Cold Spell

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Kai was the first one to recognize our love for what it was.

We were on the way to school and stopped by a doughnut shop on Ponce. It’s one of those places that attracts all types; blue shirts on their way to the office, the poor who just want an inexpensive breakfast, stoners who have been awake all night, and tired-looking mothers with babies in their arms.

We got up to the counter right as a new batch of doughnuts came out of the kitchen and so, instead of ordering two apiece, Kai ordered a dozen, laughing aloud about how we should race to see who could eat their six fastest.

“Six?” asked a woman to our left. She was tall and blonde, with skin that looked like leather and coral-colored lipstick. “Better watch how you eat now. It’ll catch up to you,” she said, giving me an especially long look.

I made a face at her; she made an ugh noise at me and turned around to place her order (some sort of smoothie and a bagel, neither of which I realized the doughnut shop carried). Kai and I sat down at a table near the back, silently agreeing that we’d skip first period in order to enjoy our feast. We each lifted a doughnut and pretended to toast.

“She’s right, you know,” he said in faux seriousness. “We’re going to end up like those people who get removed from their houses with forklifts, if we keep this up.”

“Not me,” I said. “They’re going to have to just tear my house down around me.”

Kai laughed. “Then we’ll go on a talk show, one of the trashy ones. Where we’re both huge and weird but talk about how we’ve been in love since we were little kids so we don’t care that combined, we weigh as much as an adult elephant.” I choked on a doughnut laughing, and as I regained my composure Kai grew a little quiet, realizing what he’d just said.

“Not in love since we were little kids,” I corrected, and Kai looked down, embarrassed. I continued, “Since we were seven. Seven is just straight up ‘kid.’ Anything under six is ‘little kid.’ ”

He exhaled and grinned. “Oh, I disagree. Under six is baby.”

“It is not! No one remembers when they’re a baby, but I remember life before I was six. Bits and pieces anyway.”

“Fair point. I guess I do, too,” he said, starting on a second doughnut.

“What do you remember?”

“Little things. Nothing important. Going to school, the red lunch box I loved. Oh, and the Easter my cousins came to town. I got into a fistfight with the older one.”

“Who won?”

“She did,” he said. “That’s pretty much all I remember, though, from that age.” Then he shrugged, blushing hard enough that his ears turned red. “There wasn’t much worth remembering before you, Ginny.”

Eventually, I wrap myself in a blanket I find under a seat and fall asleep on Wallace’s floorboards. I expect Flannery to join me at some point, but when I wake up, we’ve parked and she’s sitting on the bench in front of the little table. More impressively, the table is piled high with bags of groceries, a pile of blankets, and clothes from Goodwill. She’s changed, now wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt and jeans that have so few holes, they look strange on her.

“Where did this come from?” I ask, squinting in the sun. It’s got to be early afternoon, maybe even later.

“This? There’s a Goodwill just around the corner.”

“That’s not what I meant,” I say. “Where’d you get the money for all this stuff?”

“Easy,” Flannery says. “There’s some sort of indoor pool-waterslide-thing up the street. Full of tourists—seriously, who needs to swim in November? That’s the whole point of November. You don’t have to swim. But anyway, it was easy. Picking wallets was like picking apples, for fuck’s sake.”

“You stole people’s wallets to buy us clothes?”

“No,” Flannery says, rolling her eyes. “I stole people’s wallets to buy us food. And blankets that don’t have raccoon fur on them. And then I stole us some clothes.”

I frown but don’t protest too much when she hands me something from the grocery bag—beef jerky. It’s not exactly my favorite breakfast item, but I’m definitely not going to be picky at the moment.

“So,” Flannery says once I’ve changed clothes—she greatly overestimated the size of my chest, so my shirt is huge. She’s in the driver’s seat and motions to the radio, which is playing quietly. “They say it’s snowing in Minnesota.”

“Then that’s where we’re headed—”

“And also Illinois and Wisconsin. Which storm is hers?”

I exhale and sit down on one of the seats in the back. “I don’t know. Hers feel different. The cold is… darker.”

“They don’t much report that sort of thing on the weather,” she says drily, and I glare at her.

“Sing the song again?” I ask Flannery. “Just the part about where she lives.”

She sings without hesitation, her voice more elegant than she is.

She lives among the selchs and snow,

she knows her magic well.

She’ll call the very best to her,

The rest she’ll send to hell.

Perhaps hearing the song wasn’t as helpful as I expected.

“Is there a map in here?” I ask, flipping down the visor and finding nothing.

“No,” Flannery says, “but I know where some of the states are.”

“Hang on,” I say, trying not to look piteous. I reach down and grab the cookbook. “There’s a map in here, somewhere….” I flip through the cookbook hurriedly, finally finding the page on the Fenris near the middle.

“Those aren’t the states,” Flannery says, leaning over my shoulder.

“The blue lines are the states, the light ones,” I say, motioning to the faded marks. “The black ones are where the Fenris packs are. Just ignore those; look at the state lines.”

Her eyes widen. “Whew, look at Kentucky,” Flannery says, clucking her tongue. “We’re infested.”

“No kidding,” I say, glancing down at the state. The thick marker lines that separate the different packs converge on the state into a blob of black that looks foreboding even just in ink. I look up, squinting to see if Grandma Dalia left any notations in pencil that I somehow missed.

“Remind me,” Flannery says, folding her arms, “to move to Montana.” I look over and see that Montana doesn’t have any marker drawn through it. Few of the northern states do, really, save the Northeast—as if the Fenris prefer the raw heat down south.

“Weird,” I say. “All that forest? Seems like paradise for a Fenris.”

“No point living in paradise if there’s no food,” Flannery answers, and Keelin’s face races to my mind so quickly it unsettles my stomach. I let my eyes wander toward the three places expecting snowstorms—Illinois, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.

“All right, there’s that line about forests earlier on, right? And with it comes a lady, from the great wood, strong and bright,” I sing off-key. “The biggest forests out of the three are in Minnesota or Wisconsin. I don’t think there are forests in Illinois—not ‘great’ ones anyway. And Minnesota and Wisconsin probably have more snow, too.”

“She lives among the selchs and snow,” Flannery says. She runs her finger along the map, toward the Great Lakes and along the edge of Minnesota and upper Wisconsin. “Water. Gotta be here, somewhere.”

“Do I want to know what the selchs are?” I ask.

“It’s what she used to be—that’s the story, anyhow. She was a selch, a water girl, and rose out to become Grohkta-Nap. That’s why she can control the snow—she controlled water for so long,” Flannery explains. “Dunno if it’s true, but either way. If her power comes from water and if she ‘lives among the selchs,’ she lives near a lake or river or something.”

“She talks like she used to be human, though,” I say, shaking my head.

“Maybe she was both. Don’t ask me,” Flannery says.

I look back at the map. Water, trees, a snowstorm in both places. I narrow my eyes, trying to see past Grandma Dalia’s black lines, but it’s impossible.

And then it hits me. I sit back, laughing under my breath that it’s taken me this long.

“What?” Flannery asks.

“We’re going to Minnesota,” I say. “Up in the north. Near Canada.”

“How’d you work that out?” Flannery says, folding her arms.

“This,” I say, tracing my finger along one of the thick lines that slices through the top of Wisconsin, then divides Minnesota in two, indicating that much of the area below belongs to the Mirror pack. “Mora’s running from the Fenris, right? This little corner, here,” I say, pointing at the northeast corner of Minnesota, on Lake Superior. “It’s the only place she’ll be safe from them. That area doesn’t belong to a single pack.”

“She could go farther north and get even farther away from them,” Flannery says. “Into Canada.”

“She could,” I admit. “So we need to hurry. Maybe she can get across the border, somehow, but there’s no way two girls in a stolen VW bus are making it over. But this is a start, anyway. We can go up through here,” I say, drawing my finger up the border between Minnesota and Wisconsin.

“And then what?” Flannery asks.

“And then we’re there.”

“No,” she says. “Then we’re on the edge of a huge fucking forest looking for a goddess. And besides, that route takes us straight through a mess of cities.”

“It’s the fastest.”

“People will see us. All sorts of people.”

“Like who?”

“Like cops. Other buffers. Government.”

“They’re not going to arrest us for driving through a city. Go the speed limit, signal. Don’t steal anything else. We’ll keep a low profile, won’t give them a reason to look twice at us.”

“Yeah, thing is,” Flannery begins, “I’m not saying this for convenience’s sake. I can’t get arrested. For starters, I have a record. But second off, my mother will be looking out for me in the papers. Waiting to see my mug shot, to figure out where I am. She’ll drag me back kicking and screaming. Or dead.”

“It’ll be fine,” I say. “I promise.”

“All right,” Flannery says, looking doubtful.