Forecast (7 page)

Before I could ask her what she was talking about Taran gasped. I looked to find him staring past us.

How could I have forgotten that creature?

Oh gods
,
was he awake
,
too?

I scrambled to my feet. His hand was still out with those crazy-long, narrow fingers. The tips were gray and curved, almost like claws, the eyes, shrewd and black stared into space.

Shuddering, I took a step back. Then another. My body ran into Taran’s.

“What is that?” he asked, wrapping one arm protectively around my waist.

“I don’t know.” Now that my
rune tempus
had frozen the creature, it wasn’t going from normal-looking human to pointy creature in only my peripheral vision. It had stuck. With the strange, black dresslike outfit, I couldn’t tell if it was male or female, but I was going to assume male since that’s the look he’d had before. “He looked like a normal man before time stopped.”

“Was it reaching for you?” Taran actually took my arms and moved me behind him as he stared at the creature. He kept making these protective gestures so naturally, they made my heart flutter.

Magnus walked over to look at it closely.

I held my breath, still afraid it, or he, would move. “He almost touched me. We have to get out of here before the world goes back to normal. I don’t care how strange it’ll be to everyone else.” They’d all forget soon enough with the snow and apparently a new storm to worry about. I glanced at the television, saw the massive, gray whirls they used for hurricanes in several places on the frozen screen. Not storm.
Storms.
Plural
. Terror grabbed me by the gut.

“Don’t you have to write something?” Taran asked.

“What the hell is this thing?” Magnus poked it.

“It’s a dark elf,” Mist said. Something in her tone made me glance at her to find her studying me before she looked back at the thing.

Cringing, I waited for the elf to move. It could be pretending to be frozen. But it didn’t budge. My relief was short-lived because my norn shifted and twisted, her agitation sending a wave of anxiety through me. “Seriously, you guys, we have to get out of here. Now.”

Taran had stepped closer and reached out to touch the thing’s face. “Wow, you gotta feel this. It’s like touching a granite countertop or something.”

Mist frowned as she walked over and took Taran’s hand off the elf. “She’s right. You shouldn’t touch it. Elves are dangerous and very cunning. It would be best to take her away from it.”

“Me?” I asked. “What about everyone else?”

“Magnus and I will take care of the elf.”

I pulled my small notebook from my pocket as my fingers started tingling. “We have to get Josh and Grim, too.”

“Can you help me get them to her car?” Taran asked Magnus.

The bigger boy nodded.

Surprise froze me in place when Taran actually lifted Josh from the booth. He had to work him out of it because Josh’s body had frozen in a sitting position, but he didn’t seem to be struggling with Josh’s weight at all—even though Josh was bigger. Even Magnus watched Taran with narrowed eyes before he lifted Grim.

“Dude’s strong,” he muttered to me as he walked past, Grim over his shoulder.

I watched through the window as they struggled to get the stiff twins into my car, winced when Grim’s head bonked on the door frame. They finally got them inside on top of all the supplies I’d packed into my backseat. Taran leaned farther into the backseat—probably trying to work seat belts. Biting my lip, I turned to stare at the golden girl who didn’t look any older than me. “Magnus has a god’s soul, too, doesn’t he?”

She nodded.

“Where are you taking him?”

“To the same place you’ll go when you join your sisters.”

“I’m going somewhere? With my sisters? And that would be?”

She gave me a sad smile. “I wish I knew exactly. It’s north.”

“That’s it?” I tightened my fingers around my pen. “You don’t know anything else?”

She stepped close to me. “My sisters and I are taking the warriors to the gathering of wolves and ravens. A place of fire and music on the lake. That’s all we were told.”

“Maybe that’s here because I’ve seen gatherings of ravens.”

“No, it’s possible they were drawn by you and your sisters. Or they are here for other reasons.”

A place of fire and music on the lake, she’d said. I shut my eyes, frustrated with all the cryptic messages. First my norn and now her. “How will you know when you get there?”

“I’m following the music.”

“Do you hear it now?”

She tilted her head. “You don’t?”

I listened but heard nothing. “If Taran and I can’t hear whatever it is you’re hearing, how are we supposed to know where to go?”

“You will.”

I blew out a breath, my frustration burning a hole in my stomach. “We’ll just go with you.”

She shook her head and pointed out the window where Taran and Magnus were running back to the restaurant. “Thor isn’t done here. He must have his hammer. It’s more important than you could possibly imagine.”

My hand started to stiffen up and I growled in frustration, lifted my notebook. My cold fingers shook as my norn forced my hand to trace the runes. Again, she seemed to be emphasizing or yelling or I don’t know what, because she made me go over every line with the pen until it nearly went through the fragile paper.

“Warriors’ fates to fulfill,” I murmured.

Mist looked at the runes, nodded. “Verthandi speaks the truth. We all must follow our fates.”

My frustration boiled over, spilling into anger that made my skin feel scorched. “How do you know who’s in me?”

“Because I can see you. I can see you in a way the others can’t.” Again, she glanced at the elf with its creepy outstretched spindly hand. “So can he.”

“What does he see?” I whispered. “What is it you see?”

“Your darkness can be used for good or evil. The choice is yours.”

“My darkness. Oh, this is ridiculous.” I tightened one hand into a fist, feeling the need to punch someone other than Kat for the first time in my life. “Tell me what in the nine levels of hell is going on, and don’t use these cute, cryptic phrases. Speak. First, what’s the message about warriors’ fates about?”

Her eyes had grown narrower as my tone had risen. Now she crossed her arms. “Everyone here has a fate. You know yours—just as you know the boy’s. This boy you are coming to care for.”

I stared at Taran through the glass as he reached the restaurant door, knowing she was right. I liked him. A lot. “His fate is to die,” I whispered through clenched teeth.

She said nothing, her expression full of sympathy.

It was my fate, too. But I didn’t tell her that part. She probably already knew.

Magnus opened the door, his voice carrying easily with even the wind outside frozen in place. “How did you carry him like that?”

Taran shrugged as he came inside and stomped his feet to loosen the snow attached to his sneakers. “I’ve always been kind of strong.” He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and when he opened them, his dark brown gaze zeroed in on me.

I saw something in his expression—a sort of acceptance—that made me hold my breath.

“Guess Coral has been right about a few things,” he murmured. “My mom, too. About the gods.”

“Some kind of freaky shit, isn’t it?” Magnus strode across the room to the elf. “I always knew something was different about me.” He looked down as he flexed his huge fists. “Look at these big, beefy hands. They’re three times the size of my father’s.” His smile was crooked as he held out his hand at the height of his lower chest. “My dad is this tall and swears he wouldn’t believe I was his kid if it weren’t for this face. Said he passed down the handsome.”

“Who—” I broke off, cleared my throat. “Who do you think you have?”

He pointed at his chest. “You mean in here? Don’t feel anything, but Mist tells me it’s some guy named Magni.”

I remembered the story of Magni helping Thor in battle, pulling a giant’s leg off his neck. I sought out Billy, still lying on the floor. Goose bumps ran up and down my arms and I rubbed them. “Thor’s son with the frost giant, Jarnsaxa.”

“Son?” Taran croaked. “Talk about some kind of freaky shit.”

Before I could explain, that prickly, almost-painful feeling brushed over my skin, crept up my spine, and I frantically looked at the elf.

Just as its hand moved.

Chapter Five

“The elf is fighting her magic,” Mist whispered, her lips tightening. “I see nothing in this place to use to tie it up. You have to get her out of here now. They’re hard to fight—fast and devious.”

“But what about you guys?” Taran asked. “We can’t leave you here with that.”

Mist held out her hand to Magnus. “Give me your belt.”

He unbuckled it, pulled it off, and instead of handing it to her, he wrapped it around the creature. He grimaced as he worked to hook and tighten it, pulling the elf’s arms close to its body.

One of its fingers bent, then straightened. Slowly—so, so slowly—his head turned until his black eyes locked back on me.

Mist sort of flung out her hands and two daggers appeared in her grips as she yelled at Taran. “You’re out of time. Go! He only wants the darkling, so you have to get her away from him!”

“Darkling?” My norn twisted and writhed, causing me to gasp and bend over. “No, wait! You have to explain that. Why’d you call me that?” But my norn had other ideas. Felt as if she sucked the air out of my lungs, and my legs buckled, my knees cracking on the hard floor. I tried to breathe, staring up at Mist and the elf in front of her.

“Her goddess wants her gone!” Mist grimaced as the elf’s hands curled into fists.

My blood just froze in my body—my terror that profound.

“Run!” she screamed.

Taran swept me off the floor and had me through the door and at the passenger side of my car fast. I gasped and held my chest, wanting this new pain to stop, but needing to know what she’d meant by darkling even more.

“You can’t drive like this,” he said. “Where are your keys?”

“Pocket,” I managed to gasp.

Taran found my keys, buckled me into the passenger seat and ran around to the driver’s side.

Leaving Magnus and Mist didn’t feel right. I struggled to get my breath as the pain started to ease in my chest and I twisted, catching sight of them hauling the elf toward a black pickup as Taran adjusted the seat before peeling out of the parking lot’s back exit. One of the creature’s legs kicked out, hitting Magnus in the hip as he tossed it into the bed of the truck.
What were they doing?
It could just jump out.

“Your rune thing didn’t last this long last time,” Taran said as he adjusted the mirror. “What did your runes say?” he asked as he swerved around a car.

“Warriors’ fates to fulfill.” I put my hand on the dash, bracing myself. “That’s a nothing message.”

“It can’t be nothing—not with all this going on.” He glanced over his shoulder. “What do you think they were going to do with that elf?”

I shuddered, remembering the way it had looked at me. “I don’t know.” I just wanted to know what Mist had meant by
darkling.
Desperately. Now that my norn was settling, I tried to remember all the stories and could only think of one. A small mention of a giant married to Nott, who had a son called Aud. His name, Naglfari, meant
darkling.
That was it. There were no more stories of them that I’d read.

Taran jerked the wheel, cursed, and my head slammed into the passenger window. Groaning, I rubbed my scalp.

“Sorry.” He cursed under his breath again. “I didn’t see the little dog until I nearly hit it. Are you tripping over the darkling thing?”

“Wouldn’t you be?”

Everything, including the twins, jostled in the back as we hit a curb then drove onto someone’s front yard before Taran got us back onto road. I looked in the back, biting my lip to see that Taran had set them on their sides and half on top of each other. Their bodies slid on the next swerve, Grim’s finger poking Josh’s eye. “I need to crawl back there and buckle them in.”

“I tried. Won’t work. Not with the way they’re frozen—not with all the crap you have back there.”

“Crap?”

“Sorry. Stuff. I meant stuff.” Taran swerved and whipped the car into a neighborhood. “So what do you think the runes mean?”

“Like I said, nothing. Or anything. It could be about you and the two boys my sisters are trying to help. It could mean all the kids out there carrying gods’ souls because we just met another one.”

“Yeah,
I’m
kinda tripping over that. I’m like his father in some sort of mind-boggling way.” He shook his head. “I can’t wrap my brain around it. How many do you think there are?” He cursed, slowed the car to a stop, then pulled into another yard to go around a bunch of stopped vehicles.

“I have no idea. Thirty? Forty? Hundreds? We have no way of knowing which gods came back and if you count them all, it gets overwhelming.” There were also all the warriors taken off the battlefields by Valkyries, the ones who’d been living in Valhalla until Ragnarok. Just because Mist had been escorting Magnus didn’t mean the others weren’t bringing resurrected warriors. I braced myself on the dash, closed my eyes as Taran zipped through someone’s gravel driveway that went all the way through to the next street.

“So what made you think I was one of the hundreds your mom decided to pick on?”

I opened my eyes when the car bounced over something hard, then closed them when I saw the house right in front of us. “Because my mother had more on you and the other two than anyone else. You play a huge part in Ragnarok. Or Thor does. Plus, my norn sort of let me know I’d guessed right.”

The car swerved, bounced. “We’re back on the street and not too far from my house. I had to take a long way around. But back to Ragnarok. Thor’s part... it’s depressing, right? He dies?”

Squeezing open one eye, I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw we could go around the cars easier now. “That’s one possible outcome. I don’t think it’s the only one.” Hopefully, it was like that with all the prophecies.

He took his hand off the wheel to point at the notebook. “So what was the message from the other night?”

“Valkyries shadow.” I wrote it down, then wrote the new one just beneath. “That’s it!”

“What?” he nearly yelled back, gripping the steering wheel so tight, his knuckles turned white.

Guess I’d startled him. “Sorry I yelled. I was thinking that Valkyries was possessive, that my norn was talking about one of their shadows.” I pointed to the new runes. “This actually says warriors’ with an apostrophe so that first shadow is a verb. Of course we know that now with Mist and Magnus.” My norn never used apostrophes before. Maybe she was trying to adapt.

“So you think anyone with a god’s soul can move around during your rune thing.”

“
Rune tempus
,” I corrected, wondering how many times I’d have to repeat it before he got it. “It’s the only connection I know we all have. Though it didn’t always happen with my sisters, so I’m not sure if it would be happening all over or just close to us. You and me—together—seemed to have triggered it. Hey, I’m glad you’re accepting all this. I thought maybe the hammer appearing and disappearing would be pretty convincing.”

“You know, Coral, up until it started snowing, the only unusual thing about me was being a little strong. Yeah, I admit the hammer thing freaked me out, but to actually believe that I carry the soul of a mythological god is kind of hard to swallow.”

I could understand that. I’d felt my norn for nine years so I’d had time to adjust. Sort of. All this had been dumped into his lap at once. But I could tell by his tone that he was really starting to believe it. And that it scared him. Badly.

The urge to scooch over and wrap my arms around him hit me hard.

Then the warm, giddy swirling feeling—separate from the movement of the vehicle—clued me in to what was about to happen.

Taran must have figured it out too, because he groaned. “Oh man, not this. Not yet.” His words sounded more like a growl.

“Can you pull over somewhere?” I yelled, unable to imagine what would happen if we came out of this in a moving vehicle.

“No time!” Taran shut off the car and surprised me when he reached across and hauled me close, wrapping his arms around me. My seat belt cut into my neck. “I really hate this part,” he muttered into my cheek. “But it seemed better when we were holding each other. That’s not some line, either.”

“Okay,” I breathed, staring into the backseat as the twins, the seat, the piles of stuff, all smeared into a spin.

Taran moaned into my neck. “Is there any way to stop it from happening?”

“I don’t know,” I said, shutting my eyes. “I wish I did.”

When everything stopped spinning, we only had a split second to let go of each other because a car crashed into the back of mine.

The twins collided with our seats. Hard. Josh screamed as the blankets, bags of herbs and books I’d piled back there slid on top of him.

Taran winced. “Stop squealing like a girl!”

I glared at him even as I rubbed the back of my neck. It had wrenched when the car hit us. “Like a
girl
?”

“Sorry,” he muttered, frowning. “Man, Coral, I’m so sorry about your car, too. I tried to pull to the side of the road, but we ran out of time.”

“It wasn’t your fault.” The car behind us had pushed us up on a curb. The hair feather clips I kept on the rearview mirror dangled at an angle. Something else in the back slid off the seat, making Josh grunt.

Someone pounded on the driver’s side window and a bushy black beard and furious dark eyes showed through the glass. “Where the hell did you come from?” the guy yelled.

Taran pushed open the door, forcing the man to take a few steps back as he got out. The fierce winds blew tons of snow into the car. I shivered.

Josh groaned. “What the hell? How’d we get here?”

Grimacing, I looked into the backseat at the two furious guys, both more on the floor than on the seat. “Would you believe magic? Are you guys hurt? I’m sorry we didn’t have time to figure out how to get the seat belts on you.”

Grim, hanging upside down off the seat, patted his coat pockets frantically, then relaxed when he pulled out a packet of Fun Dip. He didn’t say anything, just worked to get the candy stick out with shaking hands.

“Magic makes more sense than anything else. This is what you did the other night, right?” Josh tried to right himself, his elbow smacking Grim in the nose.

Grim howled, dropped his candy and shoved his brother. “
Vitskertr!
”

Josh shoved back. “
Huglausi vifill!
”

I would have laughed at them calling each other shortwit and cowardly beetle, but their fight jostled my little car and I noticed other people had left their vehicles to stand around watching Taran and the other driver. Some were yelling questions, asking where we’d come from. I felt like sinking into the floor of the car and hiding. Felt bad that Taran was getting the brunt of what happened when my
rune tempus
screwed things up.

The driver from the car behind us got in Taran’s face. “Yeah, they saw it, too. You, appearing out of nowhere. Where did you come from?”

Taran held up his hands. They were shaking, and I knew it was from the frigid wind and snow sweeping down the neighborhood street. I looked around for his coat and didn’t see it, so I tugged one of the blankets from under Josh and Grim.

“The snow must have blocked your view or something,” Taran said loudly, trying to talk over the wind.

The guy took a step into Taran’s personal space and I saw one of Taran’s eyebrows go up, his expression bleeding into that fierce sort of scary calm it had earlier in the restaurant.

“The snow didn’t block anything, you stupid—”

The wind picked up and I couldn’t hear more but from the look on Taran’s face, the guy had said something bad—crossed a line. My hand was on the door handle when Taran yelled.

“Uh-oh,” Grim muttered. “Not good.”

“What’s not good?” I asked, breathless because Taran had closed his hands into fists, was murmuring something we couldn’t hear. The sky darkened and I leaned over to look up through the windshield. A wall of thicker, black clouds had rolled over the others.

“The yell was the first sign of a problem, but it’s better if he keeps yelling.” Josh pushed his brother off him and finally sat up straight. He pulled another of the blankets out from under himself and shared it with his brother as they kept their gazes locked on Taran now. “Quiet Taran is the scariest kind of Taran.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because that means he’s using up everything to hold back his temper and when he holds it back, it builds.”

I looked outside to see that Taran clenched two fistfuls of the man’s coat in his hands. He lifted the much bigger man off the ground. People around them started backing up. All I heard was the pattering of snow on the roof of my car, the moan of the wind coming between the houses. I scrambled out, slammed the door and ran around to Taran.

Nostrils flaring, Taran aimed a harsh glare at the man he held. I expected lightning bolts to shoot out of his eyes any second.

“Kid, put me down.” The driver’s bushy black eyebrows squished together, his eyes widening as he stared at Taran. His curly black hair whipped about in the wind as he struggled and grabbed Taran’s wrists.

“Hey,” I said softly as I laid one gentle hand on Taran’s side. A part of me thought he might go off if startled. His brown gaze flicked down to me. I smiled. Or tried to. I was pretty sure ice was forming on my cheeks. “You’re freezing. I’m freezing. Let’s just go.”

He stared as if I were speaking in another language. The guy in the air fought harder, kicking out his legs. One hit me. Hard. I winced and stepped back, then rushed forward again when Taran actually growled and started shaking him.

A loud rumble of thunder shook the earth.

“Let him go!” I blinked as snow pummeled my eyes and face. The wind hit hard, growing so loud, it sounded like ocean waves. It burrowed into me, forcing me to grab onto Taran’s arm to stay still. Everyone else ran back to their cars. The snowflakes thickened, my teeth started chattering. “H-hey! W-we can’t stay out in this. Let him go! It was an a-accid-dent. Not your fault!”

“Hell yeah, it was his fault. You heard the bitch. Put me down.”

“What did you call her?” Taran didn’t yell, but we both heard him over the wind. Lightning flashed in the overcast sky, followed by a sharp clap of thunder so loud I winced.