My air. My life. My angel. All things that I could not, should not, would not saddle Ellie with. Yet here I was with those wishes coiling around me like a whirlwind made of my own psyche.
I understood, yet I was utterly confused.
Why did I think this would be easy? Hope that after playing the odds with the universe, my good numbers had finally come up? I was a fool. But I’d already established that. I was a fool in love.
By all the pantheons of all the magicals everywhere on Earth, that mate magic tornado hurt. It burned like my morning cold, and like that cold, only Ellie’s touch brought relief.
You know, the exact opposite of a trickster god’s irritation.
My back stiffened. My senses heightened. And I immediately held out my arms in a defensive posture.
Nothing had changed about the woods. The snow continued to crackle and snap as it melted under the late afternoon sun. Birds chirped. Squirrels scurried and a small band of whitetail deer watched me from a respectable distance into the trees.
Yet for some reason the thought of tricksters overrode my Ellie implosion.
And yet there was nothing here out of the ordinary. The lake sloshed just beyond the trees. A few cars rumbled by on the road behind me. The animals acted in their animal ways. None of them seemed startled.
No response from Ellie, whom I was sure was still just out of reach. I yelled her name again.
Somewhere, in the trees between my truck and the cottage, someone giggled.
“Ellie!” I ran toward the cottage. Maybe if I got inside the gate, her concealments would cancel whatever spell hid her from me.
Cold wind slapped at my face and melting snow sloshed under my boots. Twigs snapped. A crow screeched as if it, too, had been startled by a trick neither of us understood. Magic wisps coiled around the trees and pushed through the brambles until I…
… crossed a threshold. Punctured a bubble. Ran through a barrier or veil or some other magical layer so thin I didn’t see it until I was literally inside it.
Elven magic announced itself. It shimmered like the auroras and it danced around them and their works as if fully willing to take responsibility for what it did. But this… this was just like the membrane I crossed the first night I entered Ellie’s cottage. This snuck in red and green, and tooth and claw. It was alive and living.
Hiding Ellie. Goading me to run.
A fae had set out a trap.
I inhaled, trying to right myself against this new, bountiful veil magic that felt more joyous than the malevolent carapace that had been manipulating St. Martin.
An elf manifested directly in front of me. His black eyes widened and his gray ponytail swayed. He gasped and touched his hand to his lips. “It worked!”
We’d met before, this elf and I. He was the one who’d helped me find Ellie’s cottage. The one who’d said he was Arne’s son. I’d mostly forgotten about him until now.
He extended his hand. “Hrokr Arnesson,” he said. “I knew that once you broke my semi-sister’s enchantments that I could rig a spell to extend that breaking to me.”
This elf stood between me and my mate.
I could backfill the holes in my life—my soul—with elven family connections. With helping raise my niece. With my calm and accepted life in Alfheim. But there was a price. An exchange, an offering of me so that I could stay a part of them.
It’s a good deal, as such deals go. I have community here. Family. But the mate magic swirled up into a vortex as if it was the living, breathing, about-to-break heart in my chest. It scoured my face. It raked my skin. It sandblasted my bones and all I felt was the bitter micro-bites of a life without Ellie.
I’d spent all of my pre-Alfheim days in that pit wailing and clawing and flailing as if I knew how to climb my way back into the sunshine. And now this elf had dropped a barrier between me and us.
Hrokr frowned and withdrew his hand, carefully wiping his palm on the black leather of his pants as if he’d just realized he’d offered me a filthy palm. He stared at his hand for a moment as if he really did believe he’d offered me a sticky, gooey handshake.
“Listen, Mr. Victorsson, my friend, I—”
He wasn’t looking at me, nor did I think he was aware of my feral cyclone of mate magic.
I had my hand around his neck before he could choke out the rest of his sentence. “Reverse the spell you used to hide Ellie.”
He blinked and opened his mouth as if I was actually choking him, and spread his hands wide to show compliance. “Sure, sure,” he said. “No problem.”
I loosened my grip.
“Well … there’s a slight problem.” He held up his hand with tiny gap between his thumb and forefinger. “The spell lines up her enchantments with mine in such a way that someone who’s broken one of the concealments—that would be you, big guy—can see one of us. It’s a wave crest-and-trough thing. So see me or see her, and we have business.” He shrugged.
I picked him up by his neck. He dangled off my arm, his hands gripping my wrist so he wouldn’t choke, and gargled out his words.
“You’re technically inside my concealments!” he gurgled. “Hurt me and you’ll stay the jotunn of Alfheim no one can bother to remember!”
He was lying. He had to be lying. “A Loki elf lies. How original.” I gave him a good shake.
“It was the only way!” he snorted out. “You’re the only one in Alfheim who cares enough about us hiddens and undesirables to help! Plus you’re the only one who broke one of the enchantments, so it’s not like I had a choice.”
I snatched his arm and whipped him around, arm pulled up and against the black leather of his hunting tunic, and pushed him face-first
