Winter Lost

If this had been yesterday, John Hunter would have wondered how Ymir knew so much when Gary would have been in no condition to tell him anything. But it was not yesterday, and the frost giant was not Loki or Freya to pick information out from what was not said.

Hrímnir listened.

“They are coming, brother mine. Do not underestimate them.”

He set down the phone as Ymir’s words slid through him like poison.

His dog, who had been faithfully sitting at his feet, whined uneasily. But the dog had always been smart. Smarter than his master.

John Hunter died in the molten heat of Hrímnir’s fury—because anger was better than sorrow. Than pain. It felt good to give in to his rage.

“You want to go?” Hrímnir said, knowing his voice was nasty. He opened the door and let the growing wind and snow blow into the cabin with its false sense of home. With its vanishing warmth.

The dog cowered from his wrath—and the storm filling Hrímnir’s veins and bones insulated him from shame. Of everyone in this tale, the dog was the most innocent.

“Go, then,” he thundered. “It won’t save them.”

The dog ran from him into the forest outside as Hrímnir called winter’s wrath to the world.

6

Mercy

Wind-borne magic filled my lungs and covered my skin. As if it were oxygen, it filled my muscles and lit me from the inside out. I couldn’t see, couldn’t feel, couldn’t breathe, suspended in a whiteout of icy power.

Adam’s voice centered me and I clutched at it, even as the magic fought to drag me free, drag me into the wind.

Something changed, a channel narrowed and closed. Abruptly, I was back inside my body, curled into the warmed seat of Adam’s SUV. The window I’d opened was closed. I let the empty cup fall onto the floor.

“Mercy,” Adam demanded. “What happened?”

“At a guess,” I croaked, all but crawling across the center console until my forehead found the heat of his shoulder, “Ymir may have told us the truth. It feels to me as if there might be an immortal frost giant helping this storm along. It tastes like the same magic that has my brother. And finally, I am now officially not angry that you abandoned the pack and your business to come with me.”

Winter roads are treacherous.

“That bad?” he asked.

“I have never felt anything like that,” I answered, opening the bond between us as wide as I ever had, just so I could surround myself with him. So that I wasn’t alone with the memory of that magic that had come very close to remaking me.

My husband’s warm hand came off the steering wheel and wrapped around the side of my face. The scary magic was still out there. But Adam was my lodestone. With a touch he made me feel centered. Not safe. There was nothing safe in a world that contained Bonarata. But he gifted me with his confidence, his support, and his belief that I could handle things.

All of that without saying a word.

It was a brief moment of relief, though. He had to put his hand back on the steering wheel. I was raised in the Montana mountains and lived in the capital of freezing rain, and these were the worst roads I’d ever been on. When the truckers quit driving, it was seriously bad.

“You closed the window, right?” I asked.

He nodded.

I peered out of the car to the forests, where the snow had buried everything except for the evergreens under a white blanket. The storm had not lessened just because the magic wasn’t trying to rip through me anymore.

“I don’t understand why rolling up the windows blocked—is presumably still blocking—the magic,” I said.

“Sherwood,” Adam told me. “He took a silver Sharpie and drew all over the doorjambs and inner frames on all the doors. Runes, I think. I am not sure what they do.”

“When?” I asked, startled because I hadn’t heard anything about that.

“Last night,” he said. “While you were sleeping.”

“Why don’t you know what they do?” That seemed a bit out of character for my Adam. He was a real believer in “knowledge is power.”

He sent a faint grin my way, though he didn’t take his eyes off the road. “I am not sure Sherwood knew what they were supposed to do. He wasn’t about to admit it, though, so I let it go.”

Sherwood’s fragmented memories made his magic somewhat odd. And dangerous. Ben told me a few days ago that Warren and Kyle were still finding alarm clock pieces in random places in their house. The clock had exploded in Sherwood’s house a couple of weeks ago. Sherwood did not know why the pieces ended up at Warren’s house. Darryl postulated that there might be some analogue of quantum physics in magic—I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. Darryl’s multiple PhDs could make it difficult to follow his humor.

“This storm has engulfed all of Montana, parts of Idaho, Washington, and over the border in Canada,” Adam said thoughtfully, distracting me from worrying about the dangers of riding around in a car Sherwood had done something to and back to the dangers of driving in a blizzard. “Montana is what? A hundred thousand square miles?”