Chapter 3
The cabin was dark when Linnea pulled into the gravel drive, and that alone told her she was in trouble.
Dawn was breaking blue and slow over the pines, the kind of pale Norwegian dawn that took an hour to commit to actual light, and Havi's cabin sat at the end of the track with no smoke rising from the chimney.
Worse than that, Geri and Freki weren't at the tree line. According to Layla and Arne, the All-Father's two enormous gray wolves were always visible the moment a car came up the drive, and there was no sign of them now.
"Shit," Linnea muttered, killing the engine and rubbing her tired eyes.
In the back seat, Fenris had closed his eyes sometime during the last hour and was lying with his head between his paws.
"He's not here," she said, and he sat up and shook himself.
She was meant to drive to Otta, tell Havi about Fenris, hand the situation off to literally anyone with more authority, get instructions, and follow them.
The plan had not included Fenris awake in the back of her car, the All-Father not at home, and Linnea about to break into a god's cabin at dawn to make another god a snack.
Lady Freya had said she had a part to play in all this, and apparently, this was it.
Linnea got out, and the cold went straight through her coat. She opened the back door of the Land Rover and stood aside. Fenris climbed down and did a full-body stretch before he was gone in a black flicker between the pines before she could say anything else.
She let him go. The first thing wolves always did in a new place was to sniff.
Linnea turned to face the door of solid pine and the small carved rune above the lintel that flickered with magic when she looked at it.
Linnea glanced back at the wolf-god running between trees, sniffing the perimeter of the cabin, and back to the door again.
"Sorry," she said to the wood. "Breaking and entering it is. Please don't be mad at me, Havi. I don't know what else to do right now."
Linnea closed her eyes and shook out her hands.
She was a volva, and it didn't matter that she hadn't technically finished her training with Gudrun yet.
She knew the foundation of what she needed because a lock was just a knot, like a ward was a knot, and a galdr, a rune-song incantation, was something she knew how to use to unravel all three.
She licked the pad of her thumb and pressed it to the rune above the lintel and closed her eyes.
"Lúk upp," she whispered. "Leysa. Lúk."
She breathed into the words as she repeated them over and over, letting each one fill her mouth, infusing them with magic until she was chanting them in a trance-like melody.
Open up. Release. Open. It was the smallest galdr Gudrun had ever taught her, and she had shown it to Linnea as a joke when she couldn't get the lid off a jar of jam.
The rune above the lintel went warm under her thumb before the lock clicked.
She winced and apologized again to Havi in a small, fervent whisper, and pushed the door open.
The cabin didn't have the usual smell of woodsmoke or the dry-pine cleanness of a Norwegian summer house locked up for the winter. Whatever Havi did to keep his wards hospitable, he still did it whether he was home or not. It was warm inside, with fresh flowers in a vase on the table.
Linnea stamped the snow off her boots before taking them off.
Fenris materialized at her elbow, and she didn't jump only because she had grown up around wolves who made a game out of trying to frighten her.
The snow was melting on his paws, his ears swiveling forward as he looked past her into the cabin.
She waited until he stepped inside first before she shut the door behind them.
Fenris went through the cabin the way a wolf went through any new place, which was nose-first and exhaustive.
He sniffed the doorframe, the edge of the rug, the boots by the door, the wood basket by the stove, the corner of the kitchen counter, and the door handle of every closed door in the place without opening any of them.
He stopped the longest at Havi's bedroom door, his nose pressed to the wood.
"Let's see what we can find to feed you," she said, mostly to herself, watching him as he came back into the kitchen.
Havi's freezer was full, thank fuck. Linnea pulled out some venison steaks and stood at the counter for a moment, trying not to laugh at the absurdity of the situation she found herself in.
Fenris was supposed to want to eat Havi in Ragnarok, not ask to see him.
She put the venison onto a dish and into the microwave, setting it to defrost.
"Stay here. I need a minute," she told Fenris, who didn't look up from the way the meat went around and around.
Linnea found a small bathroom decorated with paintings of forest scenes.
It was dust-free and pristine. She really wanted to know which spells he was using to make his housework disappear.
She locked the door behind her and finally got to pee for the first time in four hours.
She hadn't been game enough to stop on the drive in case someone saw the giant wolf in her car and called the cops.
Scratch. Scratch. Linnea's head whipped toward the door. Was he clawing at it?
"Go away!" she shouted. There was a short silence on the other side, and the scratching started again. "I'm trying to pee. Go away!"
The scratching continued, and she did her best to ignore it. She finished up and washed her hands and face in warm water. Her hair was a mess, so she unraveled her braid and re-did it. It didn't help. It just made the blue circles under her eyes stand out more.
Feed the wolf. Go to sleep. Figure out what to do after.
Linnea opened the door to the bathroom and stared down at the wolf. "God or not, you need to learn some boundaries, my friend."
Fenris had the audacity to wag his tail and trot back to the kitchen, where he sat on the mat and looked at the microwave.
Linnea took the meat out, chopped it into rough chunks, and the smell of it hit her wolf.
Want, her wolf said, hopeful and undignified.
Not for us, Linnea told her, and got a small, affronted huff in reply that she ignored as she crouched down and set the plate on the floor.
Fenris looked at the plate, then at her, and kept looking at her with the patient, expectant gaze, as if he were waiting for an explanation he decided was forthcoming.
"It's safe to eat. I promise," Linnea said, fighting a sudden, absurd urge to laugh. "I'm not poisoning you. Why on earth would I drive you three and a half hours to poison you in Havi's kitchen?"
He kept looking at her, so she sighed and went through the small ritual of safety by picking up a piece, lifting it to her mouth, miming taking a bite, and setting it back on the plate. He watched her do it with the air of a god being humored by a peasant.
"Dark Hells, it's safe. I swear it! Just try it, or I'll make you go and hunt your own." She picked the piece back up, held it out flat on her palm toward him. "Go on."
Fenris lowered his head and sniffed at the meat carefully.
His tongue brushed the heel of her hand, hot and rough, and he chewed once and swallowed.
He sat back on his haunches to wait for the next piece.
Linnea's palm tingled from the feel of his tongue.
She swallowed hard and held out another piece.
Linnea fed him the whole plate that way, piece by piece off her palm, while the dawn turned outside from cold blue to pale gold. He never once touched her with his teeth despite how hungry he must have been.
When there was no meat left, she put the plate in the sink, washed her hands, and decided, on the strength of that slowly accumulated trust, not to fill the silence with any more words than she had to.
She took out more venison and put it in the sink to defrost for later.
She was wary of feeding a starved creature too much at once because they had a tendency to eat until they threw up.
She couldn't find any dog bowls, so she filled a mixing bowl and placed it by the fridge.
Linnea gestured for him to follow and walked him through the cabin without speaking. She pointed to the large couch.
"You sleep there. I'll be down here. I need a few hours' rest before I figure out how I'm going to contact Havi."
She left him in the lounge, checked that the dog door was open if he wanted to go out, and went down to the spare room.
She kicked off her boots, removed her coat, and sat on the edge of the spare bed with her phone in her hand. The signal in Otta was thin but enough for her to have messages from Layla, Alruna, Gudrun, Imogen, and, most of all, Tor.
Bloody hell, her brother had called her eleven times too. She ignored the other messages and brought Tor's up first and typed:
I'm okay. Can't explain yet, but I will when I can. Don't worry.
She sent it, and three dots appeared almost immediately. A moment later, his reply pinged.
You have 12 hours. Don't make me get Layla to track you because I will.
A small laugh slipped out before she could stop it, because that was Tor in a single sentence, all the worry and all the trust folded in together.
I promise, big brother, she sent back and put the phone face down on the bedside table.
From the kitchen came the slow lap of Fenris drinking water from the mixing bowl she had left out for him. Her brain made a small note that she would wash it thoroughly before they left, because leaving wolf slobber in the All-Father's bread bowl seemed like an interesting way to commit suicide.
Linnea lay down on her side still fully dressed in her T-shirt and jeans. She closed her eyes and tried to force her body to relax.
The drinking stopped before the unhurried click of claws on the wooden floor of the kitchen, moving through the living room, and coming down the hallway. The clicks reached the doorway of the spare room and stopped there.
Linnea didn't open her eyes, and the wolf inside her went still.
The mattress dipped slowly behind her. The weight settled along the length of her spine, and the warmth of him washed through her clothes.
A heavy head came to rest between her shoulder blades, and his slow breath tickled the bare skin at the back of her neck.
Her own wolf, who had been like a hyperactive pup for hours, curled up inside Linnea and sighed once in contentment.
What the actual hell.
Linnea didn't dare move. He might have been acting like a cute wolf, but she wasn't going to forget for a second who he was.
She wasn't afraid of him, though some concerned part of her mind screamed that the greatest predator in the Nine Worlds had cuddled up next to her.
She was comfortable and content, and her body made the decision her mind could not.
It surrendered for her, pulling her down into a deep and wolf-warmed sleep.