by Gwen Rivers
“No trouble. Cocoa?” At my hesitant nod, she smiles. “Garret?”
“Coffee,” Garret grunts.
“You take Nic into the living room. I’ll be out in a jiff.” Her step is light and easy as she moves about the tight space.
I study the man who contributed to my DNA. He doesn’t look all that different from many of the high-country types I grew up around. Large, ill-dressed, but washed and relatively groomed. Again, I search for any of my own traits on his dark face and again, come up empty.
“So, Nic. What grade are you in?” The skin around his eyes is tight.
“I’m done with school.” It was a truth I hadn’t yet admitted to myself, never mind out loud.
“You got your diploma already?”
Slowly, I shake my head. “Nope, no diploma here.”
He scratches his beard stubble. “GED then?”
“Nope.” What the hell is taking Sophie so long with the beverages?
“Got any plans for the future?”
Hmm, let’s see. Free Gretchen from Fenrir, kill my mother—not the kind woman making me cocoa in the kitchen—but the one who bore me during my first life. Find my baby daddy and break the news that his cursed and monstrous line would continue in the next year. Oh, and save the fey who remain beyond the Veil from the dead. Then if I somehow swing all that, I have to convince the nice lady out there building sand monsters with your son that she really doesn’t have to kill her big sister.
“Nothing definite, yet.”
Sophie returns with a tray, one cocoa for me, two steaming mugs of java as well as a tray of homemade snickerdoodles.
“What is it you do?” One of the early social skills I’d mastered was to deflect attention away from myself by asking people to talk about themselves. Most people would rather talk than listen.
“We run a campground in the high season,” Sophie says. “This is a big tourist area in the summer. I clean and Garret does maintenance.”
“Sounds nice.” I wonder if my aunts had sent giants in disguise here on vacation, funneling money to the people who gave me life.
More uncomfortable silence. I sip my cocoa. It’s the best thing I’ve ever tasted, next to the double bacon cheeseburger.
“You look all done in.” Sophie hops up and extends a hand. “I made up the guest room for you if you’d like to take a nap.”
I don’t want to nap after the nightmares I’ve been having but any excuse that would get me out of this highly uncomfortable living room is welcome. “Sounds great.”
“Nice meeting you,” I say to Garret, who is still sizing me up and looking unimpressed. His response is a grunt.
“This is where Angie and Jedda are staying,” she points to one wing which is really more of a suite. “How exactly are they related to you again?”
“Cousins.” The lie falls easily from my lips. In a way, all the creatures of Underhill are distant cousins. Angie, really?
She nods. “Oh, well we’re happy to have all of you.”
I study her profile. It’s so much softer than mine. Though she has crows’ feet, her cheeks are flushed and she also carries laugh lines around her mouth. Salt of the earth, quality people.
It’s hard to believe I came from her egg.
My hand goes to my own belly. What will my baby be like?
She sees the gesture and her eyes widen. She doesn’t comment though.
“Thanks again for taking all of us in on such short notice,” I say to cover the awkward gap.
“It’s no trouble,” She turns away and leads me to a door. It’s a sliding barn door style at the back of the house that leads to a narrow staircase. “This room is a little inconvenient to get to but you have your own bath and the view is amazing.”
I follow her up the wooden steps and into the third-floor space. A sliding glass door leads out onto a deck that overlooks the inland waterway. The décor is just as rustic as the rest of the house, with weathered boards and a strong smell of cedar.
It reminds me of Aiden’s unique scent.
Everything looks so normal. I want to fall to my knees on the hand-braided rug, to bury my face in the candlewick bedspread. I want to climb in between the clean, white sheets and sleep for a week.
Sophie stands there, watching me take the space in and I decide to address the elephant in the room.
“Why did you give me up?” I stand by the sliding glass door where I can see Chloe and my brother making sand angels.
Behind me, Sophie sucks in a breath.
“It wasn’t by choice. We were still in high school. I grew up ‘round here and Garret, well. It was a summer fling. By the time I found out you were on the way, he had gone back to his life in New York.”
Again, her gaze drops to my middle. Yeah, the cat is out of the bag there.
Her big blue eyes fill up. “I was young, younger than you are now. And scared. My daddy was a drinker. My mama had passed on and I only had a waitressing job part-time. If I had known Garret would come back into my life, I would have kept you. I swear it.”
“I believe you,” I breathe.
Her arms go around me in a tight hug. My lips tremble and I close my eyes, breathing in her powdery soft scent. She smells of vanilla body lotion and home. My mother.
She pulls away and wipes her cheeks. “I’ll leave you to rest.”
“Sophie,” I catch her hand impulsively. “You did the right thing.”
She smiles and then shuts the door behind her.
I wash up in the adjoining bathroom, taking a warm shower and wrapping myself in a white satin robe and then head to bed. Outside, the snow begins to fall. What would my life have been like if Garret had come back to Sophie sooner? If I hadn’t been adopted by the Fates?
I fret over the child growing inside me. What will her life be like? And how will mine change? Sophie knew she couldn’t have handled the responsibilities of motherhood, even with a nurturing soul. What chance do I stand?
And how will Aiden react when he finds out? He had been vehement about not wanting a child for centuries. Paranoid that his line is cursed. Worried that he will add soldiers to his father’s army and bring about Ragnarök—the end of the worlds.
Yet in spite of all that I know Aiden will make a phenomenal father. He’s good and true. And I’m…me.
“Aiden,” I breathe his name, wishing the wind will carry it to him. “Hurry.”
Aiden stops abruptly, causing Harmony to slam into his back. He turns and steadies her.
“What’s wrong?” she asks.
“Her scent is gone.” He inhales again. The faint whiff he had of Nic has vanished.
“Do you think she crossed the Veil to find you?” Harmony lowers herself onto a boulder and rubs at her bare feet.
“I don’t know.” Damn it, if she had crossed back into the fey realm, he’d have no choice but to go after her. “Can you see anything about where she is?”
The seer pauses in her foot massage and shuts her eyes. Her brow furrows as she frowns. “I’m not sure. It doesn’t look like Underhill. Too much manmade stuff. She hasn’t made any decisions. But the room she’s in looks different than where I saw her earlier.”
“That’s it? She’s in a room somewhere?” He can’t keep the annoyance out of his tone.
Her purple lids lift and she glares at him. “It’s not like I have a supernatural LoJack. My abilities are based on individual decisions. If she doesn’t make any, I can’t see anything.”
He huffs out a breath. “Thanks for trying.”
One of her jet eyebrows goes up. “So, you trust that I’m telling you the truth? Even though I betrayed you?”
He taps the side of his nose. “I can smell lies. You’re not a fey like I thought, but I’d know if you were telling me a falsehood. And I’m fairly certain you aren’t trying to keep me and Nic apart. You just don’t want me crossing the Veil. And I won’t.”
Not unless he had to in order to retrieve his mate.
She huffs out
a breath. “All right. Can we stop for a rest? My feet are killing me.”
Her feet are bare and he can see a fresh crop of blisters. “Can you travel by sparks the way I can?”
She shakes her head. “No. I can barely manage a single flame. If not for my seer gift, I’d be as talented as a fey peasant.”
He scrubs a hand over his face. He can transform them both to sparks for a short distance, but without a direction, he’d drain his magic before they found Nic. Not like he was going to get back to her until he picked up her scent again.
He makes the decision. “We’ll camp here for the night.”
Harmony looks around. “There’s no shelter. And those clouds look like they mean business.”
“Then we’ll build a lean-to.” Aiden bends to the ground and starts picking up dead boughs and placing them diagonally from the boulder where she sits. “Gather up some branches. The fire will be our fourth wall.”
They gather wood for a camp in silence.
Aiden shifts to the wolf to find food.
“I’ll get a fire going,” Harmony says.
He’s a mile off when he hears her scream.
Wolves, his beast recognizes the scent. A pack is on her trail.
Aiden runs as fast as four paws can carry him across the damp ground, kicking up clumps of dirt with each step. How could he have been so stupid? His heart pounds. Harmony is a seer, she’s old and clever. She can take care of herself.
But he refused to let anything happen to his sister.
He breaks through the trees and looks down at the scene below. A pack of wolves, larger than any he’d ever beheld, surrounds Harmony. Both hands are out in front of her, a large branch in each one. She clacks them together and the ends ignite until she is holding flaming torches. Aiden leaps, changing from wolf to sparks and back to wolf at her side.
The pack stands down.
It’s odd, one moment they are snapping at her heels, surrounding her, but the moment he arrives, they freeze. He can scent confusion coming off of them.
The largest, a gray wolf with a white blaze across his chest, begins to shift. It isn’t a seamless transition, not like his own. No, this looks painful, as though the animal is being stretched and misshapen by great, invisible hands.
And then a young man stands before him, naked. He has shaggy dark hair and a long scraggly beard. His eyes are intense as they focus on him, one green and the other blue.
“Who are you?” he asks. It takes Aiden a moment to recognize that the wolf is speaking German. “Who are you that you are not one of our pack?”
Harmony looks to him but she is not his mate and he has no silent communication with her the way he does with Nic. So he shifts, turning back into a man.
“My name is Aiden.”
“Váli,” Harmony corrects.
Aiden scowls at her but then nods in agreement. “Yes.”
The other male steps forward. “Váli? Váli Sigynjarson?”
Did everyone in the nine worlds know his true name? “That’s right? Who are you?”
“My name is Liam.” The wolf dips his head. “Liam Cooper. And I’m your nephew.”
Generations of Pack
“So you’re telling me,” Aiden says as they sit around the fire at the wolf den, “that you are all children of Fenrir?”
“That’s right.” Liam passes around a jug of ale, offering it first to Harmony, who declines it and then to Aiden. “Although none of us knew that before we died.”
“You’re Draugar?” Harmony asks with wide eyes.
The term is met with blank looks.
“You died and then were reanimated?” the seer clarifies.
“Not exactly.” Liam rubs the back of his neck. “What do you know of your brother?”
“Other than that he is currently sitting on the Shadow Throne?” Aiden asks. “Only that he is imprisoned in a mortal body.”
Liam nods. “Fenrir is contained within different mortal bodies. He procreates with others during each lifetime. We are all his children. Gray there is the oldest, at least the oldest of this pack.”
Gray, who has the same multihued eyes, though different shades of blue and green from Liam’s, speaks with a British upper-crust accent. “I was a mortal over one thousand years ago. Fenrir was my mother then.”
Aiden’s jaw drops. “You’re telling me Fenrir gave birth to you while he was a woman?”
Gray nods. “Yes. His name was Kitty. She died of Cholera. It wasn’t until my own death, fifty years later, that I changed for the first time. I was alone and tried to return to my wife. But she had seen me pass as an old man and didn’t understand how I had reverted to this.” He waves down to indicate his youthful form.
“The point of death is when the change overtakes us,” Liam says. “I was Fenrir’s last child, born seventeen years ago. He was male in that incarnation. Hubert O’Leary. We died together in an automobile accident.”
Aiden scents the air but detects no lie from Liam or Gray. “How did you find out, what you are?”
Gray takes his turn with the ale. “After my own death and subsequent rebirth as a wolf, I struggled to adapt. And when my Owen died,” he gestures to a short stocky wolf with a black saddle and a whitetail, before continuing, “I was there to help him transition, to see him through his first change. From that point on, we tried to find as many as we could. But as Fenrir is reborn differently every human life cycle, we never know who he is or who the new progeny will be until the moment of death and resurrection.”
Aiden stares around. There had to be at least a hundred different wolves in the territory.
“You are immortal then?”
Liam shakes his head. “No, we just age slowly. Most go mad before age can show in more than a few silver hairs.”
“And they found you in time?” Aiden asks Liam.
The wolf shakes his head. “No. But the internet has made finding the newly changed wolves easier. Always someone nearby with a camera phone.”
Aiden lets out a laugh. “I guess that’s one good thing about it.”
“Why would you stay here though?” Harmony asks. “Why not cross the Veil? Surely, you would have more room to run in Underhill.”
Liam and Gray exchange a look. “The Veil?”
“They don’t know,” Aiden mumbles.
“Know what?” Liam frowns.
Aiden scrubs a hand over his face. Freaking Fenrir sowing his seed since the dawn of time. Or hatching eggs, apparently. And Aiden had been worried about having one child with Nicneven? If he ever got his hands on the wolf, he’d see the bastard fixed.
Although looking at Liam, Gray, Owen and the others, most of them appeared stable.
Harmony speaks, interrupting his thoughts. “Of course, with no one to introduce you to the hidden realms, you don’t know anything about magic.”
“Magic?” Liam scowls.
Babes in the woods. These beasts knew even less than Nic did when he’d found her.
“How far down the line does the transformation go?” Aiden looks between Gray and his son, Owen. “How many generations?”
“Only two,” Gray says as he skins a rabbit and skewers it over a fire. “My grandchildren all died naturally. No wolfing out.”
Aiden studies them. He’s gone from being the last in his line to surrounded by family. And they are family, even if they are far different than the family he’d imagined.
“So why do you stay here?” Aiden glances around the cave. “Surely you have the means to have something better.”
“We stay here because it is one of the last places we can hide from mortals. And because of our missing one.”
“Missing one?”
Liam’s gaze is distant. “She who lived among us for a time. It is about twelve years ago now. We smelled you near her house before. It’s how we picked up your scent. You smell slightly of her winter apple fragrance.”
All the small hairs rise on his arms. “Nic? You know Nic?”
Gray nods. “She came to us as a child. We spend most of our time as the wolves, this is the first time I’ve regained my human appearance since she left.”
“She was never afraid of us,” Liam adds. “We took her in, adopted her into the pack. The fragile little one, all alone. She smelled of wolf and magic. She didn’t belong and neither did we.”
Even then, at the tender age of six, his Nic had carried a shred of his scent.
“You know where she is?” Liam asks.
“Not at the moment. I’ve been trying to find her scent but it’s been hidden from me.” Aiden lets out a sigh. “She’s my mate.”
The wolves exchange another glance. “What is a mate?”
“You really do keep to yourselves, don’t you?” Harmony adds, looking out over the pack.
Gray clears his throat. “Life is both easier and more complicated as the wolf. Simpler to hunt, to sleep in warmth and relative comfort. The needs of the wolf are few. It’s our human hearts that have suffered. Most of us would prefer not to remember.”
Aiden’s wolf agrees with their assessment. Life is easier on four paws. Perhaps not safer, but straightforward and without any kind of game playing. Animals hunt and sleep and live their lives.
“A mate is a forever partner. One who is accepted by me and my wolf and accepts us in return. We recognize a piece of ourselves in the other.”
Gray nods with understanding. “That’s why you smell of her then?”
“Yes.” Aiden smiles. “It’s a rare bond, one I’m willing to do anything to protect.”
The threat is layered in his words. Liam growls softly at the perceived challenge.
“Do you possess any magic other than the shift?” Harmony asks to diffuse the tension.
Liam and Gray exchange a look. “No? Should we?”
Harmony extends her palm and lights her flame. After a moment, Aiden does likewise. The werewolves frown.
Aiden lets his flame go out. “We’re descended from Loki, a fire deity. As part of Fenrir’s line, you are as well.”
“I sense the spark in them,” the seer says. “But no one has shown them how to access it.”