“I liked the orange.” I shivered and pulled the blanket higher around my chin. “Gotta go, Kat. I still have to get home and if the drive is anything like this morning, it’ll take over an hour.”
“Call me later so I know you’re okay.”
I sighed, annoyance creeping in to fight the cold. Technically, I was older than Kat. Raven was born first, then me, but both my sisters acted protective toward me. It was as if they thought I was the soft mushy center of an Oreo that had to be protected by their two hard chocolate shells. Determination to prove them wrong made me tighten my frozen fingers on the wheel and the phone. “You be careful. You’re the one out on unfamiliar roads, not me.”
“Yeah, but I’m expecting to protect some kind of nature hippie. You’re looking for Thor, and if he’s anything like we’ve read, he could be a big, moody pain in the butt. Just call me anyway.”
After agreeing, I turned off the phone and set it in the passenger seat. I should have told her that I’d found him, but then I’d have to explain his getting arrested. Taran hadn’t been all that big, but he had the moody part down. Of course, I’d be moody if someone was slapping handcuffs on me, too.
Kat’s bossiness had been getting on my nerves for years. Her attitude toward our norns bordered on ridiculous. Why be so pissed about something we couldn’t change? All three of us had always been wary of the beings—I mean, who wouldn’t be a little scared about something living in your body?—but her outright hate made me wonder if her rune tempus was harder than mine and Raven’s. Kat could be stingy with her personal details, but she was also the only one of us to have had her fingers burned getting out a message.
As I pulled my little car back onto the slick road and joined the slow, slow traffic, I thought of the changes I’d decided to make in my life. I wanted to be stronger, not as quick to tears, not so...soft. I’d spent my life as the peacemaker—between my sisters, between them and my mother—and somewhere in there I’d made them see me as someone they needed to baby. No more. I would stand up to my mother if she showed and stand between her and Taran. Not as a peacemaker this time, but as a protector.
* * *
When I woke up in the empty house the next morning, I shivered under my blue comforter and blinked at a stain on the blue-and-white-striped wallpaper in the room I shared with my sisters. We lived in a small house, but to us, it was like living in a mansion—so, so much better than the flimsy canvas tents we’d spent most of our lives in. The best part was the bathroom down the hall. Not a community-shared, campground bathroom where you had to wear flip-flops in the shower and hope some stranger hadn’t eaten chili the night before, but a real bathroom with a bathtub and a lock on the door.
I hated waking in the house alone, though. I’d never before been separated this long from my sisters, and though it was nice not to hear Kat griping about our clothes encroaching on her third of the tiny closet, I’d like any noise over this backdrop of pattering snow.
Shivering as I turned onto my back, I noticed my breath fogging in the air. It was so much colder in here than when I’d gone to bed last night. I scurried from the bed, grabbed Raven’s heavy terry cloth robe off the hook by the door and was shoving my arms through the sleeves when I caught sight of the blank alarm clock. I flipped the light switch and got nothing. The power being out explained the cold.
It took four pairs of socks for my feet to feel halfway warm.
Guess the years of camping would pay off.
Yawning, I shuffled into the garage to dig inside the boxes of camping gear we’d stored. I pulled out a heavy-duty sleeping bag and a propane tank for the two-burner camping stove we had propped against one wall. We had a small awning on the back porch, so I set the stove up there—just out of the snow. I started water boiling for tea and ran back inside, though it didn’t feel all that much warmer.
I wanted plain black tea and cinnamon bark this morning. Maybe a little dried orange peel. I dug one of my tea balls from the drawer and glanced out the small window. We had a star fruit tree in the backyard and the shock of sudden cold added to the weight of the snow had bent the branches and caused the young fruit to fall. I could only imagine the bed of yellow under the snow, but some had recently dropped, their yellow shapes like sad, abandoned ornaments.
I left the water to boil and hurried back to my room. I put on my warmest red sweater over a thermal shirt with a pair of blue jeans, one size too big because I’d pulled my favorite over-the-knee black socks on under them. All three colors offered protection from magic.
When my tea was done, I carried it into the tiny sunroom where Mom and I grew herbs and flowers. Shivering, I sipped it while trying to see what clippings my mother might have taken. This room was what had finally made her agree to rent a house less than a year ago. Growing more of our own herbs helped with spells. I set my mug of tea on the counter and avoided looking at my shredded, dying solstice orange snapdragons on the floor. They were my favorite flowers and I’d been growing those for years. My mother had taken garden shears to them.
The only reason she would have done that was to keep me from using them. They detected spells.
But snapdragons weren’t my only source of magic. I knelt on the floor and opened the cabinet where we kept extra dirt and fertilizer. I’d stored a few jars behind the bags. They weren’t hidden exactly, but Mom would always use the easiest bag of dirt, so I left an open one out at all times.
I pulled out the saltpeter and the cinchona bark. I’d bought the latter off the internet, so who knew if it was potent, but loading up on protection couldn’t hurt. I planned to melt the saltpeter in water and sprinkle it around Taran’s house. I’d put down dill, as well.
Something crashed on the back porch and I dropped one of the jars. It caught the edge of the cabinet bottom, so it shattered all around my legs. I was stretching toward the broom and dustpan when there was another crash on the back porch, then another against the window. I turned, wincing when glass sliced into my palm. Then I saw what was making the noises, and I forgot the glass as I scrambled to my feet and out of the back door.
Birds. What looked like hundreds, no, maybe thousands of birds in a wall of black in the sky. Black dots littered the backyard I’d been afraid to go into for a while because of the recent snake infestation.
A bird fell by my head and I screamed and threw up my arms as more fell around me. They came faster and faster and just as I turned to go back inside, my norn decided to take over.
“No,” I yelled. “Not now!”
But she never listened. She shifted inside me, then threw the world into a spin. The birds and the snow began to swirl in a garish pattern of black and white. I knelt on the porch, the cut on my palm keeping my attention until the slam of nausea threatened to knock me over. Squeezing my eyes closed, I curled in on myself to ride it out.
Once the world settled, I realized I didn’t have my notebook on me. I stood and turned to go into the house, then stopped, stunned by what I saw. These weren’t crows, as I’d thought. They were bigger, the beaks more hooked. They were ravens—birds I’d never seen in Florida before. They hung suspended all around me, frozen with morbid masks of wide eyes and open beaks, bodies shimmering from the ice that had formed on their unprepared bodies. Feathers with tiny icicles. I had to close my eyes.
But then, I thought of ravens and how they were supposed to come to feed upon the dead during Ragnarok.
Shivers racked my body so hard, my teeth clattered painfully as I walked inside. I couldn’t let the terror simmering inside me free. Didn’t have time to deal with it. Instead, I picked up a notebook off the kitchen counter and snatched one of the pens we kept scattered everywhere. Then I realized the cold and fear had scrambled my brain. This wasn’t my normal rune tempus.
This was one of the vision ones.
I whimpered in dread as the tile beneath my feet turned into
a snow-covered parking lot, the wall in front of me turned into water and the wall to my right morphed into a bridge. Recognizing the Brooks Bridge, I thought about the time Raven, Kat and I had sneaked out to try to catch the nighttime run of spirit wolves across the water. Other kids had been out that night, too, but we were the only ones who could see the wispy, white ghosts.
I stood beside a bait and tackle shop, and the suspended snowflakes here were so thick, they looked like chunks of paper. I glanced up to see a wall of ravens here, as well. Five teenagers stood on a red slatted walkway next to a wooden pier, all their faces raised to watch the thick smear of blackbirds. My breath caught in my chest.
One of the kids was moving. He waved a hand in front of another guy.
During my rune tempus.
I wanted to move closer, but couldn’t. Not in my vision. The crazy panic tearing through my body made me close my hands into fists. I knew, I just knew, something bad was going to happen.
This was a vision of something that was going on right this minute.
The boy abruptly turned toward something I couldn’t see and there was a loud cry of pain as he was lifted off the pier to disappear into the water with a loud splash. I had a quick glimpse of a hammer—a familiar hammer—then I came out of the vision so fast, acid rushed up my throat. Hand over my mouth , I ran to the bathroom and barely reached the toilet in time. Luckily, I’d only had tea today.
Tears streaked my cheeks and I slid to the floor, my back against the cold bathtub. Someone had just been hurt. Badly. A sob caught in my throat and I shivered. Hurt, or killed. To be hit that hard—hard enough to fly off a pier like that? True fear spurred me into movement. I hurriedly cleaned and bandaged the wound on my hand, then raced to gather everything I’d need so I could get back to Taran.
The whole time I wondered how the boy and the person assaulting him had been able to move while the rest of the world had been caught in my time stop.
* * *
Late that afternoon, I had the backseat full of blankets and enough supplies to do at least five protection spells. I’d parked four houses down from Taran’s. The trip here had been crazy. I’d actually seen someone bust through a glass window in a shop. Three men had crawled inside while the place next door already looked ransacked. I’d seen a fistfight in a snowdrift and nearly wrecked three times, so sometimes my car barely crawled above five miles an hour. Now I sat in the little Neon, gripping the steering wheel and trying to calm down. When my passenger door opened, I screamed.
“You should really have your doors locked. Young girl all alone when the world is going crazy.” I recognized one of the twins who’d been on Taran’s porch the night before as he twisted to look in my overfull backseat. Red eyebrows crawled up his forehead. “Whoa. You some kind of weird hoarder or what?”
“No.” I narrowed my eyes and pointed to the door. “Get out of my car.”
“Aw, don’t be scared. I just came to invite you to Taran’s. He saw you drive by a few times. He wants to talk.”
Movement outside of the car caught my eye. It was the other twin. They were tall guys, topping six feet and both wore skinny jeans and black boots. The one in my car sported a weird fuzzy green sweater under his brown coat and the other only had a thick blue sweatshirt on. Orange-ish hair sat in spikes on their heads and each had a red goatee. Everything about them was pointy, from their noses and ears down to their fingers.
I did have to talk to Taran. After staring at the twin in my car another moment, I decided to just go with it. I hauled my big bag with some of the spell ingredients up and got out of the car.
“I’m Josh Tanner,” he said as he got out and straightened his coat and sweater. He stood on the other side before joining me on the sidewalk. He pointed. “That’s my brother, Grim. We’re good guys, promise.” They walked on either side of me. I felt like a munchkin between them as Josh continued talking. “Good guys in all senses of the term, you could say. I’m a confirmed kuensami, but you have nothing to worry about because my affections have been snagged by another pretty brunette. My brother here doesn’t even like girls. Okay, he likes them, he just likes boys more—get my drift?”
I nodded, surprised to hear that sort of information spilling out to a complete stranger. Also surprised to hear the Norse term for a skirt chaser just flow out of his mouth like it was normal.
“Gleidr haensa,” muttered Grim.
“Blot fetr,” returned Josh.
It took effort to hold back my shock and a snort of laughter. Grim had called his brother a bowlegged chicken, and Josh had responded with heathen fart. In freaking Norse.
Then I clued in to their names. Josh and Grim Tanner. This surreal sort of awe washed over me. If Taran carried Thor’s soul as I suspected, then these two guys were like human representations of Tanngrisnir and Tanngnjostr, the two goats who had pulled Thor’s chariot—the ones he used as food only to resurrect as companions. I wrinkled my nose at the thought, but their names were too close and they were too pointy to be anything else.
There was no doubt now. Taran was one of the warriors.
Which meant my mother had gotten it right, too.
I shivered and glanced around as if she’d suddenly pop out from behind one of the houses.
“I understand that our considerable good looks have probably stunned you into silence. That and the cold.” Josh slid his hands into the pockets of his coat. “We’ll be in the house and warm in no time. Taran still has electricity and Grim makes a mean cup of hot chocolate.”
Grim nodded. He had some kind of white stick in his mouth and he smiled around it. He had such a sweet smile, I couldn’t help but smile back.
“Good,” Josh said, letting go of me and turning back the way I’d come. “We’re all friends now. Let’s go before you turn into a pretty Popsicle.” He began walking faster but kept his strides short—probably so I could keep up. “What’s your name?”
“Coral Lockwood.”
“Pretty name for a pretty girl. You’ll have to ignore our friend’s derogatory remarks about your colorful clothes. Taran wears black and white mostly. The occasional boring brown sneaks in. Grim and I think it’s because he lacks imagination or he does it to emphasize how very much he hates the way we dress, but the truth is he just has no appreciation for the wonderful colors of life. He looks at me and sees an oflati. It’s his curse. One of them anyway.”
“Is your family Norse?”
“You recognize the language?” He lifted one red eyebrow.
I nodded.
“That’s pretty weird. I’m surprised.” He chuckled. “We’re one hundred percent Scandinavian, Grim and me. We moved here with our parents as toddlers, but we like to believe we brought a bit of our homeland with us. You are obviously part Native American.”
“Arapaho. I’m also Norse, though I’m not really sure about how much of the half is pure Norse.” My sisters and I had no idea who our father was—just that he’d been the part that had something to do with our norns, our curse...and of course, our heritage. Our mother had left her own heritage and her family behind when she’d run with us.
Josh gave this dramatic gasp. “She’s a brethren, Grim.”
Grim pulled the stick out of his mouth and chuckled. “I’m the gay one, but he’s the drama queen. Are you really part Norse?”
I nodded, noticing that my teeth had stopped knocking together so hard. Maybe the walk had warmed me up a little. “I know the old language, too. He just said that Taran thinks he’s gaudy.”
Grim nodded. “He does. Thinks we both are. And I’ll confess that we sometimes find the ugliest, most colorful clothes we can find just to annoy him. Doesn’t take much. The guy is a walking mood swing.”
“I guess that’s better than a walking Skittle.” I smirked.
“Never.” Grim winked and stuck the white thin
g back in his mouth. I thought it was some kind of candy. I was sure of it when a crunch sounded.
“We couldn’t believe it when you took off from the cops like that, but what Grim and I would really like to know is how you got from one side of the yard to another in the blink of an eye. Oh, and how you ended up wrapped around Taran. He’s not usually the affectionate sort.”
I had no idea how to answer them. Telling Taran was one thing—especially because he’d actually come into my rune tempus with me and because I was here to try to help him. Luckily, my cell phone started playing the Jaws theme.
Josh cracked up.
“It’s my sister Kat,” I explained as I dug for my phone. “She’s kind of scary sometimes.”
“I’m just happy to hear you have a sister. Does she look like you?”
I nodded. “I’m one of three and we’re identical.” My phone still rang with the scary shark theme but I couldn’t work it. Gloves were too crusty with cold.
He put his hand over his heart. “Triplets? Hot triplets? It’s like my ultimate fantasy come to life. I might have to dump my lady love for this. Too bad Grim can’t appreciate this wonderful gift.”
Grim reached around me to smack the back of his brother’s head. Hard. “Your lady love doesn’t even know you exist.”
I decided to call Kat back later and stuck the phone into my pocket. “She’s the youngest of us and acts like she’s my mother.”
“That’s okay—Grim acts like our mother sometimes. Especially when they’ve recently watched Magic Mike.” He gagged, then choked when his brother smacked him again.
I was starting to get annoyed with the way he made fun of his brother, but when I looked up, the two were grinning at each other and I realized it was all in fun. There wasn’t anything other than amusement and full acceptance in Josh’s expression when he looked at his brother.
We’d reached Taran’s house. I recognized it easily because of the massive Caribbean mahogany tree that took up half the front yard. If I’d come from the other direction, I wouldn’t have been able to watch Taran and the cop on the porch the night before.
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