“So, your name is Cat? Like the animal?” Branton stepped closer to me.
“No, it’s with a K.”
“Are you like them?” He pointed toward the group of kids milling near the fire trucks. Tyrone was frowning at something Kara was saying. With her hands. She talked loudly with her hands in wide, arching gestures. Her red curls flopped wildly around her head.
Arun and the others talked openly about the god souls in the kids. About what was happening. They’d been preparing packs for this, preparing food for this. I’d spent my entire life never talking about any of this, never sharing about my norn or why we stayed on the run. And here was a group of people who shared in the very thing I’d thought set my sisters and myself apart. This whole day felt surreal. Meeting all these kids who knew they carried souls even though they couldn’t feel them. Meeting Arun, who could stroke his finger down a leaf and heal it.
This horrific fire that obliterated years and years of hard work.
I shivered, my heart aching over their loss.
Branton plopped one of my blankets over my shoulders. “It’s okay if you don’t want to answer. There are some in the group who don’t talk much, either. Some have been here a while. Like Gillian, Tyrone and Kara. Did you meet them? They’re pretty cool.”
Tyrone walked by still carrying Gullin. I thought of the god Freyr and the golden boar who pulled his chariot. Gullinbursti. “All we need is Skirnir,” I said half under my breath.
“I know who that is, but no.” Branton laughed, shook his head. “No servants for Arun. He doesn’t even let his mother wash his laundry. He’s the most self-sufficient person I know.”
“Then he won’t give his weapon away, will he?” In the stories, Freyr had given his sword—a magic one that fought battles on its own—to his servant, Skirnir, as a reward for Skirnir’s help in getting Freyr’s wife interested in him. That gift was what led to Freyr’s death in Ragnarok because all he had to fight with was the horn of an elk. Or...I guess it would really be an antler of an elk.
I eyed Branton, noticing he shook his head and tugged on his ear again. “You seem to know a lot about the gods,” I said, barely managing not to frown. Something about him felt off. I couldn’t place it. He seemed nice and friendly, but my skin still prickled.
“I know a lot about some of them. I mean, I grew up around these people and their stories. Some of the best stories I’ve ever heard.” He shook his head, hit the side of it like he had water in his ear.
“You okay?” I asked.
He stopped messing with his ear. “Sorry. Snow must have gotten in there, and now that it’s melting, it feels weird.”
I didn’t believe him. Something was telling me not to believe him.
When my norn twisted about in my chest, I realized it was her.
She didn’t trust Branton, either.
Chapter Five
We spent hours going through what was left of the greenhouses once the fires were out and we barely made a dent. Some of the houses had survived, so it could have been worse, but I couldn’t imagine how Arun and his family felt right now. All this loss on top of knowing what we apparently faced. I couldn’t deny it any longer. I wasn’t going to Oklahoma, not yet. Not when other warriors were coming here.
Arun didn’t stop moving until his mother handed him a bottle of water and pointed to the spot next to me. I’d found a place to sit under part of a greenhouse that had only half burned, wanting out of the wind and snow for a few minutes. I needed to catch my breath.
“Where are the horses?” I asked Arun when he stopped in front of me.
“What horses?” He sat and propped his arms on his raised knees.
I pointed to a stack of hay bales. “Aren’t those for horses?”
There were black streaks in his light blond curls. They sort of sproinged about when he shook his head and laughed.
“What?” I glared at the laugh though I was kind of glad to hear it.
Crap. He was starting to get to me.
“You’d think we’d have horses. A lot of people around here keep them because they’re great for getting around in the different kinds of terrain—especially further west toward the park. But we strictly run on gas modes of transportation around here. The hay is for the greenhouses. The bales add thermal mass inside that helps regulate the temperature. Sounds crazy, but it works. Unfortunately, they’re very flammable.” He looked around the partial greenhouse we were in. Six of them had survived, and we were about to start shuffling things around so everyone could bunk inside one or two. None of the kids could afford to get a hotel in town and like most of the ones I’d tried to stop in on the drive up here, they were full, anyway.
Altogether, Arun had found ten backpacks. They were the huge kind I’d seen in documentaries about backpackers. I was pretty curious about seeing inside them. I’d grown up camping, but we’d never had tents small enough to go in a backpack. Sleeping bags, either, for that matter. Arun had explained these were specially made to be lightweight yet handle cold temperatures.
Ten backpacks weren’t going to be enough. I hadn’t met all the kids here, but from the way everyone talked, there were more. Maybe if no one else with souls showed up. I looked at Arun as he rubbed his hands over his arms.
“Yeah, they’re prickling,” he said when he saw where I looked. “There are more coming, and at least one or more has to be close because it feels like electricity is running through my body.”
“How do they know to come here?”
He shook his head. “That, I don’t know. Most of them follow the music. You met Sky?”
I nodded.
“She can hear it. But she’s powerful and even knows what goddess she has. Skadi.”
“Oh gods,” I breathed, impressed. “She’s the one who picked Loki’s punishment, right? The one who sent him to be tied up in a cave with a poisonous snake?” I shuddered. “Hope she doesn’t run into Loki.”
“That’s the one god I don’t understand in this whole mess. His curse was to last until Ragnarok. So, if he was just recently freed and all this is happening so fast, he wouldn’t have had time to reincarnate inside someone like ours did. Every kid who’s showed up here has a birthday within a month of each other, so my mom and I believe that’s what’s going on. The gods knew when this was to happen and joined with us. Unless this has been in play since we were born, Loki would just now be getting out. He has such a huge part in the prophecies of Ragnarok, he has to be around somehow.”
“When’s your birthday?”
“In a couple of days. I’ll be eighteen. Tyrone turns eighteen a few days after me. Gillian’s was yesterday.”
“Well, I’m different. I turn nineteen in three months.”
“Really.” He pulled Gullin into his lap when the little pig walked into his thigh. He scratched its head and the thing writhed in happiness.
I couldn’t help but grin.
“That makes you about nine months older than the majority of us. There has to be something to that.”
I shrugged, thought about telling him about the prophecy and how I wasn’t supposed to live past my nineteenth birthday, but I didn’t want to bring the mood down. It was already hard enough watching him sit here and try to stay strong.
Alva walked into the greenhouse carrying one of the big backpacks. “I found two more,” she said. “I’d forgotten I’d stashed a couple behind the seat in my truck. These don’t have the sleeping bags and food, but we can go into town tomorrow and pick up whatever else we need.” She sat next to her son, coughed, then took a sip of bottled water.
“Bottled again, Mom?” Arun nudged his mom with his shoulder, then grinned at me. “She actively campaigns against bottle water usually.”
“Don’t give me a hard time. Some people from town showed up with supplies. Lots
of water bottles and canned goods.”
“Oh!” I covered my mouth as I remembered something Arun had said earlier, then dropped my hand. “Was all the food you guys canned in that barn?”
She shook her head. “The stored food is fine, though the people in town didn’t know that. We dug cellars. Four of them. The fire wasn’t set anywhere near them.”
“So it was set?” I asked.
She nodded, her eyes watering. She rubbed her face on her blanket-covered shoulder. “I don’t know who would have done such a thing. It was set around the barn, and whoever did it didn’t even bother to hide how. Plain old gasoline.”
“But wouldn’t the snow have stopped that from working?” I asked.
Arun nodded. “I was thinking the same thing. Not that I know that much about starting fires, but the snow was piled up around the barn. It had to have been started from the inside.”
Alva shook her head. She had blond hair the same color as her son’s, but hers fell in a straight satiny sheet that swung around her chin. “The firemen told us to stay away from the barn and cabin while they figure this out.” She looked at Arun, her face grave. “They’re not going to figure it out. You know that, right? This was magic.”
Arun told him mother about the runes I’d written earlier. She was so interested, I pulled out the notebook and showed her.
She ran her finger over them, then looked at me in amazement. “A norn. You have a wyrd sister, a sister of fate. And she makes the world stop to give you these messages.” She shook her head again and looked at the paper almost reverently. “Every single time a new person shows up here, I find myself in awe of this—of what’s happening. To know that you carry this precious being inside you, that has to be something else.”
She’s not all that precious.
I kept that thought to myself, but my norn heard me because my heart sort of thumped. Like she’d popped it with her hand or something.
Arun shuddered, then rubbed his arms harder.
“Someone close?” Alva asked.
“Yeah, and I think whoever it is, is lost.”
She stood and held out her hand to help pull her son to his feet. He just grinned and took her hand, and I knew it was to indulge her. He was kind of a mama’s boy. Though, so far, Alva had showed herself to be seriously cool. I’d be a mama’s girl if she’d been mine.
I realized I hadn’t thought about my mother in hours. It was a new record. Normally, my resentment for her burned at the top of my thoughts at all times.
Alva wrapped both hands around her bottle. “You’ll have to go see if you can find whoever is lost. There’s a storm coming in and who knows if they have the right equipment. They could be like poor Gillian—nearly frozen in a burrow.”
Arun looked at me. “She thumbed her way across the country to get here. Remember I said she was sixteen at the time? But she picked the wrong time of year and had no idea how to cope with the cold. By the time we found her, she was out of money, had a black eye from fighting off a trucker—one she’d apparently beat all to hell before he pushed her out on the side of the road.” He picked his coat up off a hay bale. “Ever been on a snowmobile, Kat?”
I shook my head. Despite my exhaustion, excitement hit me so fast, he must have seen it on my face.
“Oh yeah.” He grinned. “You want to go.”
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” Alva said. “Let’s wait until Tyrone gets back from town. He went to get more walkie-talkies. He can go with you.”
Arun hugged his mom but looked at me. “My mother has a rule. Nobody goes out on the snowmobiles alone.” He touched his mom’s nose. “You just said I needed to hurry because a storm is coming. Kat has wicked power. I’m sure if we start to get into trouble, she’ll just stop the world again.”
“Oh yes, thank you for that.” Alva smiled at me. “Wish I had been awake for it like everyone else.”
I opened my mouth to say the She Leech had done it, then snapped it closed. These people didn’t need my snarky attitude right now.
* * *
I loved the snowmobile. Like really, really loved it. I didn’t even mind that I was on the back of one and not driving my own. I watched closely, though, so I’d know what to do if there was a next time. I held on to Arun and laughed, loving the way my voice echoed inside the helmet. Mine was black and covered my whole face. When I’d first put it on, all I could think about was sneezing in it. Yeah, weird, I know, but I’d seen that happen in a movie when I was really little and still remembered laughing on and off about it for a week. It had grossed Coral out.
My laughter faded when I thought of her. I still didn’t know if she was okay. I’d have to call her again when we stopped.
The muscles in Arun’s stomach shifted as he controlled the vehicle. I could actually feel their slight shift through the layers of coat and two sweaters he’d put on before we left. People in town had brought the clothes and he’d grabbed another sweater and pulled it over my head, laughing when my hair had flown wild with static. The sweater went down to my knees. I’d had to roll it up just to sit astride the snowmobile.
Arun had also found thick gloves after he’d dismissed the ones I’d pulled from under the seat of my car. They were too big and my fingers sort of banged about inside them, but he’d made the straps around the wrists so tight, the suckers weren’t coming off anytime soon.
Tyrone had teased him about putting clothes on the pretty girl, and Arun’s pale skin had actually turned red. The color had started on his neck just above the turtleneck of one of the sweaters and crept up his cheeks. The best part had been his ears. They’d been crimson.
And everything in me had gone girlie and quivery, which of course, had made me frown at him, then hold my breath because his eyes had narrowed and I thought he was going to kiss me. Right there in front of everyone in the temporary tent thrown up by the people in town who’d brought the food and clothes. But he hadn’t. He’d stepped back fast.
Now, as I hugged close to his back because I had no choice—it was either that or fly off into a snowbank—I accepted that I liked how his body felt against me. I kind of liked him. Even with his annoying reaction to my glares. Those glares had felled lesser men who’d dated Dru.
Arun had the opposite reaction. Like my prickliness kind of turned him on.
He brought the snowmobile to a sudden halt, and I looked around, expecting to see some bundled-up kid. Instead, I held my breath and looked up at the sky. Scary black clouds were rapidly swallowing each other as they came closer to us. As I stared, lightning ripped through them in a quicksilver, jagged streak like Thor had hurled it himself.
Arun jumped into motion, his head turning right and left as he looked for something before he pulled off his helmet. “That looks bad and there are too many trees and too much lightning for my peace of mind. We’re gonna set up in this clearing.”
“Set up?” My voice was muffled, so I pulled off my helmet. “What do you mean set up? Aren’t we supposed to find this lost kid?”
“We don’t know that he’s lost, but he is fine if that prickling on my skin is anything to go by. We’re about to get hit with a bad storm—fast—and there is no shelter out here.” He pulled the backpack off me. “The tent will have to do.”
“You want to get inside a tent to ride out a thunderstorm?” I’d been in tents in lots of thunderstorms. Um no. “Let’s just hurry back. I bet you can out-motor the storm.”
“No, I can’t.” As he spoke, thunder rumbled and roared and drowned out his last word. He scrambled to open the big backpack and pulled out the base of the tent. He unrolled it fast, then grabbed the stake bag, pulled out the stakes and shoved the bag into his coat pocket. He picked up the poles and sort of tossed them into the air. They stretched out instantly.
Our tents growing up hadn’t been like this.
/> I scrambled to help. I knew where to put the stakes, but getting them into the ground was hard without some sort of hammer.
Arun smiled at me even as the wind whipped his curls about and made him blink fast. Probably to keep his eyes from drying out. I was doing the same thing as he stood and stomped the stakes into the corners of the tent. Again, I wished I’d been gifted with that extra strength.
Within seconds he had the rest of the tent together.
The tiny tent.
We were going to be on top of each other in there. I pulled my beanie down further on my head, hoping it would block out the freezing wind that was trying to burrow under it.
Arun tossed the backpack inside the tent and held up the flap for me. “Hurry.”
Another clap of thunder shot out so loudly, I winced and scrambled inside quickly.
He followed and closed up the tent. “It’s going to get really cold fast, so let’s get into the sleeping bag.”
I couldn’t see how we were going to maneuver that. “You’re so tall—why did you get tents this small?”
Chuckling, he pulled the sleeping bag out. It was dim inside the tent, but it looked pretty thin. “Don’t worry, I fit. These are all lightweight tents built especially for winter backpackers. With two of us in here and this sleeping bag, it’ll be toasty in no time. We’ll wait out the storm.”
We had just managed to get ourselves inside the sleeping bag—we’d had to stuff our coats at one end of the tent to fit—when the storm hit. Rain and what sounded like sleet hit the tent and another crack of thunder split the air.
He’d put us on a clearing, but we had also seemed to be on a slight hill, so I could only hope all the rain and snow would wash away from us. I shivered, slid closer to him. He smelled really good somewhere past the lingering bitterness of the smoke from the greenhouse plastic covers—a mix of fabric softener and some spicy, citrusy scent that got stronger when he moved his head. It was probably from his shampoo.
Foresworn Page 7