Cold Spell

Flannery taps the brakes quickly, hard enough to cause the back doors to slam shut, then laughs. “Looks like they’re all out of gas.”

“So Callum did buy us time,” I say.

“He did,” Flannery says. “He bought us the rest of our lives. For the low, low cost of two raccoon cages.”

I laugh, but then we’re silent for a moment as it sets in. We’re free. Both of us. This won’t just be a good story to tell Kai—it’ll be a good story to tell anyone, everyone. I feel like shouting, like celebrating; Flannery, on the other hand, looks shaken. Broken, even. She keeps looking in the rearview mirror as if she wants to see something familiar, something she loves, but it’s empty.

“So,” Flannery says, swallowing hard. “We’re going to look for Grohkta-Nap. Us and the Fenris, too. Huh.” It isn’t a question, and I can tell that despite her doubts about Mora’s divinity, Flannery is still afraid of her. I can also tell that having this plan, this mission, is the only thing stopping her from feeling totally adrift.

“You don’t have to come,” I remind her, just in case I’m reading her wrong. I want to give her an out.

“I know,” Flannery answers. “But I spent my whole life thinking she was a goddess. My whole life being the shit Princess of Kentucky and being threatened with marriage and being told lies and…” She shakes her head. “I’m free. I don’t have anywhere else to go now. And truth be told, I’d really like to stab something, so your Snow Queen will do.”

* * *

Home. We’re home.

It seemed an odd title for this place, when compared with homes in her other lives—the apartment on Fifth Avenue and the depths of the Atlantic Ocean. Different as those were, strange as they were, they felt like places she belonged. Places she loved. This place felt no more like home than the hotel rooms—a place to stay, nothing more, no matter how hard she tried to change that.

Mora let her fingers dance along tree trunks, watching frost climb from the roots to the tops of limbs at her touch. Despite there being no signs of Ginny or the Fenris on her trail, a nagging worry lingered in the back of her mind. She closed her eyes, focused on the water in the air, and made it cooler, cooler, until it became rain, then snow. It poured from the sky on her command and coated the ground, covering their tracks and freezing the Fenris out, should they be lurking somewhere close.

It almost amused her, how the Fenris probably thought they were taking any power she might have when they stripped her of her humanity. But in the ocean, her new sisters showed her how to listen to the water, how to use it for her will. Not control it, exactly, but to work with it, like convincing a wild horse to let you on its back. It was a skill Mora temporarily forgot when she first emerged from the waves and joined the Fenris, until the boy she loved kissed her and her memories returned. Now, it was easy: water in the sky to rain, rain to sleet, sleet to snow. The Fenris had inadvertently given her the very skill she needed to keep herself hidden from them.

Mora kicked at the ground, watched the snow turn to ice as it struck her boot, and then opened the front door. As expected, the cottage was disappointingly unwelcoming. She’d hoped moving into a small place, something that a grandmother or an artist might live in, would make it feel more… real than the high-end apartments and New England mansions she often took over. No such luck. Perhaps we should move again, she thought as the other members of her guard rushed to greet her at the door. They kissed her hands and the insides of her wrists, letting their fingers trail along her back. She allowed it for a moment, then stiffened; they stepped back and cast their eyes downward obediently.

“Gentlemen,” she said fondly, “this is your new brother, Kai.” She stepped aside and motioned to the doorway. Kai was there, silhouetted in gray light. Snow dusted his shoulders and his bare forearms, even clung to his thick lashes, something so attractive it made Mora press her lips together hungrily. She resisted the urge to kiss him, allowing the others to shake his hand instead. She often wondered if they really saw themselves as brothers, the way she and the other ocean girls saw themselves as sisters.

“Michael, unfortunately, didn’t make it back,” she said, dropping her head respectfully.

“What happened to him?” one of the boys—Edward—asked.

“He was shot,” Mora answered. “By hunters. And they could be following us.”

“We’ll go stand lookout,” Edward said immediately, and the others nodded in agreement. They were easily excited—there wasn’t often much to do here, few ways for them to prove their love and devotion.

“Excellent,” Mora said, smiling at them. Controlling the water was something Mora had to be taught, but controlling boys, teaching them to love her above all else? That came naturally. Perhaps it was something primal, or perhaps it was something that came from the darkness around her heart. The Fenris, after all, were all males and terribly good at convincing girls to love them, trust them. And then in the water, when she was an ocean girl, boys were hypnotized by the sound of her voice. Primal or dark, it wasn’t a skill she fully recognized until well after the boy she loved kissed her.

If you’d known back then, you’d have him here with you. But now he’s just dead in the ground. A corpse who can never love you. It was a disheartening thought, one that occurred to her daily—she could have had him, right there, and yet she had missed the chance.

That was the only thing she hated herself for.

The guards turned to go outside and begin setting up the lookout. Kai looked confused, bumbled around behind them, and shivered for a moment in the snow. Mora watched him carefully; he swallowed, and the chill bumps on his arms disappeared. He stood up straighter, now seemingly unfazed by the temperature, and walked off with another guard.

Mora sat down in a linen armchair and exhaled. Ginny wouldn’t come—they never came, in the end. A few others had gotten close, of course—Michael’s girl, Dalia, found the island even, but turned away when he broke her heart; he didn’t remember her. Mora tried, once, to choose boys who weren’t loved, who weren’t adored, but they never made good guards. It wasn’t their fault; it was just hard for her to love a boy who wasn’t a challenge. Taking an unhappy, unloved person was so much easier than taking someone like Kai. Perhaps that was why it was so simple for the Fenris to take her, change her.

She’d considered killing her boys’ lovers dozens of times. It would make it easier, but it would also draw so much attention. A trail of missing boys didn’t attract the Fenris—they targeted girls. A trail of heartbroken girls didn’t warrant their attention, either. But a trail of young, dead girls? There was nothing that would attract the Fenris quicker. Mora admired the girls that followed her, sometimes—after all, the boy she loved didn’t track her down, didn’t move heaven and earth to find her fading on the ocean floor—

Perhaps he didn’t love you enough.

She clenched her fists, then reached over to sweep a lamp onto the floor in anger. It crashed, bits of colored glass skittering across the floor. Stop it, she scolded herself. Enough. Mora stomped to the front door and looked out at her storm. The Fenris were her concern at the moment. They were the threat. And they were smart enough to follow Ginny to her.

You’re just a girl, Ginny, Mora thought, looking out at the clouds. You’re like I was, once upon a time. Innocent. Sweet. I don’t want to kill you, but I will if you make me.

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