by Liz Meldon
“Your friend went outside,” the lone female bartender told me, her frizzy, grey hair stuck out at all angles, her blue mascara heavily gooped in the corners. She spoke with a thick Norwegian accent, but like many, even all the way out here, didn’t stumble once over her English. “I tried to stop her, because she was just in that little dress, but she was determined. Something about a bus.”
Damn it, Marte. “Thank you.”
I flashed the bartender a smile and a quick wave over my shoulder before bulldozing my way to the front door. A few clusters of plaid-clad men tried to stop me to chat, but I barrelled through without responding to either the English or the Norwegian come-ons.
As soon as the solid pub door slammed shut behind me, the intrusive buzz of conversation inside fell silent. I stood there for a moment, my jacket open, the loose bits of hair that had escaped my braid crown fluttering in the frigid but gentle breeze. Snowflakes fluttered down in the warm yellow lamplight, the sky an inky black—soon to be painted every color of the rainbow if the guys strolling by with a wagon of fireworks had anything to say about it. I nodded and smiled when one tipped his cap to me, then scanned the otherwise empty street for Marte. Over half the village was in the pub behind me, while the rest were likely at home with their families.
And I was out here, alone, searching for a drunk nurse. With her coat thrown over my arm, I jogged down the snowy lane to where the security goon had parked the bus, but no luck. Her scent carried on the next gust of wind: a mix of gin, sharply sweet floral perfume, and sweat. Just what my sensitive nose needed.
“Marte?” Chin lifted, I tracked her scent through the village, knowing this would be easier if I’d shifted but not wanting to take the time to properly undress and stash my clothes somewhere. Mind you, if Marte passed out at the sight of my enormous wolf form, it would probably be easier to get her back to campus…
No. I hugged her coat to my chest, taking another quick whiff to better zero in on her scent. I eventually picked up her tracks just outside Solskinn, the indent of her heels the only footprints visible in the veil of pure white.
Behind me, the village and all its warmth, its homey comfort, sat beckoning. Ahead, the only paved route back to the academy, a barely two-lane path covered in snow, plowed into the forest. A mix of leafless birch and alder trees bowed over the road, giving the illusion of a tunnel in the darkness. To my left, a mass of soaring pines—and Marte’s tracks, leading directly into the trees.
My shoulders slumped, arm dropping to my side, her coat kissing the ground. “What the hell, Marte?”
Was I seriously about to go looking for her in the pitch-black forest at—a quick check of my phone—eleven thirty-seven at night on New Year’s Eve?
Damn it. I was.
Tossing her coat over my shoulder, I trudged into the deeper snowbanks, my jeans instantly soaked, my aged leather boots doing a serviceable job barring the wet and my thick wool socks keeping my feet warm.
“Marte?” I slipped halfway down the ravine but managed not to lose my balance as the ground evened out. The trees answered, rustling in the wind, and darkness peered back. My eyes narrowed, calling on my inner wolf’s sight to see through the black. Had anyone been around, they’d see my eyes change, lighten, suddenly burning bright as a midnight moon.
No sign of her.
“Marte?”
Officials had released a statement at the start of December: stay out of the forest.
This forest.
Because everyone who had gone missing since July was last seen going into this forest, a forest that stretched on for miles, connecting all the surrounding villages. I hesitated, one hand pressed to the trunk of a birch, its rough exterior speckled white and grey. I was a wolf, and the forest had always been my friend. Yet, the hairs on the back of my neck stood straight up. My inner wolf growled a long, low warning.
Then I heard it: the rich, dark, full-bodied wail of a violin.
I staggered forward, beyond the tree line, encased in shadow as the sound surrounded me, invaded me, whispered across my skin.
And suddenly my body was no longer mine. I moved like a puppet on a string, walking, marching further into the darkness without meaning to, searching out the source of that music. It drowned out my inner wolf—it drowned me.
Serenely, I floated around the trees as the melody swelled, and as it quickened, so did I.
Because in that moment, I needed the violin, I needed its song. I needed it like I needed air, and as I descended deeper into the dark forest, a single thought trumped all others, screaming inside my head: I would do anything to find that music, anything to attain it.
When I did, I would give it everything it desired.
And the creature wielding the bow—I would worship as a god.
18
Calder
“Are you planning on drinking that, or are you just going to stare at it?”
Lost in my own thoughts, I hadn’t even noticed that my colleagues at this end of the table had up and left, replaced, at some point, by Robert Howard. Fortunately for the rest of us, he had finally stopped caterwauling on stage with his wife, the karaoke king and queen dethroned by a gaggle of inebriated nurses screeching in barely discernible Norwegian. I straightened, nose wrinkled, unable to decide which was more torturous.
“I suppose it’s not to my taste,” I said, pushing my enormous glass of ale away. It wobbled across the uneven wood, settling in front of a passed-out James Foster, who continued to snooze away, unperturbed by the festive din around him.
“I could fetch you another one,” Robert offered, his cheeks pleasantly rosy. “Bartender says they’ve cut all the prices in half for the next twenty minutes.”
I checked my watch; that would bring us to midnight, and the thought of forcing down more human sustenance than I’d already done tonight made my stomach turn. What I wanted was sitting in a cooler in my office and entirely inappropriate for public consumption.
Well, no, what I wanted most of all was sitting at the far end of the table and had been fielding my withering glances all night without so much as flinching. Clearing my throat, I cast another glance down the way, only to find Emma gone. The math trio remained, growing louder by the minute as they argued about something or other, and Emma’s chair was empty. I sat up straighter with a frown. Where the hell had she gone?
Not that I had the right to wonder about her whereabouts. I’d made a complete ass of myself after she’d insisted we stop whatever the fuck we had been doing since Halloween. My ridiculous ego was still bruised, and I’d thought that if I blocked her out completely, pretended she didn’t exist, then I could eventually forget that I had not only actively pursued a shifter, but I felt something akin to heartache when she suggested we just be friends.
Pathetic, really. In so short a time, I’d ignored the fact that she drove me absolutely insane and started to feel for her.
It must have been the air this far north; it made me weak. Sentimental and weak, mooning over some foul-mouthed, disheveled, procrastination-prone, perpetually tardy wolf shifter.
Her severing ties, demanding we cease the one thing that had been driving me further into her arms, should have been a godsend. Maybe then I could finally get some perspective and rationalize why Emma Kingsley was completely and utterly wrong for me in every way, but I’d been a moody, petulant fuck ever since that night.
And here I was, searching her out in a crowded pub, more alert than I’d been in days.
“Kent told me Emma’s taken Marte back to campus,” Robert said, and I looked to him sharply, wondering why he felt the need to tell me specifically.
“What? Why would you—?”
Was I really so obvious?
The enormous fellow shrugged, then scooped up my discarded drink, took a quick sip, and downed the rest of it without a word.
“She… Are they driving?” I sputtered, continuing my scan of the overcrowded space. No point in maintaining the charade, not when he saw straig
ht through it. The security oaf who had schlepped us all down to the village appeared in no condition to get behind the wheel of any vehicle, much less a twenty-ton bus.
“I’ve already gone out to check,” Robert told me as he set the empty glass down in the middle of the table, then affectionately adjusted Foster’s headband, Happy New Year scrawled across the bit of thin cardboard on top in glittering gold. When he looked up at me again, the English instructor wore a little wry smile that suggested he knew he had my full attention. “Bus is still there, no sign of the girls. Must have decided to walk back. Can’t imagine why in this weather—”
I didn’t hear his rationale, because I was already off, stalking through the herd of humans, headed straight for the main door. Slipping into my leather jacket, I grabbed the pointlessly thick scarf from its pocket and wrapped it around my neck a few times before shouldering my way into the freezing outdoors.
Honestly, was she drunk again? Emma hadn’t appeared as intoxicated as the rest of our colleagues, but perhaps she was just good at hiding it. Because why the fuck else would she decide to walk back to the academy on a night like this? The inky-black darkness pressed in on the village, forced back by the scattered street lamps and muted light on the other side of double, perhaps triple-paned windows. It was so dark that anywhere without another source of light, like the road leading back to the school, would be impossible for humans to navigate. Beyond that, the temperatures had reached an all-time low; Marte wouldn’t make it in that little outfit she’d been wearing.
Oh, and there was a fucking killer on the loose.
Sure, no bodies had been found. None of those missing were confirmed dead, but I had my suspicions—suspicions Emma ought to share, given her familiarity with the world’s supernatural predators. Going out into the night, alone, drunk, with a human who would only slow her down, was probably the stupidest thing she’d done so far.
I shouldn’t have cared. I should have stayed with the others, maybe grabbed another beer to at least pretend that I was enjoying myself on a night like this.
Yet as I stalked to the outskirts of the village, quickly locating and following a familiar set of tracks in the snow, I realized my problem: I cared too much. Even after she had rejected me, after she had chosen SIA over me, after she had floated that insulting let’s just be friends line—I fucking cared about Emma Kingsley.
I mean, I was wearing the damn sweater she’d knit me. Anger roiled in my gut, concern fueling each hurried step; clearly I was more of a lost cause than I’d thought.
Weak, sentimental old fool, lusting after a shifter. Developing feelings for her—obvious enough feelings for Robert bloody Howard to notice…
Wait.
I paused, still as stone.
Was that—a violin?
Bewildered, I looked to the soaring pines, to the black emptiness between, to the blanket of untouched snowfall. That was a violin, its notes clear as anything, carrying on the wind from the depths of the forest. I stepped toward the nearest snowbank with a frown. No other music accompanied the instrument, and it oozed Schubert, dripped in the composer’s dark drama.
In fact, this melody, this tune—it was Der Erlkönig.
It had to be.
A few tweaks and variants, yet my ear for classical arias wouldn’t betray me.
How fitting, this piece, based on an old poem about a father and son riding through woodlands so similar to these. In the poem, the boy dies, butchered by the evil elf-king of the forest while still seated behind his father.
“Are you out tonight, Erlkönig?” I murmured, eyes narrowed as I scanned the tree line. No sign of Emma, but up ahead her tracks veered sharply left into the deeper snow, then down the slope, almost as if she had slipped, and into the forest. Teeth gritted, I followed in her wake, striding through snow that reached just beyond my knees. “Emma?”
Only the violin answered. I hastened my pace, easily tracking her footsteps through the forest, her faint scent of lavender clinging to the bark. No longer was this about locating her and Marte, a chastisement on the tip of my tongue about venturing into the deathly cold night alone and on foot. This was about finding her—period.
“Emma?”
Because something about that violin was very wrong. I seldom felt the prickle of fear anymore, the kind that creeps along the nape of your neck, then flits down your spine and knots tightly in the pit of your gut, twisting, twisting, twisting until you succumb.
But I felt it here. Surrounded by a silent, watchful forest, fear wormed its way into my rigid vampire heart. No one else accompanied the violin: no carollers, no musicians. At no point did I hear the hiss and crackle of a roaring bonfire, nor did I see its reassuring orange sheen amidst the darkness. Bitter, cold night was all these woods had to offer me, paired with a whisper of Emma on the path ahead.
And the relentless violin.
“Emma!”
My call barely echoed, swallowed by the elements, and I ran now, adopting a speed that would render me nothing but a blur to whatever dared lurk in these shadows. I kept to the path the wolf shifter had forged for me, looping around trees, cutting abruptly one way and then the other, pushing myself until the pines gave way to a clearing.
Until I finally found her.
Until I finally found them.
Marte and Emma, their backs to me, shuffled like zombies across the clearing. I stepped out of the trees, bewildered once more to find a perfectly round space plopped in the middle of a dense forest without a lick of snow—just dead, frozen grass. While the wind rustled through pines around us, not a hint of breeze touched my face as I strode further into the clearing. It no longer toyed with my hair, burned my cheeks. It was like I’d entered a dead zone.
A place where all things came to die.
The girls were headed straight for a pond also shaped as a perfect circle, its surface dark as the deepest ocean, yet frighteningly still too, like a great black mirror. And beyond that, the violin.
More specifically, its player.
I staggered to a halt, jaw dropping for the first time in an age. For there, seated on a boulder on the other side of the pond, was a shirtless man in tattered trousers. Muscular arms dragged the bow across his instrument, his eyes closed, his face handsome. In fact, he was rather attractive, but I couldn’t imagine that was the lure for either Emma or Marte, who continued shuffling along, mute, arms limp at their sides.
Handsome fellow, playing a violin in the middle of the Norwegian wilderness, situated next to a body of water…
I reared back, nostrils flared, eyes wide.
Was that a bloody fossegrim?
I’d thought the water spirits had faded into legend. Native to our surroundings, the creatures were said to possess a gentle temperament and a proclivity for fiddles. In fact, they spent their entire lives inhabiting springs and rivers and waterfalls, playing their instruments, beguiling any who happened upon them. What they liked most, the stories said, was a willing audience.
But I had never heard of one bewitching their listeners like this, so literally, and at such a distance too…
My gaze flickered to the black pond again just as something rippled beneath its surface. The water settled seconds later.
“Emma!”
If my heart could pound, it would. The prickling fear sunk its claws in deeper, and I was off like a shot, headed straight for Marte, as the nurse was the closest to the water’s edge. I reached her in the time it would have taken her to blink twice, hooked an arm around her waist, and hurled her back across the clearing. She landed in a heap beside what looked to be her big, fur-lined coat.
“Hva pokker er det du gjør?” What the hell are you doing? I demanded savagely, snarling out each word as I glowered up at the fossegrim—a creature I still couldn’t wrap my mind around in this day and age. His eyes opened, dark blue and flecked with a strange sort of starlight; tears sliced down his flushed cheeks as he continued to play, beautifully at that. It was the most exquisite music I
’d ever heard in my life, but it was doing something to Emma, to Marte, and I couldn’t allow it to go on. Tensed, I gave him a moment, then pointed at the violin. “Nå er det nok.” That’s enough.
He shook his head slowly, sadly, and hastened his bow arm, quickening the tempo. While inexplicably beautiful, its tune alluring to all save vampires, for no spells, no magic, no trickery worked on us after we were turned, this wasn’t a true fossegrim’s fiddle. Those instruments were said to mirror the sounds of the forest itself: the whisper of wind through the leaves, the skitter of wildlife, the rush of a trickling stream. Amidst all that, a melody, yes, that sounded like this—but a real instrument of the fossegrim was so much more.
And as far as I knew, it didn’t turn its listeners into dead-eyed zombies.
What the fuck is this?
With a shake of my head, I turned on the spot and sprinted for Emma, loathing the fact that I hadn’t the faintest idea what was going on here—or why.
What I did know with increasing certainty, however, was that neither of these women was going anywhere near that damn pond.
“Emma…” Her slack expression remained fixed even as I charged her, and those glazed-over eyes stayed glued on the fossegrim. Fucking hell. When I was within reach, I clamped down on her shoulders and shook her, harder than I could ever shake a human. “Emma, it’s a spell!”
Or—something. Fuck. The helplessness, the not knowing, made the situation about a thousand times more frustrating. I shook her harder, feet planted as she tried to bowl right over me. Whatever had her under its thrall might have reduced her motor functions to undead shuffling, but she was determined to reach him.
Or maybe that pond—and whatever had caused the faint ripple in the water.
“Emma!” Fuck it. Lips peeled back in a snarl, I lurched forward and sank my fangs right into the meat of her neck. As soon as I made contact, punctured her flesh, she emitted a high-pitched gasp, her whole body flailing, hands up and fighting. Good. At least the spell or curse or whatever could be broken.