“But what about Geri and Freak?”
“They’re winning!” He pointed.
I turned back to see the giant taking off into the woods, trailing bright red blood on the fresh snow. Geri and Freak stood watching, their sides heaving, and when they turned I saw the glow of yellow—their magic—bright in their eyes. I whipped around to see if the others noticed the glowing wolf eyes, but Tucker and Rose were too far away and Lily was too busy helping Randy, whose eyes were closed.
The big guy had blood dripping down his temple. His girlfriend tried to help him to Vanir’s truck, but she was still watching the woods and she shook so much she stumbled. Randy groaned as he started to fall and Vanir hurried forward to help. He draped Randy’s arm around his shoulders.
“Always knew you had a thing for me,” Randy said as Vanir helped him into the cab. The joke completely lacked humor. Like his girlfriend, Randy looked pale and shell-shocked until he eyed his truck. Then his frown grew fierce, his hands tightened into fists. “She dented the whole side in. Big stupid bitch. And what the hell, man? What was she?”
“I don’t know,” Vanir said, but he looked at me, worry tightening his lips. He knew what she was and he knew what part she was supposed to play in all this—that everything was all wrong. And for some reason, she’d been scared of me.
“I’ll call Uncle Phil as soon as the phones start working,” he continued. “Have him come out with the sheriff to get your truck.” Vanir helped Lily up. She squeezed onto Randy’s lap.
“They better bring a few others, too. With guns. Lots of guns.” She shuddered, leaned close to the windshield. “Are Geri and Freak okay?”
I climbed in on the driver’s side and ended up plastered against Vanir when he got in. Immediately, his emotion seeped into me. His suspicion felt murky...dirty, kind of like I wallowed in swamp water. I closed my eyes and clasped my hands together in my lap. Those were his feelings.
For me.
“What just happened?” Lily blurted. “I don’t understand any of this. First we get snow in the middle of summer and now a giant came out of the woods? A giant?”
Vanir started up the truck, turned the heat on to high, but didn’t move until Tucker and Rose had pulled out. Then he got out, opened the tailgate of his truck and closed it after Geri and Freak jumped into the bed. He didn’t say a word when he climbed back into the cab, didn’t answer Lily.
“I don’t understand,” she continued. I could feel her trembling along my right side. “Why would that woman attack us like that?”
Randy hugged his girlfriend close. “Don’t think that was a woman.”
“Of course it was. A scary, colossal freak, but she was female.” She leaned over me to touch Vanir’s arm. “Are you okay to drive? She hit you pretty hard.”
I should have asked him that. Should have offered to drive. But all I could do was sit there and go over what she’d said. She’d talked about dark spirits and one of the scarier Norse worlds, and somehow she tied me up in that. Why? I had no idea what she’d meant. None. But it made me think of Vanir’s brother asking about the dark ones last night.
“I’m okay,” Vanir finally said. “We need to get Randy to a hospital, though.”
“No hospital. I’ve heard that place has turned into a loony bin. Just take me home. We can have your aunt come look at my head, right?”
“Yeah.”
I wallowed in miserable, confused silence and it took forever to get to Randy’s house. The snow fell with a vengeance, turning the roads invisible, and with the rampaging wind, snowdrifts were appearing in the middle of the streets. It took all of Vanir’s concentration to keep the truck on path. At least, I hoped that’s why he stayed so quiet after answering Randy.
Lily and Randy sat in silent shock. They probably hadn’t been brought up with magic and extra mythological knowledge pounded into their heads. In their world, snow in summer and giant loinclothed women didn’t exist, so they had to be scared. But in mine, while I’d never seen a giant, I still knew of them, or knew where she might be from, anyway. How had she gotten here from Niflheim? To think a monster from one of the nine Norse worlds, the coldest and darkest of their worlds, was free in the hills of Oklahoma.... It scared the crap out of me.
But not as much as the reason why she seemed to know me.
I laid a hand on my churning stomach, terrified I was gonna hurl all over Vanir’s truck. My fear and confusion combined with the sickening negative feelings coming from Vanir twisted my gut all up.
As we pulled down the street I assumed was Randy’s, I picked up on something new coming from Vanir. But I couldn’t place it because it came to me all jumbled and blurry.
I glanced over to find Lily burying her face in Randy’s neck. He stroked her hair with an unsteady hand and caught me staring. He offered a friendly smile.
“Fine time you picked to visit our town, eh?”
I didn’t have an answer. He didn’t expect one.
Vanir stopped the vehicle. “Do you mind waiting here while I help him inside?”
I shook my head.
“What an afternoon, right?” Lily asked as we watched Vanir go around to the passenger’s side. He stopped first to brush snow off the hood of his truck. “Wish we’d met under different circumstances, but I’m wishing a lot of things right now.”
“Aren’t we all?” I said, and offered her a smile, then watched her hurry into the house. I sat shivering in Vanir’s truck, choking on the acrid taste of my own lies.
Chapter Twelve
“Think you can lay off the anger a bit? I’m starting to chafe.”
I thought my wisecrack would make him smile. All he did was tighten his hands on the steering wheel again. At this rate, it wouldn’t last the night.
“Vanir, listen to me. I don’t know what she was talking about. I was born in the United States, not some underground shadow world. Maybe she was asking how to get home.” I moved back to the passenger’s side but the gap between us did little to slow the torrent of emotion rolling off him.
The truck swerved unexpectedly on the snow. My head conked into the passenger’s window and I saw stars. The truck fishtailed and Vanir turned the wheel into the spin. Heart pounding, I blinked my vision clear and watched the headlight beams go wild over the snow-covered street before he got the truck back under control. In the middle of an intersection.
I frantically looked for oncoming headlights, but the streets were empty. Dark, except for the streetlights highlighting the flurries. Night had arrived hours too early today.
My heart threatened to pound its way through my rib cage. Breathing hard, I waited for him to start driving again, turned to look when he didn’t. Nothing moved out there. We were probably the only people foolish enough to be on the roads right now, but his utter...calmness creeped me out.
He looked at me out of the corner of his eye. Once, twice, then he turned to face me, his gaze moving over my face in confusion. “She called you a dark spirit.”
“I have been kinda moody lately.”
He shot me a withering look and since, so far, he’d been nothing but nice, my heart fell. Yeah, eventually he was going to hate me—when he found out what I’d kept from him. But I’d been hoping for more time with him first. And at least another kiss or two.
He pulled the truck back onto what I hoped was the road. It was hard to tell out here—seemed like we were in the middle of nowhere.
“Sorry. Not the right time for jokes. I do that sometimes. When I’m nervous.” I squinted instinctively as if that would help me see between the thick, fat snowflakes falling from the sky.
Vanir flipped on his brights, but that didn’t help much.
“Maybe we should pull over.” I crossed my arms to retain warmth. The cold wasn’t only coming from outside. “And please, dial back some
of your emotion. It’s frigid and it’s making me sick to my stomach. I don’t know what that giant meant. I. Have. No. Idea. I’m not a dark anything. I promise.”
Vanir didn’t answer for what felt like forever. When he did finally pull the truck into a parking lot, I let out a breath in relief. I couldn’t make out the sign, had no idea where we were. He left the truck idling and bent his head to rub his temples. I wondered if his head hurt like mine—it had to. The giant had hit him hard. For me, the throbbing had lessened from last night, but the occasional twinge reminded me I shouldn’t be running all over the place.
But I also had to wonder how much of this throbbing pain was stress induced? I mean, the guilt? It was intense. Watching him out of the corner of my eye, I shivered as the truck’s heater fought the cold. He rubbed his eyes, then felt around his head. Looking for a lump, I was sure. “Raven, out there with the giant, when I turned to look at you...you looked different.”
“What do you mean, different?”
“It happened before when I ran into the bathroom.”
I remembered. “You said I looked pointy. I thought you were just dizzy from the rune tempus.”
“I thought so, too. Later. When I pulled you out of the bathroom by my bedroom, you looked normal and you have ever since. Up until today.”
A knot formed in my chest. A hard one. “Can you explain pointy?” I whispered. Was she coming...through me? The absolute terror clogging my throat then made me reach out to the dash. I pressed my hands into the top until the edge cut into my palms.
“Hey,” he whispered as he reached for my hands and pulled them away from the dash. He let them go in my lap. “It has to be a trick of the light or something.”
“Please explain pointy,” I insisted.
“Your chin, nose and ears just look pointed—but it went away fast. I really think it’s just me.”
I didn’t know about that. I’d gotten a few weird double takes in my life, the last time from the new cook Daddy Mac had hired. He’d done that every time he looked at me sideways. “Is it, like, in your peripheral vision? Look at me sideways.”
He grinned, his teeth white in the darkness of the cab. “I have been. It didn’t happen again.”
“I swear,” I whispered, then cleared my throat to put some strength into my tone. “I don’t know what that giant meant. I’ve spent my entire life moving, following the whims of a mother who has no sense of home. No direction. I’ve never made friends and had to hide so much of myself from people. I promise, I’m not lying about this. I want us to be friends, so if I give my word, I mean it.”
I could tell by his sudden stillness that I’d gotten his attention.
Taking a deep breath, I willed my fingers to stop trembling. “I’ve lived all over the United States, mostly in campgrounds, and I was homeschooled after I turned nine. Our rune tempus has kept my sisters and me from having any kind of real life for a long, long time. We stayed on the move, and when anyone questioned why we weren’t in school we moved. My sisters and I learned everything from books.”
He leaned until his back was against the door, his face in shadow because it had grown so dark outside. “That’s awful.”
I shrugged. “It’s not like Mom had much choice. I was a new kid yet again in the third grade when my rune tempus hit the first time. I was in front of a classroom. I didn’t get time to erase the runes from the chalkboard, didn’t even know what had happened really before time restarted. To the kids and the teacher, the runes just appeared and I went from being in front of the chalkboard to under my desk in an instant. My mother was called, and when she got to the school, the teacher was trying to do some sort of demon exorcism in the hallway.”
“Seriously?”
My talking was helping him relax. That murky suspicion backed off a bit. I’d never shared my past with anyone before. Made my stomach all wobbly and my pulse beat too fast, but I kind of liked it. Liked having someone know about me. Really know about me.
I leaned over and touched his hand. He didn’t thread his fingers in mine as he’d done before, but he didn’t push me away, either. “I don’t know what that creature meant by ‘dark one,’ but I haven’t been entirely honest with you, so maybe that’s it. Maybe she could sense my guilt because it does feel awfully dark.
“I did come here to see the runestone. I was hoping to find the gloaming grove, that part is true. Not only do my sisters and I carry the seidr magic, but we also carry the souls of the norns.”
Holding my breath, I watched the play of emotions over his face. What I could see, anyway. His eyebrows went up, then met as his eyes narrowed, lips tightened. “I wish you’d told me that sooner. I knew there was something to you showing up like this—right after the snow started....”
He turned the engine off and the abrupt loss of noise threw the pattering of snow on the metal roof into stark relief. It wouldn’t take long for the cold to creep in.
“So this is really it.” His gaze met mine and I was surprised his dark eyes could glitter in so little light. “My mother and father died on my ninth birthday. Before she died, my mom told me there would be a turning on my eighteenth birthday.”
“Norse gods and their nines.” I offered him a smile.
“My mother also said that I was supposed to be in the grove during the gloaming on that day so the circle could be complete. Only, she believed the full circle part alluded to my death. She forbid me to step foot in the grove.”
“Really?” I chewed on my lip. “But that could mean anything. Full circle could also mean you come into whatever power will help you in the coming difficulties, the battles.”
“This is just too surreal.” He gingerly touched the side of his head where the giant had hit. “Here I am hoping to go to college, maybe fly planes. My family is all about the coming battles that I really didn’t want to think was true.”
“So you don’t feel Odin? Inside you, I mean?”
Surprise lifted his eyebrows. “No, of course not. Do you feel your...norn?”
I grimaced, then nodded. “It’s not pleasant. And knowing I can feel her and have been half my life when you haven’t scares me to death.” I looked away from him, eyed the snow piling onto the windshield.
“Sorry, but that’s creepy. Supposedly, I’m not alone, but to actually feel the presence.” He shuddered.
“Yeah. It sucks.” Especially when this could mean our norns really did have the ability to take us over. Or spring from our chests like the creature in the Alien movie. I wasn’t sure which one was worse.
“I really didn’t believe in the battles,” Vanir murmured. “But that giant proved me wrong, didn’t she? Why do you think she showed up there? At the warehouse?”
“Wish I knew,” I murmured, thinking of my nightmare—of Kat with her burned scalp. The fire demon. “But her presence is just more proof of Ragnarok. Giants and war go together. I think things much worse and much stronger are coming. My sister Kat, the one who tells the future? She’s already carved warnings. I should have expected the giant, but as usual, our interpretation was off.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, now that I’ve seen the giant, I get one we didn’t get before. Kat actually wrote the word flagð on the wall when we were painting our living room. But it was drippy and looked more like the word that means to give birth. But flagð means ‘giantess.’ Our magic is vague sometimes—annoys us to death. But we’ve also read a lot of prophecies, just like the one your mom had. Old ones. Plus, we all seem to know things. It’s like the norn shares her experiences in glimpses, or nods us in the right direction. I don’t really know how to put it into words. I just know things I shouldn’t. Feel things.” I tilted my head, met his gaze. “But you know that, anyway, don’t you?”
He nodded slowly, one corner of his mouth turning up. “I have to admit, it’s kind
of cool that you do, too. And it must have been nice to have your sisters because they got it. They understand what you go through.”
“Having the rune tempus isn’t nice.”
He kind of chuckled. A low, grumbly sound that made me feel warm—probably because the tension was beginning to dissolve. “No, it wasn’t. How often does it happen?”
“Depends on the message. I haven’t actually found any sort of pattern to when or how often it takes over. But the actual event has always been the same. The first time anything has been different was—”
“When I showed up in the bathroom.”
“Yeah, that’s never happened and I wish I knew what it means. It has to mean something, just like your ability to push your emotions into people has to mean something.”
“Why does it have to mean anything? It could just be an ability.”
“But you said it’s been off the charts since I arrived. Somehow, we’re tied together in all this and I’m scared we’re missing something. What if there’s something we’re supposed to be doing? What if we’re supposed to be able to work our abilities together somehow? There has to be more than you touch me and I feel good.”
“I like that,” he whispered, grinning.
My cheeks became the warmest thing in the rapidly cooling truck. I ducked my head. “Yeah, I feel good for that reason, too. But you pushed those other feelings into me. Surprised me, too, because seidr is supposed to be a feminine magic.”
“I can assure you I’m a male.”
“Trust me—wasn’t doubting that.” I returned his grin, but inside I’d gone all warm and nervous. And that intense emotion suddenly switched gears. Like really switched. It occurred to me that no one could see what we did in the truck. Not with all the snow—not at the back of this parking lot. The warmth stirring in my gut picked that moment to go so hot I flushed in places I’d never flushed before. I thought about jumping into the snow to hide. Or cool off.
Vanir sucked in a breath. His eyes narrowed, his breath picking up speed. “What are you doing? I can feel you—” He broke off, but the deep, guttural tone of his voice affected me much like his kiss had.
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