Chapter 2
The last of the silver bindings was crumbling in Linnea's fist as she climbed the winding stone stairs.
Thousands of years of binding magic, the sound of a cat's footfall, the beard of a woman, the roots of a mountain, and the rest of the impossible recipe, all of it reduced to dust and the lingering traces of Fenris's scent.
She couldn't make herself open her hand. If she did, the wind would take the last of him, and she wasn't ready to let go yet. She had spent a long time on her knees in the void below, singing lullabies to an empty stone slab and trying not to throw up.
Lady Freya had told her she needed to keep Fenris asleep for another year. It was winter, not midsummer. She had failed, and he was gone.
Her throat was raw, her cheeks sticky from crying, and the stone steps under her boots were the only thing about the Hall of Nowhere that felt real.
He is gone, her wolf whined. He is gone. He is gone. He is gone.
I know.
Find him.
I'm going to try.
Try harder.
Linnea ignored the wolf because she didn't understand the enormity of the task. Fenris was a god. They weren't found unless they chose to be. She had to tell Lady Freya and prepare for whatever happened next.
Linnea finally reached the top step. The carved door stood open above her in the rock face, the runes around its edges glowing faintly.
She walked through, and the runes flared once, the door went silent behind her, and the stone reformed itself, smooth and flawless, the seam invisible.
Like she had never been there. Like he had never been there.
Linnea stepped onto the forest path and stopped to take a few clear breaths. Her legs trembled from the climb. She was a little out of breath, and she still wanted to scream at the winter moon.
That was when she noticed that the forest was hushed around her. Her wolf senses prickled in awareness because it was a silence that meant something large was close, and the small creatures had hidden so they wouldn't draw its attention.
The moon was high. The pines were silvered. The air smelled of frost and, faintly, of something metallic like a freshly forged sword. The back of her skull tingled in warning, her magic alerting her to another's close by.
Linnea took three steps along the path before a wolf melted out of the darkness. He was black as ink and the size of her car. He was already smaller than the form he had in the cavern, and yet he was still bigger than anything that had any business existing on a forest path at midnight.
His head was lowered. One eye was the color of a summer sea, and the other's iris was paler, milky in a single wedge where a thin silver scar ran from brow to cheek. He was watching her the way a wolf stalked something small and fluffy.
Her wolf was no longer whining or pricking ears but doing a full-body tail wag, with the entire happy bounding choreography of a dog who had just heard the front door opening.
Stop it, Linnea demanded in a shocked whisper. Stop. We are about to die.
He's here, her wolf said joyously.
Oh, my gods. He's going to eat us.
Linnea didn't move. The first thing she had learned growing up around wolves had been: never run from a wolf because to run is to be prey.
Linnea had been kidnapped, marked for sacrifice, dragged into a god's prison, and assigned a wyrd she didn't feel even slightly equipped to carry. Linnea had survived all of it, and she wasn't going to die because she ran from anything ever again.
She certainly would never run from this wolf, who smelled like the silver dust crumbling in her fist and forged steel.
Fenris took a step toward her.
Linnea didn't move, just watched him.
He took another. A wolf the size of her car should have made a sound, but each footfall was silent. His head was still lowered. His shoulders were still loose. He wasn't growling or baring his teeth, which was a good sign.
He stopped close enough that she could have reached out and touched the thick ruff of his throat. He lowered his head a fraction more, his breath huffing her hair.
"Take me to Havi, volva," the wolf said with a voice made of rust and gravel. There was no menace in it, only an exhausted, ancient, slightly impatient request.
Linnea's brain briefly attempted to faint. She forced it back and locked her knees.
"I don't know if he's in Midgard," she said, her voice too small. She cleared it and raised her head a little. "Havi, I mean. He moves around. He could be in Asgard or Vanaheim or anywhere."
Fenris didn't respond. He just looked at her with his mismatched eyes and zero patience.
"But," she continued quickly, "if he is in Midgard, I know where he stays. He has a house in Otta. I can take you there if you don't eat me first."
He took another half-step toward her, lowered his enormous head, and sniffed.
She closed her eyes so she didn't piss her pants.
His breath was hot, and she found herself wanting to lean forward to see if his fur was as soft as she thought it would be. Don't think about that.
He smells like home, her wolf said dreamily.
Stop.
He smells like sex. We should do a sex on him.
He is probably going to eat us.
Fenris stopped sniffing at her, and she dared to open her eyes.
"Right," she said, her voice steadier. "Okay. I have a car about half a mile down the path. I'll take you to Havi's, but you are huge right now, and there is no way you will fit in the back."
Fenris stared at her, and her underarms dampened with sweat.
"I'm just stating facts," she babbled on quickly. "You'll have to shrink down some more if you're going to fit."
Fenris tilted his head. His expression was deeply unimpressed.
"I know. I know," she said, stuffing her hands in her pockets because she had forgotten her gloves. "You are a mighty god, and it's beneath you. I'm only saying that the back seat isn't large enough for you, so you have to deal with it if you want to come to see Havi."
He held her gaze for one long moment, and slowly, with a grumble that wasn't quite a growl, he began to shrink. He went from car-sized to horse-sized, paused, and looked at her.
She raised an eyebrow. "Still too big."
He went from horse-sized to the size of an unusually tall Great Dane, paused, looked at her with an expression of such profound suffering that she actually laughed. It broke free of her, hoarse and surprised.
He glared at her, eyes narrowing.
"Sorry," she said, stifling her laughter. "Sorry. That's perfect. Let's go."
She turned her back on the wolf-god whom she had been singing lullabies to in the dark for over a year and walked down the path toward her Land Rover. Her hands were still shaking in her pockets, and her wolf wouldn't stop doing internal cartwheels.
She didn't look back, but the wolf fell into step behind her.
This is fine, she told herself. This is fine. I have a Norse god following me through the forest in the shape of a very large dog, and I'm taking him to Havi's vacation house in central Norway, and this is fine.
This is amazing, her wolf corrected.
The Land Rover was where she had left it, parked in the gravel turnoff beside the road. Snow was beginning to fall again slowly. She unlocked it and opened the boot's back door. The blanket was still there from the last time she had taken Gudrun's old hound to the vet.
"In," she said, gesturing.
Fenris sniffed and gave her the look of a duke being shown to a servant's entrance. With a deep and put-upon sigh, he jumped in and looked about. Then he climbed over the back seat and stretched out along it, his eye fixed on the rearview mirror.
"Make yourself comfortable," she grunted and shut the door. It wasn't like she was dumb enough to argue with him.
She got in the driver's seat, started the engine, and put both her sweaty hands on the wheel.
"Right," she said to nobody. "Right, okay, three and a half hours to Otta. I'm putting on classical, because if I have to listen to late-night dance music right now, I'll drive us off a cliff."
She tuned through a few channels until she found some Sibelius rolling out of the speakers, soft and sad. She entered the directions to Havi's cabin into her phone, ignored all the unread messages from her family, and started driving.
In the rearview mirror, the wolf was watching her.
He is looking at me, her wolf reported.
Yes. I noticed.
He smells like magic. He smells like wild things. He smells like sex.
So you said before. He is a god, confused and possibly going to eat me by sunrise. Stop thinking about sex.
He's not confused. He is hungry.
Linnea adjusted her grip on the wheel and focused on the road ahead of her, dark and pine-walled, silvered with new snow. Behind her, the largest wolf in the Nine Worlds was lying very still and watching her in a mirror.
Linnea really, really hoped Havi was home, because if he wasn't, she was going to be fucked.