33. Nicholas
Nicholas
“Fucking Forest,” I growl.
Wren shrugs, his nonchalance hiding a worry he can't quite squash. “He told us to hold. So we are.”
I pace from the door to the window and squint through the whiteout. “Waiting has never been a priority of mine.”
“Or a talent, it seems,” Wren adds. “Mistakes happen when you hesitate rather than make a move.”
And yet...
My entire existence has been forced into a perpetual loop of pause. The harder I fight and advance and accomplish and succeed, the worse it is in the long run.
Caution, I’ve found through practice, is definitely the way to go. But I will not stop.
“Well, he’s out of sight.” Wren shrugs, shadows playing across his skin. His eyes are black pits. No matter what ease he pretends, he’s pissed. He’s frantic. “Shall we?”
Helene doesn’t care for us enough to stay.
I hate those words. I hate them as much as I love how the walls of the apartment are imprinted with the scent of our sex. It’s in the wallpaper now, the plaster and lathe and foundation. There’s no way to erase the energy of what we did together, but she is bound and determined to try.
Sweat. Blood. Her perfume.
The sharp sweetness of arousal still clings to the floorboards. The bedroom reeks of Wren’s magic and Helene’s skin. Even the cracked tile in the kitchen carries traces of her.
She lingers everywhere except where I need her. A cruel joke, perhaps, that vampires are creatures built to track what belongs to them.
My fangs lengthen, bloodlust surging. “You want to leave?”
Wren sits back. “I wish you’d stop repeating me when I’m stating the obvious.”
“You’re unusually eager.”
“And you’re unusually slow.”
My jaw tightens.
Wren studies me from beneath dark lashes, posture loose despite the stormy weather battering the windows and rattling the panes.
“What?” I snap.
“You think if we give her enough time she’ll come back by choice.”
I shake my head. “I think running blind into a supernatural storm after a woman trying to escape us is idiotic.”
“No.” His shadows curl over the arm of the chair like smoke. “You’re afraid she’ll choose not to return.”
The words land cleanly between my ribs. We stare at each other for a long silent moment.
His black eyes bore into me, and I’m acutely aware of what he hides. “You’re also implying you don’t trust Forest to find her.”
“Again, I shouldn’t have to state the obvious. Thor’s hammer...she may think she knows her limits, but she doesn’t. Although I understand why she’s determined to try.”
I do, too.
I stop beside Wren, looking at him rather than the storm, the dark shadows under his eyes and the mark of too many lost nights of sleep.
More will come. The lengths we’ve gone to save her demand it.
I watch his face for seconds before groaning. “Who in their right mind wouldn’t want to escape this hellish hamster wheel we've been cursed to?”
Especially when the powerful presence of foreboding lives adjacent to us. I scoff, stomping away from the window. Wren leans against the arched wall separating the living room and the kitchen.
I’d hoped, in a way it’s never safe to hope, the sex would be enough to lull Helene in a sense of complacency, would make her more amenable to working together.
It’s too easy to get lost in the cycle, to let it drag us under and pummel us with anger and fear and loss.
Until it’s the only reality we know.
Wren stifles a yawn. “Are you inclined to believe he’ll return shortly? I’m not.”
The storm cuts visibility down to zero. And he’s right. I’m not willing to risk her, and I hate myself for it.
I lean down until we’re eye level. “With all the magic at your disposal, together, we better accomplish the same thing as that damn bird.”
I expected him to be lazy. Instead, the keen intelligence he sometimes uses is like low hanging fruit.
The pit in my stomach opens wider, heart battering my ribs.
I’m the first to move. Wren follows me out of the apartment and down the hall, the corridors dark and damp.
There is no good reason to leave without Forest. I simply can’t bear waiting.
If Helene’s safety demands it, we both fall into line.
The hunger and the pain it brings threaten to pull me tight and double me over.
“Have your shadows found her yet?” I push the words through my teeth.
“I have a general awareness of the right direction. They’re not dogs. But they’re close. She didn’t make it far.”
Wren has always been this way. And for his own personal interests, yes, it’s smarter to allow someone else to put themselves in jeopardy over him. Conserving his magic may also make sense if we’re dealing with the creature I believe we are.
This entire situation is wrong.
I’d hate myself more if we waited. If we didn’t try.
None of the other occupants of this mausoleum stir from their apartments. When we push open the front door, a blast of wind burns strange marks into my chest.
The magic in the blizzard presses against me like a living being, vast enough to tamper with instinct itself. Flakes lash across my face and sting.
Beneath the storm rides the scent of pine sap and ancient ice. Something older yet.
Wren goes still beside me.
“You feel it too.” It isn’t a question.
The sky churns overhead in bruised shades of violet and black, thunder rolling low and vibrating through the concrete below our boots.
This isn’t weather. This is an intrusion.
But we’re two skilled hunters. If we’re not able to track our woman, then we’re useless.
I lean into the wind, and Wren lifts a hand in an appeasing gesture.
“Odd, how the storm came on this way. Snow and thunder...what are the larger implications of this?”
I lower my head. “Have you tracked her or not?”
We fall into step beside each other, Wren’s annoyance at my question refocusing his attention. “Of course I have. She went south.”
The reek of fuel and dripping lubricant is unmistakable. But the storm is strong, she had an hour of head start, and nothing’s left of her tire tracks.
Her scent is buried beneath the rest of it, oil and snow, rotting leaves. Then—blood.
I stop so suddenly Wren plows into my back. “Nicholas?”
The smell is faint, almost erased by the breeze, but my body reacts viscerally. I crouch, shoving aside recent flurries with clawed fingers.
There is nothing fresh here. Not near us. But its memory on the wind is strong enough to strike something ugly inside of me.
Wren kneels at my side and his shadows writhe faster now, a tangle of black. “Is it human?”
I drag the odor deeper into my lungs. Helene.
My vision narrows. “We have to hurry.”
I can work with fighting. The way muscles warm and the body falls into familiar positions, until only the drive to survive remains.
I’m used to bracing, to allowing the world to fall away. To let a different kind of bloodlust sing.
Since meeting her, since my transformation—
Things are both simpler and more complicated. I draw in a deep breath and reach for her, senses gripping the curse. The pull of magic binding us. There's only one thing that will lead us to her, and it isn’t shadows or wings.
Wren matches my pace, arms loose. The cold doesn’t trouble him any more than it does me. I rock to the side to avoid a large drift.
“Do you smell that?” he asks.
“Smell what?”
His small sound of disappointment pisses me off. “When was the last time you went to Jotunheim, Silver?”
The somber sky closes in overhead and presses against us.
Trees hold fiery leaves encased in ice, the snow too fresh to be smeared with road dirt or compacted.
Overnight, in the early stages of October, the landscape has become a dead zone. A colder place than we left it.
Darkness swallows us and the drifts force us to a near crawl.
I don’t trust my own instincts. Exactly the same way I’d felt the last time I’d visited Jotunheimr.
“It hasn’t been long enough for me to miss it,” I reply.
We both know what this storm is. We both recognize the magic, reading it in the piles of snow thrusting up into the sky.
There are no cars to light the path, to use their beams to cut a trail for us.
“So what in the blue balls of Freya are giants doing in this plain?” Wren’s shadows point ahead, and I pretend to ignore the way his knuckles have turned white. “They haven’t come in these numbers in years.”
She’s out there in this cold. Somewhere.
“No, they haven’t. So why now? And what else is coming?”
We have no answers for it, and I hate it. The Norns' spinning fate means so much is open to transformation. Too much.
Things can change and leave us reeling with the unexpected.
Tendrils of darkness dance atop the snowdrifts in patterns only Wren knows how to read.
When they peel off to the left, when my gut pushes me forward on the same path, we follow. The blacktop is covered and leads down. Always down.
My nails curve into claws and prick my palms, slicing skin. I don't notice.
Breathe. Do not panic.
But for a second, I’ve lost her scent. I’ve lost everything. Apprehension hits hard and hollows me out, hunger following right after.
My body reacts before my thoughts intervene, fangs dropping lower, vision sharpening. The world slows until there is only movement and prey.
Wren catches my wrist and I realize I’ve buried my claws into my own palm again. “Hey.” His voice comes slow and careful. Dangerous.
“Yeah, I know.” I drag air into lungs that no longer require it.
“Don’t do anything stupid.” Snow hisses across the road and billows around us. “You losing your fucking mind out here doesn’t help the cause. It helps no one.”
I pull free from him. “If she’s bleeding—”
“Then panicking guarantees we won’t reach her in time,” he interrupts. His nostrils flare. “Hopefully it will only be a small giant.”
The words rumble from his chest, rough, landing wrong.
Between his tone and the ice, the skin on my face prickles with an odd awareness.
I bark out a humorless laugh. “There’s no such thing as a small giant.”
The jotun weren’t merely large. Humans reduced them to size because the alternative was worse.
Vastness was difficult for mortal minds to endure.
The first giant I ever saw had been kneeling and still towered over the trees. Ice formed across every step it took. Entire villages vanished in its wake, swallowed under storms that lasted weeks.
Wren’s expression darkens. “You think one crossed over fully?”
“No.” I scan the blizzard. “I think something opened the door long enough for it to reach through.”
Luckily for us, however, if one of the jotun have made it through into this world, they aren't here on their own merit. Someone is helping them. And perhaps their magic isn’t as strong as it would have been if they’d come on their own accord.
Then again, if they didn’t need their power to tear open the door, they’ve got more of it stored.
“Forest shouldn't have gone ahead without us.” I grimace.
“She shouldn’t have, either.”
No, not when the slow creep of the world's blending has turned this town into a mirror of Jotunheimr. We're in the dwelling place of the giants, the forests deep and dark, the mountain peaks too steep for summer to find a hold.
Forest understands Helene differently than we do. It’s an animalistic sense, a primordial bond. He saw her first. He staked his claim before the rest of us knew more than the way she moved across the expanse of a battlefield.
“I should have brought my skis.” Wren hikes through inhospitable drifts in this grim landscape.
The idea of her out here somewhere, trapped, sends another spike of panic down through my canines.
If I’m not the one to kill her, though...does that mean she’ll live? That she’ll be safe?
“Have you tracked her or not?”
Wren’s shadows slide south overtop the snow.
“Satisfied?”
My fangs ache hard enough to split my gums. “No.”
Ice cracks underneath us. Where one footstep lands solid, the next slips into nothingness. Shadows latch around my coat collar to pull me back from the shoulder of the road and my arms swing to steady myself.
“Unless you plan on going for the gold, Nicholas, I suggest you stick to the center of the asphalt.” Wren’s voice is breathless.
I shrug his shadows away.
Rather than slither free, they cling, sloughing off like wood ash in a hearth.
“Something wrong?”
“I don’t know. The shadows are behaving strangely. The closer we get, the harder it is to—”
“Control issues?” I interrupt.
A sharp crack to the left sounds before a pine splits, frozen from the inside. Limbs crash to the side of the road but neither of us jump out of its path.
The worst part about my heart beating again? It reacts. Right now it’s clawing up my throat to freedom.
“I’ll show you control issues,” Wren snaps.
We sidestep the fallen tree, its glazed insides bleeding like a stomach wound. The woods are unnaturally silent, even for a snowstorm.
My nerves thrum tighter.
Somewhere in the distance, another round of thunder booms. Or another gumtree falls. Either way, the world rocks, and Helene’s scent has developed the strange habit of appearing and disappearing.