by Liz Meldon
“C-Calder?”
I stayed a few beats longer, just to be sure, sweet metallic fire scorching down my throat until I finally tore away. The shifter staggered back, her eyes wide, cheeks pale, mouth hanging open as she groped at her bleeding neck. I held up a hand to settle her as soon as she started to panic, to shake, her breath coming faster.
“Emma—”
“What the fuck, Calder?” she cried, taking in her surroundings with all the mania of someone who’d woken up in a stranger’s bed, or a dingy alley, or the middle of a field with no memory of how they got there. “What the fuck? Where am I?”
Her voice had reached a pitch only dogs could hear. “Emma, something’s happened…”
Behind me—splashing.
I whirled around to find Marte and her tiny gold New Year’s Eve dress had made their way back to the pond’s edge. Her stockings were ripped, her hair mussed, her face vacant as she crawled along.
“Marte, for god’s sake,” I hissed, zipping over to her at top speed. While I moved fast, Emma managed to keep up, stumbling to a halt at my heels seconds after I reached the crawling, shivering nurse. Marte’s teeth chattered violently, her dead stare fixed on the lake, and as soon as I touched her, she screamed.
Screamed like I was tearing her to pieces.
“Calder!”
Over my shoulder, I noted Emma standing about a foot from the pond’s edge with the same dumbstruck expression I’d had only minutes earlier. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get a word out over all Marte’s screeching. Her shuffle had morphed into a scramble; whatever was in that pond had her. Either that, or the stuttering, complex pace of the fossegrim’s violin had spurred her into a frenzy. Whatever the reason, it stopped—now.
Grasping her by the chin, I forced myself into her line of sight, and the second Marte’s manic eyes met mine, I whispered, “Sleep.”
Once again, my influence proved stronger than whatever the fuck was happening in this clearing. The nurse stilled, her eyelids falling, her body limp.
Asleep. For now.
Behind me, Emma’s panting panic had quieted, but somehow it seemed louder than before.
Louder—because the fossegrim had finally stopped playing.
Gently, I lowered Marte to the ground, yanking my enormous scarf off and pillowing it under her head, setting its fat tails over her pale arms. When I stood, I found Emma and the fossegrim staring each other down, perhaps even sizing each other up. Then, those ethereal blue eyes slid to me, their starlight shimmering in the darkness.
Softly, sweetly, with a voice like a whispering meadow, a rustle of wood chimes, the fossegrim murmured, “Jeg beklager så mye.”
“What?” Emma sounded harsh by comparison. “What did he say?”
I’m so sorry.
“I… He…” Like a hooked trout, I gawked at the creature seated atop that jagged boulder, arms limp at my side. Sorry. Sorry for what, exactly?
“Calder?”
“He—”
A second great splash silenced me. With all the speed of a striking viper, two long, black, algae-covered arms shot out of the water and snapped a pair of claw-tipped hands around Emma’s left ankle, then yanked her into the pond. She screamed as she went down, scrambling at the dead grass along the shoreline, her body disappearing too fast, too sudden, even for me.
“Emma!” I dropped to my knees, racing toward the undulating black mirror. Below, faintly, I caught the sight of her hands, her outstretched fingers. I plunged my own hands in, desperately searching her out, only I couldn’t reach her. Just like that. In the blink of an eye—gone.
Gobsmacked, horrified, I sat there for a moment in a terse silence. How could this have happened? How could that thing be faster than me?
“What have you done?” I hissed, glowering up at the fossegrim, fear giving way to raw, unbridled fury. “What have you done?”
The creature merely stared back, his face placid even as tears streamed down his cheeks. Star-flecked orbs watched as I sat up on my knees and ripped off my jacket, then Emma’s gift. While I could have dove straight in, she would need something warm to wear when I pulled her out, something dry and comforting to wick away the black water.
Just as I was about to plunge headfirst into the murky depths, she broke the surface with a screaming gasp, flailing in the middle of the pond, accursed water splashing everywhere.
“Calder!”
“Here,” I bellowed, crawling for her, half in the water, beckoning her into my arms as she frantically paddled toward me. “Emma, here!”
As soon as she was within the most tenuous reach, I surged forward and captured her wrists, then hauled her the rest of the way out of the pond. She broke free from my grasp, only to claw up my arms and curl around my neck like a noose. Feet planted on the dead, frozen earth, I shot back, half crawling, half dragging us away from the water’s edge.
With Emma’s panicked breath in my ear, I watched grimly as those arms broke the surface once more. Black, thin, dripping with muddy green algae, spindly fingers groped along the shore, searching for their escaped quarry. Claws sunk into the rock-hard ground upon finding nothing, then whipped back into the water so furiously that a new prickle of fear in me surfaced.
Trembling, Emma glanced over her shoulder. Frigid water sluiced through my clothes, soaking me as we clung to each other. The pond settled in an instant, the ripples dissipating, its surface once more an unnerving black mirror. Then, seconds later, a head poked up in the middle. Curtained with black, snarled hair, the creature’s slate-grey skin made its obsidian eyes sharper, more distinct in the darkness. Emma’s breath hitched; even without pupils, that thing’s gaze was palpable. Frightening. Emma’s shifter figure radiated heat, positively burning on top of me, but she continued to shiver—not from the cold, surely.
Like a crocodile hovering at the surface, the rest of its immense body below, the creature lingered for a moment, unblinking, before submerging without a sound. Seconds later, the pond’s surface stilled.
An explosion ripped across the landscape. Emma screamed. I flinched. And in the distance, fireworks erupted over Solskinn. Midnight. Another year had come to pass, and in the waning moments of the last, I had endured fear, confusion, and outright panic for the first time in a century.
And now, in the initial moments of this new year, bloody fireworks had set me off, my usual steel nerve nowhere to be found as Emma clutched at me and I clutched at her.
To our immediate right, pinwheels of color burst against a black midnight sky. Fizzing, whirling, screaming fireworks of all shades, crackling over the landscape. It was quite the display, one usually reserved for far larger cities, but the Norwegians seemed to take great pride in their fireworks. How long it would last, I had no idea, but I couldn’t move, not with Emma curled up on top of me, shaking, soaking wet, her breath falling in uneven beats. A few feet from us, Marte remained under my thrall, asleep and likely in desperate need of a few more layers.
Amidst the chaos, bright color painting our surroundings every few seconds, the fossegrim stared at me. Tucking both arms around the shifter on my lap, I met his gaze over Emma’s shoulder, my hand on the nape of her neck. The creature’s dark brows flickered up, the serene expression splintered by anguish.
“Hjelp meg.” Help me.
What the bloody hell was I supposed to make of that? My gaze hardened, turned frosty, and I refocused on Emma when she finally extracted her arms from around my neck, then sat up, hands planted on my chest.
“Okay,” she growled through chattering teeth, staring me down like I had something to do with this. “What—the fuck—is happening?”
I swallowed thickly, hands settling on her lower back like they had a mind of their own. I needed a convincing lie until I discovered the truth, one that would keep her out of this mess, one that would keep her safe. But as she stared at me, I faltered. Lying my way through all kinds of situations had always come easy to me, yet in that moment, I had nothing. No white lie. N
o teasing retort. Nothing. “Uh, Happy New Year?”
Emma blinked back at me as the corners of my mouth twitched up—and then gut-punched me so hard I could finally see the stars.
January
19
Emma
“What the hell was that thing?”
We moved at a good clip through the pitch-black forest, with me relying more on Calder’s intense night vision than my own. I stumbled along slightly behind him, one hand hovering at his back just in case the dizziness, the light-headedness, the nausea that tagged along for the ride finally got the upper hand.
Despite everything, I would have preferred holding on to him right now, but he had his hands—and arms—full, literally, with an unconscious nurse. While I wore the maroon knit, the rest of me still soaked, Marte wore every other piece of dry clothing Calder and I could find between the two of us, except for his slacks and white undershirt. Given her lips had started to turn blue, we moved swiftly, cutting directly across the forest, following the fireworks, to take her to the village—which wasn’t ideal, but it was closer than campus.
My wet jeans clung to me with every step and probably would have frozen solid if I didn’t naturally radiate heat. Still, my teeth wouldn’t stop chattering. My throat ached from screaming underwater, the taste of that thing lingering…
“I can’t say what it was,” Calder muttered, shifting Marte in his arms as we detoured around a rotted tree stump. “I only went to check on you two, because why the fuck would you walk a human anywhere far in this weather?”
Annoyance skittered through the emotional hurricane festering inside me, and I glared at the back of his head. “I wasn’t going to walk her back to campus. Not really. It was just a joke, but then she took off while I was grabbing our coats, and I went to find her, and then—”
“The violin?”
In an instant, my irritation vanished, replaced by something darker, something colder. “Yeah. The violin.”
At the time, listening to the music, I had been both aware and not, my body operating completely out of my control. My mind had been at peace in the fog, content to just follow the music and submit to the player. Calder’s bite had been a harsh wake-up call, tinged with a sharp, unfamiliar pleasure that I felt in my teeth. In an instant, I’d been back in the real world, bleeding, my inner wolf baying so loudly that it had felt like a bomb had gone off inside my own head.
The idea that something could enthral a shifter like that, take complete control of me—it didn’t sit well. What if the player had forced me to shift somehow? I hadn’t been able to hear my inner wolf. What if he had made me do things?
Arms crossed, I jogged a few paces to fall in line beside Calder. “Do you… know anything?”
“I have some theories,” he said with a sniff, eyes constantly on the move, prowling across the dark landscape. “But I want to confirm them first.”
I huffed, breath fogging in front of me. “Calder—”
“Just let me work how I work. I don’t want to say anything that might be untrue.”
“It would be better if we bounced ideas off each other,” I said, waiting until he glanced down at me to roll my eyes. The vampire stopped so suddenly that I carried on a few long, hurried strides without him, and when I faced him again, he shrugged, jostling a sleeping Marte.
“Well, go on. Let’s hear your ideas.”
“I…” In that moment, I was all physical. There was no space in my brain for the mental side of this, for flipping through my admittedly limited Rolodex of supernatural beings to find the answer. “I don’t have any right this second—”
“Then let me sort it out.” Calder resumed his unforgiving pace, stalking by me so quickly that I had to run to catch up. While desperate to tell him that this wasn’t just his issue to sort out, that I was the more involved of the two of us, I bit the insides of my cheeks and carried on beside him in silence.
After all that had happened, the air seemed to have cleared between us. Sure, he was still a pompous ass, walking all over me, assuming I’d have nothing to contribute, but maybe he had a point. He was older and a total nerd for pointless, boring facts, for stories that most people tuned out the second he launched into another teachers’ lounge monologue.
And he had kind of just saved my life.
At the very least, he had come looking for me. After a week of unpleasantness, after all the insults hurled and the feelings muddled, Calder, a vampire, had screamed a shifter’s name when that thing pulled me under.
I owed him a bit of credit, even if I’d been the one to free myself from whatever the fuck that creature was in the pond. A chill sprinted through me at the memory; hurrying through the forest, I could still feel its clawed hands snapped tight around my ankle, dragging me into the black as my ears popped, as my lungs screamed.
The only way out had been to fight.
A wolf always fights. Always. To their last breath.
So, unable to see more than an inch in front of my face, I’d folded over underwater, grabbed onto one wiry arm—and sunk my teeth in.
“That thing,” I started, my voice catching until I cleared my throat, “tasted like dirt.”
Calder looked down at me, his brutal march slowing just for the moment, and I stared straight ahead, eyes prickling with tears I refused to shed.
“Like dirt and ash and dead flesh—”
“Make it a habit of eating dead flesh, do you?” he mused, mouth lifted in a half-hearted smirk—bait I couldn’t handle right now.
“Calder—”
“I know, I know,” he muttered, the road finally in sight ahead, lamplight fighting to breach the pines. “I’m not… I’m just saying things. I’m sorry. You did very well, getting away from it. I was about to, you know, dive in…”
I squared my shoulders, sensing apologetic and contrite wasn’t a tone that sat well with Calder Holloway. “No sense in it getting both of us.”
“Yes, but I wouldn’t have drowned.”
I stumbled, foot snagging on something rigid in the snow, heart in my throat, vision blurred. While I waved Calder off, balance regained, I couldn’t stop the thundering of my insides, couldn’t shirk fear’s sudden death grip on every part of me. Tonight, I could have drowned. That thing could have pulled me to the bottom of the pond and just held me there. Hell, it could have held me five feet below the surface and the results would have been the same.
I could have died tonight.
As fireworks crackled and hissed, their explosion of color illuminating the forest’s edge, a nagging thought settled in: What if people had died there?
What if all the missing villagers, the ones who had last been seen entering these very woods, met such a fate?
“What are we going to tell people?” I forced out. It wasn’t like we could go to the police and expose the entire supernatural community. Calder cleared his throat, each controlled, even breath whooshing from his nostrils in a fleeting fog. The forest’s density petered out as we neared the road, but before we stepped out of the shadows, we needed a story.
And I hated that. Calder might be familiar with pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes, but I wasn’t. I just wanted to do my job, go for runs with my rescue pack, and knit things in the quiet comfort of my own room. Was that so much to ask for?
“We tell them Marte wandered off, drunk,” he said at last, pausing at the final clump of trees. A snow-covered slope soared ahead, the vampire’s brief pause punctuated by fireworks and cheers. Calder studied the woman in his arms, the human who had started to shake in her sleep, then exhaled sharply. “You went to fetch her, and I joined when you texted for my assistance. We found her together in the woods.” He levelled his gaze to mine. “And we say nothing of the violin, its master, or the pond creature.”
“But—”
“Not until we figure out what the hell they both are.”
I hesitated for a moment, lower lip caught between my teeth as I weighed the collective safety of Solskinn, the i
mmensely stacked odds in favor of the hot guy with the magical violin against magic-less humanity, and then nodded. “Fine. Agreed.”
“Okay.”
“And why am I wet?”
His lips briefly pursed, as if catching a chuckle. “You’re wet because… you slipped. Fell into a drift. Soaked to the bone and in need of a slow thaw.”
“Maybe I fell through some ice?”
“The ice is very solid this time of year,” Calder said with a shake of his head. “I’ve no idea why that pond looked as it did, or why it isn’t just a block of ice, but I’ll consult my books. Something foul is keeping it as is.”
I snorted. Something foul was the fucking understatement of the new year.
Calder canted his head toward the slope, and I moved without a word. Out of the forest, I took the lead, clambering up the snowy little hill with my soaked, frozen coat hanging over my arm. Once at the top, I reached for Calder, helping him, perhaps unnecessarily, the rest of the way up with Marte in his arms. Heads down against a freezing rush of air, we made our way back to Solskinn, guided by the yellow glow of Gothic iron street lamps and ceaseless blasts of fizzing, whizzing fireworks.
Just as we breached the outskirts of the village’s main strip, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. One by one, they rose. Beneath the sweater, my skin prickled, even though I was still unaffected by the morning’s temperatures. My steps slowed. My brows furrowed. My gaze jumped from shadow to shadow, searching out the threat. Beside me, now ahead of me, Calder carried on, haunting blue eyes fixed on the firework display erupting from the village center.
A flicker in the supernatural veil. A shift in the air around us. A new bleak aura. Did he sense it too? “Calder…”
My inner wolf snarled, and I finally stopped, wondering what else I could possibly have to deal with tonight on top of everything already—
