Fall (The Ragnarok Prophesies) (14 page)

“That makes two of us,” I said. I’d had about enough of the men in my life making decisions without consulting me, or treating me like I was a non-factor in discussions that I should have been involved in. This was my life, too. My problem, too.

It’s not like that, Arionna.

Stay out of my head, Dace.
I couldn’t block him out. I didn’t know how. But I did scoot forward, away from him. I was angry, and I had every right to be. He lied to me, and he couldn’t kiss it better now.

“Dammit,” he swore.

Chelle pulled away from Gage, earning a frustrated sigh from him.

I ignored Dace and Gage both, too pissed to care if their feelings were hurt. They deliberately lied to us. And for what? So they could toss someone else into the line of fire at the first possible opportunity.

“Arionna, please―”

I turned my attention back to the field before Dace could finish whatever he intended to say.

I didn’t want to hear it. I felt like a fool for being so oblivious to the truth. I went along with him, not even questioning why we were really out here.

I should have known better.

Focusing on snow vaulting wasn’t easy when all I really wanted to do was scream, but I managed to accomplish the task. Our little group watched in stony silence as Professor Dodd and Steven Jeffries, one of the boys I met before my life became this complicated, started down the field, their vaulting poles in hand. I knew nothing about snow vaulting, but apparently the object of the sport was the same as a regular pole vault. Whoever cleared the bar and landed farthest won. Instead of landing on mats, though, they landed in a pit of snow. Clever. And cold.

Dace wrapped another blanket around me when I shivered in sympathy.

I scooted closer to Chelle.

Arionna, please don’t do this,
Dace pleaded.
Talk to me.

No.

I couldn’t talk to him without yelling. People were already staring at me. I didn’t need to give them another reason. And, to be honest, I didn’t
want
to talk to Dace. He told me he was trying, and I’d believed him, but he wasn’t. He’d only said what I wanted to hear so I’d back off instead of asking questions.

Once again, he’d hidden things from me so he didn’t have to deal with the reality of our situation. And
I
was the one left to worry over the consequences. Ronan didn’t even have the pack for backup out there because they were busy helping Dace keep an eye on all of us. Ronan was out there in the woods, completely alone.

If Sköll and Hati attacked him….

“Men suck,” I muttered to Chelle.

She nodded, wide-eyed.

“Dammit,” Dace growled behind me, jumping to his feet. He scooped me up into his arms like he would a recalcitrant child.

One of the blankets wrapped around me fluttered to the bench.

Twenty pairs of eyes turned in our direction.

Chelle’s mouth dropped open.

“Put me down,” I hissed.

“No.” Dace stormed down the bleachers with me, his face a thundercloud.

I glared up at him, fighting the urge to strangle him. Or bite him. Hard. I did
not
appreciate being manhandled like an unruly toddler in the throes of a temper tantrum. I had a legitimate reason to be pissed at Dace, and he knew it.

“Let me go now, Dace,” I demanded again when his booted feet hit the snow at the bottom of the bleachers.

He ignored me, his long, angry strides carrying us quickly away from the crowd. Only when he’d cleared the administration building, effectively blocking two hundred sets of prying eyes, did he set me on my feet again.

“You wanted to yell at me, so yell,” he said, leaning back against the building with his arms crossed over his chest. He looked furious with his jaw set and his green eyes flashing fire.

“You don’t get it, do you?” I asked, not sure if I wanted to scream at him, cry, or pull my hair out. “I’m not a freaking child, Dace!”

“I never said you were.”

“You didn’t have to say it.” I clutched my blanket around me, trying not to lose my temper. He was so freaking infuriating! “You, Dad, Ronan, and Gage make decisions without consulting me or even telling me what’s going on. You talk about me like I’m not in the room. You refuse to listen to what I have to say. You lie to me. Every time I think you’re getting better at dealing with this, you prove me wrong. Do you even care what I think, Dace?”

“You know I do.”

“Really?” I clenched my hands inside the blanket, a last ditch effort not to strangle him. My heart pounded, causing blood to rush through me in a torrent of sound. “When was the last time you asked my opinion on any of this? When was the last time you stopped for two seconds to ask what I thought we should do? Or what I wanted?”

“What do you want, Arionna?” he asked. The words were soft, a lot softer than the razor-sharp frustration stinging at me through our bond.

“I want you to wake up!” I took a deep breath as the shouted words reverberated in the frigid air around us. “You’re so insistent on protecting me, you don’t even care whose life you risk in the process, and I’m not the only one in danger here. You and Ronan decided to let him do this thing today and didn’t even ask what I thought about it―or consider that it could end badly.”

“It’s not going to end badly.”

“Are you sure about that?” I asked. “Can you promise me with absolutely no doubts whatsoever that something won’t go wrong out there today? That Ronan won’t
die
out there?”

Dace clamped his jaws together without speaking.

“That’s what I thought. You can’t promise me that because you don’t know. Neither of you do. And guess what, Dace? If this brilliant plan of yours goes wrong, if something does happen to Ronan, who’s going to face Sköll and Hati with you the next time they attack? Who’s going to help keep you alive to finish this thing if he gets killed because you two didn’t even consider the risks here?” Tears welled in my eyes and spilled down my cheeks.

How could Dace not even care that his life was in danger? Sköll and Hati nearly killed him once already. Part of me wanted to hate him for being able to forget, because I couldn’t. I remembered exactly what it felt like to stand in my dad’s office, completely unable to help while Dace fought for his life. The wounds those monsters caused him healed, but not before their memory seared itself into my soul.

He thought I didn’t understand why he was so afraid to lose me, but he was wrong because I did understand. I’d lived it once already. The memory still haunted me. And Dace was willing to put me through that again, because he didn’t want to face reality.

I’d always hated those young couples who said they didn’t want to live without the other. I thought they were melodramatic idiots. Part of me still felt that way, but the other part, this huge part of me… that part understood exactly how someone could say that. Dace and I were meant to be together. We were created for one another, by a god, no less. We had loved one another in a hundred different lifetimes. We fought together, lived together, raised a family together, and died together. Because that’s who we were. That’s who we always were.

But Odin didn’t send us into this battle to sacrifice the world for our own selfish reasons, either. He sent us to defend the world, to protect it, and to keep his transgressions from killing everyone. He was so afraid of what Fenrir might do that he endangered the world. I didn’t remember Odin, and I didn’t even understand our entire, complicated existence, but I understood sacrifice.

Our lives for the world.

That was Odin’s sacrifice for his mistake, and, somewhere down the line, even if we didn’t remember, Dace and I agreed to it. So we didn’t get to back out now. We didn’t get to change our minds now, because Sköll and Hati were out there, and death stared every single one of us in the face. Until we stopped that, what we wanted couldn’t be allowed to matter.

I didn’t want to die. God, I did not want to die. But I wasn’t strong enough to win this war for us. If one of us died, it had to be me because Dace and Ronan
had
to survive. Without them, no one stood a chance. And that meant Dace couldn’t risk his life for mine. That meant he couldn’t make stupid decisions and risk Ronan’s life to keep me safe. Dace needed to accept that.

“I can’t,” he said, his voice little more than a broken whisper. “I can’t accept that. I won’t.”

“You don’t have a choice,” I answered, tears flowing down my face.

“Don’t ask me to put his life before yours.”

“I don’t have a choice either, Dace.” I laughed through my tears, the sound bitter and twisted, choked with emotion. “Sköll and Hati are out there, and they’re not going to stop coming for us because we want them to. They’re not going to forget about me. Sooner or later, attacking from the shadows won’t be enough. They’re going to come for me themselves.”

“I’ll be there to stop them when they do.”

“And what happens if they kill you, Dace?”

He shrugged. “Better me than you.”

I sighed, sad for him in ways I couldn’t even begin to describe. He just didn’t get it. If saving my life meant the world ended, I didn’t want to be saved. My life wasn’t worth that price. And Dace would rather risk it than deal with his issues. He would force all of us to pay the price.

That wasn’t right, and he knew it.

“I’m sorry, Arionna.” He hung his head, his shoulders drooping beneath the weight of desolate emotion coursing through him.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” I whispered.

Ever since I came home from the hospital, we’d struggled with the same issues. No matter how much time passed, nothing changed. I didn’t think anything would ever change for Dace. He believed he was responsible for the awful things happening in my life so he punished himself. He threatened to make himself responsible for the deaths of our friends, just so he didn’t have to deal with the possibility of losing me. I couldn’t accept that. I couldn’t let him become that person.

No, I
wouldn’t
let him become that person.

My life wasn’t worth letting him become a monster.

Pain shot through our bond, though, whether it came from him or me, I didn’t know.

“You’re so sure one of us will die,” he whispered. “Maybe you’re wrong.”

“And if I’m not?” I wiped tears from my eyes. “Are you really willing to let our friends die just so you don’t have to live without me? Don’t be that person, Dace. Please.”

His thoughts were unclear to me, his expression shuttered as I waited for his answer.

“I’ll call it off and send Ronan home,” he finally whispered.

“That’s not the point, Dace. It’s not enough.”

“Then what is the point?” He ran a hand through his hair, clutching the long strands in obvious frustration. “What do you want from me?”

“I want you to stop tormenting yourself. What happened to me isn’t your fault, and you’ve got to let it go.” I stepped forward to rest my head against his chest. I hated fighting with him. I hated when he shut me out and refused to listen to reason even more. “Please.”

He stood tense for a long moment before his shoulders slumped. “You dream of Hati every night,” he whispered, cupping the back of my neck. “Every night, you relive what he did to you. Even in your sleep, you cry out for me. And even in your dreams, I can’t get there fast enough to protect you. Every day, I remember sitting there, watching you die. I don’t know how to face that again, Arionna.”

“You just do, Dace.” I lifted my head to look at him. He appeared so tired, as exhausted as I felt. Tears spilled down my cheeks again. I hated that this was so hard for him. That being with me made this so much harder for him. “You just do.”

“And if I can’t face it?” he asked. “What―?”

A high pitched, wordless scream ripped through the air, shattering the intimacy of our heated conversation. Another scream followed immediately behind, and then another. Within seconds, they sounded from all sides, seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere at once.

I whipped my head around, trying to locate the problem, but saw nothing except snow and brick. We were too far away from the crowd, blocked by the building shielding our discussion from eager ears.

Arionna, move!

I turned back to Dace, blinking in confusion at the urgency of his demand.

He didn’t bother to explain. He grabbed for me instead. Everything blurred for a moment. When my brain caught up, he held me pressed against the brick wall, his body positioned in front of mine.

He crouched into a fighting stance, ready to leap on whatever or whoever came our way.

Fearful shouts still sounded from the crowd behind the building, gaining in intensity.

I peeked around Dace’s shoulder in time to see a familiar gray and white wolf race by, running full tilt toward the woods on the other side of the campus.

Buka?

Snow flew from her paws with each stride. Angry snarls tore from her throat. Her fur stood on end, gray streaks blending with white all along her back.

I gaped, horrified and stunned at once.

Why was she out in the open?

Where was she going?

I didn’t have time to ask either question before Kalei darted around the building and into sight. Seff and Rafe, two of the other wolves, followed on her heels across the frozen grass and into the parking lot beyond. Students gathered in clumps in the slush there screamed, diving out of the way.

The pack paid them no attention at all. They dodged flailing, scrambling limbs, and kept running.

“What’s going on?” I yelled to Dace, terrified one of the wolves would be hurt before they made it into the line of trees across the parking lot. I thought people were too shocked to do anything more than scream though. The wolves kept to the woods, rarely venturing out into the open, and even more rarely venturing into the heart of town. No one expected to see them plowing through a crowd of hundreds.

“A hunter spotted Fuki,” Dace muttered over his shoulder.

My heart plummeted. My hands shook. “Is he―?”

“He’s hiding.”

I squeezed my eyes closed and prayed Buka made it to her baby before the hunter found him.