the Net. Looking for the boy who would kill one of her daughters.
Going silently mad.
What did she plan to do to him?
I knew when I found the one I was supposed to because the norn inside me shifted again. She was getting more potent. This time she scraped and clawed.
Holding my breath, I worked hard to ignore her and stared at the grainy black-and-white photo of a boy, his longish, light hair in midswing, covering one eye. The photographer had obviously been more interested in the two wolves staring from the forest, half-hidden by the trees. The boy was pointing them back into the woods.
Light of hair. Wolves.
Odin, the Allfather God, had two wolves.
My hands started sweating and I rubbed them on my shorts, noticing that the temperature in the room had dropped enough to make my toes numb. I blew out air, watched it mist. Scrambling to my feet, I shot to the window.
The snow fell in sheets now. White smothered the still-blooming trees and flowers. Would be killing them fast at this rate.
I turned to find both sisters behind me, knew they’d found potential warriors, which could mean the norns wanted us to stop this.
Coral handed me her page and I stared at the picture of a tall guy with crazy-short hair so pale it looked gray in the black-and-white photo. Temper blazed in his eyes, but the hammer in the corner of the piece stilled my heart.
Kat’s boy looked a lot friendlier with an easy smile stretching his lips. This picture was in color. Sunlight sparkled on his light hair—the article was from one of those stupid tabloids and said something about a boy who called rain and made crops grow.
A shiver crawled up my spine when I looked back at the one I’d found. The story was several years old—about a boy and the wolf pups that had followed him home after the accident that killed his parents. I could see they were creatures of magic and that the boy held something powerful. It was there, in the eye not covered by his hair. Vanir McConnell, it said. Norse and Irish.
“Born of two magical clans,” I whispered, thinking of the swirled symbol shared by both.
“That share life’s spiral,” followed Kat.
Coral took her paper back, stared at it as her bottom lip quivered. “Light of head, dark of eyes.”
We didn’t say the rest aloud. We’d always thought it was so stupid.
The young warrior will herald the beginning of Ragnarok. His hand to the death of a norn.
The resulting silence was broken by the sudden violence of the snowstorm. It battered the windows and roof, causing me to clench my teeth.
“We don’t have much time,” I said. “It’ll be hard to travel soon.” I met Kat’s eyes. “We’ll have to use the college money.” They’d been saving, too. None of us wanted to believe our mother’s stories about one of us dying.
Kat crossed her arms, bit her lip. “Probably won’t need it, anyway.”
“We’ll need it,” I insisted. “I won’t accept that. We’ve worked too hard for it—a better life. We’ll just have to replace the money when we can. We’ll still go to college. If this really is Ragnarok and we’re in for three years of winter, it’ll just be cold. Life goes on.”
None of us said what we were probably all thinking. Yes, life would go on, but it was going to be different. Even if the prophecy was wrong and none of us died, the world would be very unlike what it had been. According to the writings on Ragnarok, there would only be one short summer break in those three years of winter. After that? I couldn’t form images in my mind. They all froze my blood. Tidal waves and earth-consuming fire. Even with the magic in my veins, I’d never, ever taken the stories of warring gods seriously. It was too big.
Too scary.
I looked down at the boy in the picture, at his one eye staring at me in an absurd parody of Odin and his one eye. “I’m pretty sure our mother went to find the guy who’s supposed to kill us. But which one?”
Kat voiced my biggest question. “You don’t think she’d actually hurt them, do you?”
Hot tears burned the corners of my eyes but I held them back. “You guys know we can’t let her. If they live to fight and we play our part, one of them could survive and there will be no end of the world.”
Coral sniffed. Tears streaked her cheeks. “We have to stop her. No matter what it could mean.”
We stared silently at one another, each of us knowing what the others were thinking.
I couldn’t worry about dying or losing one of my sisters. We’d never been apart. We fought, sure—all sisters do—but we shared a deeper bond, one forged through years of only having one another in the weirdest of living situations. Out of the three of us, only Coral had braved a date. It was hard to date when your mother thought every potential boyfriend could be a killer. Other than that, only our jobs separated us.
Pathetic? Maybe.
But our purpose had been drilled into us from birth. We carried the norns’ souls, making us the new sisters of fate. We carved the old words in seidr trances and revealed secrets, lies and hopes. And now, we had to find all three potential world-saving warriors because we didn’t know which one Mom had gone after first.
Or what she’d do once she found him.
I risked one hand off the wheel long enough to rub my temple. This anxiety was eating me alive. I’d been driving too long and my head had ached the past twenty-four hours. I missed my sisters. We’d never been apart this long before.
So when the flash of brown stepped in front of my car, I panicked and swerved. The car hit a patch of ice, glanced off a tree and sailed with a groaning, metallic cry right over a ravine and into fast-moving, icy water.
The jarring crash rattled every bone in my body.
Shock froze me for a second or two. Then the terror hit. I screamed as the car floated down the river, slamming into boulders and tree limbs like some tricked-out carnival water slide. My suitcase flew between the bucket seats and hit my shoulder, knocking me into the steering wheel.
Blinking, I wrapped my cold fingers around the wheel until they cramped. I couldn’t see crap! Ride it out or abandon ship? The decision was ripped from me when everything came to a jarring stop.
The car had lodged into...a fallen tree. I took a deep breath. But then the vehicle tilted and my head slammed into the driver’s side window. Metal groaned again. The weight of the car pushed into limbs, causing shrill, screeching noises as they scraped the door.
Freezing water soaked into my jeans and through my T-shirt, ribbed turtleneck and my favorite jean jacket.
Fear, pain and panic create a mess of stupid.
I chucked my ego into the river and started scrambling. Everything was slippery and cold. I shivered, slid and gasped as I tried to right myself in the tilted front seat without standing on the driver’s side window. With teeth chattering and water dripping into my eyes, I searched out a dry spot on my jacket sleeve to wipe them. Water dribbled into my mouth. I caught the metallic taste of blood.
I climbed over the side of the driver’s seat and into the back, trying to brace my feet on anything.
Wrapping my fingers around the metal casing of the broken rear side window, I held on, dangling. Dizziness swept over me and I closed my eyes, trying to wrestle my panic into submission.
I held my eyes tightly closed. Took several deep breaths. When it felt as if the world would stay still again, I opened one eye and pulled myself partly up through the window. The snow pounded, feeling more like ice pellets. They stung my cold cheeks. My breath caught on a sob as the car suddenly lurched, slid a foot or two, then settled into another tree.
That’s when I saw him. Crouch-crawling along that tree. A man. A really big man in a black parka with the hood pulled over his face.
Chapter Two
My heart slammed against my rib cage.
It could have been the cold, or the terror, screwing with my head...or my penchant for scary B movies, but all I could think about were stories about girls who disappear when they’re alone out on the road.
Honestly, facing my death by drowning scared me, but being raped and murdered and left to freeze in the growing piles of snow wasn’t the way I wanted to go, either. My adrenaline spiked. I kept one eye on him and yanked the upper half of my body through the window.
Hell with the tree! I’d jump in the river and swim for it.
“Hang on,” he yelled. “I’ll pull you out!”
“No, thanks,” I shouted back. “I’m good!” I opened my mouth to repeat but choked as a surge of icy river water swept over the car and into my mouth. I spat it out, along with a twig and—oh, gross—something slippery that moved against my tongue. Gagging, I spat again and held on as the flood tried to push me back into the car.
“You’re bleeding a lot, so be still.” The deep voice was right by my head.
Gasping, I turned, swallowing the acid in my throat, not sure where to go. What to do. I was losing it. Hadn’t even realized he’d crawled that close.
“Hey, kid, if I can see the blood in this dark, with all this water, you’ve got a problem. Just stop wiggling so I can get ahold of you.”
“Who’s got ahold of you?” My words slurred and that scared me to death, even as the “kid” thing relieved me a bit. With my black hair cropped close to my head and wet, I probably looked like a twelve-year-old boy who’d stolen his parents’ car. With nasty river water choking me, I probably sounded like one, too.
“I’ve got my boots braced, don’t worry.”
Strong hands wrapped around my upper arms and he tugged me through the window opening. He slid one arm behind my knees. The other went around my shoulders. I stared into the darkness under the hood. It was creepy, like gazing into a black hollow where a face should be.
I felt the effort he put into staying on that huge limb. Every step he took was carefully thought out, strategically placed. “I heard your car go in. Noise travels well out here at night. And with the crazy weather, that little creek isn’t a creek anymore. It’s running deeper and stronger than normal. Does anything feel broken?”
“No. I just hit my head.”
“You were lucky.”
By the time he’d carried me back to solid ground, I felt the cold full-force. Violent shivers racked my body. My head pounded like it had been split. I couldn’t tell if water, snow or blood dripped down my face and I hoped it was the former. It was hard to see, to even keep my eyes open with all the wet stuff gumming them up or slamming into my eyeballs when I left them open. He didn’t stop once we reached the trees. In fact, he picked up the pace.
“My car,” I croaked, my hands sliding on the slippery material of his coat as I tried to clutch it. His jostling made me want to hurl. “Gods! Can you slow down?”
“Sorry. It’s too cold, you’re too wet and your head looks ugly.”
“Thanks.” Sarcasm. I was still capable of sarcasm.
Laughter shook his chest. “I meant the wound. As for the car, we’ll send someone for it after the snow sto—” He broke off. “Someone will come get it later.”
I narrowed my eyes even more with that abrupt cutoff. Did he know it probably wouldn’t stop? I wanted to ask, but my words were taking on separate life, buzzing unsteadily about my brain like furious, drunken bees. I closed my eyes, swallowed and concentrated on staying awake and aware.
He stopped and went quiet.
I gasped and managed to finally grab the slick parka. “Hey—” I snapped my mouth shut as the very wrongness of the moment hit me.
His caution crept into and around me until I could nearly taste the thickness of it on the air. Then I realized it wasn’t caution. It was magic. And with that, my surreal sort of dreamy state crumbled away like burning paper. I fully felt the cold in my lungs. The ache from their effort to continue working. The throbbing in my head. And the panic at the slide of that magic into my pores. Reality returned, as did my adrenaline.
I began to struggle.
He let me slide to my feet, facing away from him, but when my legs wobbled, he pulled me back against him and put one hand gently over my mouth. “Shh,” he whispered into my ear. The thick canopy of leaves over our heads slowed the fall of snow. His breath brushed hot over my cheek, down my neck. I shivered. He tightened his arms. “Someone’s out here. I was looking for a friend of mine who didn’t show at my house. I thought I heard Steven yell right before I heard your crash, so I’m worried someone else is out here, too.”
With his hand over my mouth, I couldn’t ask questions, wasn’t sure I wanted to, anyway. I nodded to let him know I wasn’t panicked now. He removed his hand, but kept his mouth close. I shivered when his breath tickled my ear. “Listen,” he said, more breath than voice.
And I did.
The forest around us joined in the silence, the only noise the patter of snow hitting snow. The occasional moan of wind through the foliage. My gaze swung right and left, the view the same no matter where I looked. Trees, bushes and a vast white that reflected the moon and lit up the night around us.
Standing there, under the treetops, with the forest silent and funereal, was like being cocooned in a world void of wildlife. I knew animals instinctively burrowed in the cold, but to hear nothing moving? This hush combined with the thick stink of magic was anything but ordinary. The air carried the smell of dark things, of twisted fury and evil intent.
And...lavender.
Slumping against him, I closed my eyes and concentrated. A faint humming sounded, a kind of mechanical whine, and it was far enough away not to alarm me much. But the responding thumping of feet hitting ground did. And the fact I could hear this when the ground was padded in snow sent something screaming up my back.
Someone was running hard, and the more attention I paid, the more I could pick out other noises. The runner’s harsh panting, a soft whimper of terror. My eyes flew open. I didn’t understand. Was it really my mom out there? Trying to hurt someone?
I tried to push away from the guy holding me. He merely tightened his arms. “Stop it,” he whispered. “You’re going to pass out. I’ll let you go, but you gotta sit down. There’s a boulder here.” He used one gloved hand to brush snow off the top of the huge rock, then gently lowered me toward it. “I’m Vanir.”
My butt thunked the last foot to the rock. Hard.
What were the odds? Odds, hell! There was no way this was a coincidence. I went light-headed. Nearly lost control of my legs, so I grabbed on to the rock. My wet jeans were already chafing my icy skin, so adding more cold against my butt made me wince.
He squatted in front of me. I sucked in a startled breath when he peeled the wet hood from his head. Scant moonlight touched his features. He wasn’t really a man. I mean, yeah, he was male, but younger than a man yet too old to be a boy. His size and deep voice had fooled me. He had to be at least six feet tall, and even crouched like this he made me feel small.
Not that that was hard considering my five-foot-one height.
But the face that met mine was around my age. Eighteen, maybe. He’d matured since that grainy newspaper photo. Sharp featured in his cheekbones, nose and chin, his face revealed a mixed heritage—like me. His eyes looked dark, though the color was hard to pinpoint in this light. His hair, swept off his forehead, reflected the light of the moon, and what hadn’t been visible in that black-and-white newspaper was the dark gold color.
He stared just as hard at me and those eyes held a maturity his face didn’t.
He smiled and I knew he did it to reassure me, because tension rolled off his body in choking waves. Suddenly, I wasn’t afraid of him. New warmth filled my gut. No, not afraid.
Just. Something. Else.
When he spoke, his voice was barely above a whisper. “My friend Steven was supposed to be at my house earlier. He never showed. His mom said he left a while ago, so I came out here to make sure he was okay.” He pulled off one thick glove and tilted my face into the moonlight, his fingers gentle on my chin.
The heat in his hand made me lean into his touch.
“You okay?” he whispered. Those eyes focused on my wound, but his thumb stroked softly over my chin, close to my bottom lip. “We need to get you looked at. My aunt is a doctor.” He dropped his hands to pull off the other glove before putting the gloves on my hands. That small bit of warmth was so welcome, I shut my eyes to enjoy it.
My eyes flew back open wide when he wrapped his coat around me and pulled my arms through the sleeves.
Some of his body heat was still in the coat, and while that felt good, the pressing of cold wet clothes into my skin didn’t. I said nothing about that. “I can hear your friend running. He sounds scared.”
His hoodie looked thick and mostly dry, though it wouldn’t stay that way long in this snow. I felt bad for taking his coat, but knew without doubt that he wouldn’t take it back.
Vanir stood and whistled softly. “I hate to leave you, but I have to help him and you can’t run. You’ll be okay if we can keep you warm.”
We? I saw the glowing, yellow eyes lock on me before two gray wolves stepped from the trees. They stopped on either side of Vanir. He bent to rub the head of one and a strand of his wheat-colored hair slid forward. His hair was long, shoulder-length at least.
In that instant, I knew I was right where I was supposed to be. Mom had been right about who he was. Right about the prophecies... Was she right about my possible death?
Was Vanir destined to kill me?
That humming filtered through the trees again, and this time the runner did more than whimper—he screamed. One of the wolves growled low in its throat.
Vanir’s hair caught the slivers of moonlight through the leaves as he whipped his head toward that sound. “I have to go. The one with the bent ear is Geri and this one is Freak—they’ll protect you.” He knelt and looked into the eyes of each wolf. “Keep her warm,” he said before loping into the woods.
Somewhere along the way he’d figured out I was a girl. I stared at the wolves, my tongue tied in knots. This was too much of a coincidence. The gods had to have a hand in this. My norn twisted behind my ribs as if she answered.
“Thanks,” I finally whispered. “The trick with the deer sucked. I know you probably hate the creatures because they munched on Yggdrasil and all, but I need my car.”
Vanir had disappeared into the forest, but I heard the slap of his feet on the snow. The wolves stalked toward me. My heart pounded so loud I knew they could hear it, could smell my fear.
One of them looked toward the place where Vanir had gone.
Geri and Freak, he’d said. Odin had run with two wolf companions, Geri and Freki.
Shivers hit me then, and before I could huddle into a ball, both animals crowded around me. Real fear froze me in place and it felt like my eyes were going to pop out of my head. These creatures listened to Vanir, but I was a stranger, nicely marinated in river water. I managed not to whimper when they crushed close, still watching the woods. Despite the pungent odor of wet fur and the absolute terror I had at the thought of relying on wild animals for heat, I sighed at the relief that warmth brought.
I couldn’t stay there, though. “Don’t worry about your friend,” I whispered to the wolves, my voice catching on the pain. Not only the physical, but the mental anguish I barely held tethered. That stupid lavender told me it was really my mother out there.
Scaring someone. Possible hurting them.
I pushed away from the wolves, though the loss of warmth made me clench my teeth. Staring into the trees, I called upon every reserve of strength I had before following.
Chapter Three
I remembered my cell phone as I stepped into the forest. I pulled off Vanir’s too-big gloves and shoved them into the pocket of his coat.
“Please, please...” I muttered, digging the phone out of the front pocket of my wet jeans. Why did jeans always shrink so tightly when wet? My fingers stung they were so cold.
The phone was damp, but the screen came on when I pushed a button. Coral answered on the third ring. “You’re hurt.”
We always knew with one another. I stumbled over something hidden in the snow and caught my hand on the rough bark of a tree. Wincing, I got my balance and curled my sore hand into a fist and pushed it into a pocket. “Gods, Coral, it’s crazy here! I’m in a forest, wet and cold, and get this, I’m walking with wolves.”
“Come again?” Her voice came across tinny—like she was in a tunnel.
I held the phone closer to my ear. “Yeah, wolves. I crashed into a stupid river and now I’m following Vanir—”
“You found him already? Is he it? Can you tell? Does he look like a warrior?” She paused. “Wait, you crashed?”
“Coral, I’m freaking freezing here. I’ll have to call back, but I think Mom is here.” I tripped over a stump this time. I knew it was a stump because my toe hit it hard. My knees crashed into snow just as one of the wolves nudged me and I dropped the phone. The snow stung my hands as I dug for it.
“Raven!”
My fingers were so stiff I could barely hold the phone, but I got it back to my ear as I leaned on a tree to catch my breath. Wet snow on the phone pricked my cheek. “I’m here. Dropped my cell.”
“Why do you think Mom’s there?”
“Because I smell lavender out in the woods in Oklahoma during Snowmageddon.” I took a deep breath. It hurt my lungs. “I’m also lost. I gotta go.”
“But if you smell lavender that means she’s—”
I closed my eyes, squeezed them to try and generate warmth and missed whatever else she said. One of the wolves nudged my side and I jumped. “Yeah, she’s doing some kind of spell. And it’s a doozy if I can smell it when I can’t even hear her.” The wolf poked me with its nose again. “I really do have to go. So cold.”
“Call me back soon, okay?” She sighed loudly. “Just let me know you’re okay. I’ll call Kat.”
“’Kay.” I flipped the phone closed and jammed it back into my jeans.
I wanted to get to Vanir before Mom did, though I still couldn’t believe she’d actually hurt him.
Fury got me moving again. One of the wolves stayed close to my side. It was so tall that I didn’t have to bend to bury my fingers in the warm fur. I should have been more scared of the huge animal, but I wasn’t. Not right then, anyway. “I don’t know if you’re Geri or Freak—which is a really mean name to give such a beauty, by the way—but you guys have to help me. Can you take me to Vanir?”
Yeah, rationally, I knew they couldn’t understand me. The weird, glowing eyes made them supernatural creatures of some sort, but wolves with the ability to decipher human speech? Nah. Still, one bounded a few feet ahead and went stiff, tail straight and horizontal to the ground. It sniffed, so I took a cautious breath, trying not to pull it too deep since my breaths felt more like they pulled in razors rather than air.
I gagged when lavender-tainted magic filled my lungs.
That wolf took off and the other stayed close by my side, surprising me with the amount of warmth it generated every time it brushed my hand or leg. I was glad the other one stopped every so often to turn those glowing eyes in our direction because I couldn’t move very fast now. Exhaustion made my limbs feel like anchors and the pillowy drifts of snow were starting to look more bedlike with each drag of my feet. And though I could smell my mother’s magic, I couldn’t follow it to the source—not even if I wasn’t already disoriented as hell from the bump on my head and the cold.
I wished then that I hadn’t cut my hair—at least it would have kept my ears warm.
Soon, my thoughts turned into jumbled mush as I focused on getting one foot in front of the other. Most of the images tumbling through my mind were of my mother and sisters during a few of the happier times, like the summer we’d crossed a couple of states with a group of people who called themselves Travelers. Took us a while to figure out they were mostly thieves, but the gatherings at night with music and good food had been cool. Or the time we’d stopped at an RV camp and I’d dived off the edge of a small waterfall and hit my head in shallow water. Mom had kept me up all night, afraid I wouldn’t wake if I fell asleep.
She’d always had problems and my sisters and I believed it was because of the prophecy, the running...maybe even our father, who’d abandoned her after their one night together. But I couldn’t wrap my mind around her behavior now. Crazy or not, she’d never left us, and as far as I knew, she’d never hurt anyone. I had such a bad feeling that she was trying to hurt Vanir.
I stumbled again and worked to focus on the problem now. The snow wasn’t that deep here since the trees were close together and their canopies were catching most of it before dumping chunks that created drifts here and there. Every now and then, I heard it spill in heavy thumps to the ground. The lavender smell wafted by again and I stopped, tried to pinpoint its origin. If only I could sniff her out, follow the strength of the nasty flower scent to its source.
A sudden, low cry of anguish pulled me from my lull and I gave up trying to snag a ride on my mother’s magic. Instead, I shot forward, running as fast as I could manage with my body ready to shut down. That sound had come from Vanir. I knew it.
I spotted glowing canine eyes before I realized the wolf had stopped in a clearing. I burst from the trees and promptly tripped over another stump and went right through at least a foot of snow.
This time, the dizziness hit me so hard I could only roll onto my spine and shut my eyes. My back stung as the snow seeped under Vanir’s coat. The world spun around me like I was caught in the center of a tornado and I moaned when one of the wolves nudged my leg off the stump or log or whatever.
Then I realized it was too soft for a log.
I reached down, feeling around until my hands closed over denim—wet, freezing denim that obviously covered a human form.
“Oh, no,” I whispered on a choked sob. “Oh, please, no.” I rolled over and got onto my hands and knees. “Hey. Are you okay?” The dark coat had me nearly freaking out until I realized it wasn’t a sweatshirt with a hood.
It wasn’t Vanir.
But my heart caught for whoever this was. Moonlight reflected in the empty gaze of one dark eye, in the strands of snow-dusted blond bangs over his other eye. A boy who favored Vanir only in coloring. I looked for a wound, anything, but it was too dark to tell what had happened to him. Everything was too wet.
CPR! He needed CPR. My hands shook so hard I could barely get them on his chest.
I didn’t hear Vanir approach. When his palm rested on my shoulder, I sucked in a breath, my head jerking up.
“It’s too late.” His voice broke, the sound of grief gravelly on his tongue. “I already tried that.” He fell to his knees next to me. “Whoever killed him is long gone or the wolves would be running after him.”
Or her. Oh, gods, or her! I sagged back to the ground. Killed him? A roaring filled my ears. Blackness edged my vision and I squeezed my eyes shut tight. The urge to scream my own grief raged in my throat. I couldn’t understand.
Cold that had nothing to do with my surroundings swamped my body like an arctic wave. The world swirled around me much like it did during my rune tempus, but this was something entirely different. This was me, dealing with the soul-changing second, the slicing knowledge that nothing would ever be the same now.
I blinked into the darkness of the forest as I bit down hard on my lip to keep in the keening wail flooding my throat.
If I’d driven down here sooner... If I’d searched out Vanir before the idea had come to her...
Opening my eyes, I stared at the boy on the ground. Steven, Vanir had called him. His life was over and I was scared to death that my mother might have been the one to take it.
Vanir stared at his friend, face slack with shock. “I don’t see a mark on him. I need my cell phone.”
“Maybe he fell and hit his head?” Even as I said it, the cold, black heartbreak crawling through my chest branded me a liar. I sat up and dug into my pants for the cell phone. The sharp stinging in my fingers and the icy tight jeans had me blinking back frustrated tears. “You can call 9-1-1 from my phone.”
He took it. “Thanks. I’ll call...” His voice trailed off and his face crumbled. “We’ve been friends since the first grade.”
“I’m so sorry.”
He blinked at me as if trying to bring me into focus. “I’ll call my uncle. He’s the sheriff.” Vanir dialed, then cursed and looked at the phone. “No signal. I always get a signal up here.”
“I just called my sister. It worked then.” I took the phone, looked at the lack of signal bars. I didn’t know what to say. Didn’t matter. Nothing I said would help him or make this any easier. Everything took on a surreal flavor again, like I floated outside of the situation, watching it from a place where I could deal with the tangled emotions ripping me up. I looked at my hands, surprised they’d stopped shaking.
Funny, I was still cold.
When I went suddenly airborne, I yelped, “Hey! I can walk.” I grabbed his shoulder with one hand, the other clutching my phone.
He’d taken two steps, but he stopped to look down at me. “You’ve had it. Adrenaline is probably all that’s keeping you going. I’m scared hypothermia is setting in. Your hands were shaking—then they stopped. That’s bad. Where’d you put those gloves?”
“I forgot. Stuck them in the pockets.” Stretching my neck to see over his shoulder, I stared in the direction of his friend. I didn’t want to leave him alone in the woods. On the wet ground with snow covering him. It seemed so wrong.
And the guilt eating at me should have been my mother’s.
“What about him?” I whispered.
“We can’t move him. It’s a crime scene, which means we don’t want to be out here, anyway. I’ll get the sheriff, come back here—” He broke off, his arms tightening around me almost painfully.
His anguish tore through my heart. “Why don’t I wait by him? The wolves can keep me warm again. You can get the authorities and I could make noise to lead you back.”
The moonlight showed me the slight upward tilt of his mouth. A smile that tried to break through his grief and failed. “I know exactly where he is. Spent most of my life running this forest with Geri and Freak. And Steven.”
I shivered. Took that as a good sign.
He tightened his arms. Heat poured from him. Pain and cold had scrambled my brain, but I could swear something else seeped into me. A hint of relief from the pain in my head, like a sneaky narcotic attached to his warmth.
Nerves zinged with the effort it took to hold in my grief. I’d really hoped we’d been wrong—that Mom hadn’t come here to hurt someone.
Kat and Coral were going to be devastated. Pain washed over me again and I didn’t say anything else. Couldn’t. I still didn’t know for sure. Maybe I’d hallucinated the lavender scent.
He didn’t talk, either, as he carried me to his house. His anger and confusion was so thick I could taste it. I had nothing to offer him, not when I was such a mess myself. We passed through a few more thick stands of trees, crossed a clearing, and once he had to turn and take a new route. I kept my eyes closed throughout most of it, trying hard to conserve what little warmth I had left without sucking all his away.
“My house is up this driveway. It’s just me and my brothers.”
I felt the moonlight on my face before I opened my eyes to see we’d cleared the trees and were now on a gravel road. I turned my head to get my first glimpse of his home. It was hard to make out the exact shape of the house since it was nestled deep into the trees, but I could tell it was two-story and either white or some light tan color. A porch ran the length of the first floor with an old-fashioned white railing. The eight front-facing windows all blazed yellow. Smoke poured from the chimney and television noise blared through the screen door as the front door opened.
Vanir’s shoes made very little sound as he climbed the four steps leading to the porch.
“Wait,” I said, pushing on his chest and wiggling my legs so he’d let me go. He did, keeping his hands on my arms until I could stand. The dizziness was thankfully gone, though the throbbing in my head still blazed strong. My teeth had started chattering again.
Some of the light streaming from the house cut off as a tall body filled the doorway. “Vanir? Did you find Steven?”
Vanir nodded, lips pinched. His grief cut into me so strongly I couldn’t stop the breathy moan that escaped my throat.
The screen door creaked when Vanir pulled it open. “Come on,” he said to me. “We need to get you warm. This is my brother Ari.”
Ari stepped onto the porch and the light fell on his face. He favored Vanir in the shape of his mouth, nose and chin, but he had hair like mine, so dark a brown it was nearly black. He had more of it, though, from what I could tell with it tied back from his face. I wondered if, like my branch of Norse ancestors, his had settled in to mix with the locals. He didn’t look much older than Vanir.
Vanir touched his brother’s arm. “She’s hurt and needs to see Sarah.”
“She?” Ari chuckled and stepped to the side so I could pass. “Only you would find a girl in the woods.”
“Her car’s in the new river.”
“New river?” One black eyebrow lifted high.
“The crazy weather changed things up a bit around here.”
Ari leaned close, his gaze zeroing in on the throbbing part of my head. I was guessing there was a nice, fat lump there now. “Better get her inside,” he murmured.
Vanir held out his hand for me.
I didn’t hesitate, just placed my cold hand in his. This time, it wasn’t my imagination. Comfort flowed along my skin, seeped into my pores.
He tugged on my hand, pulled me toward the front door. “You haven’t told me your name.”
Vanir rubbed his thumb over my wrist. The fluttering in my gut went wild. I followed as he pulled me through the door into a brightly lit room that made me squint after being in the dark so long. Instant heat nearly sent me to the floor in relief, the smell of wood smoke strong, welcome.
Another man who looked a lot like Ari, but older, sat on a red plaid couch, his cast-clad foot propped on a battered wood coffee table. He looked up when I came in, eyes narrowing.
“Your name?” Vanir prompted.
“Sorry. It’s Raven. Raven Lockwood.”
The brother on the couch sat up; his cast-clad foot hit the floor. Hard. Vanir stopped abruptly and I ran into him before he turned and grabbed my shoulders. “Did you really just say your name is Raven?”
Startled, I didn’t answer at first.
Ari stepped past us and carefully set his brother’s cast back on the scarred surface of the coffee table, which looked like it had been dragged behind a pickup. “So...not only did little brother find himself a girl, but a trickster, too.”
Chapter Four
Despite the promise of more bone-chilling cold, I stepped back toward the door. In my world, magic was reality, so even though I’d never encountered any, mind readers could exist. That was the last thing I needed—for these guys to know how not completely honest I was being.
Vanir glared at Ari. “Don’t mind him—he’s taken one knock too many playing football.”
“What?” Chuckling, Ari plopped onto the couch. “You’ve never heard the stories about the bird? Like the one about the raven who stole the sun?”
“Yeah, I’ve heard them. Didn’t that raven end up sharing the light with the world?” I wasn’t sure it was the same story, but didn’t really care. The cold had reached bone depth at this point and the effort to keep my teeth from clacking loudly made my jaw ache. Crossing my arms, I winced when my freezing, wet clothes made a loud sploshing sound. I looked at Vanir. “Why are you reacting to my name like that? It’s not like you don’t have weird names yourselves.”
He gave me a rueful smile that pursed the lips to one side. “Our mother was Scandinavian. The brother on the couch? He’s the oldest and he got the worst name, Hallur.”
Hallur lifted an eyebrow, but then he shrugged and nodded in agreement.
Vanir grabbed a huge blue towel from a pile of unfolded laundry on a red ottoman in front of the fireplace and handed it to me.
I buried my face in the warm cotton, glad it was a dark color so the blood from my head wouldn’t stain it. The heat felt so good I wanted to jump into that pile of fire-warmed laundry. Then I was happy my face was covered because Vanir took a deep breath and I knew what he was about to tell them.
“Something happened to Steven. I think someone was chasing him—I got distracted when I heard Raven’s car crash, but when I finally caught up to him, it was too late.”
The cast thumped to the floor again. “What do you mean, too late?” Hallur demanded.
“I mean, he’s dead.” Vanir’s voice shook on the last word.
I lowered the towel even though the last thing I wanted was to be in this room and seeing their expressions right now.
Hallur tried pulling himself up. Sweat broke on his face with the effort and I wondered how fresh his break was. He smacked the arm Ari used to push him back down. “Dead? What do you mean, dead? How?”
“I don’t know how, but we need to call Uncle Willy now. I’ll change into dry clothes and take him back there.” Vanir pulled off his wet sweatshirt and threw it onto the brick hearth. He didn’t seem to care that I was watching as he hauled up a clean red towel and wiped his chest. He had those intriguing lines along his ribs, defined abs. But his expression kept my attention. Now that we were out of the cold—temporarily—and not fighting snow, the truth about his friend had to be hitting him hard. He kept his gaze off me, but his grief was there in the cut of his lips, the lift of his eyebrows.
Swallowing the hard lump of sympathy clogging my throat, I forced myself to look down, dismay filling me when I saw the puddle I was making on the floor. I immediately knelt with the towel.
“I’ll get that. Here are some dry clothes you can use.” Vanir stood over me with a pair of black sweatpants and a white long-johns top. He turned back to his brothers. “I tried CPR, didn’t know what else to do.” The raw torment that passed through his eyes brought that lump back into my throat. He was holding off his misery with barely leashed control. “I hated leaving him there, but I had to get her out of the cold.”
Hallur scraped his hand along his jaw. A log in the fireplace crackled loudly as he winced and shifted, a confused frown darkening his tanned face. “Did it look like he fell? Hit his head? Was there blood?”
Vanir shook his head. “He was just lying there, staring at the sky. But I heard him running—I’m sure someone was after him.”
“But who...and in this weather? Hell, most of the town has shut down. People are hibernating—they put off opening the school. We got the call tonight.” He shut his eyes. “I don’t believe this. Steven was only seventeen.”
Ari abruptly stood and strode past me to open the closet next to the front door, his lips pinched. He pulled out a thick coat, grabbed two flashlights and handed one to Vanir. Hallur picked up the cell phone next to him and started dialing.
“Call Sarah, too.” Vanir set the flashlight on the coffee table and pulled a blue sweatshirt from the pile of clothes. “Raven needs her head checked.”
I cleared my throat and carefully did not look at any of them too long. I didn’t really think they could read my mind, but I knew I couldn’t keep the guilt off my face. My mother might have done this played liked a jammed track in my mind. “I don’t need a doctor. If it would be okay, can I borrow these clothes and maybe have someone drive me to—” I broke off. To where? I had no money, nothing. Everything was in my car.
Vanir tucked a strand of hair behind his ear in a gesture that should have looked feminine, yet didn’t. He still held his sweatshirt bunched in his hand. “Bet your purse or wallet is somewhere in the river. You can stay here. We’ll try to get your stuff tomorrow.”
Ari stood by the door, expression grim. “Take me to Steven, Vanir.”
“No.” All our attention snapped back to the oldest brother when he barked out the order. One word and everything came to a stop. “Wait for the sheriff before you go back.” He pointed to Vanir. “I want to talk to you. Alone.”
He started pushing himself to his feet and his grimace, sweaty face and relatively clean cast told me the break was new. I stood, clutched the towel. “Please. Stay. I’ll go change.” I lifted an eyebrow at Vanir. My hands shook with cold again and I wanted the wet stuff off. But I also desperately needed a couple of minutes to myself, away from prying eyes. I was swallowing back so many emotions—fear, worry, shock...not to mention the squirm-inducing embarrassment of being completely helpless here without my money, clothes and car—they all had my stomach cramping.
He tilted his head to get me to follow, placed his hand on my lower back as I passed. Again, I felt that strange comfort seep from his touch and I raised startled, wide eyes to him only to find his narrowing at me.
The slight drop in temperature when we reached the hall started up my shivering again. Warmth seeped slowly from Vanir’s hand before he reached into the bathroom to flip on the light. He held the door open.
“Do you want to take a shower?” he asked.
I did, but not here. Not in this strange house full of men. “Just the dry clothes will be enough. Thanks.”
I locked the door behind him with my cold, shaking fingers before all my pent-up emotion rushed to the surface. I sagged over the black counter, my knuckles hurting with the effort it took to hang on to the edge. Eyes closed, I fought off panic.
Summer snow.
Mom’s hexing spell.
Murder.
I couldn’t stop the acid as it rushed up my throat. I turned, saw the lid was already up on the toilet and fell to my knees as I lost the peanut butter sandwich I’d eaten in my car earlier.
Resting there a moment, I worked to get myself under control, taking deep breaths, gagging on my own nasty saliva. I needed more than a few stolen moments alone in a bathroom so badly. I flushed the toilet, lurched back to the sink and hoped they wouldn’t mind that I opened a drawer and borrowed some toothpaste. I was not going out there with vomit breath.
I spat, ran water in the sink and lifted my gaze to the mirror. Despite the new scratches on my skin, I looked like me. Same narrow face, same gray eyes, same short, black hair. But everything, everything, felt different. Nothing about my life would ever be the same again and Mom...
The norn moved in my chest and instead of the usual shift or stretch, this felt like a swoop. I choked and the room started a slow spin around me. The white walls and black countertop smeared and lengthened, turning to zebra stripes. Still nauseated, I closed my eyes, flattened my palm over my stomach.
And then I realized what was happening and my wide, freaked-out gray eyes showed in the melting mirror.
“Oh, gods!” I whispered. “Not now, not here!”
I don’t know which gods I sent the plea to—which one was responsible for this stupid curse, which one had put this...this being inside me, but he or she didn’t listen. Never listened.
Everything spun faster and faster, until the bathroom’s stark color scheme became one swirling mass of spirals. It was like being in the center of a target sign. I didn’t have the strength for this. Not now. A loud sob escaped my throat, my face jerking toward Vanir’s voice as he pounded on the bathroom door.
That couldn’t be right. Alone, my sisters and I always went into our rune tempus alone!
Normally, I only heard my heart pounding like a base drum in my head, my blood rushing through my veins, pumping life around my eardrums. Coral described it once as being inside a seashell. It was hell on earth. I was never more aware of the fragility of life than in the beginning and end of my rune tempus. And the worst part? The helplessness. The complete inability to resist whatever power overtook me and made me write, or carve...or burn.
Vanir grunted outside the door and must have slumped against it because it rattled hard.
Exhausted, I collapsed to the floor.
The spinning shuttered to a halt. In here nothing looked different. But out there, the McConnells would be living statues, men frozen in time along with the rest of the world. The first time this had happened to me, I’d been standing at a chalkboard when the green had suddenly looked like it had turned soft, melting into goo before sweeping to the side. I’d clutched the chalk tray with frantic fingers and held on throughout. When it stopped, I’d turned to find all the other kids in class staring, locked into place. They’d looked dead. All I remember after that was whimpering, crawling under the teacher’s desk, and the hellacious fight later when Mom caught that teacher digging her sharp fingernails into my shoulders while shaking me in the hallway.
It was why Mom homeschooled us after that. If one of us went into the rune tempus and moved before we came out, others would only see me or one of my sisters blink from one spot to another. The world stopped only for the sister who went into it. Mom had never hidden the fact we carried norn souls from us, but even she hadn’t known about this weird time-stopping thing that forced us to write prophetic runes. Kat’s showed the future, Coral’s the present and mine, which came from the oldest of the norn sisters, shared the past. Mine was pretty much useless. It explained a few things sometimes, but mostly showed me things I couldn’t change.
That day in school, I’d revealed my teacher’s past affair with the principal. She wouldn’t have known it if Kat hadn’t marched into the class and read the Norse runes out loud.
Groaning, I blinked away the awful memory and moved my hand, encountering fuzz. I stared, confused by the blur of black fluff in front of my eyes before wrinkling my nose at a sudden tickle. I sneezed. When the world came back into focus, I realized I was lying on my side, on a thick, black bath rug. I never knew how much time I’d get—I didn’t control this, she did. And she wasn’t patient. So I grabbed the brass cabinet knob. I opened the door and used it for leverage.
“Please don’t break, please don’t break,” I murmured before grasping the lip of the counter and pulling myself to my feet. I reached into my back pocket for my notebook with its attached short pen. That’s when I remembered. I’d set it on the seat next to me.
In. My. Car.
Thick fear tightened my chest. My heart pounded hard. Visions of my rune-filled, purple notebook floating down that river went through my head right before the burning in my hands started.
“No.” Fingers tingling, I yanked open the drawer and pawed through the contents. A pen and paper in the bathroom would be the norm at my home—we stashed them everywhere—but most people didn’t think of a bathroom for writing. There was a packet of razors but no shaving cream, which would have worked. There were nail clippers, extra toothbrushes, and I frowned in confusion at the huge pack of batteries. None of this would help me. The sting in my fingers grew worse, so I grabbed the toothpaste again. It would work. The rune tempus stopped for nothing, and if I didn’t have something to write with, it would make me burn the symbols into the wall behind me. With my fingers. It had happened that way for Kat once. She had no fingerprints on two fingers now.
Hands shaking, I twisted off the lid and squirted a huge glob on the counter. I swooped up some onto my finger and held it to the mirror just as my muscles went rigid and she took over my body. I hated this, hated the acrid resentment that tasted like rust on my tongue, hated the loss of control...hated the constant fear that one day she’d just decide to keep me. My back snapped straight, my legs locked so hard my knees made a loud cracking sound. I stood inflexible and unable to function on my own. Every fiber of my being was under her control as I watched her raise my toothpaste-covered fingers to the mirror.
This was why Mom had yanked us from school.
The reason we got fired from more jobs than I could count.
The reason Coral was fragile, Kat always pissed.
The reason I was afraid to date.
My hand moved of its own volition and I became the messenger. The passenger. The witness.
The freaking tool.
The toothpaste oozed down the mirror, but the norn wanted the runes completely legible. My hand shook with exhaustion, yet it went down for more paste, then up to draw. Down, then up to fill in the symbols more, over and over until tears streaked down my cheeks. She couldn’t control those and I couldn’t stop them—they were the only sort of release I could get during this. I was finishing the last symbol when there was a thud against the bathroom door. It flew open and slammed into the wall.
Vanir came barreling through the door and the utter shock that ripped through me did what I’d never been able to do before. It stopped me from making the symbols. Rigid muscles went suddenly loose and I sagged. Vanir caught me, but he wasn’t looking at me. He was staring at the symbols on the mirror.
“‘In violence conceived,’” he breathed, hands tightening on my arms.
“You—” My voice caught. I choked. The rune tempus not only wore me out, it sucked me dry. It used every resource I had and left me needing a refill. I tried to work up some spit, had to talk.
His face was pale, brown eyes wide with shock, red streaking the white part. He looked over his shoulder and I wanted to close my eyes at the utter panic and terror that had pulled his features tight. “Something’s really wrong with my brothers.”
Outside, Geri and Freak howled, the sound raising all the fine hairs on my body. My eyes flew open wide and I clutched at him. The wolves shouldn’t be moving, either. Shouldn’t be able to make sound. I looked up at Vanir, who stared at me like I was something he’d found crawling on his shoe. Pain slashed into my chest.
I’d always, always, been alone for this—not even my sisters shared this space with me. I swallowed again, bit my cheek, hoping for moisture. “Give your brothers a couple of minutes—they’ll be okay.”
His gaze slid back to the mirror. “What’s going on?” He lifted me and set me on the counter. I winced when the toothpaste glob squished under my still-wet clothes. He pointed to the symbols on the mirror. “How do you know those words?
I flinched when he brought his face even with mine, eyes narrowed, nostrils flaring—his mouth in a tight, furious line.
“You know my people’s words,” he repeated, voice low. “You know the runes. Why? And what the hell have you done to my brothers?”
Chapter Five
Shock kept me silent for a few seconds. All I heard was the harsh pounding of my racing heart echoed by the howl of agitated wolves. I latched on to his arms, fingers tight on hard biceps. It had taken me forever to get those words right with gloppy toothpaste. “Where were you standing when this happened? We’ve only got a few minutes!” Yeah, I yelled, sounded crazy frantic, but I didn’t care in that moment.
He flinched in surprise, blinked at me. He’d been all about the intimidation and here I was. Screaming in his face.
I shook him. Or tried to. He was built like a tree. Instead, I dug my fingernails into tight muscle and skin, probably drawing blood because he hadn’t put on a shirt yet. “Dammit, tell me where you were standing when the room started spinning! You have to go back there now! Time will go back to normal—your brothers’ll see you’ve moved!”
“Stop yelling!” Vanir grabbed my hands. “I was in the hall, out of sight. Heard you getting sick, so I was going to offer you some water.”
Relief swamped me. I sagged, nearly falling off the counter. He steadied me, leaving his hands on my shoulders. Big, heavy, warm. That weird comfort came from his palms, his touch. I narrowed my eyes. “What are you doing with your hands?”
He didn’t answer immediately, wasting the precious few seconds we had before the worst part of the rune tempus hit. His hands tightened. “You can feel that? I knew something was different about you.” He nodded toward the toothpaste runes, his hair sliding across his chin. “I’m not entirely sure what I’m doing, but I want to know what those—”
He broke off as the room began the slow spin, his dark eyes widening, his nostrils flaring...his hands tightening even more. “Not again,” he muttered, broken suffering giving his tone a low, gravelly sound.
Streams of pain slithered into my shoulders beneath each of his fingers. I put my hands on him, not even thinking about where. My palms slid over his bare stomach. A part of me, the part grasping for anything normal in this surreal situation, took note of how warm he was, how smooth his skin felt under my fingertips.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “There’s no time to explain, but you can’t say anything to your brothers. Promise me!”
Vanir swayed, closed his eyes. His groan vibrated under my hands.
“Promise me!” I screamed as the blood began to pulse in my ears.
“Okay, okay! Hell!” He gritted his teeth, eyes slitting open as they started to roll back in his head.
I cupped his cheeks to get him to look at me. “Hold on to the door or the counter or something. Focus on something else. Anything! It’ll help.” Not that he could. I mean, how could he? He had no idea what was going on and the rune tempus was scary as hell.
Shock lashed through my heart when his arms slid around me. He pulled me close, sliding my butt along the counter until our upper bodies were plastered together.
I didn’t mean me. I’d meant something sturdy.
But it was too late.
The room picked up speed. I closed my eyes and wrapped my arms around his back, smashing my cheek against the hot, hard muscles of his chest. I only had enough time to wish I could enjoy the way he felt before the world took off.
Faster. And faster. Black counters, shower curtain and rug blurring into the rest of the white room, slimming into lines. A swirling of dark and light that spun around and around until it felt like it pulled at limbs, tried to tug me into the abyss. And for the first time in my life, I wasn’t going through this alone. I hated that he felt this terror, but some small part of me reveled in having someone to hold on to.
I pressed into his chest. His hands dug into my back. He bowed his head, burying his face in my hair—the moan that rumbled from his throat slid under my skin to scrape my conscience raw. “I’m so sorry, so sorry,” I whispered, repeating the words over and over, my lips against his skin. I knew what he was feeling.
The effort it took to stand still.
The painful grip as you held on to something for dear life.
And in every single breath, the sucking, sickening terror that if you let go, you’d go flying into the surrounding vortex, screaming like a banshee as the world disappeared.
He swayed again. I was used to this and it nearly killed me every time. He started to sag and I squeezed him hard. He grunted, though I couldn’t have caused much pain. I wrapped my legs around him to help keep him steady on his feet.
It didn’t occur to me what this would do to our lower bodies.
I went hot. Everywhere. His back went rigid. He pulled back to look down at me and I realized I’d picked the only sure way to distract a guy. His mouth was a heartbeat from mine, his breath caressing my face.
Fire crawled up my neck. I bit my lip when I saw the answering flare of heat in his dark eyes. I gasped, my mouth falling open.
He swooped in and I let him.
Anticipation fluttered in my belly as his lips pressed mine. His hands flattened on my spine before sliding down to grip my waist. He pulled away, glittering eyes staring at me, one of his hands gliding up to wrap the back of my neck. Warm fingers slipped into my short hair. I tilted my head and this time he opened my lips with his, slipping his tongue inside my mouth. I had a second to be glad I’d swished some toothpaste in my mouth when the world around us literally jerked to a stop.
Vanir wrenched away, his hands coming up to make sure I didn’t fall even as he did. His legs wobbled as he took one step back and then another before he fell through the open doorway.
His slam into the wall rattled the entire hallway. He sagged to the floor, his face pasty, sweat in a fine sheen over his cheeks and forehead. I scrambled off the counter, followed and shut the bathroom door so nobody saw the runes before I could clean them off. I knelt beside him. He stared at me through barely cracked lids, his features slack with disorientation. “Pointy,” he slurred. “When I first came in...your face...was pointy.”
“Huh?”
He frowned and reached up to touch my chin.
Ari hustled into the hall. Hallur cursed loudly from the other room. “What happened?” he yelled. There was a thunderous groan, a thump. More curses.
“He fell,” I croaked. I bent over Vanir, hiding my shaking hands by slipping them under his head to adjust his neck to a better angle. “I got sick,” I added, looking up at Ari. I hoped that explained the dry croak of my voice. “I think he was checking on me and must have tripped.”
“Probably on his own feet since he’s not done growing into them yet.” Ari squatted next to me and I glanced up to find his gaze on my arms because I was unable to mask their trembling. “Let me take care of him. You’re still wet and need to get into dry clothes. I hear Aunt Sarah pulling up now.
So could I, now that he’d pointed it out. With the fire crackling, the brothers talking and snow pelting the window of the kitchen just down the hall, I was surprised I could hear the engine.
“Diesel,” he said as if he could read my mind. “She’s a doctor, does a lot of house calls for the family, so she needed a four-wheel drive—good thing now with all that snow, isn’t it?”
I started to nod and pain reminded me of the lump on my head. The episode in the bathroom had completely distracted me from all the discomfort, but the rune tempus had soaked up the last of my energy and the aches came roaring back to life. It felt like someone had stuffed me in a giant hamster ball and tossed me down a rocky incline. A long one.
Glancing one more time at Vanir, I saw that he was more awake than before, anger simmering in his gaze, fueling questions I would have to come up with a way to answer. I let go, wincing with him when I dropped his head back onto the hardwood floor.
“Sorry,” I murmured. Looked like I would be saying that to him a lot.
Ari pulled me to my feet and I offered him a quick smile before opening the door to the bathroom just enough to slide quickly through. On the mirror, the runes were thick—I’d used the entire large tube of toothpaste.
“‘In violence conceived,’” I whispered, finally focusing on the actual words now that the shock of Vanir joining my rune tempus wasn’t in my face. Digging through my exhaustion, I tried to find a memory that would explain this. My rune tempus hardly ever gave me anything useful, but this...this felt infinitely important. Probably because my churning gut was telling me this was about me and my sisters. But wrapping my mind around the horrific explanation buzzing about my subconscious couldn’t happen right now.
A noise outside the bathroom only proved that true. I shoved it aside for later, and as quietly as possible I opened drawers until I found one with towels.
But how would I explain squirting all their toothpaste into a towel?
Instead, I opened the cabinet under the sink and snatched a new toilet paper roll. I started tearing off paper and swiping the drying paste. I had to wet a lot of the paper and the streaks left on the mirror panicked me until I remembered a bottle of Windex next to the toilet paper stash.
With the Windex, it went faster. Sort of. Toilet paper left little annoying flakes. When the mirror finally sparkled, I flushed some of the paper down the toilet, then crumpled the rest as small as I could and pushed it down into the trash.
I looked at the scratches covering my face. I’d barely realized they were there because the main wound was so painful. The cold probably numbed me because I hadn’t even felt them. Running my finger along a particularly nasty cut across my forehead, I winced when it ended at the most tender spot on my head. A lump raised the skin slightly.
My hair was something else. I liked the gelled, spiky look I usually wore, but this? Looked like I’d given up shampoo altogether. Stubby tangles twisted together on my head like a nest of dirty snakes. Stubby, growth-challenged snakes.
Hard to believe Vanir wanted to kiss this.
I touched my lips, stunned again over how he’d felt. Tasted. Squirming at the memory, I pulled off my jacket, turtleneck and T-shirt. Even my plain white bra was stained from the nasty river water. But I left it on. Going braless in a thin top was so not happening.
Getting my jeans off took a lot longer. They’d stuck to my body. By the time I slid into the huge drawstring sweatpants and long white shirt, all I wanted to do was curl up on the bath rug and sleep. Shut this world out for a little while, because exhaustion tugged at my every muscle and bone, threatening to shut me down.
Glancing around the bathroom, I gathered the still-wet clothes into a ball and tiptoed into the hall. The hardwood froze my bare feet. The legs of the sweats flopped over my toes as I stood indecisive in the hall.
I heard them in the kitchen, whisper-arguing.
Holding my breath, I took a few steps closer, as silently as I could. Should have felt bad for eavesdropping, but I didn’t. I was going to have to come clean. Tell them about my mother. I couldn’t let that boy’s family deal with years of unanswered questions on top of their grief.
But...she was still my mother. Still the same woman who used to squeeze me tight and sing silly, made-up lullabies. The one who’d become so enraged by a teacher daring to hurt one of her daughters, she’d studied schoolwork right along with us so she could teach us well. There’d been good times between all the manic ones. She deserved for me to make sure I was certain before throwing her in front of the bus.
I stepped closer to the door opening, gripping the clothes so hard the wet material soaked into my borrowed clothes.
Vanir suddenly snapped in a fierce undertone. “Think about it! The raven is sacred. My birthday is two days away and she shows up now?”
“That’s just it.” Hallur’s voice was nearly a growl. “We don’t even know what’s supposed to happen on your birthday and now a boy is dead. He won’t be the first and you know it. So a distraction right now—”
“She’s a girl, not a distraction.”
The humor in the next tone let me know it was Ari. “All girls are distractions.”
There was a loud thump. Sounded like the cast again. Hallur’s anger coated his voice like molasses, making it slow, the words heavy. “The raven is a sign of war. They come to feed upon the dead.”
Vanir sighed. “So do the wolves, Hallur.”
“Yes, and the time of the wolves could be here. We’ve known this from the moment Geri and Freak followed you home as puppies. And now someone has been killed? Snow is swallowing the world? You think this is coincidence?”
“I don’t know.” Vanir’s voice, heavy with grief and indecision, burned my already roiling stomach.
“Listen, Vanir.” This from Hallur again. “Something about this girl makes the hair on my neck stand up. I want her gone.”
“I can’t.” Vanir’s voice was so low I barely heard the two words.
“What do you mean, you can’t?” Hallur’s tone turned even more fierce and guttural.
There was a long silence in the room.
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Rinda Elliott
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Детская проза
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: It is written that three Sisters of Fate have the power to change the world’s destiny. But only if they survive….The Lockwood triplets have had the prophecy drummed into their heads since birth. Still, Raven, the eldest of the sisters, can’t believe it’s really happening. She’s the reincarnation of a Norse goddess? One of the sisters is destined to die? When it starts snowing in summer in Florida, the sisters fear the worst has come to pass. Ragnarok, the Norse end of the world, has begun.Raven finds herself the secret protector of Vanir, a boy with two wolves, a knowledge of Norse magic, and a sense of destiny he can’t quite explain. He’s intense, sexy, and equally determined to save her when it becomes clear someone is endangering them. Raven doesn’t know if getting closer to him will make a difference in the coming battle, but her heart isn′t giving her a choice.Ahead of the sisters is the possibility of death at the hand of a warrior, death by snow, death by water, or death by fire…Or even from something else…Sisters of Fate: The prophecy doesn′t lie: One is doomed to die.