And I was. My car was locked and I had a weapon. But I couldn’t shake the discomfort and realized it was probably coming from my norn. She’d been shoving her own feelings into me more often lately. The emotion could be coming from my sisters. We had a weird connection as triplets and it was probably one hundred times stronger because we also all carried the souls of the norn sisters—the three goddesses who had lived beneath the world tree called Yggdrasil.
Those shared feelings had helped us out more times than I could count. And my sisters had no idea I’d sort of made it my life’s work to watch out for them. Raven was always too busy working and trying to keep things together. Coral spent her time studying and fretting. It was an old-fashioned word, but the first time I’d read it, I’d stuck it to Coral because it fit. She was the softest one of us. The quickest to tears. When we were little, sometimes all I had to do was look at her a certain way and her eyes would fill up.
Eyeing my phone, I thought about calling her. Checking in. She’d sounded funny during our last call, and I’d had the distinct feeling she’d been keeping something from me.
The three of us had split up for the first time in our lives, each going after a boy who could possibly carry the soul of a Norse god. A future warrior who needed to make it to the final battles—one who didn’t deserve problems from Dru.
Nose-hair man started toward my car again, and my unease kicked into high gear. I held up my pepper spray, watched with real satisfaction as his eyes grew wide; then I jammed my Jeep into Reverse and peeled out so fast, he had to jump away from my car.
He could have been harmless, but it was better not to take that chance.
Me and cynicism. BFFs.
As I drove back to the truck stop I’d passed on my way into this town, something Raven had said on the phone kept replaying my mind—kind of like one of those earworms that crawls deep into the brain to eat all the good songs.
“Mom changed things, so maybe she’s altered all of it and fate is now in our hands.”
Ha! Our fate had never been in our hands. We’d all grown up in fear, moving from one place to another, watching the woman who called herself our mother slowly coast along the edges of the Loony Bin Highway. Then, after years of manic ups and downs, Dru had finally steered herself directly onto it. Full speed ahead. She was out there somewhere, terrorizing someone who might or might not carry a Norse god’s soul.
Like me.
But after this morning’s phone call with Raven, I now knew she was in Oklahoma.
Driving all the way to Oklahoma after coming straight here from Florida was probably a dumb-ass move, but I wasn’t leaving Raven alone to deal with Dru.
Lately, she’d been so weird, who knew? It was possible she’d moved into murderer territory. Recently, my norn had given me a message that said “mother berserker.” I’d shown it to my sisters.
But I hadn’t told them about the time I’d seen her standing in the backyard, a swarm of snakes writhing around her ankles, with this creepy, creepy smile that had made her mouth seem out of proportion. She’d looked at those snakes like they were her children.
Though the first spine-chilling word that had whispered through my mind had been something entirely different.
Minions.
I got in the small line for food at the truck stop, barely looking at my surroundings. I’d stopped in a bunch of places like this on the way here from Florida. The trip had taken me days because of the weather. But like everywhere else, the fear coming off the people made me slightly nauseas. I’d expected it to be easier up here. People this far north were used to early snowstorms, but even they knew this was too early and not exactly natural. Not when it was snowing everywhere in the world. I caught snatches of quiet conversations coming from those in line and in the small booths.
“Old Mrs. Northrup’s heat went out last night in one of the power outages. Her daughter found her this morning. Froze in her own bed...”
“Did you hear that they ran out of gas already at the Exxon station over on...”
“One of the park rangers told my husband he saw one of those aurora borealis things twice in the past week. Right over the lake. They’ve only happened a few times before and never when it’s this overcast. My husband got so scared, he went up and bought all the beans at the grocery store. Can you believe it? Beans! If it’s end times, the last thing I want is to be holed up in my home with a man on a steady diet of musical fruit. Might as well shoot me now before the misery starts”
I had to turn away because I choked on a laugh. Death and farting—true end of the world conversation. It wasn’t the first strange topic I’d heard in these sorts of places. I decided to go ahead and get what road food I could instead of eating here, so I stepped out of line. As I walked down the few aisles, I was surprised to see anything left on the ratty shelves. With the snow getting worse, the shelves would empty fast, and who knew what I’d find on the drive to Oklahoma.
After grabbing crackers, canned chicken and iffy-dated peanut butter, I got into the checkout line. My vision blurred from exhaustion. I should be finding a motel, but I didn’t trust Dru. And unfortunately I didn’t trust either of my sisters to send her butt to jail, either. They always gave our mother the benefit of the doubt. Not me. Not since I’d watched her sit and pee herself as she surrendered to the lure of her inner catatonic world when she had three small children living in a freaking tent. That was around the time Coral had started having nightmares about a silver-haired man crouching over us at night.
I’d never seen him, but I’d barely slept for weeks after that, keeping watch. Something in her expression—her absolute certainty—had scared the crap out of me.
“Hey, you’re next.”
I blinked my gritty eyes and looked down at the person sitting in the booth next to the checkout line. “Huh?”
“The line moved without you.” She pointed.
Right then it felt like someone stabbed a hot poker through my chest.
“Oh no, not now,” I whispered through gritted teeth.
But as usual, the She Leech did whatever she wanted. I frantically looked around for a place to hide and realized sitting in an empty booth would draw less attention. I set my items on the table, then looked up at the wall menu like I planned to buy a meal. The red letters smeared hard to the left, and I squeezed my eyes tight and tried to not look as the world went into chaos around me. It wasn’t so hard lately because the pain that came with my rune tempus sort of obliterated everything else, anyway. Everything around me—the diner, the people, the shelves—would be in a spin. When I was younger, this was the only part of the process I liked because it felt like jumping into a kaleidoscope and watching the colors swirl around me. Or like being on my favorite ride at the fair. The one with the huge steering wheel in the middle so people could get a good spin in the hooded seats big enough for me and both sisters.
But the next part of my rune tempus ripped my soul out.
Being a host. Being forced to write messages against my will. Being at someone else’s mercy. It was like each and every time took away a little more of me. Broke down what made me feel like me. And what made me feel like me was being in control of my own damned life.
I peeked to see if the world had shuddered to a halt and found what I expected. The people in the booth next to me had been frozen midbite. The lady held a pickle over her mouth like she was dangling spaghetti into it. The man across from her had his nose wrinkled in distaste as he picked something off an onion ring. I squinted.