Foretold

“Stop yelling!” Vanir grabbed my hands. “I was in the hall, out of sight. Heard you getting sick, so I was going to offer you some water.”

Relief swamped me. I sagged, nearly falling off the counter. He steadied me, leaving his hands on my shoulders. Big, heavy, warm. That weird comfort came from his palms, his touch. I narrowed my eyes. “What are you doing with your hands?”

He didn’t answer immediately, wasting the precious few seconds we had before the worst part of the rune tempus hit. His hands tightened. “You can feel that? I knew something was different about you.” He nodded toward the toothpaste runes, his hair sliding across his chin. “I’m not entirely sure what I’m doing, but I want to know what those—”

He broke off as the room began the slow spin, his dark eyes widening, his nostrils flaring...his hands tightening even more. “Not again,” he muttered, broken suffering giving his tone a low, gravelly sound.

Streams of pain slithered into my shoulders beneath each of his fingers. I put my hands on him, not even thinking about where. My palms slid over his bare stomach. A part of me, the part grasping for anything normal in this surreal situation, took note of how warm he was, how smooth his skin felt under my fingertips.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “There’s no time to explain, but you can’t say anything to your brothers. Promise me!”

Vanir swayed, closed his eyes. His groan vibrated under my hands.

“Promise me!” I screamed as the blood began to pulse in my ears.

“Okay, okay! Hell!” He gritted his teeth, eyes slitting open as they started to roll back in his head.

I cupped his cheeks to get him to look at me. “Hold on to the door or the counter or something. Focus on something else. Anything! It’ll help.” Not that he could. I mean, how could he? He had no idea what was going on and the rune tempus was scary as hell.

Shock lashed through my heart when his arms slid around me. He pulled me close, sliding my butt along the counter until our upper bodies were plastered together.

I didn’t mean me. I’d meant something sturdy.

But it was too late.

The room picked up speed. I closed my eyes and wrapped my arms around his back, smashing my cheek against the hot, hard muscles of his chest. I only had enough time to wish I could enjoy the way he felt before the world took off.

Faster. And faster. Black counters, shower curtain and rug blurring into the rest of the white room, slimming into lines. A swirling of dark and light that spun around and around until it felt like it pulled at limbs, tried to tug me into the abyss. And for the first time in my life, I wasn’t going through this alone. I hated that he felt this terror, but some small part of me reveled in having someone to hold on to.

I pressed into his chest. His hands dug into my back. He bowed his head, burying his face in my hair—the moan that rumbled from his throat slid under my skin to scrape my conscience raw. “I’m so sorry, so sorry,” I whispered, repeating the words over and over, my lips against his skin. I knew what he was feeling.

The effort it took to stand still.

The painful grip as you held on to something for dear life.

And in every single breath, the sucking, sickening terror that if you let go, you’d go flying into the surrounding vortex, screaming like a banshee as the world disappeared.

He swayed again. I was used to this and it nearly killed me every time. He started to sag and I squeezed him hard. He grunted, though I couldn’t have caused much pain. I wrapped my legs around him to help keep him steady on his feet.

It didn’t occur to me what this would do to our lower bodies.

I went hot. Everywhere. His back went rigid. He pulled back to look down at me and I realized I’d picked the only sure way to distract a guy. His mouth was a heartbeat from mine, his breath caressing my face.

Fire crawled up my neck. I bit my lip when I saw the answering flare of heat in his dark eyes. I gasped, my mouth falling open.

He swooped in and I let him.

Anticipation fluttered in my belly as his lips pressed mine. His hands flattened on my spine before sliding down to grip my waist. He pulled away, glittering eyes staring at me, one of his hands gliding up to wrap the back of my neck. Warm fingers slipped into my short hair. I tilted my head and this time he opened my lips with his, slipping his tongue inside my mouth. I had a second to be glad I’d swished some toothpaste in my mouth when the world around us literally jerked to a stop.

Vanir wrenched away, his hands coming up to make sure I didn’t fall even as he did. His legs wobbled as he took one step back and then another before he fell through the open doorway.

His slam into the wall rattled the entire hallway. He sagged to the floor, his face pasty, sweat in a fine sheen over his cheeks and forehead. I scrambled off the counter, followed and shut the bathroom door so nobody saw the runes before I could clean them off. I knelt beside him. He stared at me through barely cracked lids, his features slack with disorientation. “Pointy,” he slurred. “When I first came in...your face...was pointy.”

“Huh?”

He frowned and reached up to touch my chin.

Ari hustled into the hall. Hallur cursed loudly from the other room. “What happened?” he yelled. There was a thunderous groan, a thump. More curses.

“He fell,” I croaked. I bent over Vanir, hiding my shaking hands by slipping them under his head to adjust his neck to a better angle. “I got sick,” I added, looking up at Ari. I hoped that explained the dry croak of my voice. “I think he was checking on me and must have tripped.”

“Probably on his own feet since he’s not done growing into them yet.” Ari squatted next to me and I glanced up to find his gaze on my arms because I was unable to mask their trembling. “Let me take care of him. You’re still wet and need to get into dry clothes. I hear Aunt Sarah pulling up now.

So could I, now that he’d pointed it out. With the fire crackling, the brothers talking and snow pelting the window of the kitchen just down the hall, I was surprised I could hear the engine.

“Diesel,” he said as if he could read my mind. “She’s a doctor, does a lot of house calls for the family, so she needed a four-wheel drive—good thing now with all that snow, isn’t it?”

I started to nod and pain reminded me of the lump on my head. The episode in the bathroom had completely distracted me from all the discomfort, but the rune tempus had soaked up the last of my energy and the aches came roaring back to life. It felt like someone had stuffed me in a giant hamster ball and tossed me down a rocky incline. A long one.

Glancing one more time at Vanir, I saw that he was more awake than before, anger simmering in his gaze, fueling questions I would have to come up with a way to answer. I let go, wincing with him when I dropped his head back onto the hardwood floor.

“Sorry,” I murmured. Looked like I would be saying that to him a lot.

Ari pulled me to my feet and I offered him a quick smile before opening the door to the bathroom just enough to slide quickly through. On the mirror, the runes were thick—I’d used the entire large tube of toothpaste.

“‘In violence conceived,’” I whispered, finally focusing on the actual words now that the shock of Vanir joining my rune tempus wasn’t in my face. Digging through my exhaustion, I tried to find a memory that would explain this. My rune tempus hardly ever gave me anything useful, but this...this felt infinitely important. Probably because my churning gut was telling me this was about me and my sisters. But wrapping my mind around the horrific explanation buzzing about my subconscious couldn’t happen right now.

A noise outside the bathroom only proved that true. I shoved it aside for later, and as quietly as possible I opened drawers until I found one with towels.

But how would I explain squirting all their toothpaste into a towel?

Instead, I opened the cabinet under the sink and snatched a new toilet paper roll. I started tearing off paper and swiping the drying paste. I had to wet a lot of the paper and the streaks left on the mirror panicked me until I remembered a bottle of Windex next to the toilet paper stash.

With the Windex, it went faster. Sort of. Toilet paper left little annoying flakes. When the mirror finally sparkled, I flushed some of the paper down the toilet, then crumpled the rest as small as I could and pushed it down into the trash.

I looked at the scratches covering my face. I’d barely realized they were there because the main wound was so painful. The cold probably numbed me because I hadn’t even felt them. Running my finger along a particularly nasty cut across my forehead, I winced when it ended at the most tender spot on my head. A lump raised the skin slightly.

My hair was something else. I liked the gelled, spiky look I usually wore, but this? Looked like I’d given up shampoo altogether. Stubby tangles twisted together on my head like a nest of dirty snakes. Stubby, growth-challenged snakes.

Hard to believe Vanir wanted to kiss this.

I touched my lips, stunned again over how he’d felt. Tasted. Squirming at the memory, I pulled off my jacket, turtleneck and T-shirt. Even my plain white bra was stained from the nasty river water. But I left it on. Going braless in a thin top was so not happening.

Getting my jeans off took a lot longer. They’d stuck to my body. By the time I slid into the huge drawstring sweatpants and long white shirt, all I wanted to do was curl up on the bath rug and sleep. Shut this world out for a little while, because exhaustion tugged at my every muscle and bone, threatening to shut me down.

Glancing around the bathroom, I gathered the still-wet clothes into a ball and tiptoed into the hall. The hardwood froze my bare feet. The legs of the sweats flopped over my toes as I stood indecisive in the hall.

I heard them in the kitchen, whisper-arguing.

Holding my breath, I took a few steps closer, as silently as I could. Should have felt bad for eavesdropping, but I didn’t. I was going to have to come clean. Tell them about my mother. I couldn’t let that boy’s family deal with years of unanswered questions on top of their grief.

But...she was still my mother. Still the same woman who used to squeeze me tight and sing silly, made-up lullabies. The one who’d become so enraged by a teacher daring to hurt one of her daughters, she’d studied schoolwork right along with us so she could teach us well. There’d been good times between all the manic ones. She deserved for me to make sure I was certain before throwing her in front of the bus.

I stepped closer to the door opening, gripping the clothes so hard the wet material soaked into my borrowed clothes.

Vanir suddenly snapped in a fierce undertone. “Think about it! The raven is sacred. My birthday is two days away and she shows up now?”

“That’s just it.” Hallur’s voice was nearly a growl. “We don’t even know what’s supposed to happen on your birthday and now a boy is dead. He won’t be the first and you know it. So a distraction right now—”

“She’s a girl, not a distraction.”

The humor in the next tone let me know it was Ari. “All girls are distractions.”

There was a loud thump. Sounded like the cast again. Hallur’s anger coated his voice like molasses, making it slow, the words heavy. “The raven is a sign of war. They come to feed upon the dead.”

Vanir sighed. “So do the wolves, Hallur.”

“Yes, and the time of the wolves could be here. We’ve known this from the moment Geri and Freak followed you home as puppies. And now someone has been killed? Snow is swallowing the world? You think this is coincidence?”

“I don’t know.” Vanir’s voice, heavy with grief and indecision, burned my already roiling stomach.

“Listen, Vanir.” This from Hallur again. “Something about this girl makes the hair on my neck stand up. I want her gone.”

“I can’t.” Vanir’s voice was so low I barely heard the two words.

“What do you mean, you can’t?” Hallur’s tone turned even more fierce and guttural.

There was a long silence in the room.

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