37. Nicholas
Nicholas
Never again.
No matter what happens, she's not slipping through my fingers again. I refuse to let her go this time, to watch the light fade from her eyes and know I’m the one who caused it.
I love her too much to be anything less than selfish.
I’ll never let her go.
A dull ache slices through my head, and I clutch it, temples throbbing. “Goddamn it!”
The pain undercuts immortal numbness, a pinprick of feeling in a bleak ocean of nothing.
And the memory of my blade sliding beneath her skin, cradling her on my lap while her heartbeat stopped for the first time, the sheer horror of immortality…
It’s never stood for shit before. It does now.
Because Wren is right, and I hate it. The jotun undoubtedly recognizes us because of all the frost giants to walk through the door into Midgard, of course. It would be him.
Isvargr. The Ice Wolf.
It takes all the gold of Asgard to set this creature loose, a bestial version of Fenris without the world domination.
His grin sends hoarfrost down into places hoarfrost has no business going and coats me in cold, threatening to freeze my balls off.
Runes flare beneath Isvargr’s translucent skin before he speaks again, smiles wider, his words a garbled mess in a giant tongue I barely remember. He tightens his clawed grip on the car. An ice wolf indeed.
Each wicked fang in his mouth stretches the length of my arm.
I can’t make out the words.
“Sorry, I’m a bit rusty, friend,” Wren calls out. “Can you repeat that? Because right now it sounds like you said you’re a little bitch who wants to have his ass kicked for threatening my woman.” He turns to me and shrugs. “Loose translation.”
The weather haunts, kills, and Forest is out there dying. Snow eats sound.
Ice obliterates my senses.
And somehow Wren has the audacity to make jokes.
His shadows swirl like shields, but they won’t be thick enough, strong enough, to stop Isvargr from attacking. Not when they freeze at the edges.
Frost cracks across Wren’s magic.
“Assassins are expensive,” I mutter.
“Especially this one. Do you know how much someone had to pay to get a giant with Isvargr’s reputation?” His lips round. “When was the last time you came out to play, bud? Two centuries ago? Three?”
Longer than most memories.
The last time a jotun assassin arrived, it was no ancient war, but the Black Plague.
Not rats, but giants.
They crashed through old England and trashed the place.
Helene yells from inside the ruined car, clutching what looks like the headrest in her hands. Audra huddles at her side and the stench of their fear is the only tangible solid thing in this world of no substance.
It’s a blur of panic. Of pain.
Only endless walls of white cut through with glimpses of inky tree limbs bowing under the weight of slush. Already we step through a minefield of fallen branches like spears.
And Forest, curled in a broken heap on the ground…
Ice forms inside my lungs, and snow swallows sound. It warps my sense of direction. No wonder I’d lost the scent trail. It’s impossible to keep my senses from malfunctioning.
I head right, keeping Isvargr in my line of sight while Wren goes left.
“I had no clue frost giant assassins are in such high demand lately,” he tells the jotun. “Who hired you this time?”
Gods and Fae alike make use of frost giants like Isvargr. And if we kill him, he will only be the first of many.
Another will come to take his place. And another.
Stomach hollowed, jaw aching, I glance again at Helene. Soon enough the crushed carcass of the car will be buried beneath a mound of snow and ice. We need to get them out. Now.
Isvargr cranes his head to watch us both, to mark any sudden movements.
“Rock, paper, scissors for which one of us gets the girl and which one goes ice fishing?” Wren asks.
I shove down a growl. “We do this together. We kick this thing’s ass before he sends the world into another ice age.”
Vampire sight is a blessing and a curse.
Despite the distance, each new line on Helene’s face stands to attention. The frozen blood on her forehead hooks me, a siren’s song, droplets of it splattered on the steering wheel.
In this deep freeze, it refuses to dry.
Nerves nip along my spine, using the bones to ladder their way up to the base of my skull.
Something is wrong.
This moment is poised and rife with meaning. Uncertainty.
Held in a perpetual and unsustainable tension.
But she isn’t giving up, not even with the storm from hell and a huge as fuck frost giant.
I take another step to the right, and ice snaps underfoot. Isvargr snarls at the sound. We are fucked.
“It’s going to take both of us to bring him down,” I mutter. “He’s too strong.”
Isvargr’s size—like a family sedan—coupled with jotun healing abilities? We’re outmatched. Frost giants are notoriously hard to kill without physical flesh to penetrate.
If we fail and the ice wolf freezes us to our bones and takes off with Helene, the new weaving of fate won’t matter.
“Nicholas, stop making blanket statements before we’ve drawn first blood. It’s boring.” Wren’s shadows writhe, darker than the nightmares in these woods.
Jokes aside, his eyes are black pools. His footsteps light, creeping.
I barely breathe. Helene’s taste lingers on my tongue as we circle the beast, trees blocking the road.
“You hurt Helene,” I say to Isvargr. “And I haven’t fed yet today.”
The emptiness in my gut howls for something to fill it.
Wren groans. “Looks like it’s brain freeze for both of us.”
Isvargr reacts before we’ve made the first move. A swipe of his rear claws takes out the nearest tree and sends a chain reaction crashing through the forest.
The girls scream, snow and ice exploding outward like shrapnel.
If she’s truly wounded in any way...
What? I’ll do what?
The same thing I’ve done for centuries, only to realize those wasted years accumulate to nothing aside from beating my head against a wall? The wall feels nothing.
Only I bear the brunt of it, with nothing to show for all the work.
But I know how this ends and not because I can see the future. Immortality is nothing but repetition wearing different disguises. Everyone dies eventually.
Friends and lovers. Families. Entire kingdoms.
Everyone and everything except me.
I outlive them all and somehow manage to call it survival instead of suffering. And Helene, well, she’s already ruined me.
The first time I saw her, I knew. I wanted something impossible.
I wanted forever.
I wasn’t built the same as the other Visigoths. But…
Forever was never made for beasts like me.
“Come on, Niketas.” Hellevi swings her battle ax in a circle before widening her stance and smirking. “Do something more than play with your sword like it’s a cock. Hit me. Do your duty! Or did I bandage you for nothing?”
A slow burn from enemies to ridicule to something mean, but real. She could have let me die on the battlefield, another barbarian. Instead, she saved my life.
Pent-up aggression lights my limbs. The cold is the barest throb against the numbness of my system, years of immortality turning me into little more than a meatsuit.
Pinpricks of ice are an annoyance, and my stomach turns with the bloodlust, the hunger. The desire to ravage my enemy and let his blood coat my skin until I'm a steaming mess in the middle of a monotone white.
“I’m not in the mood for games. Sorry.” I crack my head to the side, bone snapping in preparation.
I span the clearing, dodging those impaled tree branches like an obstacle course. Launch.
Vampire speed gets me to him in the blink of an eye, so vampire strength ought to bring him down. I slash claws across his flank where ribs should be and the hit rattles through him.
Isvargr meets me, hungry, matching me effortlessly.
With a roar, runes flare to life inside of him and he slams his skull into me. I go flying. Wren neatly sidesteps me when I land, disgraced and uncomfortable, at his feet.
“Again, my jotun is rusty, but I’m fairly sure he’s laughing at you.”
Isvargr chuckles louder, the sound a glacier splitting, and I hoist myself up.
“I’m getting warmed up,” I reply.
“Warm up faster, will you? Bird brain doesn’t have the decency to be conscious for this, so it’s up to the two of us.”
Wren’s shadows move peculiarly. The hoarfrost tips his darkness, blackness hissing against ice.
Isvargr snaps his teeth in warning, another bluster of wind rustling snow and hail-shredded leaves to earth. I flinch and lift an arm to block pellets of hail.
Through it all, the scent of Helene’s blood cuts through the blizzard. For a tense moment, there’s nothing but her, not the giant, not the cold. Not the ruin of the forest around us.
Only her.
Fuck.
Familiar, primordial hunger uncurls inside me with disgusting familiarity. Something old enough for creatures like the ice wolf to remember, through plague pits and killing fields slick with gore and opened bodies.
This is worse.
Much worse.
Mate blood is a living thing, crawling, hooking into my ribs with its demands.
Feed.
My canines stretch, involuntary motion, sheer terror rising at how badly I want her. The physical reactions are outside my control in every way.
I burrowed my fangs in the velvet soft skin of her neck, tearing down to puncture the vein.
She went still in my arms, the desert stretching and scorching and killing around us.
Then life giving blood flowed into the cavernous pieces of me and filled them all.
For the first time since the last, I was whole.
And she was empty.
The last time, the only one that counts.
Isvargr rumbles something in his ancient language but my incisors ache with violence. I prick my tongue, tasting copper before I realize I’ve bitten myself.
Helene shifts, contained in the car, and clutches Audra tighter to her side. Panic and frustration tighten her skin, and the monster inside me surges and blurs my vision.
She’s mine.
The words slam through me with enough force to stagger, and I reach for Wren.
Gods. I never should have come near her again.
Not when I feel her heartbeat within me. When I sense her fear, hear her pain. Smell her blood over miles.
Blinking, I launch at Isvargr again, angling to avoid a swipe of those claws. Metal crunches when he grips the car tighter. Within, Audra screeches a wordless prayer.
Shadows snake around my ankles before Isvargr roars. The darkness freezes solid.
I bend my legs to take the force of it, to absorb the sound. And when I open my eyes, the creature’s tail slams me across the midsection. Frozen shade breaks and scatters.
From the corner of my gaze, Wren winces with theatrical largeness. “Hell, Nicholas, that looked painful. On a scale of one to catastrophic emotional damage, how are you doing?”
“Shut up.” I spit blood into the snow.
“Oh, sure. Great. Good talk.”
The frost giant swipes at Wren, who vanishes into shadow a heartbeat before frigid claws carve through the space where he’d stood.
He materializes behind the beast. “You missed me, Elsa.”
Ice like javelins erupt toward him and Wren laughs, wild, sharp around the edges.
“See, there he is. I knew he spoke like a bitch.”
We have to get him away from the vehicle. Away from the girls.
Isvargr hasn’t moved, hasn’t released his hold on the wreck. With each new taunt he bears his weight against the already cracked and caved hood.
“I’m over here.” Wren waves to the frost giant.
And in the space between his words and my next breath—
“Nicholas!” Helene’s voice tears through the gale, and I turn before I stop myself.
Big mistake.
Isvargr bears down, and the car door gives beneath him with a metallic screech. The door cracks open, the window shattering. Her arm. She had her hand on the door.
Blood streaks down her forearm where the glass tore at her skin, and Helene flinches, shocked. The sharp triangle slides easily across her wrist, the ooze blooming slowly.
The world dulls, the storm narrowing, and everything inside me stops.
Her heartbeat spikes.
Hunger detonates through my entire system at the thin line of red running down her jacket. I already taste it on my tongue, the sensual glide of it, the sweetness of her heat filling the cold core that should contain a heart.
Control slips, and I take a step in her direction.
Wren’s head snaps to me and his shadows freeze mid-motion. “Ah, shit. Nicholas. Are you serious?”
He knows. The shift. The creature wearing my face. He sees it all.
So does Isvargr.
In my distraction he moves, targeting the girls intentionally. Frost collapses more trees around us as Isvargr stretches a hand through the windshield. Reaches inside to grab one of them.
Shame tears through me.
Wren’s shadows interact with frost, freezing the giant’s hand before it can touch them.
“Do something, you blood-sucking fool!” he yells.
I shake loose the image of Helene’s blood chilled on snow. What am I doing?
Isvargr bears down, unable to move his hand but the rest of him is free. His legs tense, bunch, and the car creaks when he steadily nudges it up from the ground.
I throw myself on his back. Wren’s shadows crack Isvargr’s wrist like glass as I climb higher, cresting his shoulders.
Helene’s face, the fear when she looks at me. The way Wren sees too much—
I almost let her die for blood.
Self-disgust has me clinging tighter to the ice wolf’s neck. Claws gash through frosted flesh. The moment the runes beneath the first layer brush my hand, they scald.
“You can’t just tear him to shreds!” Wren yells instructions. “Otherwise, it would be too easy.”
Too easy…
There is nothing simple or clear about this, about Helene seeing me become monstrous. I fight through the burn, worse than sunlight, punching past runes to get to the heart of the beast. I can do this.
For her, what won’t I sacrifice?
I’ll heal. Until I don’t.
The ice inside my lungs solidifies, builds, weighing me down. Glyphs seep into my skin and lodge there, burning, the cold stalling any recovery attempts in their tracks.
Vampire healing and Fae shadow magic don’t stand a chance against this enemy.
And Helene will freeze to death if we can’t find a way to pull victory from defeat.