Page 106 of Winter Lost

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.”