by Gwen Rivers
“I’ll be along in a second,” I say.
She studies me carefully but in the end nods and guides Jedda inside the farmhouse.
I head into the barn. It is not much more than an old hay barn, hasn’t worked as more than a garage for years. I let out a breath at the familiar smells. Clean, fresh air. Freedom.
I would have done anything to get it.
Scratch that, not anything. I’m not my mother.
Putting one foot in front of the other, I climb up into the hayloft and sit facing the west, to the setting sun. How much time has passed in Underhill? How long will Aiden and his friendly neighborhood wolves be gone?
“I was wondering where you’d gone.” A voice says from the corner.
I look up unsurprised to see Nightweaver. “Have you been here long?”
She shrugs. “Time really isn’t relevant to me anymore.”
I hear that. “What do you want, Nightweaver?”
“Freedom.”
A chill goes through me. “What do you mean?”
She tips her head to the side. “You needed me for a single purpose, to find the spirits of the Wild Hunt. That was long ago, yet you’ve kept me tethered to them.”
“You know the rules. Once a soul is claimed by The Wild Hunt it belongs to the Hunt for eternity.”
She hisses, her hideous birdlike face pulling up in revulsion. “You aren’t even a queen any longer, not even a fey. The Wild Hunt belongs to another. And yet I made a vow to serve you. Release me.”
“You also made a vow to Underhill.”
She stares at me, her dead gaze unblinking.
I swallow and then shake my head. “I’m sorry, but I can’t.”
“You won’t. Selfish fey bitch. You’re no different than you ever were.” Mist rises up through the barn and she vanishes out the open window.
I put my head in my hands. Maybe Nightweaver is right. I could let her go. What is one spirit compared to all the rest of the Wild Hunt? But if I release her, I have no one to tell me what’s going on across the Veil. Nightweaver is my only connection and spy or no, I refuse to give that up.
A chill travels up my spine and I look to see another ghost lingering in the space. It’s the FBI agent who’d shot Astrid. “What are you doing here?”
He shakes his head, his mouth opening and shutting like a fish out of water.
I blow out a tired breath. “Okay, pal here’s the skinny. You’re dead, I killed you and your soul belongs to The Wild Hunt. They are across the Veil in a land called Underhill. You follow?”
He scowls but then nods.
“What’s your name?”
“Hank. Hank Yates.”
“Well, Hank Yates. You work for me now.”
He didn’t like that. I can see the flare of resentment on his face.
“I have one job for you. About three miles in that direction,” I point to illustrate. “There is a tear in what we call the Veil. Go there and tell me the instant anyone crosses through it onto our side, okay?”
He looks as though he’s going to argue, but then dissipates. Nahini told me it’s difficult on the new ones. That they don’t understand where they are or how they are different. They don’t know why they are compelled to obey me.
I lie back in a pile of hay. It pokes through my sweater, making my skin itch but for the first time in weeks, I am where I belong.
“Nic?” A voice calls my name.
I sit up and then look around, utterly disoriented. “Hello?”
A head pops through the opening by the ladder. Jedda has shed his glamour and again has taken on the silver-blue skin that is so reminiscent of his father. “Chloe said I should come get you. That dinner is ready.”
“Thanks.” I stretch muscles stiffened by the cold. “Any word from the other side?”
Slowly he shakes his head.
I follow Jedda down the ladder and into the house. It smells of hot spices and dust, a side effect for having stood empty for the better part of a month.
“There you are. Dinner’s on the table.”
“Where’s Laufey and Harmony?” Their car had been right behind ours.
“Went for a walk.” Chloe turns to the fridge and extracts a bottle of wine.
“Chloe?” I ask, eyeing Jedda. I’m not sure how much I want to say in front of the boy king.
“What is it?” She tips the entire bottle into one huge glass.
“Nothing.” I tuck some hair behind my ear and concentrate on getting some food into my system.
“What are you going to name your baby?” Jedda asks.
I pause with the spoon partway to my mouth. “You know, I haven’t really thought about it.”
“How about Addy?” His question is innocent but a cold shard spears into my heart. “That’s your other aunt’s name, right?”
Chloe and I exchange a look. “It is,” I say at length.
Jedda nods. “My father said it is important to keep names within families so that the beings who matter know where they come from.”
“How about Addison Sophia?” Chloe says softly.
I smile at the suggestion. Addison Sophia Jager. Because I want the baby to carry Aiden’s last name. Rutherford is just something my aunts made up to help me fit in.
“I’ll suggest it to Aiden.”
The next time I saw him. Which I hoped would be soon.
Snag
“It’s gone,” Liam breathes as he touches the wall that had been an in-between.
Cold chills travel down Aiden’s spine. “Underhill must have moved it. She knows we’re here.”
The wolves stare at him, waiting. He doesn’t know what to tell them. If Underhill didn’t know where they are, she’ll soon find out. There is only one path left to them.
“We’ll have to cross through the tear,” he says. “Follow me.”
Taking off at top speed, Aiden runs down the hall to the kitchen. The pack is hot on his heels. They burst through the kitchen, startling cooks into dropping their spoons and leaping onto counters. Most of the servants are enthralled humans, like the FBI. But some are low magic fey who work for the scraps that fall from the royal tables.
“It’s him,” one fey woman cries. “The one Underhill has been hunting!”
Shit. Aiden picks up speed. Liam is less than a pace behind, the three other wolves flanking them.
“Take her.” Without slowing, Aiden shoves Gretchen into Liam’s outstretched arms. “I’ll try to lead them away.”
Fey lights flare in the darkness outside the underground palace.
“Stay with us!” Liam yells. “Aiden, it’s too risky!”
“I won’t let them catch me.” He’s the one they want, there’s no doubt in his mind. He shifts to sparks, flitting up over the underground lake, rising higher and higher through the gossamer strands of reflective webbing and into the fresh air beyond.
Even with Underhill’s ability to change the landscape, he can still feel the tear to the east. The wrongness of it, the sucking void of darkness. He heads north, planning to double back once he is sure Liam and the others have had enough time to pass through to Midgard.
Up and up he drifts into the night sky. Behind him, all sorts of winged creatures take flight, following, tracking him. Their wings blot out the moon as they swarm behind him.
He dives down into the icy mountain peaks, his sparks barely clustering together enough to keep him intact. One hundred feet from the snowline, then fifty, twenty. At ten feet he shifts again into his wolf form, his pads hitting the snow with enough force to make the peak shake.
Aiden runs. He charges down the hill, ducking into the trees to keep the winged fey at a disadvantage. Spells are hurled in his direction, bright balls of light igniting like fireworks in the blue-black haze of the night.
He runs harder, zig-zagging across the ground. The evergreens thin out into an open space. There are more trees dead ahead if only he can reach them.
He hears the crack first and thinks the fey
have brought down trees to block his path. And then the ice beneath his paws splinters. He tumbles into the frigid water.
The cold penetrates to his marrow. He struggles and fights, but his head dips down beneath the water, then bumps up against the intact ice at the far side of the fissure.
He tries to shift but the wolf’s panic bubbles up. The beast hates water deeper than his knees. He bucks and struggles, trying to fight his way free.
We’re both going to die if you don’t stop, Aiden tells the beast.
The wolf relents enough and allows him to shift.
The sparks lift up again. All the water stays in the pond.
“Gotcha.” A gossamer net falls over him.
The chains force another shift on him. He crashes to the ground in his human aspect. Naked and freezing on the ice.
A face looms over him.
Rodrick.
“Somebody wants a word with you.”
Angrboda lands in her giantess form on the far side of the tear.
The land beyond her writhes with bodies of the dead. Some intact, others with visible mortal wounds. Still others nothing more than bones. It is the magic which animates them the evil magic of the runes.
The giantess pulls her ax from across her back and releases the hold on her glamour. She grows larger, towering over the army of corpses.
The dead don’t move forward, don’t move at all.
As if they are waiting for something.
“I told you never to come back here,” Underhill murmurs.
Angrboda stares down at the small female figure who strides out from the ranks. She’s a beautiful woman, with hair the color of midnight under a new moon. Her dark eyes though are as dead as her army.
“You won’t win, Pharaildis.”
“I already have, Hag of the Ironwood. I have Loki’s son.”
Angrboda swallows. Váli and the others are lost.
She turns, planning to leap back inside the tear and warn Nic, but with a snap of her fingers, Underhill alters the world around them. The plain disappears. Instead, they stand in a frozen wasteland.
“What do you want?” Angrboda faces the threat.
“From you? Nothing but your death.”
“You’ll have to do better than this puny army,” Angrboda grows larger still, letting her powers have free reign. For a moment she basks in the free magic, there for the taking. Midgard is nothing like this.
But Underhill’s smile never fades. “Goodbye, Hag of the Ironwood.”
She strides off through the dead, who close ranks around her.
And then they too begin to grow. With each step, their height increases until they become taller than the trees, the mountains.
Taller than her.
She swings her ax, connects. But weapons can’t kill what is already dead. Desperate she strikes out with her magic, blasting those nearest her away.
She is grabbed from behind, tossed down hard enough to make the ground tremble.
The ground shakes as the swarm over her tear into her. And carried on the wind is her former lover’s mad laughter….
I awake, the scream bursting from my lips. No. No. It can’t be real, it can’t.
Yet it felt real.
My palms are saturated with sweat and my hands tremble. Throwing off the covers, I head into my bathroom and turn on the light.
My blue eyes look haunted.
These hallucinations can’t be real.
Yet what had Harmony said about the gifts of those who’ve been snatched away from the clutches of death? They manifest in different ways. Dreams were how I’d remembered my past life. And Nahini said those threads could lead to the future as well.
I’d had one every time I’d slept, except when I’d slept in Aiden’s arms.
Aiden. If that dream was real and Nightweaver had really betrayed me, Aiden and the wolves are in danger.
I splash water on my face, then pull on an oversized bathrobe and head out into the main sitting room.
Chloe is curled up on the couch, her gaze locked on the fire. “Couldn’t sleep?”
“More bad dreams,” I tell her.
“You want to talk about it?”
I shake my head. “What good does talking do?”
She looks at me for a long moment, then gets up and moves to the kitchen.
“What are you doing?”
“Making hot cocoa.”
“Why?”
She looks over at me. “Because if I learned one thing from your mother, cooking something is better than doing nothing.”
A fist pounds on the front door so hard it rattles in its frame. I leap up but Chloe is faster.
“Where is he?” I ask when I see Liam standing on the far side of the door, three wolves at his heels and Gretchen slung over one shoulder. “Where’s Aiden?”
Out on the front lawn, his wolves are shifting in that horrible melting way of theirs.
“We got separated,” Liam gasps. He carries an unconscious Gretchen into the room and lays her on the couch. “Did it work?”
Chloe shakes her head. “No way to know until she wakes up.”
“You left him?” Damn it, I knew I should have gone with them.
“He gave her to me and just did that fire thing he does.” Liam swallows. “I have no way to keep up.”
“It wasn’t our fault,” Gray comes through the door, snagging a blanket off the bench seat. Unlike Aiden, most of the werewolves had been human and possess a sense of ingrained modesty. “Underhill changed the in-between. We had to cross through the tear.”
I shudder at the memory of crossing through the rip in the Veil, the angry jagged pieces populated by the souls of the damned. “I’m going after him.”
“Nic, no,” Chloe is on her feet. “Aiden can take care of himself.”
I ignore her, stepping into my boots. “He’s public enemy number one so far as Underhill is concerned.”
“Until she finds out that you are there!”
“Then I’ll have to be sneaky.” I storm into my room searching for my trusty backpack. Without paying too much attention to what I grab, I fill it full and then head for the door.
“Think about this a minute,” Chloe begs. “We can put out a call for help. Freda and the others—”
“There’s no time. You know as well as I do that time moves differently over there. She intends to kill Aiden and free his father.”
“And what about your baby?” Chloe snags my arm on the front porch. “What about little Addison Sophia? You’re not just risking your own life now, Nic. You have her to think about.”
I swallow. “I know that, Chloe. Believe me, I do. And I am thinking about her and how much I want her to be born, not die in the womb like my last child.”
Her eyes fill with tears. “Nic.”
I yank myself free. “Listen to me. Underhill isn’t going to hold Aiden captive. She is going to cut him open and use pieces of him to unbind his father. I’ve seen it, she tried to do it to Addy while she was disguised as Aiden.”
Chloe pales.
When she doesn’t respond I add, “Think, Chloe. If Loki gets free, there will be nowhere safe. The end of the worlds.”
Chloe grumbles something under her breath. “Fine. But you’re not going alone.”
I gape at her. “What?”
She pulls her coat off the hook at the back of the door. “You heard me. You and Addy think you can just leave me here keeping the home fires burning like some 1940s hausfrau? No way. I’m done sitting on the sidelines. And if the universe doesn’t like one fate messing with the timeline, it will hate two.”
I stare at her. “This could mean your life.”
She gives a rueful shrug. “Then that much more chocolate for the rest of you. Come on. Let’s go.”
The truck fishtails on the gravel roads as we race for the tear. My stomach lurches and my dinner threatens to make a comeback.
Chloe murmurs inaudibly under her breath. I don’t know if it’s some s
ort of spell or incantation, or maybe just a self-directed pep talk. My own thoughts need to settle.
Crossing through the tear is dangerous and not just because of the mental and physical strain. It’s a fixed point, one that is easily monitored from both sides.
Which is why I sent the newbie ghost to keep a lookout.
“So, what’s your plan?” Chloe asks.
I shake my head. “Find Aiden and get to him before my mother guts him like a trout.”
She wrinkles her nose. “Okay one, that’s icky. And also, that doesn’t sound like much of a plan.”
“You’re right.” I glance over at her. “But it’s the best I’ve got.”
We pull into the woods alongside the tear. I shift my vision to the spirit plane. The tear has grown even larger since the last time I saw it. It stretches from five feet above the ground to a mile above the surface of the earth.
“Shit,” Chloe says as we see the magnitude of it.
“It shredded Nahini’s horse,” I say, still hearing the deafening screams as the creature was pulled apart. “But the wolves made it through.”
“It might be less severe over there.” Chloe sounds doubtful.
“Why is it getting worse?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “No idea. But when it reaches the ground level on this side anyone or anything can cross.”
Meaning the Draugar. The dead might walk right on through and start terrorizing the good people of Western North Carolina.
I swallow and secure my backpack over one shoulder. “Let’s go.”
“You must go back!” A voice calls, startling us both.
I turn and behold the two women, side by side. Aiden’s sister, the traitor Harmony.
And the goddess of love and beauty herself.
My lip curls in revulsion. “Goddess or no, if you stand between me and Aiden I will end you. Freya.”
She stares down at my belly as though she can see the pregnancy within. “You can’t cross, not while you are with child.”
“Then I’ll find another in-between. Midnight isn’t far off. The largest in-between in the world.” One I had crossed though before.
