36. Wren
Wren
Midgard fights my magic every damn step, this world dragging at my power like wet cement.
Faster my ass.
Shadows skew sideways, torn from me, someone on the other end tearing them away. Devouring my power like sipping a fine wine through a straw.
They pull and tug on their own. But shit, they’ve got her scent.
She didn’t make it far.
A long stretch of road spans deeper into the hungry woods where the reek of Jotunheim blankets this land. Midgard rips free of its anchor the longer the two intertwine.
Whatever god or creature opened the door, they’ll have serious fucking hell to pay. Idiot. There are worse things than dying, much worse, a fact I’ll happily remind them of.
And honestly, if Helene survives this, I might let her kill them first. It feels like a fair trade. Maybe even cathartic.
Then I’ll resurrect them and do it myself all over again. Just for fun.
Nicholas growls, sprinting through the snow, a bullet of black against a monotone backdrop. He’s losing the plot. My shadows aren’t the only hounds out here hungry for a taste of her. Hungrier still to find out where that drop of blood came from, and how fresh it is.
Shadows tear loose on their own and scatter.
Bird brain is out there flapping heroically through the ice apocalypse, thinking he’s got the rest of us beat. He’s about to save the day. If he rescues her first, we’ll never hear the end of it. He’ll add this to his vault of memories, of the two of them together, and if we win—
What’s worse? Him forgetting everything again? Or him remembering?
Forest collects victories and hoards them like shiny objects, tiny little treasures to keep close to his chest.
Helene smiled at me first.
Helene kissed me longer.
Helene chose to fight at my side.
And now it will be, I saved Helene from certain death while you hundrs were still playing catch up.
Gods, he’d be unbearable. Assuming I don’t choke him out myself before sunset.
“Hurry the hell up, Wren!” Nicholas shouts.
The elements are not our allies today.
But she ran. Smart girl. Wrong fucking direction.
Vicious cold tears under my shirt as I sprint through drifts. This storm, the finality of it, isn’t natural. Something is out there watching.
Our breath cuts sharp, flaying my lungs raw. Snow lashes and leaves welts across exposed skin. Beneath the whiteout, the road groans, buried by ice.
Jotunheim rot spreads over Midgard like an infection. Black veins web through the frozen ground every time lightning flashes overhead, there and vanished. I almost think I imagined them.
Almost.
My shadows hate this place, and damned, if I don’t, too.
Magic slips strange and awkward over snowbanks and lash against my control. Too long gone one moment and snapping short the next.
Is this world rejecting them now? Or is the frost realm trying to eat them?
Somewhere ahead of us, Helene is trapped in the middle of both.
She did exactly what any sane person would have in an insane situation and cut and bolted. Who could blame her?
The force of the memory knocked us all on our asses. The onus is on us. We failed her. Again.
I run beside Nicholas, spurred on by shadows. “Please don’t be dead,” he whispers.
Dangerous prayer.
But the words punch through me harder than any of this unnatural cold. Of course, the bond reacts. Immediate. Instinctual.
A vicious tug lances beneath my ribs and hooks me. Yoking me. Shadows and magic explode outward in a pulsing wave and scatter through the storm. In the emptiness, Nicholas’s panic bleeds into me.
Forest’s too, but it’s distant and frantic, somewhere overhead.
These mate bonds were never meant to stretch this far but there they are—Nicholas balancing on the knife edge of his bloodlust, Forest spiraling toward something primal, feral.
And underneath them all our poor little mortal. Faint. Terrified. And pissed the fuck off.
We should have known better. We shouldn’t have fallen asleep, or allowed the sex coma to make us useless. We should have put some kind of layered protections on the house. Rather than focusing spells on keeping things out, we should have added another wall to keep things in.
But the sheets had still been warm when I woke, the indentation of her body between ours and the scent of sweat and her skin still present.
All the while she’d been heading for the hills, gone. Carving herself out of the center of us and leaving the wound gaping. Then, of course, Forest going on a tear, shifting, feathers exploding out of his physical form in a panic he couldn’t control.
Nicholas pretending to have his shit on lockdown. And me. Standing there a rotten second too long staring at the imprint on the bed.
A single second where every terrible, awful loss slams into me at the same time. Again.
We keep finding her only to lose her.
“It’s pressing closer.” Nicholas's warning is an arrow through my temple and shadows seethe.
“We have company?”
He shakes his head. “I’m not sure. I feel it, everywhere, in the flakes, in the sky. This storm—”
I pick up speed to get ahead of him, an endless line of footprints imprinting the path behind us. They’re swallowed quickly, fancy fluffs of snow marking even more dangerous black ice underneath.
Nicholas nearly cracked through.
I’m such a softie. I won’t let it happen again.
“They’re coming for her.” He picks up the pace, blurring, forcing me to stop dragging ass and use my magic to match him.
If she’s hurt, if something happened to her, the gods will pay. But is she finally too important for them to lose?
Unease rides the air, and rot slithers beneath the cold. Frost realm rot.
The main road curves away from Nightshade Hollow, and through the dip between two swells of hills. There are no more houses here. Only creatures moving through the weight in a shade darker than night, pushing from one plane of existence to the next.
And somewhere out there, Helene. Bleeding.
“Don’t do this to me, monster.”
We track the scent of her through the curse, my powers going haywire the closer we get. At last something eases, a shifting in the world, and with the yellow paint on the road a suggestion of color, we catch it.
Tracks of tire prints swerving from one side of the street to the other.
I clamp down on the animalistic sound forcing higher up my throat. My hand lifts, shadows pushing across those lines, and even those resist me.
Traitors.
“Find her!” I yell.
Thunder cracks, a biting wind nipping beneath our clothes, stealing life and warmth and my fucking afterglow.
For Nicholas, it doesn’t matter.
His blood stilled in his veins on the battlefield too long ago to mention. His undead heart doesn’t need paltry things like sunlight or heat to exist.
And Forest—
Branches crack overhead and I glance up in time to watch the huge raven take off between them, dive bombing toward the faint disappearing wheel marks, barely visible through the snowfall.
“Fuck,” Nicholas grumbles.
Forest disappears into the storm. If he dies before I kill him myself, I'll be furious.
“He’s ahead, following the tire tracks.” Nicholas takes off, pumping his arms faster.
Worry strings us together, and I’m only a step behind him, trees closing ranks to the rear of us.
Blocking the road. Blocking the world. Like no one has ever dared to build among them until now.
Shadows bind tight, landing on their target. Nicholas and I pull up short as snow breaks into ice, driving against our skin. Thick clouds overhead pummel the world in cold. The car.
The giant.
At first there’s only wreckage, twisted metal buried under ice and snowdrifts. Steam has long since stopped curling up, leaving only the ghost of pale ribbons.
Then the creature moves, and the world shrinks around the car.
A massive shape, too large for this realm. It crouches over the frozen heap of the midsize sedan, hovers, claws digging into the rear bumper. Fucking huge thing, its attention focused on the vehicle.
And the screams inside.
Ice groans under those four massive limbs when the ice giant shifts. Its claws drag, harsh, diagonally over the crushed hood of the car and frost tendrils spiral outward. Wherever the frost touches, violent cracks spread like spiderwebs.
Well. Fuck.
The brute is enormous.
Spiny shoulders hunch high into the lower pine branches with skin the color of creeping glaciers stretched over the wolf’s form. Faint runes and words of power hum inside translucent flesh and pulse white and blue, alive.
From the backseat of the sedan, one of the girls screams. Helene.
The tenor of it slices through every thought in my head. A smaller, shriller cry sounds from overhead.
Forest jets forward and angles down. No. Not flying. Falling.
He drops out of the storm, cutting through the clouds one moment, his wings spread wide. And in the next, ice detonates around him.
Hail pummels him, sending him shooting to earth faster than a fallen star, slamming into him and folding one wing wrong. Black feathers scatter through the air, his body spinning, spiraling to the dark canopy below.
Way too fucking fast.
The raven plummets like a stone through the snowstorm.
Oh, for fuck’s sake. I knew this would happen eventually. No matter how dazzlingly he fights, bird brain has the survival instincts of wet paper.
But my stomach bottoms out, and I groan. “Ugh. No.”
I’m not about to go mushy for a six-foot-whatever tall raven shifter with a superiority complex.
“Forest!” Nicholas shouts.
I throw shadows without thinking.
They rip out of me hard enough to tear a yell loose from my throat. “I swear to every miserable god—” I start.
Nicholas skids, grabbing my elbow, our gazes tracking the black missile, the raven’s body a smudge against the horizon.
“Fuck. We’re not going to make it in time.” He takes off, the edge of his leather duster sending puffs of white upward in his wake.
“Like hell we aren’t.”
I send more shadows out in a net, whipping through the wind. Tangling with ice.
Faster than me. Faster than either one of us. This world, the strain of it… sweat drops, beading through with blood, my teeth grinding.
“Do you have him!” Nicholas yells back to me.
The shadows take everything I give them and demand more, clawing on their way out.
Like always.
My knees hit and bury grooves in the snow.
Tendrils wrap around the raven’s body with inches to spare before he collides with the ground. But Forest is cradled within them, and for some reason, the rescue mission has taken a chunk out of my reserves.
I cough, sputtering.
He isn’t shaking himself free. He shudders against the shadows, hunching into a tight ball.
That’s gratitude for you.
Screams come again from within the car and this time, the sound distorts, twisting, obscured by weather.
A shuddering breath wracks through me as I draw my shadows back, Forest in tow.
“If you’re not going to help, bird brain, then at least have the sense to stay out of my god's damned way.” I lurch to my feet.
The windshield is shattered now, and through the cracks, movement flashes. Helene kicks up wildly against the rear door, blood streaking down one side of her face from a cut on her forehead.
Frost creeps across steel and glass to sear her hand whenever she touches the handle.
The jotun chuckles, an awful, grinding sound, like ancient ice splitting.
Helene’s gaze snaps from the giant to us, snowflakes falling harder, faster. And for one terrible second, the relief of her expression hits hard enough to gut me.
Then the creature’s talons slam down to the roof of the car and dented metal caves inward.
“NO!”
A battle cry echoes through the ages. One I haven’t heard since the last time I was on a battlefield, fighting alongside her. It rips from Nicholas’s lips.
I feel it too.
An awful certainty carves through my ribs. If we lose her this time, something in us won’t survive it.
So, it’s simple. We won’t lose her.
Not now. Not ever.
The sound shakes something loose inside me. Not fear, but memory. Gilded armor drenched black with blood, smoke-choked kingdoms and battles forgotten.
Our girl, standing proud in the center of the carnage with her sword held in both hands and dishonorable dead at her feet.
We’ve all fought beside her in the past. Except none of us have had the good decency to die with her.
The ridiculous memory lands jagged and incomplete, followed by enough grief to anchor it home in the present.
Then the frost giant angles toward us and his awful gaze snags on me, on Nicholas. Frosted lips peel away from icicle fangs like daggers.
I brush snow off my arms, shadows tangling like tattoos. “It’s your lucky day, buddy,” I call out. “Because this time I’m not standing on the sidelines.”
Good. He’s finally looking my way.
Instinct, the creature inside me, sits up and grins. Fear would be smarter. It probably should dominate, right along with tactical restraint. Self-preservation.
You know, those mature and reasonable matters.
I get a flood of hot adrenaline through my veins instead. “Ah, I’ve missed this.”
Nicholas whips to me. “What?”
“Oh, the violence.” I take a step closer. “The certainty. The beautiful simplicity of tearing bastards like this apart with my bare hands.”
Excitement and determination light a fire under my ass. The same combination as the last battle I joined, before everything went to shit.
Because I can survive a lot of things.
Gods. Wars. Curses. Losing pieces of myself.
But not—
I shove the thought away so brutally shadows burst from the snowbanks.
“No pressure, Helene,” I mutter through gritted teeth. “Just three emotionally unstable immortals depending on you for their continued psychological wellbeing.”
The frost giant turns fully toward us. His eyes are wrong and ancient, not mindless. Not when recognition flickers there. Somehow I’d rather it be animal ignorance. It inhales, ice crackling across its enormous chest.
And the smile…shit.
My shadows coil tighter around my arms.
When the jotun speaks, it’s a language older than this realm. It punctuates the statement with another wide smile like breaking bones.
Nicholas goes still beside me when I start to laugh. “Oh.”
“What?” he snaps.
My hand presses to my heart. “He remembers us.”