Cold Spell

  She’d considered killing her boys’ lovers dozens of times. It would make it easier, but it would also draw so much attention. A trail of missing boys didn’t attract the Fenris—they targeted girls. A trail of heartbroken girls didn’t warrant their attention, either. But a trail of young, dead girls? There was nothing that would attract the Fenris quicker. Mora admired the girls that followed her, sometimes—after all, the boy she loved didn’t track her down, didn’t move heaven and earth to find her fading on the ocean floor—

  Perhaps he didn’t love you enough.

  She clenched her fists, then reached over to sweep a lamp onto the floor in anger. It crashed, bits of colored glass skittering across the floor. Stop it, she scolded herself. Enough. Mora stomped to the front door and looked out at her storm. The Fenris were her concern at the moment. They were the threat. And they were smart enough to follow Ginny to her.

  You’re just a girl, Ginny, Mora thought, looking out at the clouds. You’re like I was, once upon a time. Innocent. Sweet. I don’t want to kill you, but I will if you make me.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Kai was the first one to recognize our love for what it was.

  We were on the way to school and stopped by a doughnut shop on Ponce. It’s one of those places that attracts all types; blue shirts on their way to the office, the poor who just want an inexpensive breakfast, stoners who have been awake all night, and tired-looking mothers with babies in their arms.

  We got up to the counter right as a new batch of doughnuts came out of the kitchen and so, instead of ordering two apiece, Kai ordered a dozen, laughing aloud about how we should race to see who could eat their six fastest.

  “Six?” asked a woman to our left. She was tall and blonde, with skin that looked like leather and coral-colored lipstick. “Better watch how you eat now. It’ll catch up to you,” she said, giving me an especially long look.

  I made a face at her; she made an ugh noise at me and turned around to place her order (some sort of smoothie and a bagel, neither of which I realized the doughnut shop carried). Kai and I sat down at a table near the back, silently agreeing that we’d skip first period in order to enjoy our feast. We each lifted a doughnut and pretended to toast.

  “She’s right, you know,” he said in faux seriousness. “We’re going to end up like those people who get removed from their houses with forklifts, if we keep this up.”

  “Not me,” I said. “They’re going to have to just tear my house down around me.”

  Kai laughed. “Then we’ll go on a talk show, one of the trashy ones. Where we’re both huge and weird but talk about how we’ve been in love since we were little kids so we don’t care that combined, we weigh as much as an adult elephant.” I choked on a doughnut laughing, and as I regained my composure Kai grew a little quiet, realizing what he’d just said.

  “Not in love since we were little kids,” I corrected, and Kai looked down, embarrassed. I continued, “Since we were seven. Seven is just straight up ‘kid.’ Anything under six is ‘little kid.’ ”

  He exhaled and grinned. “Oh, I disagree. Under six is baby.”

  “It is not! No one remembers when they’re a baby, but I remember life before I was six. Bits and pieces anyway.”

  “Fair point. I guess I do, too,” he said, starting on a second doughnut.

  “What do you remember?”

  “Little things. Nothing important. Going to school, the red lunch box I loved. Oh, and the Easter my cousins came to town. I got into a fistfight with the older one.”

  “Who won?”

  “She did,” he said. “That’s pretty much all I remember, though, from that age.” Then he shrugged, blushing hard enough that his ears turned red. “There wasn’t much worth remembering before you, Ginny.”

  Eventually, I wrap myself in a blanket I find under a seat and fall asleep on Wallace’s floorboards. I expect Flannery to join me at some point, but when I wake up, we’ve parked and she’s sitting on the bench in front of the little table. More impressively, the table is piled high with bags of groceries, a pile of blankets, and clothes from Goodwill. She’s changed, now wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt and jeans that have so few holes, they look strange on her.

  “Where did this come from?” I ask, squinting in the sun. It’s got to be early afternoon, maybe even later.

  “This? There’s a Goodwill just around the corner.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” I say. “Where’d you get the money for all this stuff?”

  “Easy,” Flannery says. “There’s some sort of indoor pool-waterslide-thing up the street. Full of tourists—seriously, who needs to swim in November? That’s the whole point of November. You don’t have to swim. But anyway, it was easy. Picking wallets was like picking apples, for fuck’s sake.”

  “You stole people’s wallets to buy us clothes?”

  “No,” Flannery says, rolling her eyes. “I stole people’s wallets to buy us food. And blankets that don’t have raccoon fur on them. And then I stole us some clothes.”

  I frown but don’t protest too much when she hands me something from the grocery bag—beef jerky. It’s not exactly my favorite breakfast item, but I’m definitely not going to be picky at the moment.

  “So,” Flannery says once I’ve changed clothes—she greatly overestimated the size of my chest, so my shirt is huge. She’s in the driver’s seat and motions to the radio, which is playing quietly. “They say it’s snowing in Minnesota.”

  “Then that’s where we’re headed—”

  “And also Illinois and Wisconsin. Which storm is hers?”

  I exhale and sit down on one of the seats in the back. “I don’t know. Hers feel different. The cold is… darker.”

  “They don’t much report that sort of thing on the weather,” she says drily, and I glare at her.

  “Sing the song again?” I ask Flannery. “Just the part about where she lives.”

  She sings without hesitation, her voice more elegant than she is.

  She lives among the selchs and snow,

  she knows her magic well.

  She’ll call the very best to her,

  The rest she’ll send to hell.

  Perhaps hearing the song wasn’t as helpful as I expected.

  “Is there a map in here?” I ask, flipping down the visor and finding nothing.

  “No,” Flannery says, “but I know where some of the states are.”

  “Hang on,” I say, trying not to look piteous. I reach down and grab the cookbook. “There’s a map in here, somewhere….” I flip through the cookbook hurriedly, finally finding the page on the Fenris near the middle.

  “Those aren’t the states,” Flannery says, leaning over my shoulder.

  “The blue lines are the states, the light ones,” I say, motioning to the faded marks. “The black ones are where the Fenris packs are. Just ignore those; look at the state lines.”

  Her eyes widen. “Whew, look at Kentucky,” Flannery says, clucking her tongue. “We’re infested.”

  “No kidding,” I say, glancing down at the state. The thick marker lines that separate the different packs converge on the state into a blob of black that looks foreboding even just in ink. I look up, squinting to see if Grandma Dalia left any notations in pencil that I somehow missed.

  “Remind me,” Flannery says, folding her arms, “to move to Montana.” I look over and see that Montana doesn’t have any marker drawn through it. Few of the northern states do, really, save the Northeast—as if the Fenris prefer the raw heat down south.

  “Weird,” I say. “All that forest? Seems like paradise for a Fenris.”

  “No point living in paradise if there’s no food,” Flannery answers, and Keelin’s face races to my mind so quickly it unsettles my stomach. I let my eyes wander toward the three places expecting snowstorms—Illinois, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.

  “All right, there’s that line about forests earlier on, right? And with it comes a lady, from the great wood, strong and
bright,” I sing off-key. “The biggest forests out of the three are in Minnesota or Wisconsin. I don’t think there are forests in Illinois—not ‘great’ ones anyway. And Minnesota and Wisconsin probably have more snow, too.”

  “She lives among the selchs and snow,” Flannery says. She runs her finger along the map, toward the Great Lakes and along the edge of Minnesota and upper Wisconsin. “Water. Gotta be here, somewhere.”

  “Do I want to know what the selchs are?” I ask.

  “It’s what she used to be—that’s the story, anyhow. She was a selch, a water girl, and rose out to become Grohkta-Nap. That’s why she can control the snow—she controlled water for so long,” Flannery explains. “Dunno if it’s true, but either way. If her power comes from water and if she ‘lives among the selchs,’ she lives near a lake or river or something.”

  “She talks like she used to be human, though,” I say, shaking my head.

  “Maybe she was both. Don’t ask me,” Flannery says.

  I look back at the map. Water, trees, a snowstorm in both places. I narrow my eyes, trying to see past Grandma Dalia’s black lines, but it’s impossible.

  And then it hits me. I sit back, laughing under my breath that it’s taken me this long.

  “What?” Flannery asks.

  “We’re going to Minnesota,” I say. “Up in the north. Near Canada.”

  “How’d you work that out?” Flannery says, folding her arms.

  “This,” I say, tracing my finger along one of the thick lines that slices through the top of Wisconsin, then divides Minnesota in two, indicating that much of the area below belongs to the Mirror pack. “Mora’s running from the Fenris, right? This little corner, here,” I say, pointing at the northeast corner of Minnesota, on Lake Superior. “It’s the only place she’ll be safe from them. That area doesn’t belong to a single pack.”

  “She could go farther north and get even farther away from them,” Flannery says. “Into Canada.”

  “She could,” I admit. “So we need to hurry. Maybe she can get across the border, somehow, but there’s no way two girls in a stolen VW bus are making it over. But this is a start, anyway. We can go up through here,” I say, drawing my finger up the border between Minnesota and Wisconsin.

  “And then what?” Flannery asks.

  “And then we’re there.”

  “No,” she says. “Then we’re on the edge of a huge fucking forest looking for a goddess. And besides, that route takes us straight through a mess of cities.”

  “It’s the fastest.”

  “People will see us. All sorts of people.”

  “Like who?”

  “Like cops. Other buffers. Government.”

  “They’re not going to arrest us for driving through a city. Go the speed limit, signal. Don’t steal anything else. We’ll keep a low profile, won’t give them a reason to look twice at us.”

  “Yeah, thing is,” Flannery begins, “I’m not saying this for convenience’s sake. I can’t get arrested. For starters, I have a record. But second off, my mother will be looking out for me in the papers. Waiting to see my mug shot, to figure out where I am. She’ll drag me back kicking and screaming. Or dead.”

  “It’ll be fine,” I say. “I promise.”

  “All right,” Flannery says, looking doubtful.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Hotels are excellent places to pull over, not because we can afford a room, but because they’ve got massive parking lots. This hotel, in upper Indiana, has been repainted poorly—all around the fake shutters, you can see where the stucco was once avocado green instead of creamy white. Flannery and I sit in the back of Wallace, rear doors open, watching traffic on the interstate fly by.

  “How much gas do we have left?” I ask, flipping through the last of our money.

  “Half a tank,” Flannery says somberly. “Used to be able to steal it, easy. Not anymore. Had to go make everything complicated by making you pay first.”

  “Wonder why they did that,” I say. When I go to tuck the money into the cookbook—we figured it’d be safest there—Flannery’s knife flips out of the sheath on my hip for the third or fourth time today.

  “Stop it,” Flannery says. “You’re gonna break the blade.”

  “Here,” I say, sighing. As much as I like the idea of having it, we’re probably safer if it’s with Flannery anyhow. I take the sheath off and go to hand it to her.

  “Keep it,” Flannery says. “I’ve got my own.” She reaches down her shirt, between her breasts, and pulls out a knife exactly like the one I have. “Part of a set,” she says. “I don’t much care for having one in each hand, though. Makes it hard to throw a punch.”

  “How long have you had that on you?”

  “Never take it off,” she says, shrugging.

  “So you let me break into Callum’s RV and threaten you when you were wearing a knife the whole time?” I ask, and Flannery grins.

  “Aw, don’t be mad! You looked menacing!” she says when I fold my arms. “Come on. Let me show you how to use a knife, at least. It’ll help in case you need to kidnap me again.”

  It takes some convincing on Flannery’s part, especially since my pride is a little wounded. But a few minutes later, we’re standing outside, shivering every time the wind gusts through. Flannery has me start a few feet away from her, my back toward the open rear doors. She removes her knife and motions for me to do the same.

  “All right,” Flannery says, flipping the knife and catching it squarely in her palm. “What do you already know?”

  “About knife fighting?” She nods. “Nothing.” Flannery sighs and rolls her eyes at me.

  “What can you do? Run? Jump? Are you super flexible?”

  I raise an eyebrow.

  “Christ, Ginny. All right, here.” She reaches over and grabs my wrist, shaking it until I tense my muscles. “Hold it tight. But don’t treat it like it’s your hand or anything. Remember that it isn’t stuck in one spot. Yeah. Hold it tight but loose.”

  I nod, as if I understand.

  “So, the trick,” she says, “is to cut the other guy.”

  “So I gathered,” I say, and she gives me an irritated look. “What? I mean, that’s pretty obvious. Isn’t there something more to it?”

  “I’m getting there,” she says. “So, here. Try to cut me.”

  “What? Right here?”

  “What’s wrong with right here?”

  “You’re afraid of getting arrested, but you want me to try to stab you in a hotel parking lot,” I point out. “What if someone sees us?”

  Flannery laughs dangerously. “For starters—I’m not afraid. It’d just be an inconvenience. And secondly, you’re making excuses. Let’s do this.”

  Before I can answer, she runs at me, arms out, flailing, hair streaming behind her head like a crazy person. I jump out of the way and she flies by, slamming her hands onto Wallace’s back floorboard.

  “Ginny! How the fuck am I supposed to teach you if you won’t try to cut me?”

  “I don’t want to hurt you!” I protest.

  “You won’t, you’re not actually gonna get me!”

  “What the hell? I might!” I say, indignant, though I suspect Flannery has a point. She puts her hands on her hips impatiently as I adjust, ready myself. I nod, tense; she flails at me again. Right before she reaches me, I can’t help wondering what someone looking out the hotel window will think is going on.

  I lunge forward, stabbing my wrist out as if the blade is a sword. Flannery dodges it, laughs at me, and slows.

  “Shut up,” I say.

  She ignores me. “You’re trying to stab me. Why?”

  “You told me to!”

  “No, I told you to try to cut the other guy. That’s different. Don’t try to stick the other guy like a pincushion because then you’ve only got one shot—you stick out your knife, you miss, and then he guts you while you’re recovering.”

  I try not to cringe but fail; Flannery, as expected, gives m
e an exasperated look for it.

  “Instead,” she says, “just try to touch skin. Slice around, keep your arm moving, re-angle the knife. You just want to hit skin. Because… what do you do when you cut yourself?”

  I frown, thinking about the many times I’ve nicked myself with a kitchen knife. “I stare at it,” I answer. “Put a hand over the spot.”

  “Exactly,” Flannery says. “Cut them the tiniest bit, and you’ll almost always get a moment where they’re staring at the spot you hit, or where they have to fight one-armed, cause the other palm’s pressed against the wound.”

  “And that’s when I stab them?”

  Flannery studies me. “If you’ve got the stomach for it, yeah.” She lifts herself into Wallace, lunging across the floor to grab an apple she stole from a roadside stand. “There are two secrets to fighting, though—any kind of fighting,” she says as she sits back up. “The big secret and the little secret. The big one”—she pauses to stick her knife into the fruit—“is to not get in a fight to begin with.”

  “Really?” I ask, alarmed to hear something like that come out of Flannery’s mouth.

  She shrugs, slices off a bit of apple, and chews it noisily. “I’m assuming that what’s most important to you is surviving, right? In that case, don’t get into a fight. Bam. You survive.”

  “What about when you fought for me?” I say accusingly.

  “Surviving wasn’t the most important thing,” she says darkly. “And besides, that wasn’t a real fight. You think they’d have killed the Princess of Kentucky in front of her clan? Not that I couldn’t take them in a real fight, of course. Fuckers wouldn’t know what hit them—”

  “What’s the little secret?” I cut her off.

  Flannery cuts off another piece of the apple and studies it in her fingers for a moment. “Before you start, figure out who’s going to win.”

  We make it to northern Illinois before we finally pull over in a shopping center parking lot for the night. We stop the car in the back, near a closed bookstore, and spread out on Wallace’s floor. Flannery is leaning against the rear doors, letting them press against her the same way the wall of her bedroom would have back at the camp. She’s eating from a drum of cheese puffs that she stole from a display outside a gas station.