Winter Lost

13

Mercy

The first time I woke up, I was so cold my whole body felt as though I was burning—a feeling that originated at my shoulder and boiled through my body down to my toes. My head hurt so much I wouldn’t have been surprised to find I was bleeding out of my ears.

But that wasn’t the worst of it.

When the Soul Taker had altered me in October, all that I had to do was look at someone and I saw…everything, I suppose, if I’d been fool to look long enough. That had been terrible and frightening, but it had gone away when Zee had destroyed the artifact.

I knew that the creature (Garmr—I knew it was Garmr) was not feeding upon my physical body. He was reopening the channel the Soul Taker had woven using my magic—magic that was divine in nature because my father was Coyote—and my soul to force my mind to do something that it was not made to do.

In my hands, the magic of the walking stick tried to save me. But it was not a thing of soul, like Garmr was. It was not able to do much more than keep my hands warm. But that might be enough to keep Garmr from killing me.

He wanted to kill me—but help was coming.

I could feel them.

The second time I woke up, I was still cold. Someone was carrying me. I ignored that, because it wasn’t the most important thing—and if I thought about the stranger carrying me, I would get distracted. I couldn’t afford to get distracted.

This was important.

What had the frost giant promised me as we groomed the horses?

Doing the right thing doesn’t mean no one gets hurt. I understood, now, that he hadn’t been speaking about my brother, or not only about my brother. He’d been speaking about what he intended to do to me after it had been clear to him that I was not going to find the artifact before the solstice with the tools I had available to me.

I will do anything in my power to help you find it.

Hrímnir had known what the Soul Taker had done to me. He knew that the ability was still inside me, despite all that I had done to close it off. And he’d had the perfect tool to rip it open again.

Because he’d turned Garmr into something very like the hungry ghost—a creature of soul, spirit, and magic—while Garmr’s physicality was otherwise engaged.

And I knew all that because Hrímnir was watching us. And I could see—

I shivered and the motion was enough to distract me, and I could no longer hold on to the flood of information rolling by me too fast to catch or make sense of. I understood why the Soul Taker’s priest in Hrímnir’s story had gouged out his eyes in an attempt to stop this.

I don’t think it could have helped much, because my eyes were shut.

The third time I woke up, I was warm. My head still hurt, but I was getting used to that. The air I breathed in smelled like Adam, and the frost giant’s overwhelming presence was gone. It didn’t help as much as I might have hoped.

I was on a bed wrapped in a blanket. My face was buried against Adam’s hip, one arm wrapped around his leg, the other around his back. He was sitting mostly upright, pillows at his back and his shoulders against the headboard. Adam wouldn’t lie down with me vulnerable and a stranger in the room.

And there were strangers in the room.

I used the familiar scent of my mate to anchor myself, focusing on Adam and using him as a barrier to hide behind. When that worked, more or less, I seized the ties between my mate and me—pack and mate bonds.

I kept those bonds tightly shut. I didn’t want the information that was flooding my head to also flood the channels between us. I didn’t know what it would do to my mate and the pack. But I held on to them tightly, wrapping them metaphorically—and that was how my magic worked best—around my wrists as an anchor.

My head felt like a calculator that someone had managed to download the entire Internet onto. I might have managed to survive with the damage the Soul Taker had done—but I didn’t think that I could function like this for long. Something was going to give out—my heart, my head.

But Hrímnir had given this to me as a gift—and it was a gift, no matter the cost to me.

Without Hrímnir’s gift, I would not have been able to find the artifact—and I knew where it was. But I don’t think the frost giant had meant me to be this helpless—I couldn’t even bear to open my eyes for fear of what I might see.

I had this one chance to save the world. I breathed a little deeper, taking my mate’s scent into my body. I had this one chance to save Adam.

I would have to be very careful to make use of this gift. To do that—I needed to hide what had been done to me. For just a little while, I had to pretend to be normal.

“I left my rental and luggage at a gas station in Bonners Ferry,” said an unfamiliar male voice. “When it became obvious the roads were impassable, I came the rest of the way as the stag.”

“Dangerous to travel that far,” Liam said, with what sounded like disapproval.

Liam was old. He’d done a lot of things I didn’t want to know about. His devotion to Zane was fed by his ties to the Great Spell in a way that made him a servant, exactly as a vampire’s sheep are servants of the vampire they feed. But a vampire’s sheep weren’t usually powerful fae lords. The twist that made Liam serve rather than host felt like a punishment, like he’d done something to merit his fate.

I didn’t want to know what he’d done or what had been done to him—though it involved screaming. Happily, before I was drawn further into who and what Liam was, the stranger spoke again.

“I didn’t have much choice,” countered the first man. He didn’t sound defensive. “It wasn’t likely I’d meet anyone in this storm.”

The groom was here. Zane Heddar.

I didn’t need to look at him to know him.

Zane’s self didn’t hurt me as much as Liam’s. Zane had never been a mass murderer or a torturer. Or even a killer. But he was painful in another way.

Zane held his ancestors inside him, bearing the burden of the memories of every man in his family who had been one of the grooms for the Great Spell over the centuries. He knew their names, had access to their memories. If I wasn’t careful, I might get lost in those memories.

Zane understood the nature of the Great Spell in a way necessary to its survival. He’d been born with the understanding of his destiny, and it had shaped his life. There were so many people in his head, I wondered that he could function at all.

I had a vision of a five-year-old Zane standing on the railing of a balcony that was on some sort of skyscraper. I could see the other tall buildings around him; a few were higher, but he could look down on most of the city. I knew that he was deciding if he should jump or not. If he jumped, would his parents be forced to have another child? Someone else who would have to bear the weight of their ancestors? Then that chance was over, his nanny wrapping her arms around him and pulling him off the railing. She was shaking and crying.

“Meeting someone would be dangerous?” someone asked—and I realized it was me. And that I was asking why Zane and Liam both thought that him running around in the storm was dangerous for other people.

“Hello, there,” Adam murmured. “Welcome back to the land of the living.”

“That’s pretty optimistic,” I muttered. If I spoke any louder, my head would explode. “Let’s say conscious.”

“I could be satisfied with conscious,” he admitted.

“Hello, Mercy Hauptman,” said the stranger. “I’m Zane Heddar.”

“The groom,” I said—which was better than “Yes, I know.” As soon as I spoke, I realized I’d almost forgotten that we needed to do more than just get the artifact. There had to be a marriage. “You made it. Congratulations.”

There was a pause. I think they were waiting for me to pull my head away from Adam so I could see the person I was greeting. I didn’t know if looking would make my understanding of him deeper—and I had no desire to find out.

“Zane came in to save the day when Garmr—the hound—proved resistant to my attempt to destroy him,” Adam said.

And I felt Zane’s puzzlement, because he knew Garmr. The creature he’d driven off hadn’t been the way he remembered Garmr.

I knew that. Because I knew what Hrímnir had given Garmr. Receiving gifts from Hrímnir was apparently worse than receiving a gift from one of the fae. Dangerous gifts.

“Mercy?” Adam said, and I felt him tug at our bond.

I tightened my fingers—and tightened my hold keeping the tie between us closed. “Headache,” I told him. Truth. “I don’t want to make you hurt.” Also the truth—even if I wasn’t going to be able to avoid that.

“To your question about why my encountering anyone while I was running here—”

—a long, cold run, longer than he’d ever done before. The consequences of failure were so high that he fought past exhaustion into a white space where magic supplied his muscles—

“As a white stag,” I said, comprehending the problem.

There was a surprised silence.

Pretend to be normal, I chided myself. White stags. I remembered a couple of stories about white stags. “Any human who sees the white stag will hunt it until they die.”

“I was beginning to wonder if I was the one doomed to run around until I died,” said Zane—and I realized he was talking to the whole room, not just me. This wasn’t a repeat of a story. “I got stuck trekking fruitlessly around the mountains. It was frustrating as hell. I knew where the hot springs were.” There was a hollow sound as he hit something—his chest, maybe. “But I kept getting turned around—and then, about twenty minutes before I ran into you, I was allowed in.”

“Hrímnir?” asked Liam.

Oh yes, I thought dreamily. Because Garmr could have killed me—would have killed me if he’d been allowed to.

I knew that without the artifact, the frost giant’s control of his dog was not without limits. He would not have been able to stop Garmr from killing me. Hrímnir would have known that. He must have timed Zane’s arrival. But the frost giant didn’t know exactly why Garmr would want me dead, because Hrímnir didn’t understand what he’d done to Garmr. I did. I understood because no matter what form I wore—I could die.

Timor mortis conturbat me, I thought muzzily, unsure where I was getting the phrase from, my memories or the memories of someone in the room—but I knew what it meant. Hrímnir did not.

Zane, not a participant in my inner dialogue, said, “I can only suppose.”

I didn’t remember what question he was answering.

He added, “But just because I’m here in time doesn’t mean we’re in the clear.”

He was the groom, and he was here. Necessary. Right. My efforts to appear normal were doomed to failure. I needed a plan B and I couldn’t think.

“We need the lyre,” said Liam.

“Yes,” I said, my voice sounding oddly muffled. I realized my face was still pressed into Adam. His hands were threaded through my hair in a way I’d usually have noticed earlier. “Or harp. Depending apparently on which side of the wedding we’re talking about. If Hrímnir doesn’t have the lyre in his hands during your marriage, then Garmr is freed and the world ends.” I paused. “Poor Garmr. It’s tough being a good dog.”

“Who have you been talking to?” Adam asked, sounding concerned. I definitely wasn’t doing a good job of acting normal.

“I saw a frost giant about a couple of horses,” I tried. I had a sudden thought. “The eggs didn’t make it, did they?”

His warm hand resumed petting me, and his voice was definite when he said, “Mercy, no one is ever sending you to get eggs again if I have anything to say about it.”

Something happened upstairs—I felt it before I heard anything, but the soft cry caught Adam’s attention. I heard Liam’s indrawn breath before a woman’s voice called his name. The stairs were a ways away from this room, but I heard Emily’s footsteps as she ran down them.

Liam got up and strode to the door, throwing it open.

“Emily,” he said in a voice that would carry without being a shout. “Here. What’s wrong?”

“Liam, Liam.” Emily’s steps, already rapid, changed to a full-out run toward our room. But it wasn’t until she burst through the open doorway and Liam caught her by the shoulders that she said, “Victoria and Able are dead.”

The goblins, I thought. I’d all but forgotten about the goblins.

Of course the goblins had figured it out—because we’d never gotten around to asking Dylis about the music in the wall. Liam knew the lodge like a chef knows his kitchen. Therefore, I knew where Dylis’s room was, and what the outside wall butted up against.

Because of that, I knew why Dylis had heard music. The goblins had known it, too. They hadn’t needed to walk through Liam’s understanding, they only had to listen to Dylis and know the layout of the lodge.

They’d stolen the artifact—and paid the price of their theft.

“Able and Victoria?” asked Zane.

Emily asked, “Who are you?”

Liam said, “I’ll explain, but first, what happened to our guests? How did something happen to them?”

A green man couldn’t prevent harm from happening to his guests—he just took it personally when it did. He should have known when it happened…but he hadn’t known about the hungry ghost, either.

But the spirit of the lake was different, and with Liam’s knowledge, I understood why she was different. She should have been able to protect the goblins who were refugees from the storm. She should have protected them.

“How did something happen to them?” was indeed the right question, I thought. But no one in this room had the answer.

“Shot,” Emily said, sounding as if the questions were helping her regain her poise. “Both of them. Right in the middle of their foreheads.”

Goblins were fast. I could see someone shooting one before they understood what was happening, but to shoot the second one—

Adam thought, Elyna. And then he thought, Is it dark enough for her to be about?

But it hadn’t been the vampire who killed the goblins.

Emily couldn’t answer Liam’s real question, either.

That was okay. Liam was thinking what I was thinking. If the spirit of Looking Glass had not saved them, it was because they had never been refugees at all. Predators, not prey. Then, usefully, Liam showed me how the lake spirit defined the status of refugee. The goblins could have defended themselves. But it did not mean they could kill as they willed.

Timor mortis conturbat me, I thought. The fear of death disquiets me. And I knew where I’d heard it, too: English Lit 201, the fifteenth-century poet William Dunbar. My roommate had spent a week trying to memorize “The Lament for the Makaris.” But the phrase was older than that. I shivered. As old as mortal-kind, I thought.

“Let’s go up,” said Zane.

Adam said, “I’m staying here.”

That wouldn’t work. I needed him to go with Liam and Zane. I needed to be alone because I was in no shape to hunt down my prey. If Adam stayed…that would leave too many things beyond my control. I thought that I might have this one chance only.

“Go,” I told Adam, brushing my hand over the carry gun he had in the small of his back. It didn’t feel like his usual HK. “You’ll be useful. None of them can scent a trail.”

I wasn’t wrong. But I didn’t know that for sure until after I’d said it and the thoughts of the others confirmed it. I needed them all out of the room.

I didn’t have much time, I thought with black humor.

Adam stiffened—he knew I was planning something. He hesitated.

“Go,” I told him. “Please.” Oh, dear God, I prayed, let this work. One chance.

“I can stay,” Adam said, and I knew he’d caught my fear and misread it. I wasn’t worried about me; I was worried about him. About what would happen to him if I failed.

“Go,” I said, willing him to continue to believe that what I was afraid of was being left alone. “You need to go.”

He heard the utter truth in my words, because he left, shutting the door and locking it behind him. As soon as they were all gone, I sat up. Then I pulled a pillow over my lap and curled over it, resting my forehead on the cool linen. I waited for the coolness to make my head stop hurting so much, but that didn’t happen.

The door opened again. Soft, hesitant footsteps approached the bed. A gentle hand touched my head. I didn’t open my eyes, but I knew who it was. I hadn’t met him—but Liam knew him, a gentle man who was good with flowers.

“Hello, Hugo,” I said, and speaking out loud helped. Not with the pain, but with the confusion that tried to take over my thoughts. Maybe talking it through would help everything make sense. “Can I tell you a story?”

He hesitated. I wasn’t doing what he thought I would do. But he hadn’t had his magic torn open and his soul exposed to the world, so he couldn’t understand me.

“I would like to tell you a story,” I said, almost sick with fear of failure—and sadness. “Please, have a seat and listen.” I tried to infuse that last sentence with a bit of force—Adam to his pack, giving a polite order.

I didn’t need to open my eyes to know that my visitor had moved to sit on the chair in front of the window where someone else had just been sitting. I couldn’t remember if it had been Liam or Zane. Then I remembered the reason I hadn’t known which one of them had been sitting there was because I hadn’t opened my eyes once since I’d woken up. The idea of adding light to my headache still had no appeal at all.

I couldn’t read Hugo like I had Liam and Zane. Those two were old, even Zane. Maybe especially Zane.

My visitor was, in all the ways that counted just now, not old at all. I felt him as I expected a child would have felt—a rich present, here and now, but not deep or complex.

“Simple,” Liam had called Hugo once—I couldn’t remember when. The green man hadn’t been wrong about the heart of this man, who, obedient for now, walked around the bed and sat down on the chair in front of the window. Though my eyes were shut still, the dimming light told me it was already getting dark. Tomorrow would be the shortest day of the year. Solstice.

Liam was worried because the marriage should take place as dawn replaced the darkness. Not much time at all now. And I was tired, so tired of fighting to find a path through all the information bombarding my head from connections that I hadn’t quite gotten rid of when they left the room.

“I am telling the story for me, too,” I told him. “So I don’t get any of it wrong, or miss something important.”

I hoped I got some of it wrong.

My visitor made a soft noise.

“Victoria and Able are thieves,” I said. “Were thieves. Very good thieves. They were hired to steal the lyre from Hrímnir.” I paused. “Hired by Ymir, I think—but it could have been—”

“Ymir.” Hugo’s voice was toneless—something had happened to it, Liam had told us. Cancer. Something like that.

Magic, I thought tiredly.

“I was almost sure it was Ymir,” I told him. “But when the goblins went to steal the artifact, it was already gone. The storm was building and they…”

I paused. “No. I need to start with the marriage—I keep forgetting about the marriage.”

“I remember,” said my visitor darkly. “Hrímnir could, too, but he chooses to forget.”

The sudden burning rage that seared in my head wasn’t mine. I couldn’t help making a sound.

“Are you all right?” Hugo somehow managed to convey concern in his toneless voice. I had no doubt it was real concern.

Ironic, that, considering everything.

But I reminded myself who I was talking to. None of this was his fault. Most of it wasn’t his fault. He’d been facing uphill on skis without realizing it, too.

“No. But there’s nothing to be done about that.” I felt like I was in a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, where there were no happily-ever-after endings.

Now, what had we been talking about?

“Hrímnir.” I thought about Hrímnir. “Very old powers are complicated,” I said. “They compartmentalize in order to function.”

Their minds might be like mine was now, all the time. I shuddered at the thought. Even if they only had their own memories, not those of everyone around them, that was thousands of years of memories. No wonder Zee played the part of a grumpy old mechanic so intently. If he existed like this—

I dragged my straying thoughts back. It was getting harder.

“The part that you see—” I thought of the various Hrímnirs I’d seen. The gryphon. The frost giant in the wolfskin cloak. The quiet man taking care of the draft horses because he’d taken away their caretaker. The one who had engineered Garmr’s attack so that I would become what I was right now. So I could assume my role in Hrímnir’s play.

“The part you see is real and true,” I said. “But it’s not the whole truth.”

Hrímnir had sacrificed for this spell, too. I had a visceral understanding of how Great Spells worked and I didn’t know where I’d picked that up. There had to be sacrifices—and Hrímnir paid that cost willingly. Instead of a Power who could change the world, make it a better place—because that was the kind of Power Hrímnir was—he lived alone except for his good dog and an artifact, the embodiment of his Great Spell.

“He has to forget to protect the spell,” I said, understanding why that was. It was the same reason I couldn’t pay too much attention to ghosts without making them more real. Hrímnir’s knowledge of the Great Spell might make everyone remember. He held that kind of power.

“Victoria and Able,” said Hugo deliberately. He didn’t want to talk about Hrímnir. Their relationship was complicated and painful. “You were going to explain what their role was.”

“You know what role they played,” I told him involuntarily. “But this story is mostly for me, anyway.”

“I am not sure of that,” he said. “I…I don’t always remember, either. ‘Compartmentalize,’ you said.” He laughed then; it sounded awfully close to a sob. “Compartmentalize. So talk. For both of us. Explain it to me.”

“Right,” I said. “As the shortest day of the year approaches, the stronger the call.” I’d gotten that from Liam, I thought, but I wasn’t sure anymore. “People who are needed for the marriage remember, then they come. Or they come and remember. But the Great Spell is not sentient. Not quite. It runs more like an if-then conditional on a computer program. If you know about the spell—and the artifact, the harp, is the embodiment of the spell—then you are called here. You are invited to the wedding.

“Victoria and Able didn’t know about the wedding or the Great Spell or anything like that,” I said. “But they were sent to steal the artifact. They knew about it. When they abandoned their unsuccessful mission, they were called like everyone else.”

“Yes,” agreed my guest. “Yes.”

“Ymir hired them to steal the artifact and bring it to him, so that Ragnarok”—I was having trouble enough with English sounds, I couldn’t be bothered to pronounce “Ragnarok” the way Zee would have wanted me to—“so that Ragnarok would begin and he could break free and bathe in the blood of his enemies. You know what I don’t understand?”

“What?”

“How did Ymir know about the Great Spell?”

“I told him about it,” my visitor said. “I called him on the telephone a couple of months ago, when I understood what was going to happen. I called him and told him how to bring about the end of the world.”

Timor mortis conturbat me.

“Okay,” I said. “That explains Ymir.”

I’d never have figured out that one without help.

“Anyway, Able and Victoria were called to Looking Glass,” I said. “So they weren’t truly refugees of the storm.”

I clutched my pillow to my face and dried the pain-driven tears leaking out of my eyes. Hrímnir was right when he said there wasn’t much time.

“The goblins were guests,” my visitor said, sounding a little impatient. “But not refugees.”

I nodded my head into my pillow. “Victoria and Able, right.” I wondered how long I’d been sitting without speaking.

“This place is a refuge,” I said. “And people who come here in need, people like you, are protected.”

Instead of agreeing with me, Hugo said, “You aren’t a refugee, either.”

I took a breath.

“Not a refugee,” I agreed, then changed the subject. It wasn’t time for that yet. “But Victoria and Able didn’t know about the wedding, they only knew about the lyre—”

“The harp.”

“They didn’t understand why they were here. But they thought they figured it out when I told them that the artifact they were supposed to steal, the one someone else had stolen, had been brought here. Ymir, the power they served, would have been capable of herding them here—or they thought so. Dylis heard the lyre—”

“Harp,” said Hugo firmly.

“In the walls. Your room—a room in the back of the greenhouse where you sleep when you stay at the lodge—shares the back wall with Dylis’s room.”

“Yes,” he said.

“The goblins waited until everyone was out shoveling snow. They broke into the greenhouse and stole the lyre.”

“Yes,” he said. “I was asleep.”

I opened my eyes to see an older man sitting on the chair by the window. He was a little stooped and his eyes were red-rimmed, as though he’d been crying. He sat a little sideways, so I only had a clear view of the side of his body facing me.

“I have another story to tell you,” I said, “if you can bear with me just a few minutes more.”

He gave me a faint nod. He didn’t want to come to the end of our conversation any more than I did.

“My father is Coyote,” I said. “Once upon a time, he was wandering in the world and grew bored. So he put on a mortal body and lived as a young rodeo cowboy, Joe Old Coyote. Joe was a bull rider and amateur vampire killer. He didn’t remember that he used to be Coyote. He met my mother, conceived me, and then died under the fangs of some vampires he was hunting. Joe was dead, but Coyote? Death doesn’t hold any surprises—or permanence—for him. He dusted off his jeans and went back to wandering around the world. He remembered being Joe the cowboy and he remembered my mom. But he wasn’t Joe Old Coyote. My father—with all of his hopes and dreams, his love of my mother—that man was dead.” I paused. “I told my brother that story. I think he must have told it to Hrímnir.”

“I have a story, too,” Hugo said.

I had to squint, because I’d been right: keeping my eyes open made my head hurt worse.

“Once upon a time,” he said, “there was a good dog who was bored. And his master said, ‘I will give you a body, and you can go live in the world for a while as a human. Until winter solstice, when I shall take back the gift.’ ” His voice broke and he continued in a whisper. “I learned that I liked to grow plants and be useful. I liked to meet new people.” He stumbled to a halt. Then he said, “If the wedding doesn’t happen, maybe Hugo can live.”

“You became Hugo,” I said. “And you knew that Hrímnir couldn’t come here. When my brother stole the artifact, he brought it here and left it with you. Where he thought it would be safe. Why did he go back to talk to Hrímnir?”

Hugo shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said.

“I don’t think that preventing the renewal of the spell will save you,” I told him gently.

He looked down. “You don’t know that. Ymir said…”

“Ymir lies,” I told him. “You know that.”

“Maybe so,” he said. “Probably. But at least Garmr will be free. I…I will be free. And there will be no more lies.”

I was ready when he pulled out the revolver. I’d smelled the peculiar combination of gun oil, gunpowder, and char that is the scent of a recently fired gun when he’d come into the room.

Still, I waited until I saw his finger twitch before I shot him through the pillow I held in my lap. Adam’s gun, the one I’d liberated with his permission, given with a nod because Zane and Liam and Emily had been watching, wasn’t the HK I was familiar with. But Hugo was less than six feet away.

He will die there, Hrímnir had told me the first time I’d met him. I’d thought he’d been speaking of Gary. I knew now that he had not been.

Hugo’s body hit the floor, and a few seconds later, the giant beast that had ripped my mind open stood over it. He was still not quite real. His lips drew back in a snarl.

“You’ve done your job,” I told Garmr. My head hurt too much—and I was too sad—to be afraid of him. “I played my part in this farce. If you had left me alone, I’d never have figured everything out before Hugo killed me, too. Save your snarls for your master.” I put the safety back on Adam’s gun. “Hugo was always fated to die.”

The words tasted like ashes and truth on my tongue.

Adam would be here soon, drawn by the sound of his gun being fired. Zane was with him, and apparently Zane had been able to drive off Garmr. I wasn’t surprised when the door flew open with enough force to hit the wall.

But it wasn’t Adam who came in.

An elderly Native woman entered the room, clothed in a white deerskin elk-tooth dress and white leggings, her long hair a shade of gray that looked metallic silver, plaited into two braids that draped over her shoulders and down her chest, ending at her waist.

Her feet were bare and thick-soled, as if she spent most of her days without shoes. Her strong, fine-boned hands bore long, thin calluses, as if one of her usual tasks wore her skin.

Her attention was not on me but on Garmr.

“Poor boy,” she said. “Poor, dear boy. It was not her fault. She only had her part to play, and she played it. Come here.”

Garmr closed his lips over his teeth and quit growling at me. He carefully stepped over the body, around the bed, and sat at the old woman’s heel. His attention focused on her face.

She set a hand on his head, unbothered by the not-quite-realness of it. “This has been difficult for you, and your tasks are not done, poor boy. Fetch the harp for me, if you would. We have need of it tonight.”

He whined softly.

“Hugo doesn’t need it anymore,” she said. “He never did. You know that. Be a good boy and fetch it.”

He chuffed and padded out the door—giving me a baleful look over his shoulder when the old woman couldn’t see him. Then all that was left was the soft clicking of his toenails on the floor outside as he went about his task.

She surveyed the room and sighed. “Poor thing.”

I couldn’t tell if she was talking about the dog, the dead man, or me. I was feeling sorry enough for myself that I didn’t need anyone else’s sympathy.

“I don’t know why they put locks on the doors in this place,” I complained mildly.

“Locks only ever keep out people who aren’t determined to come in,” she said.

She sat down on the bed beside me. Without asking, she took the gun from my hand. I looked at it, too. It was Adam’s 1911, his spare carry gun. I had killed someone with it. I had known I would use it to kill when I took it from Adam’s holster.

After a brief examination, she set it on the bed. She put her hands on my face and looked into my eyes.

And all the pain in my head fled at her touch. The only thoughts running through my head belonged to me. I could think. I could wonder who this woman was. The spirit of Looking Glass Lake, maybe? That didn’t seem right.

“I didn’t fix you,” said the old woman. “I isolated us—gave us a pocket of time to solve our problems.”

I blinked at her. With the pain gone, I recognized her voice. “You’re the spider. The silver one.”

“Call me Asibikaashi,” she invited with a grin that briefly displayed her teeth. “Grandmother Spider. Or just Grandmother.”

“Oh, Grandmother, what big teeth you have,” I murmured, realizing only after I spoke that I was still a little woozy.

She grinned again. “Oh, no. I am no wolf. The big bad wolf is your mate.” She made a sound of appreciation, and I remembered she’d seen him naked when she had destroyed the hungry ghost. It hadn’t bothered me at the time. “A fine mate for Coyote’s daughter.”

She frowned a little and shook her head. “Such a smart boy.”

“Adam?” I asked.

“Him, too,” she said. “But I am thinking of that troublemaker, my old friend, your papa. I did not see his hand in this—and I should have. I knew you were one of his the first time I saw you.”

She perceived my confusion, because she laughed. “Oh, I have no doubt that you and I are both here for reasons that have nothing to do with putting off Ragnarok.” She gave me a sharp look, shook her head, and said, “All right. I am here for reasons that have nothing to do with that. You are pinch-hitting for your brother.”

“Did you just use a baseball analogy?” I asked.

She tapped her cheek just below her eye and said, “These old eyes see, these old ears hear.”

She stood up, taking a firm grip on my arm—much firmer than anyone of her apparent age should have been capable of. With a tug, she had me scrambling off the bed.

“Come now, child,” she said. “We have much to discuss.” She glanced at the dead body on the floor. “And better places to discuss it.”

She let me go and urged me out of the room.

“Clothes?” I suggested.

Grandmother Spider made a dismissive noise. “No one will see. We are still in our pocket outside of time.”

I might have argued with her, but I didn’t see any of our luggage lying around. Probably it was still in our original room. Being a shapeshifter meant I didn’t really care about being fully dressed anyway.

I trotted after Grandmother Spider as she made a straight line through the main hall of the lodge, the big windows framing the darkness outside. For a small old person, she was quick.

I wasn’t really surprised when she led us outside and down the path to the lake and the hot tubs. That’s when I decided I did care about being naked.

“I thought we were in a pocket out of time,” I said, my bare feet sliding on the icy path. “Shouldn’t that mean we don’t have to put up with wind and snow? Doesn’t this stupid blizzard need time for it to move?”

She laughed, a warm, youthful sound, and took my arm again. Nothing magical happened except that I didn’t fall on my butt when my foot slipped on my next step. I don’t know whether she knew I was about to fall and stopped it—or if my start when she touched me made me slip in the first place.

“The frost giant’s touch is more difficult to evade than that,” she said. “It’s a pocket, not a slice. If we can move, so also can the storm.”

She paused, closed her eyes, and lifted her face to the wind with evident enjoyment. “Ah, one doesn’t encounter a storm like this every day.”

I knew what she meant. Part of me gloried in the power of the wind and snow—I thought of Adam’s wolf dancing in the snow before he ran off to play guide for me driving the SUV.

The rest of me was tired, naked, and cold.

“Come on,” I said grumpily. “Let’s get in a hot tub before my toes turn black and fall off.”

This time there were no lights, no fire, just the steam rising from the water and the filled tubs and the snow blowing over the lake. Grandmother Spider led me past the modern tubs to the far corner where a short set of stone stairs led down to the surface of the lake.

Native stone had been used to lay out a pool in the corner of the lake. It felt like a secret, tucked to the side of the platform where the lodge amenities held court. Grandmother Spider put a bare foot in the water, took it out again, and said something in a Native tongue that I did not understand, though I felt like my skin might pick out the meaning had I been less tired.

A faint, cool white plane of light traveled from one side of the little pond, reminding me of nothing so much as the light beam from a photocopier as it reads a paper. Grandmother Spider put her foot in again, then nodded her head and stepped aside.

“Get in, get in. You’re making me cold just looking at you,” she scolded.

As I waded into the waist-high water, she took off her clothing and set it aside, well out of reach of the water, though the snow blowing past began accumulating as soon as she turned her back.

“Tell me,” she said, finding a seat along the edge that allowed the water to cover her up to her chin, “about how you ended up this damaged. There are not many things that can rip open both your soul and your magic.”

She frowned at me. “That’s not really the right word for it, either, is it? Not magic—but the source of your magic.”

She grew still and her eyes were full of starlight—though between the mist and the storm, there were no stars visible above us. “You must be precious to him for him to go to all this trouble.”

Coyote.

“But we’ll talk of him later,” she said, closing those strange eyes and snuggling down in the water. “Tell me about the thing that hurt you.”

“It was an artifact,” I said, “called the Soul Taker.”

Unlike Hrímnir, she didn’t appear to know about it. She was a good audience and she hummed a little as I talked, weaving her hands through the water. I couldn’t see exactly what she was doing. It was dark, and the water from the lake made a small waterfall into the pond, keeping the surface rippled. But I could feel her power fizz against my skin where it touched the water.

When I’d finished my story, we sat in silence for a space.

“Now tell me,” she said slowly, “how Coyote poked his nose into the frost giant’s business.”

“I think he convinced my brother to steal Hr—” I stopped at her hiss.

“Let’s not name him now,” she said, “in his storm. He can’t come here, but still…”

I nodded. “My father convinced my brother to come and steal the frost giant’s harp.”

How had Coyote found out about it? How did he find out about anything?

“Possibly the wind told him,” Grandmother Spider said, as if I’d spoken aloud. “The wind likes to flirt with Coyote.” She nodded gravely. “Go on.”

“I think my brother was supposed to steal it so that Victoria and Able, the goblins, couldn’t steal it and take it to Ymir.”

“He couldn’t be bothered to just drop in with a warning,” she muttered, her attention firmly on what her hands were doing under the water. I caught a glimpse of light playing along one of her fingers, but it was gone before I could be sure I’d actually seen anything.

“Hey, look, frost giant. Your brother is sending thieves to steal that artifact you need to keep the world from ending,” I said in a cartoon Coyote voice, before dropping into my own. “Not his style. But my brother stole the artifact. I think something about the situation tipped Gary off that our father was playing a game, though. I think he went back to check with a source he could trust. So he went to talk to H— to the frost giant, who, instead of discussing matters, hit my brother with a spell that made communication impossible.”

“By then your father knew what the Soul Taker had done to you,” Grandmother Spider said comfortably. “He had this plot going already and saw an opportunity. A unique opportunity, in fact. So he saw to it that one sibling was replaced with the other. The one who needed to be here, in this place, at this time.”

Yep. That’s what I’d thought. Coyote had played my brother not once but twice.

“To what end?” I asked.

“Hmm,” she said, bending down a bit and bringing her hands up to the surface. I saw light then, like a red thread in her hands. She lowered them again, and the water was all darkness once more. “Let me tell you how I was brought here, to this pond, to tell stories with you.” She paused and smiled. “The night before the shortest night of the year is a good time for stories. For remembering.”

The water tingled a little against my skin.

“Do you know Baba Yaga?” she asked me.

“Do you know,” I said seriously, “that is the last question I expected you to ask me tonight. Yes. Or at least I have met her. And she has taken an interest in me a time or two.”

“Ah, that might explain things,” she said. “Baba Yaga told me that she had a decoration job in Uncle Mike’s pub, and would I do her a favor?” She paused. “I owed her a small favor. And a Christmas tree in a fae pub sounded amusing—at least in theory. In practice…let us just say that I was looking for something interesting when you wandered in. Soul damage is unusual by itself. But there was more to it. And your power tasted…There are not many of Coyote’s descendants running around anymore. He doesn’t bestir himself to flirtation as much as he used to and—” She gave me a rueful look. “They do tend to die young, child.”

“Mmm,” I said.

“He and I are…well, not friends exactly, but we are friendly, and I decided to follow you a bit and see if I might mend what was broken.”

“Heal me?” I said.

“I am not a great healer,” she offered. “But I do weave, and sometimes that will substitute.”

“You came here to help me?” I said slowly. “But what about Jack? Why did you attack Jack?”

“Jack?” She paused and gave me a faintly bewildered look before comprehension dawned. “Ah, the vampire’s true love.”

I think it was supposed to sound ironic, but it sounded a little tender to me. Maybe I was projecting.

“You’d mucked about trying to heal your damage,” she said. “And it looked like you had some help, but you might tell the Dark Smith to stick to metalwork next time you see him. Clumsy repairs are guaranteed to make things worse eventually. I needed to see the actual wounding—and it was better for you to rip that patchwork off than for me to do it.”

“You can fix me?” I said.

She nodded, then said, “With help. I can fix the damage to your soul, Mercy, but it takes a holy being to fix the damage to the spark of divine that your father bequeathed you.”

She stood up. In her hands was a…a something. It looked like a piece of cloth maybe two feet by three feet, but it was made of deep red light that flickered and sparkled in turn.

Grandmother Spider walked to the edge of the pond, the one nearest the lake, and held her work over the surface.

I was somehow not surprised to see a woman rise from the steaming depths a few feet from our pond. Like Grandmother Spider she was Native, but her skin was smooth with youth and her braided hair—one long braid down her back—was pitch-black.

“She killed one who took refuge here,” she said, her voice so soft I almost could not hear her. I could feel her anger, though.

“Did she?” Grandmother Spider said.

As if her voice called him, I heard the tapping of short claws on the stone where the warmth of the lake kept the snow at bay.

“Ah,” she said, not moving from where she stood, holding the cloth of light. “Good dog. Thank you.”

I backed up so I could see the spirit of the lake, Grandmother Spider, and Garmr at the same time.

In his mouth, the great dog carried a silver lyre whose blue stones leaked light into the darkness, illuminating the woman’s face on the bottom of the lower curve of the instrument.

I took a good look at it, then took a better look at the woman who rose from the lake. It was as like her as her image in a mirror.

Grandmother Spider waved her hand at Garmr, summoning him to her. He set the lyre down and stepped into the water—which lit the submerged bits of his body with gold and red as if his coat were made of fire instead of fur. Maybe it was, just then.

He heaved his front paws to the edge of our pond, extending his nose out toward the spirit. She moved toward him and touched his muzzle.

“Hugo,” she whispered.

“Hugo never was,” Grandmother Spider told her gently. “He was an idea born in the heart of this one. This good dog who serves so that the world is not engulfed in madness. Mercy didn’t kill Hugo—he was created to live briefly and had to die this night so that Garmr could serve as he should. She did him a kindness.”

Had I? It didn’t feel like a kindness.

As if he’d heard my thoughts—and maybe he had—Garmr turned his head toward me. His tail wagged gently, splashing water on my face.

Yes, said Garmr, his voice a deep bass purr. A kindness. Though I think you would have saved him if you could have.

“He was fated to die,” I said.

From the moment he was created, Garmr agreed.

“Because of Mercy,” Grandmother Spider said, “he did not take the world with him when he went.”

He wouldn’t have wanted that, Garmr said.

I wasn’t as sure as Garmr was about Hugo’s wants, but I didn’t think this was the time to argue with him.

“Mercy has served us all,” Grandmother Spider said. “We should help her in return.”

The spirit gave the dog a thoughtful look. But when Garmr nodded, she took the cloth from Grandmother Spider’s fingers and disappeared under the water with it. For a moment I could see a faint glow, and then it was gone.

Garmr waded back out of the pond and shook himself dry—or made the motions, anyway. No water splashed around him, but his drenched fur appeared to absorb the water. In a handful of seconds, he was dry.

“Good boy,” Grandmother Spider said. “Take the harp that will be to your master, would you?”

Yes, he said. Taking the instrument in his mouth once more, he bounded over the wall and into the storm.

“There,” said Grandmother Spider in satisfaction. “That’s one thing done.” Her bright smile lit the night. “And here’s the other.”

She reached into the bottom of the pool and pulled. The cloth that emerged this time was still made of light, but now there were threads of white intermingled with the red. She held out the cloth in both hands and then wrapped it around me.

I woke up, wet and naked, sitting in the bed next to Adam’s gun. I didn’t even have time to look for a towel before Adam burst into the room—tearing the door off its hinges.

“I see Grandmother Spider was right,” I told him ruefully. “Locks only ever keep out people who aren’t determined to come in.”