Arctic Dawn (The Norse Chronicles Book 2) (14 page)

Thorin clenched his fists at his side and gritted his teeth again. I never knew what move he would have made next because the wolves cried out, nearer than before. Their howls raised the hairs along my arms and on the back of my neck. The hostility blooming between Thorin and me scattered like smoke in a stiff breeze.

“They’re close.” Thorin turned and slid in front of me, holding Mjölnir in a ready position. He called into the night. “Come for us, you worthless mutts. No more skulking out there in the dark. She’s here. You want her. You can smell her. Why don’t you come and taste her?”

I understood Thorin meant to bait them, but a cold spurt of nausea stirred in my stomach. I tightened my mental grip on my fire and stepped closer to Thorin. He reached back and rested his hand on my hip, more to keep aware of my proximity than to comfort me, but it did anyway, conveying a current of strength and assurance, and I channeled it into my own power source.

Harck! Harck! Ahhwoooo!
The wolves threw back their own threats.

“I can’t see them,” I whispered. “Where are they?”

“Why don’t you give us a light?”

“Now? Are you sure?”

Thorin looked at me over his shoulder. His breath rushed past my temple. “Trust me?”

I hesitated. “Just a minute ago, you were threatening me.”

“
Solina
.”

“Okay, okay.”

“Do it. Light up the night.” My period of recuperation at the hotel had restored my powers—not to full capacity, but close enough. My fire show in the warehouse was nothing compared to the energy required to convert to that
other
state, and I had bounced back a lot faster. I stepped away from Thorin and let the flames out in two blazing fireballs that filled my palms. Oh, and it felt so good, like scratching a hard-to-reach itch.

“Keep it low,” Thorin said. “Don’t burn out all at once.”

I clenched my jaw. “I know what I’m doing.”

Thorin knelt beside me, and my light flickered over him like a campfire. He raised his weapon high, the Hammer of Thor, and brought it crashing down to the earth. Starting from the impact point, a crack shot out across the ground, growing and widening as it went—total special effects moment, but it was real. Thorin and I fell back as the crack turned into a fissure that bloomed into a crevasse six or eight feet deep and about the same width.

The wolves came to the edge, baring their teeth and growling.

“A male and two females,” Thorin said as he drew back his hammer, preparing for a throw. “They’re all wild. Skoll’s not here, but he’s got to be close.”

After a flash of movement, one wolf went rolling, screeching, head over heels like a tumbleweed. It slumped into a furry pile and did not rise again. The other two wolves skittered away.

“Oh my God,” I wheezed.

Thorin grinned at me and leapt over the crevasse, graceful as a lion. He called his hammer back into his fist, and he searched the darkness for signs of the other wolves.

“We can’t keep this up all night,” I said. “I won’t last long at this rate.”

“Just one mistake on their part is all it takes.”

Rocks clattered behind me, and I spun around in time to duck a flying ball of gray fur. The wolves Thorin had sent into retreat had recovered and gone the long way around for a rear attack. One wolf, the gray one, rolled midair and landed at the fissure’s edge. The other wolf, a brownish one, came toward me in a crouch. Thorin threw his hammer as I lunged at the gray wolf, meaning to shove him into the crevasse. The victim of Thorin’s hammer, the brown wolf, barked a painful cry and fell silent. My prey yelped and darted around, moving more like a fish than a wolf. My fingers brushed his coat, singeing him, but he flitted aside before I could really hurt him.

“God, they’re fast,” I said.

The astringent stink of singed fur wafted to my nose. The gray wolf hunkered several yards away and growled at me. He wasn’t Skoll—he was too small and dark.

I bared my teeth and laughed at him, doing my best Skyla impression. “What are you waiting for?”

His muzzle crinkled into a mask of rage, and his teeth glistened in my light. He snarled and leapt toward me. I braced for his impact and called out more flames, but he twisted midleap, landed several feet away, and dashed around the edge of the crevasse, heading for Thorin.

“Thorin!” I shrieked.

He spun, bringing
Mjölnir around in an arc that connected with the gray wolf. At the same time, a fourth wolf sprinted forward, appearing like a ghost from the darkness. He leapt for me, teeth bared, snarl ripping apart the night.

Skoll.

I gathered the remains of my fire, imagining nuclear bombs and sunbursts, and lunged to meet him. Skoll shrieked, a howl of mortal pain, and everything went as bright as a million flash bulbs. I was going, crossing over that line, the transition and loss of self. That conversion was happening again, and I couldn’t stop it.

“No, no, not now. Not now,” I said, as if protesting could help.

Nothing could help, though. Nothing could stop me.

But then, a boom of thunder… and another.

A torrent of rain gushed down as though God had gathered all the oceans and poured them over me, and all the lights went out.

Chapter Fifteen

I
came back to myself, aware of cold wetness but not much else.

“Sunshine?”

I pried open my eyes but wrenched them shut again when a blinding light stabbed into my field of vision. “Ow!”

“Sorry.” Thorin clicked off his flashlight, and darkness enveloped me again.

I was zipped up in my sleeping bag, snug as a bug in a rug—a bare-naked bug. After freeing an arm from my mummy bag, I raked damp tendrils of hair from my face and asked, “Why am I wet?”

“I put out your fire. Is that how it happened at the lake in New York?”

“Yes.” I heaved a sigh. “I gotta work on it. I can control it up to a certain point, but after that…” I puffed out my cheeks, made an explosion noise, and spread apart my fingers, miming the disbursement of smoke and flames. “It’s all or nothing.”

The fire had burned away my clothing, and yet again, Thorin had seen to the defense of my modesty—what little of it was left.

“Oh God,” I groaned.

“What?”

“I was just realizing…”
Realizing I’ve lost count of the number of times you’ve seen my bare behind
.

Thorin crouched beside me and watched a pot of water bubbling on my butane stove. He kept his face turned, showing only his profile.
Good.
Talking was easier without the discomfort of his direct stare.

“Would you mind getting a shirt from my bag for me?” I asked.

Thorin’s lips curled, and even from the side, I could tell he was smirking.

“Already ahead of you.” He pointed at a stack of clothes lying on the ground between us.

I snatched the pile and slithered farther into the sleeping bag. “What do you mean you put me out?” I asked as I wriggled into the leggings and a long-sleeved thermal. “This is a desert. Where did you find—” I remembered the storm. “You went all God of Thunder,
didn’t you? Wish I had been aware of it. I bet it was awesome.”

“You weren’t so bad yourself.” Thorin lifted the pot, poured steaming water into a mug, gave it a stir with a spoon from my mess kit, and presented it to me.

I scooted out of the sleeping bag, took the mug, and sniffed—hot chocolate.

“I’ve never seen anything like what you did, not since the days of the original Sol.”

Fresh from the pan like that, the hot chocolate should have scalded me, but I drained it in a couple of giant gulps and held it out for a refill, doing my best Oliver Twist impression: “Please, sir, I want some more.”

Thorin filled my mug again, dumped in two Swiss Miss packets, and stirred it into a thick, sugary mess.

“You knew the real Sol?” I asked.

Thorin looked up at the stars. “I knew her.”

“What was she like?”

His Adam’s apple bobbed a few times before he answered. “Lovely. Radiant, I guess you could say. She wasn’t around much. Things were more literal where I come from. When the legends say Sol rode in a chariot around the world, it was truth in Asgard. Her husband, Glenr, was her driver. Maybe the humans perceived her as the sun, but to us she was real. She was always a little frantic and tired, but she had a fiery personality.” He chuckled. “A lot like you.”

I ran my finger around the bottom of the mug to dig up the fudgy bits that hadn’t quite dissolved. “You liked her?”

“Yes. I liked her a lot.”

If I pried further, he would probably shut down as he usually did, so I changed the subject. “Where are the wolves?”

In reply, Thorin clicked on his flashlight. The beam landed on a lumpy, bloody pile of fur. I sucked in a breath and almost choked. “Are any of them Skoll?”

“No. It’s the group he was with. I think they were sick. Rabies or something. It might explain their behavior.”

“And Skoll?”

“Your fire chased him away. He was burnt pretty badly. He looked like a blistered lab rat.”

“You didn’t go after him?”

“And let you go shooting star and risk losing you again for another month? I don’t think so. Don’t worry, Sunshine. He’s going to be licking his wounds for a while. We’ll find him again soon enough.”

Going after Skoll and killing him would have guaranteed the failure of Helen’s plans and removed the threat to Thorin and his kind, but Thorin had chosen to let the wolf go and take care of me, instead. My heart twitched, and another crack shot through my walls.
If he keeps this up, I’ll have nothing left to resist him with.

I studied the dead wolves again and pitied them, regretting their deaths. “You really think they were sick? Or are you just saying that to make me feel better?”

“Look at them. They’re skin and bones, missing patches of hair. They smell
terrible
, and not just wolf musk but something rotten. They weren’t far from death, anyway.”

“And Skoll could control them?”

Thorin shrugged. “I suppose.”

I gnawed my bottom lip and replayed the fight in my mind. Skoll’s escape embittered me and stoked my ire. If not for the loss of my self-control, we might have succeeded in killing him. My failure tasted as bitter as old coffee grounds. I resisted the urge to spit.

“Sunshine?” Thorin asked, as if sensing my distress.

I waved him off, rolled out of my sleeping bag, and shuffled into the tent. After rifling through my pack, I found a pair of warm socks and slipped them on.
How am I supposed to hike out of here in sock feet?
I set that problem aside and set about repacking my things, anything to keep me distracted from dwelling on my mistakes and shortcomings.

Thorin moved around outside, clinking dishes and rattling gear, but that fell away, and silence settled over the desert. Rather, all the people fell silent. Wind whispered, and desert owls screeched and sang their other strange noises. Distant coyotes—
not the wolves this time
—howled and barked. Their haunting voices provided the perfect accompaniment for my grief.

Maybe Thorin had thought my despair deserved some alone time, because he was absent from camp when I eventually crawled through the tent flaps and shuffled into the moonlight. All traces of Thorin’s deluge had sunk into the dry earth, but the new crevasse remained. I walked over to it, sat down, and dangled my feet over the edge.

Thorin naturally moved as silently as a ghost, but the skitter of rocks and crunch of grit announced his approach, as though he meant for me to hear him coming.

“What do we do next?” I asked.

Thorin crouched beside me and tossed a rock into the chasm, and it
tick-tack
ed all the way to the bottom, bouncing off the walls as it went. “We should go to Vegas. I think Skoll would go back to Helen to give her a report, to hide out until he recovers. We also need to start looking for signs of Surtr’s sword.”

“You want to kick Skoll while he’s down?”

“That would be ideal,” he said, staring into the shadows of his ravine. “What do you want to do?”

“I want to go back to Alaska.”

Thorin’s head jerked up. His eyes cut to me, and the moonlight glowed in their dark depths. “Really?”

“I felt close to Mani there. I’m missing him very badly right now.”

Thorin nodded. “Of course.”

“I don’t have anywhere else to go. I can’t go home—it would bring trouble to my connections there. I’m half surprised Helen hasn’t already used them to get to me.”

“She’s always been single-minded. Now, she has a lot of variables to juggle. She might not risk going after your family for fear of spreading herself too thin. I think we shouldn’t underestimate her, though.” Thorin paused and exhaled. He looked down, found another pebble, and threw it into the ravine. “I would be wrong to dismiss your concerns about your family. They are a weakness for you, and the best way of dealing with that is to end this matter as quickly as possible.”

“Las Vegas is the reasonable choice,” I said. “If you think that’s where we should go, then I won’t argue.”

“We’ll leave in the morning. It’s about six hours until sunrise. You should try to get some sleep.” Thorin stood and held out a hand for me. When I took it, he pulled me to my feet. “When this is over, I’ll take you back to Alaska. We’ll go on one of Mani’s favorite hikes.” Again, that unexpected empathy—Thorin kept me guessing. Always guessing.

“I thought Mani and I would be together forever, that I’d always know everything about him. He wasn’t supposed to be a stranger to me.”

Thorin had the sense to keep quiet rather than offer clichéd prattle to try to comfort me. We walked back to the tent, and I gathered my sleeping bag and laid it out inside. Thorin zipped the flap behind me as I snuggled down into my cocoon of insulation.

“Thank you,” I said through the thin nylon walls.

“For what?”

“Fighting Skoll… saving me from losing myself again.” After pausing to let out a big yawn, I said, “And thanks for letting me sleep. The fire always wipes me out.”

His footstep scraped over the ground. “You don’t have to thank me. Just get some rest. Who knows what tomorrow will bring?”

“Okay,” I said, yawning again. “Good night, Thorin.”

“Goodnight, Sunshine.”

At dawn, Thorin woke me. We put away the entire campsite without a word. Not until we had our packs in place on our backs did he breach the silence.

“I brought the truck close. You won’t make it far in those sock feet.”

“That was nice of you. I appreciate it.”

Thorin shrugged. “Don’t give me too much credit. I was partly being nice and partly not wanting to waste any more time.”

He stepped close to me and pulled something from his pocket. It was Mjölnir, the chain-and-pendant version. He swept my hair aside and fastened it back in place around my neck. It hung down low, the charm falling into the neck of my jacket and settling against my skin as though it belonged there. As though I had always worn it.

“We’re not hunting the desert anymore,” he said. “There’s no need to hike. I’m in a hurry to move on.”

“What did you do with the bodies?” I had noticed when we finished packing up that the wolves were gone.

“Buried them. Seemed the decent thing to do.”

Unshed tears burned in my throat. I said nothing but nodded. The wolves were wild beasts, creatures of the natural world—not my brother, not a friend or a person—but I mourned them anyway. Theirs were three more lives lost to Helen’s scheming. Their deaths weren’t fair, even if they were sick and suffering. At least Thorin had given them quick mercy.

Once we stowed our packs in the back of the Yukon and climbed inside, I jacked up the heater. Thorin maneuvered, slowly and carefully, over the bumpy terrain until we reached pavement. The moment our wheels touched asphalt, he stomped on the accelerator and put the Mojave in our rearview mirror.

Later, when Thorin’s cell phone picked up a signal, it beeped, letting him know it had messages.

“Check those, will you?” He dug the phone from his hip pocket. “It’s probably Skyla wanting you to call her.” He was wrong.

Val’s voice played over the speakerphone: “Baldur’s gone. There is a handbasket on its way to hell, or maybe I should say on its way to Hela, and I’m pretty sure he’s in it.”

“Get to the point,” Thorin grumbled.

“Baldur said something about having found Nina, and he was going to get her. I’ve been calling him ever since. His phone rings straight to voice mail, and he’s refusing to respond to any of my other attempts to contact him. Call me.”

The message ended, and a monotone phone voice announced that Thorin had no new messages.

“Not now…” Thorin groaned and rubbed a hand over his face. “Call Val. Find out what he knows.”

Val picked up on the first ring. “Thorin, thank the gods.”

“It’s me,” I said. “We got your message. Thorin’s driving. I’m putting you on speaker.”

“What happened?” Thorin’s voice carried a hint of exasperation.

“Baldur got a call a couple of hours ago—right after we got back to Vegas. He started acting all secretive, going outside so I couldn’t hear his conversation. A few minutes later, he came into the room and said, ‘I found Nina. I’m going to get her,’ and then he left.”

“You didn’t stop him?” Thorin asked.

“How am I supposed to stop the Allfather when he wants to go somewhere? One minute he was there, and the next”—Val made a snapping noise—“he was gone.”

“He didn’t say where he was going? When he would be back?”

“No. He just went. He looked half crazed.”

“We’re on our way back. We’ll go after him as soon as I get there. Keep your phone at your side. Call me if anything changes. We should be there in another hour or so.” With that, Thorin ended the call and dropped his phone into the console between us.

“You know,” I said. “From the moment I first met him, Baldur seemed a little…
unstable.
It’s gotten worse.”

“I’ve not seen him like this in a long time. His experience with Helen was…” Thorin scratched his jaw while he thought of what to say. “It was torturous. It broke him. He’s not the person he was before.”

“You’re going after him again?”

“I have to. If Helen gets her hands on him, I’m not sure he’ll survive it.”

“He’s immortal.”

Thorin looked at me from the corner of his eye. “That’s even more reason to keep her from him. She can’t kill him, but she can make him wish he was dead.”

When we reached the outskirts of Las Vegas, Thorin’s phone rang again, and Skyla’s name flashed on the caller ID. Thorin held out the phone to me. “You should probably answer.”

I swiped the Answer icon and uttered the beginning of a greeting, but Skyla cut me off. “Stop talking and listen to me.”

“Okay, okay. What’s going on?”

Skyla’s voice shook as she said, “You have to get out here, now. The Aerie’s been attacked.”

“Attacked? What are you talking about?”

“Put her on speaker,” Thorin said, and I did as he instructed.

“Someone set fire to the place, and it’s burning right now, as we speak. More like a bomb than a fire. It trapped some of the Valkyries in the dormitory wing. They couldn’t get out. They… they…” Skyla muffled a moan, but her grief carried across the airwaves, regardless. “There’ve been women on guard duty since your dream, Solina, but they didn’t know what was going on until it was too late. It all happened so fast.”