34. Helene
Helene
Shock pins us to our seats. No matter how many times I force my foot down on the accelerator, the tires spin.
The engine roars.
My head aches where it slammed into the steering wheel, and when I touch numb fingers to the area, they come away smeared with crimson.
Through the clamor of my heart, there’s no mistaking the thunder of footsteps in the distance, unnatural. Something found us. And we’re trapped.
I turn, scanning, trying to find the creature that sent us flying off the road.
The snow disorients everything, but I swear there're shapes in the white, looming and waiting. Shifting underneath the natural propulsion of wind. But the thing I saw earlier isn’t there.
“Helene, what are we going to do?” Audra’s terror matches mine. “There’s something out there."
Quiet, I glance in the rear-view mirror again. My heart leaps into my throat and I force myself to breathe past it. “I know, kid.”
“Should we try to get out and push?”
More than likely the tires have already dug deep trenches in the snow, polishing it to an icy sheen. We won’t find any purchase. Not unless I somehow acquire Hulk-like strength before we freeze to death.
It’s only the blizzard and us trapped in the car.
“I don’t think pushing will help. What about the cell?”
We can’t afford to panic.
Audra fumbles for my smartphone, sinking lower into the seat with the belt pulled tighter over her chest. She slides the cell free, but when she opens the screen, she holds it up for me. “No bars.”
Her voice goes rough. The kind of rough I associate with fear.
“It’s all going to be fine. I’m sure the snowplows will be out shortly, and they’ll give us a ride back.” I tamp down a shiver. “Someone will find us.”
Our car battery fails after an hour.
The heat sputters out first. The world outside is clamoring to get in. Frost covers the hood, seeping closer, covering the car’s elements and breaking them with its purity of cold.
Intricate patterns of ice decorate the windshield and the windows, creeping through the cracks in the metal.
Audra shivers and I wrap my arm around her shoulder.
That’s when the lights go out.
“It’s gonna be okay,” I whisper.
Snow piles higher, casting odd shadows across her skin that are nothing like Wren’s. Nothing like the ones I’m desperate to see because it means there is someone more powerful than me to wrench open the door.
Drifts encase the tree trunk and the bumpers. Neither front door will unseal and the two in the back are frozen shut, ice wedged against them.
Our breath is a gust of white in the gloom.
“Don’t worry, kid. It—” I start.
“Stop lying. I don’t want to hear it anymore.” Audra’s teeth chatter, biting down on the words, control stripped from both of us with the drop in temperature.
“How many times do I have to apologize?”
“It would be nice to hear it once.”
“I’m sorry.” I glance at her, my lashes stuck in place, pinned by ice. Tipped in ivory and glinting silver. “I was trying to protect you.”
She shakes her head. “You shouldn’t have tried to run.”
“Running might have been the best thing I’ve ever done. If this fucking storm—”
“You can’t outrun the gods.”
My features harden, and my response, when it comes, is clipped. “The gods aren’t real.”
Audra jerks her hand toward the windows and the blue hush of the compacting snow forming an igloo out of the car. "Then how about this? Or do you want me to call it fate instead?"
“This is a freak blizzard.” My excuses are too thin to hold weight for long.
“Running from our problems has never fixed anything,” she insists.
She would know.
Mom dumped us in this hole of a town and left us to rot. Without her, our option to run disappeared. She might not have loved this place, but it was hers. It was where she died.
And because of that, we adopted it, too.
Audra’s doctors are nearby. Nostalgia and questions and survival keep us here. Maybe we’ve grown to like our graves too much.
My fingers twitch in an opposite rhythm to the chattering of my sister’s teeth.
Ten years we’ve been deprived of the woman and her eccentricities, her warmth, and she’s still dictating how we move and act and talk. A full decade has passed since I found her in her bed, the drain of her veins soaked through the sheets, my vision narrowing to a pinprick on her body.
The following weeks weren’t real.
Grief counselors gave excuses for the creature she described, the one whose details I memorized until I saw her, too.
My mind, struggling to shield itself from the trauma of loss. And the guilt of arriving too late.
Then the days blurred into doctor appointments and meetings with the funeral director. Did we want our mother buried or cremated? What could we afford?
There were pills for me and for Audra, to help us forget, help us sleep, help us move on. So many pills. My nerves were shot.
Everything changed.
I hadn’t bolted then, had I? I’d stood up to keep her with me, officially old enough to act as her caretaker although I’d done the same things since she was born. When the diagnosis had come down from more official hands than mine.
No, I hadn’t fled. But maybe I should have.
She was a tiny frail young girl, even at twelve. She needed stability.
The temperature drops lower. We’d survived, but for what?
“If this is true, if this entire situation is real...” Audra trails off. “Then you can’t run, Hel. There’s nowhere to go. And we’re not better off on our own. Your men know how to handle this thing. They’ve lived through it enough times to understand it, much more than we do.”
“My men," I repeat with my gorge rising. “They’re insane.”
“Didn’t stop you from sleeping with them.”
"Stop bringing it up!"
The need to lash out is strong, violent, potent. I whip around with my teeth bared. Sleep with them. Like I’d had a choice. The memory had stoked those fires inside me, and I’d woken up to...
I’d wanted...
So badly.
Instead, I go for my bag. “Are your hands cold? I think I’ve got one of those warming packs in here. I have to find it. It will help more than those old mittens.”
Audra glares holes through my skin. “Ignore me all you want, but we know it’s the truth. They know what they’re doing. They’ve done it before. We have, too. Only they remember.”
I dive both hands into my purse up to the wrists but there’s no magic at the bottom. This isn’t Mary Poppin’s bag of mystical fucking wonders.
“Sure they have,” I agree evenly. “They’ve fought and tried and beat their heads against a rock wall, and I’ve died every single time, if you believe them. So have you.”
But to Audra this isn’t drivel.
It’s the first sweet spoonful of hope instead of sugar. Damn, she used to watch that movie hundreds of times when she was little. I think she liked the idea of someone coming into our lives to make everything better.
I did, too.
Except none of it is real.
“I’m trying to keep us alive this time. I don’t particularly feel like having ancient Norse assholes shish-kebob us. Okay?”
Rather than the rough plastic edges of the package of hand warmers I know I have stashed, my fingers graze leather strings.
“This time is different,” Audra insists. "You'll see."
“Now you’re regurgitating what Nicholas said.”
“He’s not wrong!”
I twine my index finger through the straps and pull. “You can’t make a snap judgment call about it,” I reply.
I wish arguing was a physical exercise, something to get our blood pumping.
Then I drag the bag of sigils out of my purse. It dangles between us like a grenade with my finger through the pin.
The sense of horror, of something coming, stretches until she feels it too. Osmosis or sisterly bond or magic. I’m not sure.
“I didn’t realize you’d brought those with you,” she says at last.
“I didn’t.” I distinctly remember leaving them in the living room, discarded, forgotten.
We need a weapon, or hand warmers. Instead we have runes and the stir of wind.
It blows the snow from the windshield, and through the haze of white, a form separates. Thick and solid and real. Gone in an instant.
Audra reaches for the bag and jolts back at the peal of thunder like the strike of metal on metal. “What’s happening?” Her whimper lashes barbed wire around my heart.
“It’s fine.” My eyes burn from staring for so many minutes without blinking. But the image of the figure, too tall, too thin, remains no matter how long I wait for the illusion to shatter.
“It’s not supposed to thunder when it snows.”
“It’s not supposed to snow this hard before Halloween,” I argue.
Then the entity moves. It takes one powerful step forward, and the earth rattles beneath it.
“Oh my god,” Audra sobs. “Oh my god.”
I blink tears free. “Don’t pray to them.”
We fall into silence, and I know there are some regrets I'll never be able to reconcile if this is how we go out.
My legs bob.
Wren would make a joke if he were here, something designed to get my attention off the creature, the worry, and solidify my focus. Nicholas? He’d ignore the fact that I’m scared as fuck because his faith in me seems more complete than my own.
And Forest, jeez, he’d say nothing. He’d simply charge.
And the worst thing is, I didn’t think I’ve ever wanted anything beyond safety with any man. No one has lingered because of the unconventional life I’ve built around my pain like scar tissue.
Why does the thought of not getting to see where things go with the four of us get my heart skipping beats?
I know why.
Because for once, it feels like someone might actually stay. Audra is with me because she has to be. Because she loves me and needs me.
Even my own mother took her life. She left. No one stays.
But those three immortals? I think they might…would…stay.
Audra’s ragged breathing fills the carcass of the car, and suddenly my pulse is galloping.
“Hey, calm down. Breathe. We’ll make a plan. Whatever it is, we’ll fight it,” I say.