Chapter 1
The first thing Fenris noticed was the feel of his breath, and the cold air pulling through him, sharp as a knife. He was lying on his side and had no memory of how he got there. The ground under his cheek was frozen earth, pine needles, and a thin crust of old snow.
He hadn't breathed fresh air in a long time. His ribs creaked, and his tongue was thick in his dry mouth. Somewhere far away, water ran over stone, slow and patient and indifferent.
Fenris opened his eyes and tried to figure out where he was. His right eye had only opened once for a millennium. The rest of the time, he had been in the dreaming, watching the slow drift of time above him, and hearing only the voice that came to sing him to sleep.
His left eye had been shut so long that everything was more diluted and stranger than the rest of the world. The scar that ran through it made part of his blue pupil gray. Sometimes it warned him when magic was close. Now it just throbbed from disuse.
He flexed his fingers that cracked painfully in the snow. They were a man's fingers, long and pale with a cross-hatching of scars. He turned his palm to the sky and looked at it in the moonlight.
Get up, said the wolf inside him.
Fenris pushed himself onto one elbow. His back throbbed in a long aching line down his spine where Gleipnir had crossed over him a thousand times for thousands of years.
He looked down. The scars were silver-bright on his chest and arms. He turned his legs slowly in the cold moonlight and found them with the same pattern of scarring from his magical bindings.
Fenris's head reeled, and the trees around him swirled. The air was full of the smell of frost, pine resin, old leaf decay, and the distant musk of a small mammal that had passed through a few hours ago. His stomach growled.
Up, urged the wolf again.
I am up.
You are sitting. Up means standing, so our ass doesn't freeze to the ice.
Fenris snarled, set his teeth, and got his feet under him. His knees buckled twice before he caught the bark of a pine.
Strong start, the wolf said.
Shut up. We shouldn't have shifted yet.
I didn't want to, but you insisted.
I don't remember. I'm shifting back, or a cold ass will be the least of our problems.
His heart was beating a little too fast, but it could just be that he was hearing it again. He let his wolf rise up like a tide to pull him down again.
The shift came easily, unlike standing. He settled onto four paws, and the wolf came out of the man and looked at the forest through his sensitive eyes.
He stood higher than a horse and wider than a bear.
He could grow as big as a longhouse if he wished, but he didn't want tree branches slapping at him.
His black pelt smelled of dust from the years underground.
He rolled in the snow to try to ease the itching that accompanied his skin settling over his bones.
The forest around him was thick, covered in snow. The bark of the pines was similar to what he remembered, but the pines themselves were leaner, younger, no older than a thousand years between them. The forest had been cut once and had grown back. Possibly more than once.
He listened. There was a road somewhere, and he cocked his head.
He couldn't see it, but the wind brought him the slow, distant grumble of an engine, and after that, fainter, the smell of burning. Black smoke, oil, and rubber that had been worked too hot. Beneath that, the chemical sweetness of something he had no word for.
Men have been as busy as the dreaming showed me, he thought.
Men have probably made everything worse, like always, the wolf grumbled, with a lack of interest because he had eaten three humans in a row once in self-defense and hadn't particularly enjoyed it.
How did we get out of the cavern?
We walked out, and then you passed out in the snow. This is where the path out of the Gap went. The wolf had no more information than that.
Fenris had no idea how long he had been awake. Time, like balance, was a thing his body would have to relearn. His wolf stopped walking the way an animal would when it scented its own death, or its god, or both at once.
It breathed in a faint thread of woodsmoke, wool, clean soap milled with something like juniper, and the green bite of dried herbs from a pouch she carried at her belt or in her bag.
Under it all was the scent that was uniquely her. Sweet cloudberries, honey, female musk, and magic that scorched the air around her.
Fenris knew that scent the way a man knew his own heartbeat. The singer.
Mate, the wolf said, and it was no longer a small voice but a roar in his bones. MATE.
The man inside the wolf didn't know how to respond to that statement. The wolf had said 'hers' of his human wife, 'pack' of their children, 'den' of the place they had built together before Asgard's prophecy and fear had taken it from them.
Never mate, because the word meant only one thing to the wolf. The wolf had loved before, in its blunt animal way, but the wolf had not been the one picking a bride; the man had. The wolf had gone along with it because it was fed, and the man seemed happy, and that had been enough.
The wolf now had thousands of years of waking and sleeping and waking again. It had a long, dark time to sit and covet impossible things, because it was Loki's son and had inherited certain bad habits.
The wolf didn't try to explain as it ran toward the smell. The pines flickered past him on either side. The icy air raked the inside of his throat, his blood roared in his ears, and the Great Wolf finally panted a single word through his fangs, "Mine."