Forecast (20 page)

My breaths tore through my chest as I slowly reached into my bag and felt around for the sheathed boline I used for cutting herbs. It had a wickedly curved blade. My fingers clutched it, and I gave up trying to be subtle and pulled the knife out of the bag.

The bald elf looked down at my hand clutching the knife, threw his head back and laughed. Then, in that split second, I saw something pass through the first elf’s expression—something that gave me pause because I didn’t understand it at all. It almost seemed as if he got angry at the other elf for laughing at me. But then he scowled as the redheaded elf grabbed his arm and yelled again. He made a cutting motion with his hand and hissed.

The sound raised the hair on the back of my neck.

“I don’t see the twins,” Taran said, voice barely above a whisper. “Are these the same elves that took them?”

“Yes. I think I saw someone on that pier over there. Do you think they left Josh and Grim there?”

“I want to look but I’m not taking my eyes off these guys. Did you see how fast they move?”

I turned to squint at the pier but still couldn’t see enough.

Several of the elves joined in the yell fest, and my stalker one made that hissing noise again—this time so loud, it pierced my ears. I winced.

“You,” he said, pointing one of those creepy long fingers at me. “Come closer so I can see you.”

I shook my head, gripped the knife so hard, my frozen fingers started to ache. “You saw me just fine in the restaurant, so no. Where are our friends? I saw you take them.”

“Such defiance,” he said slowly. His voice, like his graceful movements, was a weapon of enticement. Smooth, melodic and deep—it drew me in, made me want to step closer. I could only imagine the people or creatures the elves lured in in the past with their voices alone. “I learned your language,” he continued. “So I could speak with you.”

“You heard her then.” Taran said. “Where are the two boys you took?”

“The humans are fine.” The elf didn’t look at Taran; he never looked away from me, and that locked stare wasn’t only getting to me. My norn started to shift as a flood of fear and anger swept through me.

“My name is Vrunlin.”

The redheaded elf scowled, grabbed Vrunlin’s arm again and yelled right in his face. He kept pointing at me, then back into the shadows of the spilled barge.

Vrunlin ignored him, merely tilting his head so he could watch me. “He is saying I’m too weak to do what must be done. That I’ve allowed my...fascination with my creations to soften me.”

My stomach dropped into my feet. I gasped, tried to talk, but my mouth was suddenly desert-dry.

“No,” Taran said, half turning toward me even as he kept his gaze on the elves. “Don’t listen to him. He’s lying.”

I swallowed a couple of times, trying to get my voice to work. “I don’t think he is. I told you I’d seen him before—that he came to see me and my sisters.” I managed to swallow the lump in my throat so I could raise my voice. When I spoke louder, the other elves shut up. “So I’m your—” I broke off, unable to say it.

He inclined his head in a strange, elegant sort of swoop. “My daughter? Yes.”

“But how?”

One white eyebrow lifted, followed by the pointy corner of his wide lips. “My first real act as a father is to explain how babies are made?”

The redheaded elf stepped forward, and moonlight spilled onto his face, showing the fierce scowl that made him look like a monster from the worst sort of nightmares.

“I know my mother. She wouldn’t have.
She wouldn’t
.”

“You with the red ponytail—” Taran raised his voice “—you’d better stop coming closer.”

The elf tilted its head, then chuckled. He said something that made the others laugh. All except for the one calling himself my father.

“Tell the god boy the others can’t understand him. But you, you saw my glamour before. It’s very handsome to your species. It wasn’t hard to lure your mother into the magic grove. Keeping her there once she saw my face?” He grinned. “That was harder.”

“Oh gods,” I choked out. This rancid mix of disgust, horror and grief washed through me as I understood then what had happened to my mother. “That explains so much,” I whispered. My norn began to writhe, her fury so suddenly strong, it tasted of rust on my tongue.

One of the other elves hissed and boots crunched near the water. A tremor crept up my spine.

Verthandi had had enough. She threw me into my rune tempus so hard and fast, Taran yelled and grabbed me, putting me in front of him—both of us facing the elves. Vrunlin’s mouth fell open before he swirled into the world spin. Like the time in front of my house the night before, it went so fast, nausea slammed into me, forced me to close my eyes. I groaned, sagged, and Taran caught me up against him with one arm around me and the other still brandishing the hammer.

Everything jerked to a halt, and I was so happy to see the elves weren’t moving, I looked up at Taran, but he was squinting into the darkness, where we’d heard someone walking. Now there was silence. “Come on,” he said. He pulled me toward the pier. “Let’s get Josh and Grim.”

I kept glancing back toward that spill of crates from the barge, sure I’d seen movement. My stomach heaved and I cried out when we were halfway down the pier. I tried to grab a handrail, but there wasn’t one. Falling to my knees, I tried to focus on the wooden slats as I sucked in gasps of painfully cold air.

“Coral?” Taran dropped beside me. “What’s wrong?”

“Sick. It’s making me sick. Can you see if that’s them?”

“I think it is—looks like they were tied sitting back-to-back.”

I closed my eyes. Tied meant alive. “Hurry, go untie them.”

“Good idea.” He left me and I sagged, held my breath and tried to get control over my body. Between my norn’s upset and the nausea from the rune tempus, everything wanted to shut down. Instead, I focused, on the world around me, the way the moonlight glittered on the snow and reflected off the still water. I’d been to this bridge many times but it had never been this quiet. The eerie silence made my ears feel somehow hollow...made me hypersensitive to the magic rippling in the air because now that I was starting to focus, I could feel it. It flowed over the water like fog.

A sound trickled through and my eyes flew open as my mother’s laughter sounded and grew louder. Dread filled my limbs with weights as I turned toward the noise and watched her walk slowly toward us. She strolled, as if she was out for a Sunday jaunt. But she looked like she’d been running with wild dogs.

“Why must you girls do this so many times a day? You keep throwing me off and I don’t like it. You didn’t get this magic from your father. Did you enjoy meeting him? I told them he couldn’t come. Upsets your mama and that makes her belly hurt.” She stopped, braced her booted feet and crossed her arms over the ugly, black-feathered coat. “You didn’t get this magic from your mother, either. Have anything to write with, Coral?”

“Of course.” I laid my hand on my bag.

She threw her head back, much like the elf had earlier, and laughed.

I frowned, then felt horror flood through me. My purple coat at her feet earlier came back to my mind.
She’d been in Taran’s house
. Swallowing the whimper gathering force in my throat, I dropped the bag on the pier and frantically pawed through it.

Taran squatted next to me. “This is bad, isn’t it?” he whispered. “What about the ribbon? Could you cut it into shapes?”

I shook my head, panic tearing into my chest. “Too small!”

“Can you sprinkle herbs?” He pulled out a vial.

“I could try.” I looked around. “Snow could work.” But there wasn’t as much on the pier. I touched the wood, realized the water had started to swish over the slats. But only on the right side. I glanced down the pier again, seeing that it had tilted. “The water is starting to move. Oh gods, see if the elves are!”

“I’m not taking my eyes off your mother. That’s who that is, right? It’s the woman who shot that arrow at me.”

“It’s her body, but it sure as hells isn’t her.”

“Such an interesting power you have.” My mother took a few steps closer, her boots clacking hard on the wood. “I took your notebook and all your pens. I wanted to see if you would burn the runes as your sister did. Your mother has the memories. I’m fascinated.”

As if my norn realized I could write any other way, my fingers began to warm. I looked up at Taran, my heart in my throat.

“What does she mean burn the runes, Coral?” he asked, his eyes wide.

“My fingers will catch fire, burn the message into the wood.”

“‘On the wood, they scored,’” my mother quoted. “That is how it’s supposed to be done.”

“They carved the runes and you know it.” I opened up my bag again. “I have the boline—it was in my hands.” I scrambled around, spotted it a foot away and snatched it. “I keep it sharp so it can cut—” I broke off, gasped as my fingers began to burn. I put the tip of the knife to the wood slats. The first rune started to take shape but the wood was so wet, and water washed over the surface so many times, my norn grew frustrated—her annoyance bled through me like poison through my veins. “Blood,” I whispered.

“What?” Taran asked. “Why aren’t you carving?”

Before I could lose my nerve, I spread my bag out on my lap—glad I’d brought the beige one—and hurriedly slashed the knife across my palm.

“What the hell, Coral?” Alarm made Taran’s voice gritty.

“She wants me to write faster,” was all I got out before I started writing the runes with my blood.

“What does it say?” Taran whispered.

I looked up at my mother, my tongue tied in knots, my hand stinging from the deep cut.

She started to walk closer, but Taran stood, gripping his hammer. She actually eyed the weapon with fear briefly, then let her lips stretch into a smirk—the one that looked nothing like my mother.

“I’ve had such fun playing with that,
Thor
.” She said the god’s name with a sneer. “All that time we spent together in the past, all the tricks I used to play on you and you still didn’t figure out what was going on.” She pointed to her head, tapped her temple. “Always were as thick as a half-wit giant.”

“I was right.” I stood, curled my aching hand into a fist and faced her. No...him. “You aren’t my mother. It makes so much sense now. Her fall off the ladder, how ill she was. All those damned snakes! You’re Loki, and you’re using my mother’s body—possessed her somehow when she fell, right?”

“Score one for the norn.” With each word, her voice grew deeper until it didn’t sound like my mother anymore at all.

“How dare you use my mom like that?” I yelled, shaking with fury. And fear. Taran and I were standing on a rickety pier, facing the powerful god of mischief. The trickster god. One who had apparently instigated all this horror surrounding us. And there was the fear for my mother. She was not out there killing people, she was trapped in there with a lunatic.

“Use her?” Loki scoffed. “I’ve been used in all manner of things by my people. Told to do this and that, then forced to fix problems—other gods’ problems. One of those fixes involved me giving birth of all things. To a horse!” My mother’s mouth curled. “And then there’s this one. My supposed friend.”

I narrowed my eyes. “If you hate Thor so much, why not just kill him then? Why hurt the other kids? Why all the stupid games? You killed someone in Oklahoma, too, didn’t you?”

“Some of those kids had to die. A couple were accidents.” He shrugged my mother’s shoulders. “After years locked in a cave, wouldn’t you want to have a little fun?”

“Your idea of fun and mine are pretty different.”

My mother’s head nodded. “True. There are some memories in here that prove that—like the one of you sticking your tongue on some poster of a shirtless boy.”

Heat scorched my cheeks as I peeked at Taran. “I didn’t do that.”

He wasn’t paying attention to me. He was looking at the runes. “Tell me what they say, Coral.”

I didn’t answer. I hadn’t told him about the prophecy of my death.

My mother’s laugh spilled out from the shadows, then deepened until the voice sounded nothing like her. “Aw, Coral, you didn’t tell the warrior that you’re supposed to die. That he’s supposed to kill you.”

“Yeah, I did.”

Taran growled. “No, you said your mother believed I was going to kill you. Do you mean you’ve thought I would, too? This entire time?”

I shook my head, frantic. “No, not really. There was always the chance, but—”

He interrupted. “What do those runes say, Coral?”

“Darkling blood to spill.”

“Figured out the darkling part yet, little girl?” Loki stroked toward us, then abruptly stopped. My mother’s face frowned as water sloshed over her boots.

Opening my throbbing hand, I stared down at the pool of blood in my hand. I’d spilled my blood, but somehow, I don’t think Verthandi’s anxious warning meant this little bit in my hand.

I was a darkling. Me. Apparently the child of a human and a dark elf.

Then it hit me. All the runes altogether.

Valkyries shadow.

Warriors’ fates to fulfill.

Jotnar on the march.