Jonas’s hands grip at my wrists with a sudden ferocity. “What the hell are you doing?”
“I was about to make a shield!” I snap, trying to shake his hold off, but not having any luck. If my rage was a running convict before, it just jumped onto the back of a stallion with a thorn in its side. I practically snort and paw as the green glow begins to fade and leak out of my hands. When it’s completely gone and there’s nothing left but the dull white glow that’s beginning to run just under the surface of my skin all the time, Jonas loosens his hold on me, and I lash out with a fury that builds low and deep as a tsunami wave. “What the hell are you doing?” My voice hisses like the tide retreating from the shore.
“We need to leave Vee’s head before you do more damage than Sakura ever could.” His voice is rough and impatient, and it grates at the edges of my already raw nerves.
“I didn’t let Vee know where I am yet. Get away from me while I send her the message.” I jerk away from his side and collect powerful waves of energy again. I know it’s more than Vee would need from me. This is supposed to be simple, quiet, non-intrusive.
But the memory of that green burn bobs and prods in my brain, my blood, my entire body. I want it back. After weeks of feeling weak and stupid and used by every single person in my world, I want to hold the key to a command that no one else can control. I want to manipulate something I know is frighteningly powerful, even if I don’t completely understand it or how it works. I tell myself it’s Vee I’m focused on, but I can’t stop my need to use this new power.
It’s like trying to hold the remnants of an imploding star back with a kid’s butterfly net.
I know it’s going to pulse and burst in my face, but part of me tingles to feel the explosive reach of my possible power. The green radiates up and down my arms and pools in both my hands and every finger.
When the glow fades this time, it isn’t as obvious right away. It’s a slower, subtler drain, and I flick my wrists a few times, imagining that I’ve somehow unplugged or disconnected from my power source.
Then I feel a tightening that goes from caress to bone-crushing in a few quick coils, like twin anacondas roped around my arms.
“Let me go.” I use my best shidlemaiden/witchin-charge voice. “I know what I’m doing.”
“You have no fucking clue what you’re about to do.” Jonas talks slowly and steadily, the way negotiators in the movies talk to the guys with bombs strapped to their chests. “This power will backfire and annihilate you. Do you feel how easy it is to collect? How strong it gets so fast?”
“So?” I try to move my arms, wiggle my fingers, turn my wrists, but I’m locked down and it’s damn infuriating. “Maybe one thing in this whole ordeal could be easy for me. Or maybe I’m a hell of a lot stronger than any of you give me credit for. I don’t need all the incantations and magic voodoo. I’m beyond that. Maybe this is just me coming into my own.”
“This is you getting manipulated.” His voice is still stubborn and strong, a riptide pulling me under. “The power you’re tossing around is a plant someone left here for you to find. They’re counting on that fact that you’re not going to be able to walk away from it. It’s a Pandora’s box, and if you open it, it’s going to unleash shit you don’t have a chance in hell of controlling. Then it’s going to send out millions of poisonous spores that will rot the people you love from the inside out. It’s a trick, Wren. You’re too smart for it.”
The threat of hurting Vee or Bestemore or my parents makes the eagerness to use this power wane. “It feels good. It feels powerful, but like I can harness it. I swear, I wouldn’t want to try it if I didn’t think I could handle it.” I argue, and it’s the grasping desperation in my voice that makes me shut the hell up and listen to Jonas, let his voice tug me away.
“It’s like a drug.” His voice is sweeter now, coaxing me back. “It’s feeding on your rage. You have to let go of that, or it will consume you.”
“Was it put here? In Vee’s mind?” Thick black clouds roll into the scene, obliterating the sun and spiking my panic. “Can this hurt her? Is it getting worse? Who’s doing this?” My last shrill word echoes back at us.
Jonas eyes the clouds with narrowed eyes. “I don’t know. It could be Magda or Sakura. Or they could have united.”
“United? Can we protect her? Can we make this okay?” Even the white glow is fading from my hands. The water at my calves slaps at my skin in violent, choppy waves, and the wind picks up and stings my eyes.
“I have no idea. No shield will be permanent enough. We can leave a temporary one, but it will fade without you here to monitor it.” He kicks at the brackish water and mutters a long line of swears in what sounds like seriously pissed-off Norwegian.
“What about a ferdig, like we did on my memory boble?” I finger the warm little sphere around my neck and wait for him to tell me the logical reason why it won’t work.
“A ferdig spell is for small trinkets and portable shields. It can’t be done on a full force shield.” He puts his hand on my arm, ready to drag me away, but I grind my feet deeper into the rough sand.
“Why? Why can’t it? Has anyone tried?”
The wind picks up and throws my hair, wraps it around my neck, and tangles it in a black web netted over my face. I brush it away and yell over the screaming current. “Please! Try with me, Jonas! Look at this, at what’s happening!” I hold my arms wide on either side and gesture at the once peaceful interior of my gentle best friend’s brain, now filled with crashing waves, darkening skies, and the screech of gulls I know are white seabirds, not black harbingers of disaster. Knowing that doesn’t stop the fear that nettles through me. “I have to fix this!”
“We have no time! We’ll get trapped.” Jonas yanks me close, his breath ragged, his voice a razor cutting through my nerves. “We can go back, figure out a plan. Worst case, Vee is like Bestemor. It’s reversible. I promise.”
But his light eyes brim with guilt. He’s making promises he has no business making. And I understand his reluctance. His job is to protect me.
But right now, all I can think of is my grandmother, pale and comatose on the bed.
There’s no way in Hell, on Earth, or in this weird realm in between I’d let that happen to my beautiful Vee.
I spin around once, twice, and let the insanity of the scene sink in. I think about how my stupidity, my inability to accept my powers and my place caused this all. I’m sick and tired of it.
I’m ready to sink my teeth into this crazy problem and suck it dry.
The fury that prickled through me before gets syrupy, clogs my veins and stops up my rational thoughts. After a few seconds I’m panting. Then I arch my back. My fingers curl, I rock on my feet, and my core tightens, ready for a long, nasty fight.
I ignore Jonas’s warning because I have to. I have to trust myself, and I have to use this power I know I’m made to control. I gather my fury, my dangerous, acidic fury, and let my hands glow a hot, nasty green. The green glow shoots through pinhole breaks in my fingernails, which are cracking and splitting with a power I can’t harness fast enough.
It crawls up my arms and bubbles in radioactive furrows and ridges that morph with frenetic speed right in front of my eyes. My veins pick up and strain my skin, igniting with the color. My back hunches over, throwing me forward at the waist, then whips me back, so my head is tipped up, my arms thrown wide, and flashing hot green light shatters through my cells and rolls off my skin. The entire sky blinks and quivers as my fingers flick and my fists ball erratically. I feel like I’m howling right back at the wind, smashing into the waves, silencing those squawking gulls with a power so enormous, it poisons me.
A wave of nausea creeps up my throat. The headache that brackets my brain takes my nerves hostage and tortures them until they scream. My heart throws itself at my ribs, demanding to be let out, wanting away from the damage I’m doing to my own body.
I untangle the burning lines of green light from my shoulders and w
rists and force them to align in the most complicated shield I know. I cast a smør over the perimeter of Vee’s thoughtscape, but this shield isn’t pure and white like the ones I’ve made with my mother. It isn’t stable and radiant. It snaps and electrifies whatever comes near it. There is no hum of concentration or steady flow of power to ground me. This snarling, clawing power shocks me so hard in such violent flashes, my neck snaps back and my knees buckle as I work to keep it contained.
My wrists twist unnaturally, almost in complete circles, until I’m sure they’re going to rip from my body. My elbows extend straight and shake in their joints, and my teeth chatter so hard, I know I’m going to wind up with shards of broken teeth flying down my throat.
I scream, and the tear of my voice from my throat shakes the shield’s walls, ripping gigantic holes in the force field. The gulls pause in midair, their squawks lodged in their throats before they’re sucked with feather-loosening violence out of multiple expanding and contracting portals like dustbunnies discovered by a powerful vacuum cleaner. The black clouds roll into a dark reverse funnel and whirl and twist out of widest, gaping opening. The wind falls like a giant with its throat slit and the air stops its insane, unrelenting cacophony and goes dangerously still.
I fall into the ocean, cold and rough, my body seizing violently, letting water churn down my throat and plunge me further under.
Jonas’s hand knots in my hair and drags me, coughing and hacking, back to the surface, warm with the reappearance of the sun.
I vomit sea water and bile, retching without worrying what Jonas will think. I brace my shaking arms on my knees and register with shock the sickly bruises that purple them, the limpness of my wrists, and the bloody, broken-nailed state of my fingers. Before I collapse back into the waves, Jonas wraps his arms around me.
“Wren?” His voice is on the cusp of being a full-on scream. “What did you do? What the hell did you do?”
I squint against the bright sunlight. Vee’s mindspace wriggles back to life, all gentle breezes, neon fish, and waving corals with just tiny hints of darker waters. “I fixed it.” I shade my eyes and look up at the power shield, flickering and buzzing, the holes expanding and contracting in a patternless carousel.
“We need to get out of here.” He closes his eyes and the incantations come strong and fast.
“Not yet,” I gasp, my fingers clawing at his chest. “I need to do a ferdig—”
“Are you fucking insane?” he growls, his harsh words strangling mine. “I still don’t know if what you did hurt Vee. And I hope to hell that mess of a shield breaks down on its own before it fries everything around it.”
“Hurt Vee?” I stumble away from him, not sure where I’m headed, when he yanks me back by the waist.
“Stay put! What’s the point of my being here if you’re going to ignore everything I say?” He tightens his arms around me, and this time, there’s no preparation or focus. His words are deep, guttural, and incomprehensible. I feel the water rush back like lowtide on steroids, and the sand under our feet cracks and erupts. My arms, already weak and battered from making the shield, slide off his neck, and my head bumps against his chest heavily. Weak-kneed, spaghetti-spined, I sink low and let him grab at me and hold on with rough, impatient hands. The light shifts. I can tell how bright it bursts even behind the closed lids of my eyes, and then the pull and pop of the suction sends us hurling back. We get whisked back out of the bubble of Vee’s thoughts with a whiplash-inducing jerk and tumble onto the couch we were sitting on before.
My brain feels like eggwhites whipped into a meringue, and I’m not sure I can trust the reality of the dark, rustic cabin. “Are we really here?” I run a hand over the back of the faded plaid couch, my body pressed along Jonas’s.
He heaves me off of him and growls, “Yes, we’re really here. Where the hell else would we be?”
“I don’t know.” I lie on my side and curl my legs to my chest. “Maybe in a weird ocean world that’s actually the inside of my best friend’s mind? Or a diner on the way to a magical birch forest? Are any of those places real?” I feel like it’s time to blink, but my eyes stay wide open.
He slumps in a hard-backed chair and runs his hands through his hair over and over. “Yes. All real. Just different dimensions of reality. I know it’s a lot. I know it’s too much. There’s just no explanation that makes any sense. I thought I was ready, and now? What you did in Vee’s space? I’m—” He stands up and hammers his fist into the solid log wall, then kicks at it like a lunatic for a few long, grunt-punctuated minutes.
I’m not sure what reaction he expects from me, but I’m literally too worn out to blink. My eyes are tearing, and I wish I could just will them closed and sleep. But I might be too tired for sleep, too.
Jonas strides over and crouches low, right at my eye level. “What the fuck were you doing back there? Even after I told you to stop, what was going through your head?”
A slow breath rolls through my lungs. “Saving Vee,” I answer. “Not letting her wind up like Bestemor.”
My little declaration takes the fighting wind out of his sails. He sits back with a thump. “We’re in this way over our heads, Wren. I don’t even know who we’re fighting. I don’t even know why. Do they want you? Is it the Kochis or the Baltos? Or someone else? Why not just grab you? Why this whole damn cat and mouse game?”
“Fox and mouse,” I correct. “I wish I’d been nicer to Loki.”
“You were nice,” he mumbles to placate me.
“No. I wanted her gone. I didn’t want to deal with the whole mess. The power. My power. But I played with it. Just enough to get everyone riled up. Just enough to get everyone hurt. Not enough to learn how to help them.” I hold my hands out in front of me, knuckles up, and direct pure hate at them.
I barely hear Jonas get up and walk away, because my mind is back on the first few days I had Loki. My powers were so new and raw, I could have changed this. I could have bonded with her and Bestemor would be zipping around the house and my parents might have come out of hiding slowly, to help me. Vee and Zivalus would be dragging me to parties, and when Jonas watched me dance, I wouldn’t stop until he was on the floor with me. Sakura would have crawled back to Japan with her tail between her legs, and all this would have been—
“Wren!” Jonas’s hands grip at my shoulders and ease me down onto the couch cushions. “There you go. Lay down. I’m going to wash your cuts.”
He has an ancient bottle of iodine and some paper towels with sudsy soap on them. He takes my one hand in his and rubs it with gentle strokes. I try not to wince, but my fingers are sore and torn.
“What’s the plan, Jonas?” My eyelids keep bumping shut, then swinging back open, elevator doors that want to close, but keep getting interrupted by the hands of eager passengers.
“I don’t know. What’s the plan, Wren?” He dabs the orangey red medicine on the split ends of my fingertips, and I suck air between my teeth to hold the whimpers back.
“I’ll fix every…thing.” This time the elevator is going down, down, down. Oops! One more over-eager passenger. “Down, down, down.” My voice is so groggy it’s almost a croak.
I feel the scratch of a wool blanket pulled under my chin, and imagine, but maybe also don’t imagine, Jonas’s lips on mine for one worth-remembering second.
Deep, deep back, at the triangulation of the core and the stem and the center of my brain, there’s a tiny, black space, pitch black, but all mine. Solidly mine. I owned the only map, and I peeked at it one time before I ate it and let my stomach acids melt it apart. I wander there now, because there’s a voice calling my name.
“Wren! Wren?”
“Loki?” There’s no more light at this spot in my brain than there would be in the bottom of the ocean, so I don’t expect to see Loki, but I can’t feel her either. “Where are you, Loki?”
“Escaped.” I can hear the doggish pants of my fox, running fast. “I ran away from Sakura before Hina came back, Wren! I�
�m going to wait for you at Bestemor’s.”
“No!” I flail in the black, trying to find her, trying to tell her why she can’t. “Loki, no! No one will be there! Mom and Dad are gone. Bestemor is gone with them. I’m gone. Jonas is gone. Turn around.”
“I can’t.” It’s a strange mash-up, her ethereal voice and her stubborn words braided together.
“You have to.” I think of the Kråke with their black wings and tearing beaks. “I’m not there to protect you.”
“Come protect me.” Like a severed phone line, the connection goes dead, and I’m jolted awake, covered in sweat, and frantic to get to Loki before Sakura and Hina get her, before the Kråke hunt her down, before I screw up the life of one more thing I love.
I kick the scratchy blankets away and wonder who I can call, who I can connect with.
Vee.
Before I can talk myself out of it, I close my eyes, grab the boble around my neck, and race across the solid bridge of white into her mind. I hardly notice the suction and pop as I enter the ocean and sand of her mind’s inner reality. My shield is still buzzing in the blue sky, small chunks getting sucked and hurled back into the void every few seconds. I wade into the shallows too fast, my splashes scaring the scores of neon fish from their tiny pools.
The water laps around my shins, and I can see reflections of my sweet best friend in the shimmering here and there under the surface. For a long second, I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to tangle her in this. But I have to.
“Vee, lovey, I’m in deep shit!” I call into the sky, into the breezy air. I wait, but I don’t hear or feel her. I have no clue if she can hear or feel me, either. “Loki is headed to Bestemor’s house. Go to her, but please don’t go alone. Please don’t. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
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