Winter Lost

Almost as if it were an echo of my words, I felt something that rocketed up through the bottoms of my shoes and up through my spine. Not quite magic, but power of some sort. It felt a lot like an earthquake, like something was pulling a firm foundation out from under my feet.

Liam’s nostrils flared and he growled, “My lodge. My home.”

His magic surged with his asserted ownership, and the trembling feeling subsided. Mostly. The hairs on the back of my neck still felt a little unhappy.

“If it is yours, why don’t you know if there’s an artifact here?” Adam asked softly. He’d thought Liam was talking to us. “Why didn’t you notice the hungry ghost in our room?” His voice dropped into the soft tones that were Adam at his most dangerous. “Or did you set that ghost on us?”

I shook my head. “He didn’t. It didn’t belong to this place.” Then I added, “He wasn’t talking to us, he was enforcing his claim on the lodge. How long have you been here, that it isn’t yours yet?”

Liam narrowed his eyes at me.

“You don’t have to answer that,” I said. I’d just wanted him to know that I understood what I’d felt.

Liam tipped his head. “You aren’t quite…whole.” He shook his head. “Not the right word. You are wounded and it leaves you open in a way that is dangerous.”

“Thank you for telling us something we already knew,” Adam said blandly. “Do you know what to do about it?”

He asked it so casually, I don’t think Liam understood it was an honest question.

“Not in the slightest,” Liam said. “I’ve never seen anything quite like it.” He smiled a bit grimly. “Not in anyone who lived. Would you share what kind of creature caused it?”

I could feel Adam’s worry, though his face didn’t change.

“Not a creature,” I told him. “An artifact—not built by the fae.”

“Do you still have it?” Liam asked casually, a hunter’s gleam in his eye.

“Destroyed by a friend of ours,” Adam said.

“A fae friend,” I added at Liam’s indrawn breath.

He regained his butler friendliness. “Pity. If you still had it, I might have been able to figure out how it damaged you.”

“My brother came to my house the day before yesterday, cursed with an inability to understand or communicate with anyone,” I said, more to change the subject than because I had any plan in mind. But after I said it, I realized that withholding information wasn’t going to make our task any easier.

Adam looked at me. I shrugged. “We’re in the same boat right now. Maybe if we all talk, we might be able to come up with a solution. And, Adam, if he’s like Uncle Mike, if Liam has the artifact, the only way we are going to get it from him is if he gives it to us of his own free will.”

Adam hesitated but finally nodded.

Liam, for his part, didn’t react to my naming him a suspect by so much as a twitch of his eye.

I told Liam the whole thing, from the moment my brother showed up until we were attacked by the hungry ghost. I didn’t tell him about the silver spider. She seemed like something…someone dangerous to talk about. It was easy enough to do when I reduced our battle with the hungry ghost to “We won.” Even easier when I left out Jack, too, because he was Elyna’s and no business of anyone else’s.

When I was finished, Liam closed his eyes. “Coincidences. I don’t like coincidences. You tell me the storm is caused by Hrímnir, who wants his lyre back. And I believe you.”

He uncrossed his ankles and moved a little, letting his body inhabit the seat rather than simply sit in it. His change in posture seemed to alter the nature of his chair. It became a throne, not the kind used in modern royal ceremonies, but the high seat earned by a chieftain.

I couldn’t help thinking of a painting of a barbarian king, like something on the cover of a Conan the Barbarian novel. An incongruous thought, given Liam’s outward tidiness, but it felt true. In some other time and place, one that was bloody and messy, this man had been a ruler of a fae court.

I could almost see…

Liam’s eyes widened. He leaned forward, saying something to Adam when my mate blocked his way. But I couldn’t understand his words. All of my attention was focused on the vision I was experiencing of a different time and place.

—blood on a wooden floor. So much blood. A man screaming.

Liam’s fingers brushed my forehead and the visions scrolling in my head drifted away, leaving me sweaty and shivering. Hot and cold at the same time. Adam’s arm around my shoulder let me center myself.

“You need to find someone who can fix that,” Liam told me.

“I intend to,” I told him. The consequences of not fixing it were growing more obviously grave on a near-hourly basis.

Liam sat back again, once more a well-groomed, graceful man in a wingback chair.

I cleared my throat and tried to remember what we’d been talking about.

“Why do you think the storm has trapped us here?” I asked.

“To prevent a wedding,” Liam said.

Interlude

New Mexico Don Orson