He tilted his head to get me to follow, placed his hand on my lower back as I passed. Again, I felt that strange comfort seep from his touch and I raised startled, wide eyes to him only to find his narrowing at me.
The slight drop in temperature when we reached the hall started up my shivering again. Warmth seeped slowly from Vanir’s hand before he reached into the bathroom to flip on the light. He held the door open.
“Do you want to take a shower?” he asked.
I did, but not here. Not in this strange house full of men. “Just the dry clothes will be enough. Thanks.”
I locked the door behind him with my cold, shaking fingers before all my pent-up emotion rushed to the surface. I sagged over the black counter, my knuckles hurting with the effort it took to hang on to the edge. Eyes closed, I fought off panic.
Summer snow.
Mom’s hexing spell.
Murder.
I couldn’t stop the acid as it rushed up my throat. I turned, saw the lid was already up on the toilet and fell to my knees as I lost the peanut butter sandwich I’d eaten in my car earlier.
Resting there a moment, I worked to get myself under control, taking deep breaths, gagging on my own nasty saliva. I needed more than a few stolen moments alone in a bathroom so badly. I flushed the toilet, lurched back to the sink and hoped they wouldn’t mind that I opened a drawer and borrowed some toothpaste. I was not going out there with vomit breath.
I spat, ran water in the sink and lifted my gaze to the mirror. Despite the new scratches on my skin, I looked like me. Same narrow face, same gray eyes, same short, black hair. But everything, everything, felt different. Nothing about my life would ever be the same again and Mom...
The norn moved in my chest and instead of the usual shift or stretch, this felt like a swoop. I choked and the room started a slow spin around me. The white walls and black countertop smeared and lengthened, turning to zebra stripes. Still nauseated, I closed my eyes, flattened my palm over my stomach.
And then I realized what was happening and my wide, freaked-out gray eyes showed in the melting mirror.
“Oh, gods!” I whispered. “Not now, not here!”
I don’t know which gods I sent the plea to—which one was responsible for this stupid curse, which one had put this...this being inside me, but he or she didn’t listen. Never listened.
Everything spun faster and faster, until the bathroom’s stark color scheme became one swirling mass of spirals. It was like being in the center of a target sign. I didn’t have the strength for this. Not now. A loud sob escaped my throat, my face jerking toward Vanir’s voice as he pounded on the bathroom door.
That couldn’t be right. Alone, my sisters and I always went into our rune tempus alone!
Normally, I only heard my heart pounding like a base drum in my head, my blood rushing through my veins, pumping life around my eardrums. Coral described it once as being inside a seashell. It was hell on earth. I was never more aware of the fragility of life than in the beginning and end of my rune tempus. And the worst part? The helplessness. The complete inability to resist whatever power overtook me and made me write, or carve...or burn.
Vanir grunted outside the door and must have slumped against it because it rattled hard.
Exhausted, I collapsed to the floor.
The spinning shuttered to a halt. In here nothing looked different. But out there, the McConnells would be living statues, men frozen in time along with the rest of the world. The first time this had happened to me, I’d been standing at a chalkboard when the green had suddenly looked like it had turned soft, melting into goo before sweeping to the side. I’d clutched the chalk tray with frantic fingers and held on throughout. When it stopped, I’d turned to find all the other kids in class staring, locked into place. They’d looked dead. All I remember after that was whimpering, crawling under the teacher’s desk, and the hellacious fight later when Mom caught that teacher digging her sharp fingernails into my shoulders while shaking me in the hallway.
It was why Mom homeschooled us after that. If one of us went into the rune tempus and moved before we came out, others would only see me or one of my sisters blink from one spot to another. The world stopped only for the sister who went into it. Mom had never hidden the fact we carried norn souls from us, but even she hadn’t known about this weird time-stopping thing that forced us to write prophetic runes. Kat’s showed the future, Coral’s the present and mine, which came from the oldest of the norn sisters, shared the past. Mine was pretty much useless. It explained a few things sometimes, but mostly showed me things I couldn’t change.
That day in school, I’d revealed my teacher’s past affair with the principal. She wouldn’t have known it if Kat hadn’t marched into the class and read the Norse runes out loud.
Groaning, I blinked away the awful memory and moved my hand, encountering fuzz. I stared, confused by the blur of black fluff in front of my eyes before wrinkling my nose at a sudden tickle. I sneezed. When the world came back into focus, I realized I was lying on my side, on a thick, black bath rug. I never knew how much time I’d get—I didn’t control this, she did. And she wasn’t patient. So I grabbed the brass cabinet knob. I opened the door and used it for leverage.
“Please don’t break, please don’t break,” I murmured before grasping the lip of the counter and pulling myself to my feet. I reached into my back pocket for my notebook with its attached short pen. That’s when I remembered. I’d set it on the seat next to me.
In. My. Car.
Thick fear tightened my chest. My heart pounded hard. Visions of my rune-filled, purple notebook floating down that river went through my head right before the burning in my hands started.
“No.” Fingers tingling, I yanked open the drawer and pawed through the contents. A pen and paper in the bathroom would be the norm at my home—we stashed them everywhere—but most people didn’t think of a bathroom for writing. There was a packet of razors but no shaving cream, which would have worked. There were nail clippers, extra toothbrushes, and I frowned in confusion at the huge pack of batteries. None of this would help me. The sting in my fingers grew worse, so I grabbed the toothpaste again. It would work. The rune tempus stopped for nothing, and if I didn’t have something to write with, it would make me burn the symbols into the wall behind me. With my fingers. It had happened that way for Kat once. She had no fingerprints on two fingers now.
Hands shaking, I twisted off the lid and squirted a huge glob on the counter. I swooped up some onto my finger and held it to the mirror just as my muscles went rigid and she took over my body. I hated this, hated the acrid resentment that tasted like rust on my tongue, hated the loss of control...hated the constant fear that one day she’d just decide to keep me. My back snapped straight, my legs locked so hard my knees made a loud cracking sound. I stood inflexible and unable to function on my own. Every fiber of my being was under her control as I watched her raise my toothpaste-covered fingers to the mirror.
This was why Mom had yanked us from school.
The reason we got fired from more jobs than I could count.
The reason Coral was fragile, Kat always pissed.
The reason I was afraid to date.
My hand moved of its own volition and I became the messenger. The passenger. The witness.
The freaking tool.
The toothpaste oozed down the mirror, but the norn wanted the runes completely legible. My hand shook with exhaustion, yet it went down for more paste, then up to draw. Down, then up to fill in the symbols more, over and over until tears streaked down my cheeks. She couldn’t control those and I couldn’t stop them—they were the only sort of release I could get during this. I was finishing the last symbol when there was a thud against the bathroom door. It flew open and slammed into the wall.
Vanir