Page 4 of The Fanged One

This is amazing, her wolf corrected.

The Land Rover was where she had left it, parked in the gravel turnoff beside the road. Snow was beginning to fall again slowly. She unlocked it and opened the boot's back door. The blanket was still there from the last time she had taken Gudrun's old hound to the vet.

"In," she said, gesturing.

Fenris sniffed and gave her the look of a duke being shown to a servant's entrance. With a deep and put-upon sigh, he jumped in and looked about. Then he climbed over the back seat and stretched out along it, his eye fixed on the rearview mirror.

"Make yourself comfortable," she grunted and shut the door. It wasn't like she was dumb enough to argue with him.

She got in the driver's seat, started the engine, and put both her sweaty hands on the wheel.

"Right," she said to nobody. "Right, okay, three and a half hours to Otta. I'm putting on classical, because if I have to listen to late-night dance music right now, I'll drive us off a cliff."

She tuned through a few channels until she found some Sibelius rolling out of the speakers, soft and sad. She entered the directions to Havi's cabin into her phone, ignored all the unread messages from her family, and started driving.

In the rearview mirror, the wolf was watching her.

He is looking at me, her wolf reported.

Yes. I noticed.

He smells like magic. He smells like wild things. He smells like sex.

So you said before. He is a god, confused and possibly going to eat me by sunrise. Stop thinking about sex.

He's not confused. He is hungry.

Linnea adjusted her grip on the wheel and focused on the road ahead of her, dark and pine-walled, silvered with new snow. Behind her, the largest wolf in the Nine Worlds was lying very still and watching her in a mirror.

Linnea really, really hoped Havi was home, because if he wasn't, she was going to be fucked.

3

The cabin was dark when Linnea pulled into the gravel drive, and that alone told her she was in trouble. Dawn was breaking blue and slow over the pines, the kind of pale Norwegian dawn that took an hour to commit to actual light, and Havi's cabin sat at the end of the track with no smoke rising from the chimney.

Worse than that, Geri and Freki weren't at the tree line. According to Layla and Arne, the All-Father's two enormous gray wolves were always visible the moment a car came up the drive, and there was no sign of them now.

"Shit," Linnea muttered, killing the engine and rubbing her tired eyes.

In the back seat, Fenris had closed his eyes sometime during the last hour and was lying with his head between his paws.

"He's not here," she said, and he sat up and shook himself.

She was meant to drive to Otta, tell Havi about Fenris, hand the situation off to literally anyone with more authority, get instructions, and follow them. The plan had not included Fenris awake in the back of her car, the All-Father not at home, and Linnea about to break into a god's cabin at dawn to make another god a snack. Lady Freya had said she had a part to play in all this, and apparently, this was it.

Linnea got out, and the cold went straight through her coat. She opened the back door of the Land Rover and stood aside. Fenris climbed down and did a full-body stretch before he was gone in a black flicker between the pines before she could say anything else.

She let him go. The first thing wolves always did in a new place was to sniff.

Linnea turned to face the door of solid pine and the small carved rune above the lintel that flickered with magic when she looked at it.

Linnea glanced back at the wolf-god running between trees, sniffing the perimeter of the cabin, and back to the door again.

"Sorry," she said to the wood. "Breaking and entering it is. Please don't be mad at me, Havi. I don't know what else to do right now."

Linnea closed her eyes and shook out her hands. She was a völva, and it didn't matter that she hadn't technically finished her training with Gudrun yet. She knew the foundation of what she needed because a lock was just a knot, like a ward was a knot, and a galdr, a rune-song incantation, was something she knew how to use to unravel all three. She licked the pad of her thumb and pressed it to the rune above the lintel and closed her eyes.

"Lúk upp," she whispered. "Leysa. Lúk."