Norse Chronicles, Tome 2: Arctic Dawn

CHAPTER ONE

Oneida Lake looked almost the same as I remembered. The water was dark and glassy, the perfect mirror for a giant or a god. Late fall had come to northern New York. The surrounding trees had shed their fiery fall cloaks and encircled the lake as skeletal sentries, silent witnesses to what happened there all those weeks before. A blast of wind sent the trees swaying, and they creaked and groaned but gave away no secrets. They told me nothing about what had happened to Skyla.

The bits of detritus scattered throughout the Ramirez family’s cabin maintained the silence as well. Our sleeping gear and luggage lay undisturbed. Empty wine bottles adorned the counter, and dishes collected dust in the drying rack. I ignored the cooler squatting on the kitchen floor. The ice had certainly melted over the past five weeks, and whatever was left inside had probably bred several mold cultures I was happy to never know about. If only mold could talk. Then again, the stuff growing inside that cooler probably could.

Outside, in the front yard, a smear of burnt grass indicated the place where I had gone stellar, transmuting into that other state, but no rusty stains showed where Inyoni had bled out from a fatal cut to her throat. No remains proved Khalani, the Valkyries’ Mistress of the Blade, had existed. No ash pile signified the gravesite of Hati, the mythological wolf who’d killed my brother. No monument to my vengeance, no memorial to commemorate the place where I’d fulfilled my promises.

I had found Mani’s killer and brought him justice. Still, a hollow place lingered inside me: the hole that had formed after Mani’s death. Killing Hati had not healed it. Perhaps it restored some sense of balance, though, because I no longer felt so much like a broken-keeled ship, listing to one side.

I had never killed anything other than the occasional spider or mosquito. Hati was a man, a wolf, a monster, and I had snuffed his animating spark, or his spirit, or whatever it was that had brought him to life. Did it matter whether he was myth or real, magic or flesh and bone? I had wanted him dead, and the result was the same. I kept asking myself if I regretted killing him, if I felt bad about it, but I never did. I still don’t. Was that wrong?