Foresworn (10 page)

I cupped his chin to direct his gaze back to me. “What?” I mouthed.

“Listen,” he whispered.

I heard the sound of my own heart as it worked to keep me warm and keep me going in this snow. I also heard the sound of the snow itself hitting the leaves, the ground...falling in clumps from the trees. In the background, still faint, I heard the music—like wind chimes made into voices. But I knew he heard something else, so I stood perfectly still and listened.

“You stupid, stupid fool.”

The woman’s voice came to me on the wind, muffled and low, and recognition hit me like a blow to the head. The faint hint of lavender in the air was my second clue. I started to run toward her, but Arun stopped me. He turned me to face him, placed his finger over his lips and mouthed, “Wait. Let’s listen.”

I pulled him down so I could whisper into his ear. “But it’s my mother.”

He pulled back fast, blinking at me, then shook his head. “That’s crazy,” he mouthed. Then he cocked his head again to listen.

“Why did you set that fire?” my mother asked, louder this time. “What purpose did it serve?”

“The supplies are mostly gone. It made them vulnerable. It was genius.”

This time, I stopped Arun when he started to bolt forward. I didn’t even have to ask why. I recognized the voice even though I’d only met the boy the night before.

Branton.

The expression on Arun’s face tore into me. His shoulders slumped, and he shut his eyes briefly. When he opened them, they blazed with anger. His fierce expression sent an answering anger boiling through me. Even my norn responded. She moved and sort of slithered around.

My mother spoke again. “No more fires, Sutter.”

“Stop calling me that! I go by first name, not my middle.”

“Idiot. You have to save your power for the last one. I’ve promised you’ll get your reward.”

“The fire is my reward.”

The sound of near ecstasy in Branton’s tone made me ill. I couldn’t imagine what it was doing to Arun. They’d grown up together. And it was pretty obvious Arun knew nothing about any power Branton had. Or his apparent psychotic love of fire. How had he masked all that—especially the power part because Arun could sense it?

But right then, I needed to focus on my mother. Needed to know how the hell she’d gotten here so fast if she’d truly been in Oklahoma yesterday.

The sound of an approaching snowmobile drowned out whatever my mother said next. And if I heard it, she did, too. Arun’s gaze locked with mine, and I knew he was thinking the same thing, so we both lurched around the tree and ran toward their voices. Then toward this loud sound of breaking glass. The cloying, nasty lavender scent grew stronger. We reached a clearing, and there were footprints everywhere but no people. I started to walk across, but Arun tugged on my hand.

“Wait. Look.” He pointed to the edge of the clearing, then aimed his finger in a circle all the way around it. “The prints are only in the middle. How did they leave?”

He was right. Shock held me in place as I looked back the way we’d come and saw only two sets of prints from Arun and me. They were perfectly clear—not smudged in the least as they would have been if we’d walked over another set. Plus, we would have run into them if they’d gone that direction. The snowmobile grew louder then quieter as it passed us.

“That was Branton’s voice, wasn’t it?” I asked. “Though she called him Sutter.”

His lips tightened as he nodded. “That was him. Apparently, he’s one of us and I hadn’t even known it. All these years. Maybe he didn’t know until now.”

I kind of doubted that.

His half smile was rueful. “Yeah, I can tell you don’t believe that. Neither do I. And you’re sure that was your mother’s voice?”

“Positive.” I looked around again. “Do you smell the flowery odor?”

He nodded.

“My mother mixes lavender into her spells because she thinks it masks the other odors that would give her away. It’s dumb, but she always uses it. So that was her. I don’t get how they disappeared. My mother is nothing but an Earth witch. She can do spells, but she can’t make herself disappear and certainly couldn’t make herself
and
Branton disappear.”

“She said my friend started the fire. You heard that, right?”

I nodded. “I also heard her say he needed to save his power for the last one. Gods, Arun, I think I know who he’s carrying.”

The devastation on Arun’s face made my heart hurt, and I stepped close to him, stood on my toes and wrapped my arms around his neck.

He went stiff, probably surprised at me offering affection first, but then his arms came around me and he buried his nose in some of my loose hair under the beanie. He was shaking and the emotions pouring off him made me tighten my arms. Devastation and sadness, yes. Disappointment for sure. But the fury was something else. It felt like it burned the air around us.

“I know exactly who he’s carrying,” Arun said against my neck. “Surt.”

His best friend had spent all these years hiding because if he had power already, he had to know what he was. His best friend had set the fires that destroyed his home and years of work and all that plant life. And his best friend was going to try to kill him.

In the stories about Ragnarok, Freyr fights the fire giant Surt and dies.

Chapter Eight

We walked back to what was left of the compound hand in hand. I’d started to let go only to sense that Arun needed my touch. Maybe he needed anyone’s touch at this point, but I was happy to give it. And knowing the grief he had to be feeling right then ripped me up. The loss of the greenhouses and his home was bad enough, but Arun struck me as someone who cared more about people than he did things. To learn that his best friend had been lying and pretending all this time had probably put him past his limit of upset.

And I could
not
figure out this thing with my mother. Just trying to understand how she could be in Oklahoma one day and Wyoming the next had me feeling jittery and confused.

Keeping busy that morning helped. Everyone pitched in to continue going through what had survived the fire. We were down to the wire now that we knew giants and elves were already on their way to Yellowstone. Arun’s mother called around town to see who still had camping gear left and hit pay dirt when a friend of hers who worked at a supermarket said he’d put stuff back for them when he’d heard about the fire.

Brigg and Nanna offered to go with us to get the supplies, and they climbed into the backseat of the truck Arun decided would work best. For some reason, he put an extra backpack inside and even tossed one into the back of my Jeep, too. “Better to be prepared later if we use yours,” he muttered as he started the truck.

I kept my gaze out of the passenger window as we drove through Cody. We passed a Conoco with a line of cars wrapping the building. Got stuck because some of the cars were stopped on the road, the drivers waiting to turn in.

My chest hurt today, and I didn’t know if it was from the cold or if I’d inhaled too much of that suspended smoke the night before.

My throat tickled and I coughed, trying to dislodge the annoying tingle.

Brigg talked with Arun. I tuned them out, glad for the buffer because I didn’t want to talk. It was all I could do to try to make sense of what I’d heard. I wasn’t surprised that my mother was involved in any of this, but what she was doing running around the wilds of Wyoming had no logical explanation. Raven thought she’d been there, but she must have been wrong because I knew that voice. And I knew that lavender scent and what it meant.

“What I don’t get is how she got away,” Arun said as he stopped at a red light and glanced at me, his thoughts obviously running along with mine. “We both heard her. She wasn’t that far from us, so I can’t figure out where she went.”

I just shrugged.

As we pulled into the parking lot of the Kmart, my ears started popping. I rubbed one, wiggled my jaw and couldn’t seem to shake the feeling. When I looked at Arun, he was doing the same thing.

“Did we go higher or something?” I asked him as he parked. My voice sounded so strange. Tinny.

“No. This isn’t right.”

We got out of his truck. Brigg and Nanna, both frowning, went around to the front and leaned on the hood.

My phone rang, and I was surprised to see the word—or in this case name—
Vanir
on the screen. I smiled, hearing that strange popping noise my mouth sometimes made, only inside my head and weirdly loud. I held up a finger to ask them to wait for me as I walked around to the back of the truck and answered the phone. “It’s freaking weird seeing the word
Vanir
in my caller ID. Didn’t his Norse mama know that Odin was actually a part of the Aesir?”

“Kat, what if I’d let Vanir call you?”

Sounded like she was standing in the wind, but it was so good to hear Raven’s voice. I smiled even as I snorted, shivered and tried to swallow past the dry scratchiness of my throat. “Then he’d answer.”

“Are you okay?”

“Honestly?” I sighed. “No. Been a bad, bad couple of days. Mom’s here, by the way.”

A whooshing sound momentarily filled the phone. I guessed it was very windy there. Wasn’t there something about wind sweeping down the plains in a song about Oklahoma?

“That’s impossible,” she said. “I thought she was here, and Coral swears she’s there.”

“I can’t explain it yet, but she is. I heard her voice. And if we thought she’d been acting crazy before, it’s nothing compared to now. She’s set up a wicked little alliance with a real certifiable pyromaniac. His name...wait for it...is Sutter.” I wanted to tell her the other stuff—the stuff about the Whirlwind Woman—but blurting all that over the phone just didn’t feel right.

“You found your warrior.”

“I did. Peaceboy here is carrying the soul of Freyr.” I stared at him as he gestured to the side of the parking lot as he talked to Brigg and Nanna.

“Peaceboy?”

“Gentle as the summer snow, he is.” I laughed and it caught in my throat, causing me to cough pretty hard. Even I knew I was acting kind of weird, but something in the atmosphere was causing my ears to ring. It made me feel kind of woozy.

“Kat?”

I winced as she yelled but couldn’t answer right away.

“Are you sick?” Her voice was still loud. “Hurt? What’s going on?”

I finally got my throat under control, wished I had some water, then blinked when it appeared in front of my face. Looking up, I caught Arun’s sweet smile as he held out the bottle. Peaceboy was a perfect nickname for him. “It’s been a cold night,” I finally answered her. “Well, the part of it I spent alone under the blanket, anyway. Peaceboy is awfully warm.”

He frowned at the nickname, then shrugged and wiggled his eyebrows suggestively. He walked back to the others, giving me privacy.

“Um,” she mumbled.

I couldn’t stop my laughter this time and didn’t care if it hurt my throat. And I knew it sounded like one of those cynical sounds, not a joyous one. “Don’t worry—it’s all good. Well, except for the pyro, the cold, the insane progenitor and, oh, an all-consuming fire even I didn’t expect.”

“That’s it. We have to figure out where Mom really is and we have to get together somehow. I can’t stand this. Between you and fire and Coral and tidal waves...” Her voice faded out.

I wanted to say it was a storm surge, not a tidal wave, but all I could do was stare at the ground as my heart stopped and restarted. She was right. All these terrifying things were happening, and it was stupid that we weren’t together. What if this really was the end of the world? “I love you, Raven.”

Her pause was long and I knew she was surprised but also pleased—I could hear it in her returned, “I love you, too.”

My ears started popping harder. I rubbed one, wiggled my jaw, but couldn’t get the sounds around me to feel right. I looked at Arun and the others to find them doing the same thing. There was a loud cry that had all of us straightening and staring toward the fast-food restaurant in the other end of the parking lot. The air changed, thickened, until it felt as if I had cotton balls stuffed in my ears. “Hey, I gotta go. We’ve got a problem here.”

“Call me later. At this number. Let me know you’re okay.”

“I will.” Other people in the parking lot were stopping, rubbing their ears. “Hey, Raven? Be safe, okay?”

“You, too, Kat.”

The sadness in my sister’s voice cut into me.

Arun came around his truck. “It feels like the world is muffled.”

I nodded because that’s exactly how it felt. Like someone had plugged my ears so all the sound around me came at a different decibel. It was so strange. Like even my nose had been stuffed with cotton balls.

“Come on,” he said. “Maybe it’s better inside the store.”

But the closer we walked toward the store, the quieter it got. I walked around a set of shopping carts, noticed that even the sounds in the air—the cars, birds and snow—seemed to disappear. To test my theory, I went back and walked on the other side of the carts. Sound got louder.

I took Arun’s hand and pulled him back to walk him on either side of the carts to show him. He stared to our left. “Someone yelled over there earlier. Let’s head that way.” He pointed toward the fast-food restaurant at the front of the store’s parking lot. There was a lake beyond the restaurant, and I looked around and realized this was near the place I’d pulled over to talk to Raven yesterday morning. It was hard to believe everything that had happened since then.

We walked closer to the lake. Snow fell hard and fast, coating the trees, the ground. Some even floated on top of the water. A group of blackbirds gathered overhead and I heard the distant sound of their cries.

But they were right over our heads.

They should have been so loud.

After we stepped off the pavement and onto the grass, everything sort of just stopped. I stepped to the right and again heard the cries of the blackbirds above us. Barely. Arun touched my arm and I looked at him. He held up a finger in the universal “wait” signal. Frowning, he took another step to the right, stopped, then moved left. His dark eyes went wide and he gestured for me to follow.

I stepped to the left and even the sounds from the birds disappeared.

At this point, all I heard was the fast pound of my own heartbeat. And it raced, raced, raced because everything in me at this point was screaming for me to start walking backward. Back into the parking lot, back to the truck. As fast as humanly possible.

But another part of me wanted to keep going left so I could see why the noise seemed to be sucked out of the atmosphere with every step.

So I took another.

This time, even my heartbeat stopped sounding in my ears. There was complete and total silence and nothing in my entire weird, crazy life had ever sent this sort of terror singing through my veins. It moved so fast and hard, I half expected to hear it swimming through my body.

I closed my eyes, tried to wrestle back the fear and felt Arun take my hand.

I stared at his hand, then looked up at him, expecting to find one of his kind smiles as he offered me comfort. But he wasn’t looking at me. His eyes were narrow and directed to a group of drooping snow-covered trees right next to the water.

In that moment, something in my chest—this knot that had made everything feel tight and full—sort of loosened up. Warmth flowed through me, and I tightened my fingers around his. His expression, when he looked down at me, turned that warmth into something I hadn’t felt since that night I’d taken another boy’s hand and followed him into the woods.

Excitement.

Hope.

Arun tilted his head left, wanting me to go with him.

I nodded but tugged on his hand first.

He bent close but shook his head. I knew he was telling me he wouldn’t be able to hear me, but I hadn’t planned to say anything. Instead, I stretched up and pressed my lips to his. He smiled against my mouth, then kissed me back. When I pulled away, there was something new in his gaze as he stared at me, something thoughtful. And something kind of hot.

Answering heat crept up my neck, and I guess he could see it because he grinned and touched my cheek.

Brigg’s face appeared right next to ours and he rolled his eyes.

I rolled my eyes back, then glared at him.

He laughed silently, his smile fading fast as he pointed.

A boy around our age knelt there in the snow with his eyes closed as he rocked. His mouth opened, then closed and his head moved like he was humming. Blood smears covered his mouth and chin.

He had dark brown skin and shaggy black hair spilled over his hands, which were pressed tight over his ears.

We stopped in front of him. At this point, even my thoughts started to feel fragmented. I reached down with my free hand and slowly touched one of the hands he held over his ears. He went stiff, looked up at us and stared.

I tried to smile reassuringly—tried to channel one of my sisters’ smiles. I pointed to my own ears and mimed lowering my hand. He pulled his hands from his ears and all sound raced back in so loudly, Arun and I both fell to our knees in the snow.

The boy slammed his hands back over his ears, his gaze frantic and apologetic.

When every single noise abruptly cut off again, dizziness made me sway on my knees. I wrestled control, blinking hard until his face came back into focus.

“No,” I mouthed as I touched his hand again. “It’s okay.”

He lowered his hands again and in the next instant, I heard the birds, the cars zooming over the street in front of the fast-food restaurant. I heard the snow hitting the water, the insanely loud cries of the ravens above us.

And I heard the sounds of a fight. Grunts, thumping noises...then a cry of pain.

Arun jumped to his feet and ran toward the noise. So did Brigg. Nanna ran back toward the truck—probably to get her nunchucks. I stared at the boy, who stayed hunched over but now stared at me with liquid brown eyes even darker than Arun’s—which I hadn’t thought possible. They were pretty much black. There was something infinitely beautiful in that gaze. I felt the overwhelming need to protect him. Someone cried out behind me and I tried to see, but a few snow-covered trees blocked the view. Nanna ran past me, her weapon in hand.

“Can you leave your hands down a few minutes?” I asked the boy. “We really need to hear what’s going on.”

He nodded. “The fight scared me. With my hands over my ears, I only hear the beautiful music.”

Whoever he was, he carried a god’s soul and some pretty strong magic. To be able to block sound for everyone else...I’d have to think on that one. I didn’t know of a god who could do that.

Someone yelled and I jumped to my feet. “Just stay here,” I said before I ran around the trees and skidded to a stop. Snow kicked up around my feet as I gaped at the woman there. My mother, looking strange in the black-feathered cloak-type thing she’d been wearing the last time I saw her, turned and roundhouse kicked a boy just as Brigg ran toward her. She’d had on a skirt before, but now she wore jeans, so her kick wasn’t hampered in the least. The boy flew back into a bank of snow. Dru raised her arm, and shock locked my knees when I saw the small crossbow in her hand.

“No!” I screamed as I ran toward her.

Brigg stopped, his face going back and forth as he looked from me to my mother.

She lowered her arm and narrowed her eyes on me. Something in her stare raised the fine hairs on the back of my neck. She looked...bad. Puffy purple circles darkened her eyes and she didn’t have on makeup. Looked like she hadn’t brushed her hair since before I’d last seen her.