AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“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.”
