“Might as well stay close,” he said. “We’ll be warmer.”
Even with all the layers of clothes between us, his heat seeped through. I’d never been so thankful for warmth in my life because the wind that managed to sneak into the tent felt like it was below zero. “I was really cold on the back of the snowmobile.”
“I heard you laughing.”
“I was. I like the ride. Not the cold, but the ride is awesome.”
He cracked a grin I could barely see in the near darkness. “I’ve always read that sharing body heat could make all the difference between life and death in the cold, but this is the first time I’ve been able to test the theory.”
“Well, body heat is all we’re sharing. Just so you know.” I snapped my mouth shut, not sure why I’d said that. It’s not like he’d made any sort of move on me. No, all he’d done was look at me earlier like maybe he wanted to kiss me. Though why when I kept snapping at him was anybody’s guess.
“I didn’t expect anything different.”
I was actually getting sleepy. Everything was catching up to me. The trip, the worry, the lack of sleep, the adrenaline crash after the fire.
“Hey, Kat?” His voice came soft and low out of the now darkness. Outside a winter mix tried to overturn the tent. Thunder rumbled and every so often, the tent lit up from the slashes of lightning tearing through the sky.
“Hmm?” I turned my nose into his shoulder.
“I know we just met, but something tells me that if you stick around, at some point I’m pretty sure I’ll want to talk to you about sharing more body heat.”
I stiffened up.
He laughed and squeezed his arm around my shoulders, pulling me closer to him. “Relax. I said if you stick around.”
Sleep decided it was time to take over and I dropped off.
The ropes cut off my circulation; the bark scraped the tender skin on the insides of my arms and thighs. At first, I thought I was naked, but when I managed to pry my eyes open, I saw that I had on the shorts and red tank top I’d packed in my suitcase. The one I’d left back at the compound. In my Jeep.
My cheek had grown numb, smashed against the cold limb. My arms and legs wrapped around the thick branch. Something dripped down my temple, and I blinked as it filled my eye. Another stream of it came down my cheek, and the taste of metal filled my mouth.
Blood.
Shivers racked my body so hard, my thrashing pulled the ropes even tighter. Something crackled and popped and my nose began to itch as it filled with smoke. I opened my mouth to scream, and it filled with blood just as the fire reached my hair.
“Kat!”
I choked on the scream building power in my throat and lashed out. The back of my hand smacked hard into something.
“Ouch. Damn it, Kat! Wake up!”
Arun’s voice pulled me partially back to reality. I fought the sleeping bag. “The walls are too close! The smoke!”
“There’s no smoke. You were having a nightmare. Come on.” He wrapped his arms around me.
I sniffed for the smoke but only smelled the traces that still clung to us. I swallowed back a sob and burrowed into his neck. For moment—just a moment. I was so tired of dealing with the dreams every time I shut my eyes.
“You have these a lot, don’t you?” he murmured, tightening his arms.
Safety was something I’d craved my entire life. Craved it with the kind of ferocity I could never put into words for anyone. And staying in control and handling things that came my way was my only way of coping.
But right then, I wanted to share with him, wanted someone else in on this burden. I didn’t pull away, just spoke into his neck.
“My sisters and I have grown up with this prophecy of our death. Our mother was told that one of us would die before our nineteenth birthday. I didn’t totally believe it, but there’s a part of me that believes it’s supposed to be me.”
“How could you know that? Prophecies don’t always come true.”
“I know because every damned time I close my eyes, my norn shows me a way I might die.”
“A way? So there is more than one? Which could mean there will be none. But still, why would she do that to you? How can you ever feel any peace with that sort of thing hanging over your head?”
“Peace?” I smiled against his skin. He smelled really good.
“Peace is important. We all need to feel it in order to enjoy our lives.”
I chuckled, snuggled closer and felt his body tighten, so I pulled back. “You okay?”
He let out a sort of strangled-sounding laugh. “You’re kind of stunning and plastered up against me.” He cleared his throat, obviously embarrassed. “I like it. That’s all.”
I snorted. So very ladylike. Then I surprised myself. “Just kind of stunning?” Gods, I was flirting. My sisters would be proud. Right before they checked to see if my norn had fully taken over my body.
He brought his hand up in the sleeping bag and touched my chin. I leaned back so I could look at him. Not that I could see him. We both must have slept because it was full-on dark. Thankfully the storm had stopped. I didn’t even hear the light pattering of snow on the roof of the tent.
Then I quit thinking at all because his lips touched mine. Lightly. He somehow found me in the dark and pressed the softest, sweetest kiss I could have imagined on me. I gasped, pulled back.
“Sorry, couldn’t help that one.” His voice did sound like there was an apology in it, but not a big one.
I stayed quiet until it started to feel awkward. My lips sort of tingled, and I had no idea what to say because I was just so surprised. But the kiss had been nothing like the one I’d experienced before. His mouth was closed, his lips softer than I’d expected, yet still nice and firm...and I didn’t feel scared. At all.
“Don’t apologize,” I whispered. “I kind of liked it.”
“Just kind of?” He nudged me, stealing my earlier words. “Come on—let’s see if we can find whoever is out here before I make a liar out of myself and ask about that body heat thing.”
I sat up, started wiggling out of the sleeping bag and immediately wanted back inside it when I felt the air away from Arun. “You think they’re still out here somewhere?”
“Yeah, the prickly skin is so bad, it woke me.”
“Maybe that’s coming from me still. You said it doesn’t last long, but you only met me earlier today.”
He stilled. “Wow, seems like it’s been longer, doesn’t it?”
“A lot has happened today.”
“True, but no, it’s not just you. I think there could be more than one out here be—” He broke off. “Whoa, look. Can you see that?”
I turned and at first thought someone had a flashlight outside our tent. “They’re probably looking for us.”
“That’s not someone moving around, and that is not a flashlight.” He scrambled out of the sleeping bag and crawled out of the tent. “Wow. Kat, you gotta come out here and look at this.”
“Let me get my coat on first. I’m not made of warmth like you. My Florida bones sort of hate it here.”
He bent down so his voice came right into the tent. “It’s snowing there, too.”
“Well, I wasn’t there long enough to get used to it,” I muttered as I finally got my coat on in the small space without breaking my neck. I squatted to duckwalk out of the tent to keep my knees from getting wet in the snow.
When I stood beside him, my heart sort of stopped then started racing as I took in what had him so transfixed.
Where we stood on the small hill, we could see out over the tops of some trees, and not that far away, a light shone bright. Unnaturally bright. Not a campfire or an oil lamp sort of bright. No, it was like someone had one of those fog lights used in lighthouses.
&nbs
p; “Let’s get this stuff put up fast,” Arun said as he continued to stare at that bright, bright light. “I’m pretty sure I know exactly which god is lost in these woods.”
Chapter Six
We took the snowmobile as far as we could toward the light. The closer we got, the more the thicket of trees seemed to grow together until Arun stopped the vehicle at something that looked very familiar.
I yanked off my helmet, scrambled off the vehicle, staring at what looked like a tangled thicket-covered path. “Tell me if that looks like the entrance to Narnia to you? Because I don’t wanna go to Narnia.”
His grin was crooked. “It kind of does. Look at the light coming through the branches. It’s reflecting off the snow making it look li—”
“A magical path where we go and disappear for years or something, right?” I broke in.
“You aren’t curious?” His eyes glittered in the light as he looked down at me. “Because the girl laughing and squeezing me on that snowmobile seemed like the adventurous sort.”
My shoulders slumped. “This just feels off to me. I can’t remember any creatures that put off light.”
“There was the god of light.”
How could I have forgotten that? “Baldr,” I whispered, suddenly not afraid in the least. In fact, a hint of excitement, peppered with some curiosity, slid through me. “The god so loved, his death sparked the end of the world.” I broke off, frowned. “Maybe we won’t like what we find in there.”
“He wouldn’t be putting off this kind of light if he was dead.”
“How do you know? That could be his power. You touch plants and give them health—he could be a walking lightbulb even as a corpse.” I stared at the path. “I’m pretty sure I’ve seen something like this in more than just Narnia and I think it was a horror flick. Just sayin’.”
“You have a morbid streak.” Arun rolled his eyes, set his helmet and mine on the snowmobile and took my gloved hand in his. “Come on, adventure girl, let’s see if we’re hiking into a scary-movie scenario.”
We walked under that thick clutch of branches. The light made stripes on the snow we crunched under our feet. And the silence that met us as we stepped into another clearing made the hair on my neck stand up. Again.
Maybe I was going to do this electrical, prickly thing like Arun now.
“Hi!” The boy who stood abruptly looked nothing like I’d expected. I don’t know why I was expecting anything, but I’d sort of pictured this huge, broad-shouldered muscled blond. Like the guy who played Thor in the movies. Baldr was such a strong-sounding name. This boy wasn’t that much taller than me. He did have the blond hair and when he grinned at us, the shine of his teeth was startling. So was the utter friendliness that emanated from him. In fact, I started to feel warm.
And kind of...happy.
A girl with pretty copper-colored skin and short black hair stepped next to him. She was taller by close to a foot. She was like Arun—long and lean—and when the boy next to her looked up at her, all that light suddenly made sense. He was completely and utterly in love with her, and from the way she ran her hand along his arm before she started walking toward us, she felt the same. She held out her hand. “Are we glad to see you! We’ve been lost most of the day.” She paused before she reached us, tilted her head and stared hard at me before her gaze moved to Arun. “You guys are like us. I can feel it.” She looked over her shoulder at the boy. “Whatever it is that tells me about others like us is getting stronger.” She turned back. “I’m Nanna, and, yes, I know it’s weird that I have the same name as the goddess I carry. My grandmother raised me, figured things out pretty fast and legally changed it.”
The goddess Nanna had been Baldr’s wife. “Is his name Baldr then? You guys haven’t actually married yet, have you?” I couldn’t help asking as I waved my hand around at the light. “We can kind of tell who he has.”
“No, luckily that’s not my name.” He laughed as he came forward and held out his hand, too. Arun shook it, then I did. I also shook her hand. It was really weird to be shaking hands with other teens—that wasn’t something I’d ever done with them before. Usually there was a mumbled hey and then another mumbled hey back.
“My name is Brigg.”
I couldn’t stop my eyebrow from rising on that one.
“I know.” He laughed. “It’s a horrible family name, isn’t it? Every single firstborn male gets it, and I was the lucky one out of seven boys.”
I looked around him, half expecting to see six guys standing around.
“They didn’t come. Well, some tried. Nanna and I gave them the slip somewhere in Idaho. We’re from Washington. The state, not the capital.” He turned back to the campfire. “Come on. Join us. I’m really hoping you came here from somewhere close by. Somewhere with shelter. That was a bitch of a storm, wasn’t it? Luckily, we found this thick roof of branches.” He pointed up.
My mouth fell open. I’d never seen trees reaching over a clearing of this size. Not ones that had tangled up so much they basically created a shelter.
“This wasn’t here before,” Arun said half under his breath. He moved to one of the trees, put his hand on it, then snatched it away. “These trees feel weird.”
I thought of my dreams. Of being tied to a tree that was on fire. I wanted no part of weird-feeling trees that seemed to have minds of their own. “I don’t want to be in here.”
Arun didn’t question me. He merely nodded and hefted up the backpack he’d dropped. “How did you guys get here?”
“Now there’s a story,” Brigg answered. “We did have a snowmobile, but a giant stepped on it.”
I had turned toward the Narnia-like entrance, but I stopped and looked back at them. “Seriously?”
Brigg nodded and his sandy-blond hair flopped over his eyes as he pulled a red hat on. “Seriously. A giant. We’d parked it outside a small cave and saw him crouched over it before he stood and just stomped on it.”
“So rude,” Nanna muttered.
“We saw more than one, too,” Brigg continued. “It’s the reason why I liked this thicket. I thought it might hide the light I haven’t been able to shut down since we got so close to the music.”
“How many giants have you seen?” Arun asked. “I’ve wondered when we’d see them.”
I stared at him with my mouth open. He asked as if it was a normal sort of question. “Wait a second. You guys are talking about giants. Real ones. Like the ones in the myths.”
Nanna nodded as she packed what looked like sandwich makings into her backpack. “Some of them are really big—scary big—while others are only about as tall as pro basketball players. They are all headed west of here. We were going to follow, but then we heard about a group of kids gathering at a compound and decided to go there first. Until we got lost.”
“Back to the giants. How many did you say?” I asked. I tried so hard to picture what they could look like and while my first thought was the Jolly Green Giant, my absolute terror over the thought of facing them down chased away that kinder image and gave me something out of The Lord of the Rings. Massive gnarl-faced creatures who could chomp the heads right off our bodies.
When Brigg frowned, I noticed that my mood dropped.
“We saw three together, then two together.” He looked at Nanna, who stroked her hand down his arm again. His smile came back and it wasn’t my imagination—I got happier. This guy could do wonders in a mob-ruled crowd. He looked at me. “We saw more than ten the last time. When they walked together, the ground shook. And that’s not all we’ve seen.”
I was afraid to ask.
Too bad Arun wasn’t. “What?”
“Dark elves.”
A shiver crawled up my back. I don’t know why, but the idea of those scared me more than the giants.
“At least that’s what we
think they were,” Brigg continued. “We saw a group of men acting weird, and Nanna got curious, so we followed them. They must have been using magic to alter their looks because once they were alone, they all changed and had black skin that sort of glimmered like polished stone and pointed facial features. They’re headed west, too. We hid out in the last town and heard them. They’re following the music, too.”
I closed my eyes because it hit me. It finally sank in. All these kids were gathering here. And, yeah, I’d started to realize we were all converging for some kind of battle, but this was something else. If the underworld creatures were also assembling...I looked at Arun. “You were right. It’s all happening crazy fast, and it’s wrong. In my gut I know it’s wrong.” I touched my chest, right over my sternum where my norn lived. “Right here, where she is, I know it’s wrong. It’s not supposed to be happening like this.”
And she moved. Hard. I thought she was going to give me another rune tempus and I’d never had three in one day. Hell, my norn was the most vocal of the three and I’d never had two in one day before. But she was doing her best to warn me, was trying very hard to get something across.
“Dark blood without rival,” I said, staring at Arun as he stepped closer to me. I looked up at him. “First she said music on the lake and you’ve been telling me—they just told us—that everyone is following music. It has to be the Yellowstone Lake. If the giants and dark elves are going there, that’s the place where we’re supposed to meet them. But that other rune tempus, the second one today during the fire, it said that the dark ones won’t have a rival. So what are they going to do?”
“Snow. Great floods...” Arun’s eyes flared open wide as he trailed off.
“Fire.” I whispered, thinking of the greenhouses, the barn. The way the fire hadn’t been slowed by the snow. “Surt is here. He’s here, Arun.”
Surt. The fire giant who was to lead creatures into battle. Who was supposed to fight the god Freyr.
Arun stared hard at me. “We need to get back and warn everyone. Step up our game, replenish the supplies so we can get to the lake.”
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