Winter Lost

6

Mercy

Wind-borne magic filled my lungs and covered my skin. As if it were oxygen, it filled my muscles and lit me from the inside out. I couldn’t see, couldn’t feel, couldn’t breathe, suspended in a whiteout of icy power.

Adam’s voice centered me and I clutched at it, even as the magic fought to drag me free, drag me into the wind.

Something changed, a channel narrowed and closed. Abruptly, I was back inside my body, curled into the warmed seat of Adam’s SUV. The window I’d opened was closed. I let the empty cup fall onto the floor.

“Mercy,” Adam demanded. “What happened?”

“At a guess,” I croaked, all but crawling across the center console until my forehead found the heat of his shoulder, “Ymir may have told us the truth. It feels to me as if there might be an immortal frost giant helping this storm along. It tastes like the same magic that has my brother. And finally, I am now officially not angry that you abandoned the pack and your business to come with me.”

Winter roads are treacherous.

“That bad?” he asked.

“I have never felt anything like that,” I answered, opening the bond between us as wide as I ever had, just so I could surround myself with him. So that I wasn’t alone with the memory of that magic that had come very close to remaking me.

My husband’s warm hand came off the steering wheel and wrapped around the side of my face. The scary magic was still out there. But Adam was my lodestone. With a touch he made me feel centered. Not safe. There was nothing safe in a world that contained Bonarata. But he gifted me with his confidence, his support, and his belief that I could handle things.

All of that without saying a word.

It was a brief moment of relief, though. He had to put his hand back on the steering wheel. I was raised in the Montana mountains and lived in the capital of freezing rain, and these were the worst roads I’d ever been on. When the truckers quit driving, it was seriously bad.

“You closed the window, right?” I asked.

He nodded.

I peered out of the car to the forests, where the snow had buried everything except for the evergreens under a white blanket. The storm had not lessened just because the magic wasn’t trying to rip through me anymore.

“I don’t understand why rolling up the windows blocked—is presumably still blocking—the magic,” I said.

“Sherwood,” Adam told me. “He took a silver Sharpie and drew all over the doorjambs and inner frames on all the doors. Runes, I think. I am not sure what they do.”

“When?” I asked, startled because I hadn’t heard anything about that.

“Last night,” he said. “While you were sleeping.”

“Why don’t you know what they do?” That seemed a bit out of character for my Adam. He was a real believer in “knowledge is power.”

He sent a faint grin my way, though he didn’t take his eyes off the road. “I am not sure Sherwood knew what they were supposed to do. He wasn’t about to admit it, though, so I let it go.”

Sherwood’s fragmented memories made his magic somewhat odd. And dangerous. Ben told me a few days ago that Warren and Kyle were still finding alarm clock pieces in random places in their house. The clock had exploded in Sherwood’s house a couple of weeks ago. Sherwood did not know why the pieces ended up at Warren’s house. Darryl postulated that there might be some analogue of quantum physics in magic—I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. Darryl’s multiple PhDs could make it difficult to follow his humor.

“This storm has engulfed all of Montana, parts of Idaho, Washington, and over the border in Canada,” Adam said thoughtfully, distracting me from worrying about the dangers of riding around in a car Sherwood had done something to and back to the dangers of driving in a blizzard. “Montana is what? A hundred thousand square miles?”

“About a hundred and fifty thousand square miles,” I said. Montana history had been a requisite class when I’d been in high school, and some things stuck.

“We were supposed to have bad weather,” Adam said. “This is a storm that has been growing for a few days, but when we left this morning, it wasn’t supposed to be the storm of the century.”

“I know.”

“On a scale of one to ten,” he said, “how much power do you think a creature has to have to drag a once-in-a-century storm down on a couple of hundred thousand square miles?”

“The kind of creature that most of Northern Europe thought could bring about the end of the world,” I said, remembering the power of the magic that had tried to consume me. “Ragnarok.”

I should have been more afraid, but knowing that there was a being, presumably Ymir’s brother frost giant, out here calling the storm—that made me think saving my brother was a possibility.

Adam drove for a bit. Then he said, in a voice that was more thoughtful than worried, “I guess we better not tick off Ymir’s brother, then. Look, there’s the first sign.”

It was painted on the side of a dilapidated barn with a roof that would be lucky to survive this storm. Unlike the barn, the sign looked like someone was keeping it in good shape. Looking Glass Hot Springs, it read, Established 1894. Exit two miles ahead.

Two point two miles later there was a much, much smaller sign poking bravely out of the snowbank that read just Hot Springs with an arrow directing us to take a left turn.

Adam slowed to a stop on the highway. He was probably safe doing that. There had been no one on the road since Libby, even though I’d been assured the snowplows were out doing their thing. Somewhere that wasn’t here.

Impossible to tell if the road was in front of the sign or on the far side. There really wasn’t much of a way to tell where the highway was, either, except that it was a suspiciously wide space without trees or brush. Adam had been driving right down the middle of that space for a while.

I stared at the blowing snow outside for a second, and then popped my door open and jumped out. I paused involuntarily, waiting for the magic to hit me again.

“Mercy—” Adam stopped speaking, his eyes fixed on me.

Though the wind still tasted of magic, it made no effort to crawl through me. Too bad I didn’t know if that first time had been some sort of attack, or if my weird and unreliable immunity to magic had decided to kick in. Or, possibly, the thing the Soul Taker had done to me was relenting for a bit.

“I’ll find the road,” I told him, grabbing my coat out of the backseat and putting it on. I didn’t have to tell him to watch for traffic, because he wasn’t stupid. It was pitch-black outside. Even with the snow falling sideways, we should have some warning of other idiots out driving so long as they had their headlights on.

For lack of any other guide, I trotted through knee-high snow toward the sign. I’d planned on slowing when I got near it, but I misjudged and found myself tripping in the suddenly deeper snow when the ground disappeared under my feet. Shoulder-deep in a drift, I scrambled awkwardly back up the drop.

I made it to higher ground, but everything I wore was covered in a layer of snow. I should have put on the gloves currently sitting, warm and dry, on the floor behind my seat. I pulled my hands into the sleeves of my jacket.

The snow was deeper here than it had been on the road. I guessed the snowplows had helped the highway a bit. Even on the raised flat ground I was wading knee-deep. With a general knowledge of how rural roads and cattle guards interacted in this part of Montana, I shuffled along the edge of the drop until my shins banged into something hard and metal and possessing many different angles. I would have interesting bruises in a few hours.

I turned ninety degrees, putting my back to the sign, the buried thingy that I was pretty sure was one end of the cattle guard my gas station informant had warned me about on my right. I found a hump with the side of my foot that I decided was the first bar of the cattle guard. I wasn’t going to dig down with my bare hands to make sure. If I was correct, I was on the road.

I used the straight line of the hump to guide me across the flat, snow-covered ground that looked very much like the flat, snow-covered ground that had just dumped me in a hidden ditch. My knee found another upright something that ended below the snow level and I stopped.

I turned back to survey the roughly thirty-foot-long line my tracks made in the snow, a line that should cross the road we needed to take, while Adam waited in the middle of the highway. There still hadn’t been a car on the highway in either direction because even truckers and native Montanans didn’t travel in this kind of storm in the dark. You had to be pretty stupid to do that.

I moved to the midpoint in my line and waved Adam over. When the SUV stopped in front of me, bumper skimming the snow, I walked to the driver’s-side door instead of the passenger side.

Adam rolled the window down.

“We can’t follow a road we can’t see up the mountains without falling off the side of a cliff or into a creek,” I informed him, waving vaguely behind me at the path we needed to take, where, about a quarter of a mile away, the rugged foothills of the Cabinet Mountains rose. Between the blizzard and the night, they were almost invisible. “I think we need to go back to Libby and try this in the morning.”

My stomach hurt at the thought. My brother was caught in a trap, and I didn’t know when he was going to start thinking about a way to chew his foot off to get free. He was old, but I knew he wasn’t immortal.

Adam rolled the window back up, then got out of the SUV. He frowned ahead, then brushed the melting snow off the seat of my pants. He lifted me into his seat, which startled me by moving to adjust for the change in drivers without anyone pushing a button. I’d been hijacking Adam’s SUV enough that it recognized me. I needed to get my own daily driver.

“Take this.” Adam handed me his coat.

“What are you doing?”

Adam glanced up at the sky. There wasn’t anything to see, not in the middle of this storm. But Adam, his eyes already full of his wolf, knew where the moon was.

“We don’t know what we will be heading into,” I said. “My brother was on his own. The hot springs are supposed to be open now, but I don’t know if anyone actually lives there—and no one has been over this road in the time it took for more than a couple of feet of snow to fall. It makes more sense to turn around and come back in the morning.” The snow would still be here in the morning. “Maybe the spring.”

My brother would not last until spring. I wasn’t sure he would last a week.

Adam pulled his shirt off with less care than he’d used on his coat, and I could hear stitches give way. His knuckles were a little more defined when he gave me the shirt.

“Camping gear in the back of the SUV,” Adam’s wolf said. He breathed the frigid air with joy. “If we need it. I can find the road. Just follow me.”

In snow this deep, my coyote self would not sink to the ground. I could have run on top of the snow—but I couldn’t have been sure of the road. Adam’s wolf was nearly ten times heavier than a coyote and his paws were armed with large retractable claws that would dig down beneath the snow.

“We could drive back to Libby and bribe a snowplow,” I persisted.

“Spoilsport.” The wolf laughed, though Adam was still mostly human-shaped. “Don’t want to be trapped with me in a snowstorm?”

I rolled my eyes in a fashion his daughter had taught me. “Fine. When they shovel our frozen corpses out next spring, they can put ‘They thought it would be fun’ on our gravestone.” But inside, I was grateful. I needed to find Ymir’s brother and get him to release the spell on my brother—and the thought of retreat when we might be close to our goal felt like I was failing Gary.

Adam pulled off his boots without untying them. Rather than giving me his snowy boots, he tossed them over my shoulder into the back. His jeans ripped when he tried to unzip them with transforming hands now more suited to rending the flesh of his enemies than manipulating delicate things.

“I liked those jeans,” I told him sadly. “They hug your butt just right.”

He laughed again—though I knew that he had to be in a lot of pain already. “You can see my butt anytime you want, my love.”

I heaved a sigh as I took the wet shreds. “It’s not the same when you know I’m looking,” I told him, and tossed the mass over my shoulder, presumably on top of his boots. Maybe on top of my gloves, too.

I wasn’t as good at ignoring the cold as the wolves, though I did a lot better than they did in hot weather. I turned the vents toward me and activated the seat heater, but I left the door open as Adam changed. Closing the door on him felt too much like abandoning him to the storm.

Even if he had forgotten the magic that had tried to take me, I hadn’t. Adam was an Alpha werewolf, but he couldn’t feel magic like I could, even before the Soul Taker had had its way. Not that I could do much about any magic that came at us—but at least I could warn him if I felt it change.

The actual temperature wasn’t all that cold for a Montana winter. Seventeen degrees, the SUV said.

When the mountains got really cold, the skies were bright and clear because the air could hold no moisture at all. If it had been colder, every piece of fabric on me wouldn’t have been wet. I was wearing a coat, but my fall into the deep stuff had forced snow up the back of my coat.

I held my icy hands to the warm air blasting from the vents for relief from the wind that howled through the open door. Even with the nearness of the last full moon, it took a while for Adam to change to his wolf. He staggered to four feet and swung his head in my direction, pinning his ears in disapproval.

Shut the door.

They weren’t really words. A werewolf’s mouth and throat aren’t shaped right for speaking. But I picked out his meaning anyway, and the bond carried his unhappiness that I’d sat shivering and wet when I could have shut the door and been toasty warm…though still wet.

“When you are done,” I told him.

He growled, but most of his attention was on the final, most painful parts of the change now. He’d blocked most of it, but I could feel the edge—like the bite of a dentist’s drill when the numbing agent wasn’t quite good enough.

It took another five minutes. Being away from the pack really had slowed his change down—or else he was saving his power in case we ran into trouble. He could have drawn from me, if he’d needed to, but he didn’t. He shook himself off at last, his fur—silver and black—blending into the storm. The Marrok’s older son, Samuel, was a white wolf. He’d have been invisible.

Adam gave the open door a pointed look.

I shut the door. Unlike a werewolf, I didn’t have supernatural healing abilities, so I put on the seat belt. When I drove the SUV over or into the side of a cliff, the seat belt might be useful.

Adam jumped the length of two cars to clear the cattle guard, which wasn’t any more pleasant to cross for a wolf than a cow. When he landed, he slid off an invisible bank. Presumably that meant that the road curved just past the cattle guard. I stopped before I got to him.

Rolling down the window, I said, “It’s not too late to drive back to Libby.”

He leaped out of the snow, shook himself off, and gave me a laughing look that displayed his many sharp white teeth. Tail sweeping the air, he crouched, shoulders nearly on the ground, and then danced off in a clear invitation to play.

“Alabama boy,” I told him. “This is winter. You don’t know what you’re messing with.”

He did, of course. He’d been born and raised in the South, but he’d spent some time in the Marrok’s pack. It had been before I was born, but it would take more than a few decades to make someone forget what real winter was like.

I could feel his laughter in our bond as I rolled the window back up and he turned to face the mountains. He threw his head back and howled, his challenge echoing through the night. When nothing answered him, he set off again, zigzagging across the road in a pattern designed to take him from one edge to the other while the SUV and I crawled along behind him.

When we left the flat ground and the road climbed in the narrow valley between two steep hills, the deep snowpack lessened, replaced by drifts I could mostly avoid. I got stuck once, but shifting into four-low got me out of it. I left the SUV downshifted; we weren’t going fast anyway.

I couldn’t see the road under my tires, but with less snow, the SUV bumped in ruts and over rocks. I was able to use the feel of the car to tell me where the road was. That was the good change. The bad change was that the wind increased and I could barely see Adam—his silver-and-black coat blended a little too well with the winter night, even though I’d turned on the SUV’s big spotlights and he was only a couple of car lengths ahead of me.

I could tell we were still winding our way through the bottom of the ravine, but any smaller visual cues were obscured by the night and the blowing snow. It felt as though we’d been traveling for hours and traversed a hundred miles. According to the SUV, we’d been driving for twenty minutes since crossing the cattle guard and had covered around three miles. I wished I’d thought to ask my helpful informant how far up this road my brother’s ranch was.

There was a very real possibility that we’d drive right past it and end up somewhere lost in the Cabinet Mountains Wilderness. Adam had a sat phone, I reminded myself. If we got that lost, we could call for help. We weren’t too far from Aspen Creek, I could call—

I hit the brakes and the horn at the same time.

Adam stopped and turned to me. Driven by the need to keep him safe, I threw open the door of the SUV. I was on the road beside him when I realized I should have had Adam jump in the Sherwood-protected SUV and shut the doors instead of hopping out like an idiot. But it was too late to retreat now.

I couldn’t see it. Couldn’t see him. But I could feel him, a dense mass hidden in the heart of the storm and the darkness. And the magic.

The wind stopped as if someone flipped a switch. Not the whole storm—I could hear that continuing around us. But in the ravine in which we stood, it simply stopped. All of the snow that had been whirling about fell abruptly, leaving the air crystal clear.

The sudden-fallen snow covered me, and it covered Adam in an inches-thick blanket. The amount of snow felt as though it was too much, even with as bad as the storm was. The consistency was wrong, too—it didn’t feel like snow. It was too heavy, too stiff. And I couldn’t feel any magic at all, anywhere, as if the weird snow insulated that part of my senses.

I could have laughed in the relief of it. Except that we were not alone and my feel for magic was the only way I had to understand what we might be facing.

Everything was still, the only sound the raging storm that surrounded our little pocket of calm. I stared in front of us where something huge—half again as big as the SUV—blocked the road. Like us, it was covered in the snow. Staring at it was like looking at a piece of furniture covered with a sheet—all the important details were missing. But it moved, so whatever it was, it was alive. Breathing.

Snow tickled my nose, I sneezed, and the snow blanket fell off me in unnaturally large pieces, like a clay-mold reverse of my body. When it hit the ground, it turned to powder, as if it had been normal snow all along.

Adam shook himself clear as well. I threaded my fingers into the ruff at the base of his neck. Both of us kept our attention on the mound of white.

Finally, the shape gave an avian, rattling shiver. Instead of breaking free of the thick white covering, it absorbed the snow and grew. It rose up and unfurled huge wings, oversized even for the bulk of the creature. The wings were odd, composed of giant, snowy feathers that melted and re-formed in a way that made my eyes hurt. Fully extended, the wings stretched—improbably—from one side of the ravine to the other.

Illusion, I thought, but I wasn’t sure.

Like the feathers, the edges of the wings were hard to focus on, changing subtly moment to moment in a way that wings were not meant to.

The body the wings attached to had four legs that were covered in thick feathers of frost and snow. The front legs ended in scaled raptor’s feet complete with foot-long silvery claws that, unlike the feathers, looked as solid as Adam’s. The feathers of the back legs covered the limbs all the way to the ground, hiding the details—but I didn’t think the back legs ended in bird’s feet.

The creature’s head completed the mythological winter raptor effect, looking vaguely like that of a giant horned owl, but one that wore the colors of winter instead of autumn. Above the great dark beak were cold eyes the deep secret blue of a winter’s night. It was a being that invited a metaphorical description.

I could not see pupils in those eyes. My night vision is coyote-good, sharp-focused but sometimes uncertain about colors. The thing’s eyes were as dark as the night—I don’t know why I was so sure they were blue.

The creature stepped forward and changed as it walked, the wings folding down and smoothing into a hefty winter coat built of layers of furs like the old mountain men had worn. The being took on man-shape, tall and broad with a full white beard and hoary hair that looked like a wild pony’s mane, thick and wind-tangled. He was maybe six inches taller than Sherwood, whose human self was the largest in our pack. The frost giant wasn’t quite outside the realm of human possibility—but he was definitely on the edge of probability.

His eyes were still the eyes of the gryphon.

“Gryphons are Greek,” I said. When I am cold and scared, when I am faced with primordial and terrifying forces, when my life is on the line, sometimes the history degree makes itself felt. Because fear also tends to make me rash, my voice was accusing. “Or Persian. Or Egyptian. And they have eagle’s or hawk’s heads.”

He stopped moving forward and looked at me.

I lifted my chin as I remembered Adam’s admonition that the best path forward would be not to tick off Ymir’s brother. I stopped before I actually told him that he had done it wrong, which were the next words that wanted to come out of my mouth.

“I am no hound of Zeus,” he said, his voice softer than I expected, but there was something odd about the quality of it, piercing. “No creature of Mithra or Osiris.”

I thought I could have heard him in the middle of a roaring crowd—or battlefield. What he didn’t sound was angry, which was good. I drew a breath to figure out how to respectfully request he free my brother.

Then the Jötunn said, in that same voice, though now it seemed to rattle in my bones, “I am the wind and the storm. Hear my name and tremble, all you mortal children of weak and puling gods. I am Hrímnir.”

He sounded as though he expected me to bow to him, or tremble in fear. I was afraid, but his expectation that it was his due was annoying. The trembling I was doing had more to do with being wet and cold, or so I told myself staunchly. The wind and the storm. Hah. He was lucky I had a liberal arts degree so I knew what “puling” meant.

Adam bumped me hard because he knew me inside and out. Don’t be funny, he was telling me. Don’t be a smart-ass. Remember this is the guy who pulled up a storm that is blanketing three states.

The knowledge of how far out of our league this one was, was not useful, because when I’m really scared, really really scared, the other thing I get is angry.

Remember your brother, Adam’s second bump said.

Adam was very smart, even when I was putting words into his mouth.

It was the thought of my brother’s plight that allowed me to swallow what I wanted to say and change it into something that was more in keeping with good manners and common sense.

“We’ve felt your magic in the wind,” I said, “but we knew of you before that, Hrímnir.” My tongue didn’t want to make the rolling “r.” I ended up putting too much emphasis on it, so his name came out sounding more sarcastic than I meant it to. I went on before he had a chance to notice. “My brother came to our house unable to understand what he sees or hears. Unable to make himself understood. Ymir tells us that it’s your magic that holds him. I am here to ask you to free him of your magic.”

He stared at me with cold, predatory eyes—and I knew better than to meet the eyes of a predator unless I wanted a fight. There was something about his gaze that made it impossible to look away, the way I should have. I couldn’t sense any magic, but it was very, very hard to breathe. I was pretty sure there was a lot of magic around that only my lungs were aware of. Maybe he was hiding it. Maybe there was so much magic that I’d overloaded my ability to detect it.

At least I wasn’t drowning in insight. I had a feeling, call it self-preservation, that Hrímnir wasn’t someone whose soul I wanted to read accidentally. Or otherwise.

“I know why you are here and what you want,” the frost giant said. “My brother told me to expect you.” His eyes went from me to Adam. “Are you his? Wolves are his to call.”

A low growl rumbled out of Adam before he could stop it. And that’s when I figured out that the Jötunn wasn’t asking if I belonged to Adam. Hrímnir thought we might belong to Ymir. I wondered if that would be a good thing or a bad thing as far as getting the frost giant to fix my brother.

“Werewolves belong to themselves,” I said firmly.

Hrímnir made a scoffing noise.

“Ymir took one of our pack,” I told him. “Adam took her back.” I waited a beat. “Ymir apologized.”

The frost giant gave me a look of utter disbelief.

“He didn’t mean it,” I acknowledged. “But we did get her back.”

“He said you weren’t his.”

Yep, I thought, even his brother knows Ymir can lie.

“We aren’t.”

He stared at me again, but this time I took care to keep my eyes on his beard. He gestured to the wintry world around us and a gust of wind cut briefly through the stillness.

“I thought you would take the hint that you were not welcome. He—” He broke off abruptly, and his breath fogged in the chill. The ambient temperature dropped—my childhood senses, attuned to winter, told me it was down by twenty degrees or more. There is a feel to the air when the world achieves below-zero temperatures.

“If you take the spell off my brother,” I told him, “we will be happy to leave.”

It was the wrong thing, and I knew it as soon as I said it. He didn’t have to wait for us to leave. He could kill us here and now, and neither my brother nor Adam and I would be any bother at all. I didn’t need Adam’s warning bump to tell me I’d screwed up.

Hrímnir turned away, the skins flaring around him like a cape. I was pretty sure those were wolfskins, very large ones. The relief of being out from under the frost giant’s regard, of being able to breathe again, made me a little light-headed. He paced in an angry, agitated circle, and when he was looking at me again, he shook his head.

“No,” he said. “No. You should leave.”

I was pretty sure he hadn’t been considering letting my brother go. We were lucky in his choice—but it didn’t feel that way. I had to persuade Hrímnir to release my brother.

I needed a way in. Something we had in common. What did I have in common with an ancient frost giant except my brother? And I’d just proven that was less than useful just now.

Reading fairy tales had become something of a passion with me because I dealt so much with people who had inspired them. More than once I’d found a kernel of truth that helped me. The fae love to bargain, I thought. I was pretty confident that the Jötnar weren’t fae, no matter what they had told the government. But a bargain was almost legal tender among the creatures of power I’d met, not just the fae.

“Is there anything we can do for you that would change your mind?” I asked carefully.

Hrímnir started to reply—a negative by his body language. Then he hesitated, closed his mouth, and frowned at me. “What is it you think you can do for me?”

Not a freaking clue.

“I am Mercedes Hauptman, daughter of Coyote and mate to Adam Hauptman, who is the Alpha of the Columbia Basin Pack.” I didn’t try to match his proclamation-of-greatness tone, but a little hubris was necessary. “This is my mate, Adam Hauptman, who took our wolf back from your brother when he would have claimed her for himself.”

“Daughter of Coyote?”

I had thought that might get his attention.

“As my brother is son.” I wasn’t sure it was smart to bring my brother back into the conversation, but it also seemed counterproductive to leave him out. He was the reason I was here—I dug my fingers into Adam’s fur—the reason we were here.

Hrímnir rocked back on his heels a moment, then said in a completely different voice that had lost the German or Germanic accent entirely, “Gary is your brother?”

“Half brother.” It didn’t seem smart to say anything that he might read as a lie.

“Is Gary Coyote’s son?”

His voice was still not a frost giant’s voice.

I thought of my brother, living up here all alone. He wasn’t the type to enjoy being alone. I thought of the way I had been able to taste the frost giant’s magic in the storm. Would my brother have chased that down? Had they been friends? Acquaintances? But an acquaintance would not have engendered the complicated emotions I sensed in this…well, not a man. Being.

“Yes,” I said.

Slowly the frost giant nodded. “That explains…” Then he shook his head and drew in a breath. When he spoke again it was in that soft voice designed to make gods tremble, accent firmly back in place. “He stole from me.”

Adam ghosted in front of me, standing between me and the frost giant.

“Are you certain?” I asked, risking his temper.

He looked at me. “Can you lie? Can your brother?”

The answer was yes, of course. I didn’t want to tell him that.

“I am not fae,” I told him as a compromise, quickly following it with a question of my own. “What was stolen from you?”

But Hrímnir had turned away from me again and was pacing in his circle. Talking to himself.

“He was my friend. Our friend. He couldn’t have taken it. Taken him. He lied. They wouldn’t. He is our friend,” he muttered, then followed it with a louder and more heated statement. “He lied. He is a liar. He took it and lied.”

He seemed to be stuck there.

I loved being faced with a being of godlike powers who might be in the middle of a psychotic break, complete with vague pronouns. I didn’t know if I should interrupt or hope he forgot about us entirely.

His voice dropped again. “He hurt us. Hurt me. Did they do it together?” He stopped and looked up at the sky, where the stars were hiding behind the clouds.

“What was taken?” I asked.

He turned to me, face lighting with rage. “My harp. He took my harp.”

“I don’t know if he took it,” I told him. “He can’t tell me because of your magic. But he came to my home, a day’s journey by car. He did not bring a harp with him.”

I’d looked in his truck to see if Gary had brought any clothes—which he hadn’t. I was pretty sure I’d have noticed anything as big as a harp.

“He got away,” Hrímnir growled. “But he didn’t take it with him. It’s here. I can feel it, but I can’t get to it because he has taken refuge.”

“Someone took your harp,” I said, parsing through his words. I couldn’t tell if he was certain it had been my brother who took it or not. Maybe that’s what the argument he’d had with himself had been about. Maybe not. “You know where it is?”

His eyes narrowed on me suspiciously. “I do.”

“And it is not with my brother.”

“He took it,” he snapped with such force that I wouldn’t have been too surprised to see bits of teeth fly out of his mouth. He turned his head away in a motion that brought lashing tails to mind. “He didn’t take it. He wouldn’t. Not from us. He didn’t know what it meant.”

I’d grown up with very old and sometimes irrational creatures who could kill me if I pushed them too far. I knew what was possible and what was not. I needed to redirect Hrímnir to more useful thoughts.

“You know where the harp is,” I said. It wasn’t a question because he’d said as much. “But you can’t get to it.”

“They won’t keep it,” he said slyly. “They will all die. None of them will keep it.”

“Of course not,” I agreed. “Where is it?”

“In the holy place of fire,” he said.

I blinked at him while I assimilated that. The snow was still deep enough it was hard to see where the road was, the road that my helpful informant at the gas station had told me led to two properties. The dude ranch my brother worked on, and Looking Glass Hot Springs. One of those fit the phrase “holy place of fire” better than the other.

“You believe the harp is at the hot springs,” I said. “The resort. And you are going to let this storm rage until everyone there is dead. There are people at the hot springs now?”

“It was taken there. They took it there. He took him there.”

Truth shivered through his words. Which was very helpful because I couldn’t tell if what he said was true—which is what it felt like. Or if it was that he believed what he said—which was a different thing entirely. And it didn’t matter, because what he said didn’t make sense to me at all.

“Why can’t you just go get it?” I asked.

“They fled before me to a place they knew I could not follow,” he told me with sudden coherence. “But they will die there.” He paused and said, with the force of a prophecy, “He will die there.” Sadness came and went so fast I wasn’t sure I had seen it at all. “I may not be able to go there, this is true. But it is also true that they cannot leave unless I let them.”

“If they escape—”

“They die,” he said with a fierce smile, and I thought of the gryphon—or whatever the beast had been.

I rubbed my forehead as if pressure could make the Soul Taker’s damage go away. Wind I did not feel lifted the skins on his back and made them flutter.

“Why can’t you just go to the hot springs and retrieve the harp?” I said, holding up a hand as his anger began to rise. “I am ignorant about holy places of fire and also mostly ignorant about Jötnar. Maybe if I knew more, I could help.”

He considered me.

“This is a place where the heat of the heart of the world rises in the water,” he said. “Rich in magic and healing.” He closed his eyes and turned his hands palms up—and the air became thick with a magic as pure as the snow. Evidently, from the rush of effervescent power on my skin, my senses were noticing magic again.

He closed his hands and I could breathe, though magic still rippled around us.

“This fire I may sup upon,” he said simply. “But the land has been held sacred and the element opposes my own. Generations upon generations have made the springs a refuge. If I get too close to the fire of the holy place, I burn.”

Hot springs were not uncommon in the Rocky Mountains, of which the Cabinets were a small chunk. Many of them were secrets—there was one in the Marrok’s territory that I was pretty sure only Charles and I knew about. But at the turn of the previous century, building hotels and health spas around largish and safe-ish hot springs had been popular. Most of those naturally occurring hot springs had been considered sacred by the original inhabitants of the land. A place that held the touch of God, by whatever name people addressed him by. Holy.

Holiness was one of those things that I knew when I felt it—but I couldn’t have described it coherently if my life depended upon it. I was unclear if holiness was something that was independent of belief or not. I wasn’t even absolutely certain what it was—a force, a warding, or something else entirely. I did know that it could affect magic strongly, and sometimes unpredictably.

“Someone stole your harp from you and ran to the hot springs, where you couldn’t follow them. The harp and presumably the person or people who stole it from you are at the resort. They can’t leave, and you can’t go in to get it.”

“Yes.”

“You have made it so they cannot leave. They will die. Your harp will stay there, and you will never recover it.”

Hrímnir roared, a sound that carried with it the force of the winter wind. Cold bit at my face and burned everywhere I had skin exposed.

“Unless…” I said, letting my voice trail off.

He turned his head to me, and I felt his attention as a wave of cold. I didn’t shiver, but it took an effort.

“What if we go in and get it for you?” I suggested.