by Cari Z
I did. “What about yours?” I asked.
“I can heal any damage, and I dislike limiting my peripheral vision. Come.” He jumped over the edge of the bunker and headed casually down the hill.
“Hey!” The guy I’d used as my human shield looked at me, anger in every line of his recumbent body. “You were supposed to shoot him!”
“Was I? Huh.”
I kept going and didn’t even mind when he yelled out “Prick!” and shot me in the back.
I did mind when someone else screamed. It wasn’t a fun, playful “Omigosh run!” kind of scream; it was a genuinely terrified scream. “He’s got a gun!” someone else yelled, and I groaned.
“Fucking perfect.”
“Ah.” Sören had stopped, his eyes clouding over with purple mist. “It’s my brother Artύr.”
Yeah, I remembered Artύr. Some of these guys might have been coerced into obeying their father, but if anyone was helping of his own accord, it was Artύr. He’d been the one to dunk me over and over again into the bathtub filled with ice water. He’d been the one to pull out two of my fingernails when threatening to drown me didn’t work. Artύr wasn’t the cleverest of the brothers, but he was the biggest, the meanest, and the one least likely to give a fuck about his risk-to-reward ratio, as evidenced by the fact that he’d pulled a fucking gun in the middle of a theme park. I could see him now, coming at us like a black-suited behemoth through the trees. And all I had was a paintball gun.
Well, I’d better make it count.
My hopper was mostly full, thanks to my stinginess with my shots. As soon as Artύr rounded the last tree, I dropped to one knee and fired my gun as fast as I could, right at his groin. The paintballs actually had a pretty slow muzzle velocity, just enough to burst on impact, but level enough of them at someone’s crotch and they were going to feel it. Artύr didn’t disappoint. He groaned and jackknifed onto both knees, one hand clutching his bespattered manhood, the other shakily raising his real, live gun in my direction. I pushed to my feet and darted to the side just as the first bullet flew. More people screamed, and the guy I’d left “dead” on the hill quickly rolled over the top into the bunker for shelter.
I turned and faced Sören, who stared at me with a little smile on his face. “We have to go, now!”
“All right.” He let me lead him away from his bellowing sibling, even though a cry of, “Þú getur ekki bjargað honum! Hann mun deyja!” made him pause for a moment.
I led the way out of the field of battle at a run. Sören could explain later, if we survived.
Chapter Twenty-One
I was getting paint on Andre’s seats. He’d probably be pissed about that whenever I got this car back to him, but at least it wasn’t bullet holes. Chock that up in the “win” column, I guess. Ha, this was my life: where not being actively shot at with a deadly weapon was the best thing that had happened to me all day. I should’ve probably ditched the car, honestly, and gotten a new one just in case they had some way of tracking this one, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I settled on switching out the license plate at a gas station and just kept going.
We were an hour out of St. Louis now, and I was doing everything in my power to keep calm as I drove down the highway. I had to go fast but not too fast, burn away the miles but not get burnt in the process. Every time I saw a black SUV, my heart clenched and my hand made an abortive twitch toward my shiny new gun resting between the front seats. It wasn’t them, I was almost sure of that, but the potential was enough to make me sick to my stomach.
Fuck, I wasn’t meant for this vigilante desperado thing. I wasn’t a guns-blazing, sharpshooting, badass motherfucker. I was an idiot with a talent he didn’t want and a lot of luck, both good and bad. I wasn’t sure which type was making more of an effort right now.
I’d given Sören the game console, but he wasn’t using it. Instead he was quiet, eyes closed, head tilted toward the window as warm air streamed through the car, making a mess of his pale hair. Every so often his mouth opened, like he was going to say something, but a moment later, he’d close it without a sound. I was happy for the silence and focused on the road and what a moron I had been. Kissing him? Kissing him to get him to go along with me? Great idea, really brilliant. Mixed messages much? I’d already told him I wasn’t going to have sex with him, and I stood by that, but it had seemed so…so right, in the moment. Like it was the only thing I could do, and it had worked. And it had felt good. Shamefully good.
I drove nonstop until it was dark and we were close to the Oklahoma border before I finally couldn’t ignore my hunger anymore. “Drive-through okay for dinner?” I asked, and Sören finally opened his eyes and looked at me. Not with the purple I’d been expecting to see, but with red-rimmed blue eyes.
“It’s so warm,” he whispered, and my heart suddenly tried to beat its way out of my chest.
“Sören…oh my god, really?” My throat was incredibly tight, my words almost inaudible.
“Yeah.”
I couldn’t handle this and drive at the same time. I took the first exit and pulled into a parking lot, mostly abandoned except for a few big trucks parked lengthwise along one side of it.
I shut the car off and stared at him. “What―I thought this wasn’t allowed.”
“So did I,” he whispered. I recognized the smile on his lips, small and trembling. It was the one he’d worn when he’d told me to go, to leave him and escape. “It’s colder now,” he said, and I saw his hands start to shake. “I need…”
“Hang on.” I got out of the car, came around to his side, opened the door, and held out my hand. “I know just the thing.” Sören stared at my hand for a moment, and I waited breathlessly to see if he’d reject it, or if the landvættir would reemerge and take control. Eventually he took a deep breath and grabbed hold of me. I pulled him out of the car and into my arms, but his shaking got worse.
“Hang on, wait.” I guided him around to the hood, doing my best to ignore how strange, how exquisite it felt to hold him again, and sat him down on the edge of the hood. The engine had heated up the metal until it was uncomfortably hot, to my mind, but Sören visibly relaxed as the warmth seeped through his clothes. “Lay back.” He went, and I went with him, gritting my teeth and bearing the heat for his sake. I didn’t want to let go yet. “Better?”
“Better,” Sören agreed. He turned his head and looked at me. “So this is real, then?”
“Um…yeah?”
“I thought maybe I was making it up.” He laughed uncertainly. “It’s…I make up a lot of stuff when I’m in the dark. Gives me something nicer to focus on.”
“Fuck, I am so sorry about―”
“It’s not that bad,” Sören hastened to say, and I gritted my teeth against the torrent of curses trying to beat past my lips. “I’m not lying. It’s not that bad when I’m in deep. It’s so cold there. For the most part, I just sleep. If I felt the cold all the time, I think I’d just…sink into it and forget anything else, you know? But the vættir gives me heat and sensation sometimes, and I love it, but it also reminds me of everything I’m missing.”
“Sören.” I didn’t know how to continue. I didn’t know what to say.
“I’m so fucking angry at you, though.”
Wait… “What?”
“I did all this for you, and now you’re screwing around with my family again? Cillian!” He smacked me on the shoulder, not even hard enough to sting, and then immediately turned it into a grip that twisted my T-shirt up in his fingers. “I did this so you could be free, not so you could live to fight another day!”
“It wasn’t right.” I knew that―oh, how well I knew that. “You shouldn’t have had to do this for me.”
“None of it was right in the first place,” Sören said, looking pained. “I knew the things we were doing weren’t right, and I went along with my father anyway. I helped him kidnap you; I listened to my brothers torture you, and I didn’t―I didn’t say anything. I didn’t do anything.
And you’re so beautiful, and strong, and you didn’t deserve what we were doing to you. I couldn’t live with that.”
No, no, this was all wrong. “I seduced you. I made you help me!”
“I fell in love with you,” Sören corrected me. “And I wanted to save the man I love. I still want to save you. It’s not too late to give us back to them.”
“I’m afraid it is.” There was no going back from paintballing someone in the crotch until they collapsed. “And I wouldn’t let you go anyway. I’m going to save you.”
“You’re going to try, I guess.” He sounded so resigned. “But you shouldn’t. Fuck.” Sören wiped his free hand across his eyes. “We’re quite a pair.”
It was true, I couldn’t bring myself to care about how fucked we were right now. I rolled onto my side and curled closer to him, and he laid his head against my chest and sighed.
“Star-crossed lovers,” I murmured.
“Does that make me Romeo or Juliet?” he asked.
“Juliet, definitely. I’m the dashing one.”
“You’re the idiot who couldn’t wait for me to wake up before poisoning himself, you mean?”
The metaphor was breaking down now. I didn’t want to speak in metaphors anyway, not when I had Sören actually here, in my arms. I wanted the reality of that, the reassurance of it. Fuck, I wanted it forever.
“You wouldn’t have woken up if I hadn’t come after you, Sören.”
“But you’d be safe,” he whispered against my collarbone. “I just want you to be safe.”
“You can’t fight fate,” I said, and boy, was that ever the truth. “Whatever happens is gonna happen no matter what we do.”
“You didn’t have to come to Chicago.”
“You’re deliberately missing the point, jackass.”
Sören chuckled. “Maybe.” He shifted closer to me. “It’s really not so bad. But I’m so cold, and sometimes I remember the wrong things, and they loop over and over in my head. Sometimes I think I’m going crazy, and that’s―that’s kind of the deal, right? I go crazy so the rest of my family doesn’t have to.”
“That’s not the deal at all.”
“I love my nieces and nephews. I don’t want them to live with the curse.”
I held him closer. “I’m going to work this out. I’ll fix it. I know I will.”
Sören pressed a kiss to the base of my throat. His lips were freezing. “You can’t see into your own future, remember?”
“Sören…”
“I’m so cold, Cillian.”
God, could my heart break any harder? “I know, but it won’t be for long,” I promised him. “I’m going to fix this. I’ll make it better.” I squeezed him hard and wished all of my warmth into him, pressed him harder against the hood, but it was too late. A moment later, Sören was gone, and the landvættir looked up at me with eyes like twilight and a pleased expression.
“Was that nice?” he―it―asked.
“Bring him back,” I begged. “Let him come back.”
“The distance has grown too far to let Sören out for long. It exhausts us. The more energy I expend, the harder it is to keep him in comfortable stasis.”
“Well, he’s obviously not comfortable if he’s freezing and having nightmares,” I snapped.
“I could control for that better if I were closer to my land. But you stole me,” it reminded me, “and now you must fight to keep me. When one of you wins, Sören will be comfortable again.” It smiled at me. “But it was nice to see him, wasn’t it? To speak with him again? He misses you.”
Time to control my temper. I didn’t need to antagonize anyone else today. “I…yeah. It was nice.” Fuck, it was so, so nice. “I appreciate it.”
“Good.” It―no, he―looked at me happily. “I think I’m learning better how to behave humanly.”
“You mean humanely?”
“No, humanly.” He nestled closer. “Would you like to kiss me again?”
I suddenly recalled that the two of us were basically cuddling on the hood of a car together, and Sören version 2.0 looked way too interested in turning that into something else.
“No, we should get going. I need food and we need to find a place to sleep. I have to figure out how Egilsson tracked us down so fast.”
“He consulted a sorceress.”
“He…” Of course he did. I wasn’t the only game in town. “How?”
“Over Skype. She is a distant kinswoman, and he knows she won’t betray him to the others. She read the cups and saw the amusement park. She isn’t terribly powerful, though. I think if we avoid large landmarks, it will be all right.”
“How did you learn all of this?” I asked.
“While Sören was with you, I returned to my land. Within my land, my powers extend to those under my protection. I wanted to learn how Ólafur would fight for me. He’s quite dedicated,” Sören added with a contented sigh. “It’s very pleasant.”
“I’m glad my imminent destruction amuses you.”
“You are a drama queen.”
Fucker. “I am not a fucking drama queen,” I muttered. “Who’re the others? The ones she might betray him to?”
“That,” Sören said languidly, “is information you will have to earn. You can start by taking me to bed.”
“Ha.” I let him go and sat up, curling my hands together in my lap. I’d held Sören, the real one, my Sören. I’d touched him. I wanted to immortalize my hands in bronze; they’d never feel any better than they did now. “No way. And no beds either, nothing with a sign that might identify us. We’re camping from here on out.”
Sören frowned as he sat up next to me. “Camping?”
“Yeah. Sleeping on the ground. You’ll probably love it.”
I turned out to be utterly wrong on that count.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Don’t get me wrong. I was not, and had never been, big into the “great outdoors.” My mother might like roughing it in a little cabin with unreliable electricity, and I might have spent more than my fair share of days tied up in uncomfortably rural locations, but I’d never enjoyed it. It wasn’t the sort of thing I did for enjoyment―it was what happened when there were no other options and I had to suck it up. I figured it would be second nature for Sören, though. After all, he was a freaking landvættir. If getting comfy on the actual land wasn’t a part of that, I didn’t know what was.
Living in ignorance was way better than finding out the truth.
I bought a couple of sleeping bags, some paracord, and a few tarps at an army surplus store, because there was no way I was fucking around with putting up poles in the dark, and then drove us out to the ass end of nowhere with no identifiable landmarks and rigged a shelter. It was warm and the sky was clear, so I wasn’t that worried about getting rained on, but I took the breeze into account when I tied down the plastic sheets so that our heads would be decently protected. I set up the sleeping bags and then called Sören over so we―or I, at least―could try to get some sleep.
Any hope I had of that vanished in the first five minutes of him joining me.
“I don’t like it,” Sören said just a few seconds after he lay down.
“Why not?”
“I just don’t. I want to find a hotel.”
I scrubbed the heels of my hands over my eyes, feeling dried out and worn down. Fuck, today had been such a―ha―roller coaster ride. From Denny’s to St. Louis, through our ill-fated theme park excursion and Sören’s miraculous, heartbreaking reappearance, I was so tired I was almost too tired to sleep. I saw the muzzle of Artύr’s gun pointing my way every time I closed my eyes, felt the thud of paintballs that could have all too easily become real bullets. I still had paint on my hands and neck, and it itched. I was desperate for a shower and a drink, not in any particular order, and there was no chance of either right now.
I wanted to reach inside the vættir, grab Sören, and pull him out by force, another completely unattainable goal. I wanted to lie on my sleeping
bag in the middle of this damn field and try to ignore the insects that crawled beside my head and over my fingers and get some goddamn sleep. Needless to say, I wasn’t in the mood right now to cater to Sören’s whims.
“Too bad.”
“I can’t rest like this,” he said, and the way it was phrased made me sit up and pay a little more attention.
“I thought you didn’t sleep.”
“I didn’t say sleep, I said rest,” Sören replied, and there was no mistaking the petulance in his voice. “I can’t be comfortable here.”
I sighed. “Look, if it’s too hard―”
“It is not a matter of the body’s discomfort. It’s that this land doesn’t like me.”
Well, that wasn’t what I expected to hear. Although maybe I should have, considering we were on our way to talk with a shaman about exactly this kind of problem. “How can you tell?”
“Oh, it’s letting me know,” Sören said darkly. “Wild lands are so much more territorial about this sort of thing. It’s being very rude, actually.”
“It’s, what, talking to you?”
“If that’s how you need to think about it, then yes, it’s talking to me. And it’s quite upset that I’m here.” He glared at me. “Not that this was my idea.”
“Jesus Christ.” I could almost hear Marisol chiding me for that, but I couldn’t be made to care right now. “How was I supposed to know you wouldn’t be able to camp like a normal person?”
“You should have assumed as much, since I am not a normal person.”
I was so tired of being the person people shouted at or got indignant with. “Right, no. I’m not buying that. If you can’t sleep like this, go and get comfortable in the car, because I’m not going anywhere else right now.”
Sören’s eyes narrowed. “That isn’t a very wise move, leaving me alone with your vehicle.”
“No?” I chuckled despite myself. “Why, are you going to drive off in it?”
“I might.”
“But you won’t.” I was becoming more and more convinced of that fact. “You’re the prize, but you’re also the prisoner. The terms have been set. The stakes are established. Sure, if you want to throw the whole competition, you can get in my car and drive back to Chicago. I can’t stop you.”