Chapter 41
The path gave out under Fenris's boots, and the mist that had risen with every step down into the gorge thinned away to nothing.
Ahead, the ground ran flat and barren to a wall of black onyx, the cold coming off it in a slow tide. His scarred eye throbbed the way it did near old, deep magic, and went on throbbing the longer he looked at it.
Before the wall sat a hall, no bigger than a crofter's house, its timber gone gray and hard as iron, its turf roof furred with something pale.
Past the hall, set into the onyx itself, stood a pair of doors.
They were carved over every inch with bind runes he half knew and others he did not.
He knew what was behind them as surely as his own name.
"That's where my father is," Fenris said, the magic in his blood thrumming in recognition.
The others fanned out on either side of him and stared.
"There is supposed to be a trial here," Von said, looking about. "The Wanderer's story spoke of it and said they failed it and were sent back to Midgard."
"Maybe the trial is surviving boredom," Ciara said.
Von rolled his eyes at her. "I doubt it, pet. Perhaps the runes are the riddle."
"Ah, I think we have bigger problems than the runes right now," Layla interrupted them. She wasn't looking at the door; she was looking behind them.
Darkness was rising like fog and rolling toward them. Shapes began to form in it, hints of sharp teeth and hunger.
"Inside or out?" Tor asked.
"Out here we have a wall at our backs and open ground on every other side," Arne said, already grabbing Layla's hand. "In there we have four walls and a door we can ward."
"In there, we also have whatever trap Hel built the hall to spring," Ciara argued, pulling a longer dagger free.
"Inside," Fenris chose for them. "We can hold a door. We can't hold the dark and fight whatever the fuck is living in it."
They ran from the stone doors, across the dead ground, and up the stairs of the hall. Tor and Fenris shoved the doors open as Arne watched the group's backs, and they all hurried in. They shut the heavy door behind them and dropped the beam to lock it.
Linnea was already singing, the tip of her knife carving bind runes into the wood. Von added his own, and the two magics settled together.
"Let's check out the rest of this place while they do that, in case literal monsters are hiding under a bed," Arne suggested.
Layla whacked him. "You just had to say it, didn't you? I'm making you go first to check."
Tor and Ciara had already shifted into wolves and were darting off with their noses to the ground. Fenris guarded Von and Linnea until the wards had settled over the hall like a warm blanket.
"The rooms are clear. Everything seems to be clean and in order like last time, except there are no signs of any welcome shades or a note from Hel," Tor reported back, minutes later when he and Ciara had shifted back into their human forms.
"Maybe she didn't expect anyone to ever get this far," Von replied.
"If the Norns and Havi helped make all of this as part of Loki's plan, then no one but Fenris was meant to free him," Linnea pointed out.
Fenris's eye twitched. "Me and you. This is part of your wyrd too."
"Perhaps," she said, her eyes not meeting his.
He had given her the night Ciara told him to give her. He had given her today as well, and who knew what tomorrow would bring.
"There's not 'perhaps' about it, Linnea," he growled. "You and I need to talk. This nonsense has gone on long enough."
The wolf lifted its head. About time.
"We don't need anything…"
Fenris crossed the hall. She tensed before he reached her but didn't have time to move before he tossed her over his shoulder.
"We need some privacy," he told the others. None of them looked about to stop him. Von was grinning.
Linnea made a sound somewhere between a squawk and a snarl. "Fenris, put me down! I swear to every god…"
"No." He was already walking.
"Tor!" she snapped, upside down, hair swinging. "Tor, are you seeing this? Help me!"
"Sorry. He's bigger than me," Tor called back.
"Ciara!"
"Grovel harder," Ciara reminded Fenris.
Layla said to no one in particular, "I feel like we should at least pretend to stop this."
"Von, do you know any decent sound warding?" Arne asked.
Fenris carried Linnea through the nearest low doorway into a bedroom, shot the iron bolt across the door, and dropped her onto the bed.
Linnea glared up at him, chest heaving, a flush up her throat that had nothing to do with wanting him and everything to do with fury.
"You have about three seconds to explain yourself."
"I'm not doing this anymore," Fenris snapped.
"Doing what?"
"This." He gestured between them. "You, talking to me like I'm a stranger.
Me, letting you push me away without explanation.
I'm done with it. You're going to tell me what your mother said to you in that hall that made you hate me so much, and I'm going to tell you the rest of it, and neither of us walks out of this room until we do. "
Linnea flinched. "There's nothing…"
"Linnea, don't lie to me on top of everything else."
Linnea's blank expression finally cracked, and her face came apart. She pressed the back of her hand hard against her mouth like she could push it all back in.
"She said I was the reason she left, okay?
" she said, trying to force the words out through a ragged gasp.
"My mother sat down across from me like we'd arranged to meet for coffee, and she told me she looked at a daughter who couldn't shift and did the math and chose herself, and never regretted a day of it. "
Fenris forced himself to stay where he was, to not crowd in on her when all he wanted was to take her in his arms and kiss all her sadness away.
"The thing is, Fenris, it doesn't even matter if it was really her," Linnea continued, wiping the stray tears off her cheeks.
"Tor seems to think it was a trick, a mask, something the place dredged up to gut us because we don't know if she's really dead.
It still doesn't matter either way because every word of it was true. "
"It wasn't…" he began.
"I'm a volva of Ulfheim who can't shift.
" She rode straight over him. "That's the whole truth of who I am.
Not wolf enough for my father, who beat it into me.
Not wolf enough for my mother, who walked out over it.
Not wolf enough for the pack, who looked at me like something born wrong and only tolerates me now because my magic has value to them.
Not wolf enough for the god of wolves to want for anything more than a warm body to hold in the dark until he gets where he's going.
" Her voice gave out in the middle of it, but she kept going anyway.
"No matter what I do, I'm just never enough, and I'm so fucking tired of it! "
The wolf was up on its feet inside him, hackles raised, furious on her behalf, with nowhere to put it. Fenris crouched down on the floor in front of her and gave her the only thing he had that was bigger than Inga's poison.
"I have been a wolf for longer than your people have existed," he said softly.
"I have become the monster in every telling of my story.
Men carved me onto standing stones with my mouth open and the world ending in my teeth.
Everything that has ever looked at me has been afraid of me.
Everything except you. You stood on a forest path in the snow and told a god the size of your car to get in the back and not eat you, please.
No one in the Nine Worlds has ever looked at me the way you do, like I'm worth being treated normally and being rude to. Do you understand what that is to me?"
Linnea's mouth opened and shut again. He took that as a sign he should continue.
"Sunniva was afraid of me," he said, because he had started now, and she would never understand unless he laid it bare for her.
"I loved my wife with the part of me that is a man, and she loved that part back, right until the day the wolf showed through the skin, and she saw what she had married.
After that, she couldn't meet my eyes. That's the sum of the great love you think you're never going to measure up to.
A woman who flinched when I came into the room, until I let them put me in the ground because being buried was easier than watching her be frightened of me in my own house. "
"You were holding her hand and smiling and… Why do that if she was so cruel to you?" Linnea asked, her brows drawing together.
"She was apologizing to me, Linnea," he said, summoning his courage.
"She told me I'd spent an age building a shrine to a marriage that scared her, and that I should pull it down.
She told me to stop being afraid and to claim my true mate.
To ask her properly, so the yes would be hers to give.
That is what you watched across that hall.
Not a man going back to the love of his life.
A dead woman cutting me loose and pointing me at you because it's where I've always belonged. "
"Your true…" Linnea's brows came down further. "What the fuck are you talking about, Fenris?"
"You're my mate, little singer," he whispered. "You have been my mate since the first time I heard your voice. When I woke, your scent reached me in that forest, and my wolf recognized you. I have known every single day since."
She stared at him. The fury came right after, which he should have braced for because she was his in more ways than one.
"The forest," she said, color climbing into her face. "You've known since the first day, and you let me walk into Niflheim thinking I was someone you'd pass the time with, and that you'd be embarrassed about later…"
"I have never thought that about you," he began, but she cut him off.
"But I still believed it because you never said otherwise! Oh, my gods, Tor knew, didn't he? Ciara told you to grovel. Every single person in that hall out there knows what I am to you except me. Why?" she demanded, all the hurt in her face turning to embarrassment and anger.
"For a whole lot of reasons, Linnea! I have enemies older than your world, and the fastest way to get a thing taken from me is to let the worlds see I want it!
" he said, standing back up. "I didn't think I'd earned another chance to feel this way.
Sunniva's fear nearly finished me, and I didn't even love her the way I love you.
If you ever looked at me like that, it would end me.
So I told myself I was protecting you, when half of it was protecting myself. Both were true."
Her eyes were wet now as she rose to her feet to face him. "Anything else?"
"Every choice you have ever had was made for you by somebody else.
" He dared to take one of her hands with his.
"A cult took you and bled you because of what your blood was worth to them.
Your father decided what you were before you could speak.
Your mother decided you were a reason to leave.
I wasn't going to be one more person deciding your life for you.
I wanted you to choose me, or not choose me, with the whole truth in your hands and no bond dragging on you to tip the scale.
You have had enough taken from you, and I wouldn't take this too. "
"I see," she whispered. "Are you done?"
"No." He took her face in his hands. "I don't care that you can't shift.
I've never cared, and I thought you understood that, but clearly, I have to repeat it.
I'm the god of wolves, and I am telling you that the wolf you keep behind that wall is no doubt as beautiful and wonderfully stubborn as you, and whether she ever comes out is for you both to decide.
You could stay exactly as you are for the rest of your life, and you would still be my mate. I would still want you."
She was crying now, the quiet kind, the kind that scared him worse than the loud.
"If we open those doors tomorrow and it goes wrong, if we can't free Loki, if Ragnarok comes early and the dark eats all of it, you and me and the whole of Yggdrasil, it won't change one thing I've said in this room.
I will love you while it ends. I will love you whether you take the bond or you walk out of here and never let me touch you again. "
He had run out of caution a day ago. The rest of it came out plain.
"You will always be enough for me, Linnea. I want you in any way you will allow me to have you. That's the whole of it. That's everything I have been holding back since the night you found me."
The wolf, which had held itself still through every word so it would not crowd him, let go at last.
Ours, it said, low and certain. Always was. Always will be.
Linnea stared up at him, her gray eyes huge and swimming, her hands fisted now in the front of his shirt.
"Mate," she whispered. "Mate?"
He had seen the shape of her magic since the first night, and the strange wall she raised with her own hands to keep her wolf locked away where her father could not reach it.
Now, with the word out of her mouth and hanging in the cold between them, the wall shook.
Mine, his wolf answered it, rising to meet her through the shaking wall. Ours. Come home.