Winter Fire (Book I of the Winter Fire Series)

Still in my new boarding boots, I trudged past the lodge and toward the employee dorms, slowing over the bridge as I tried to sort my thoughts. Bren had spent all morning with me -- they all had -- after what they had done to Tyler, and none of them had mentioned a thing about it. Bren had probably laced his fingers through mine with the same hand he had used to hit Tyler. I felt sick and betrayed. But more disturbing to me was my quickening heartbeat as I neared the apartment building, the anticipation of seeing him offering to dissolve my fury. I shook it off and crossed the bridge.

  Their slider was open and I heard strains of harsh, raised voices from inside the apartment, but I didn’t slow to listen. Maybe Bren’s uncle had found out what they'd done, but I had as much right to yell at Bren as he did. I yanked open the heavy door, pivoted to the right, and pounded. The arguing inside the apartment halted. After a moment, Bren answered, his expression solemn.

  I took a deep, steadying breath as I stared at him, then glanced into the living room, where Frieda and Dag sat on one of the couches and Frey reclined on the other. Skye was perched next to him. A tiny icicle stabbed at my chest at the sight of her and I turned to the kitchen, where Bren’s uncle stood over the table, working on the edge of Bren’s board with a big, metal file. He was the only one not watching me.

  Bren moved aside. I took a few steps into the apartment and he closed the door behind me.

  “Jenna,” he said, “this is my uncle Val.” He glanced back at Val. “This is Jenna.”

  Val’s ice blue gaze rose to meet mine. His face was grave, but his eyes changed enough to convey warmth. “Hi Jenna."

  “Hi.” I didn’t seem able look away until he did, focusing, once again, on the edge of the board. I turned back to Bren.

  “So,” I said. “I went into the lobby just now to talk to my mother, and guess who was there?”

  “Who.” His tone was flat.

  “Tyler. And his father. Tyler looked really messed up. His face was bruised and his knee was sprained. And his father was yelling on and on to Mr. Neil and my mother about how some snowboarders attacked his son on the raceway this morning. Isn’t that horrible?”

  “Horrible.” Bren said. “Why don’t we go talk about this in my room?” He reached for my arm and I pulled away.

  “No. Why would we do that?” I wondered if he had been planning to charm me out of my anger. “This involves all of you, doesn’t it?” I glanced around the room, letting my eyes stop on each one of them. None of them made eye contact except Frieda, whose green eyes glistened when she finally looked away.

  “What are you, the Norwegian mafia?”

  A smirk broke on Frey’s face as he stared at the floor.

  “I told you I didn’t want you to do anything,” I said to Bren. It occurred to me then that he would have had to tell them all what Tyler had done. Then I remembered that Skye had known, too. I felt like I was standing there in transparent clothes.

  “Which one of you told everybody?” I asked, glaring from Bren to Skye. I studied their expressions – hers stoic, his anxious – and took a guess. “You?” I said to Bren. “So basically you completely invaded my privacy, and then went behind my back and did exactly what I asked you not to do. What you agreed not to do.”

  “I didn’t exactly agree…” he started, holding up a hand.

  “Don’t give me that. I asked you to leave it alone. And then you were with me all morning,” I glanced briefly around the room again before turning back to him, “and you acted like nothing happened. As if you didn’t just attack somebody like a pack of freaking wolves.”

  “Jenna.”

  “No.”

  “In all fairness,” Frey said, looking up at me, “the guy’s a dick. He deserved it.”

  “Not helping.” Bren closed his eyes.

  “That’s not the point,” I said to Frey, stepping around Bren. “It’s not about Tyler. You don’t understand.”

  Frey leaned forward and clasped his hands between his knees. “I do. You feel invaded. You feel like you had your choices taken away.” He said this softly, his sandy, seascape eyes moving over mine. “So you can sympathize with the next girl who takes a walk with Tyler.”

  The anger ran out of me like cold bathwater. Staring into his eyes, seeing only compassion, seeing only right, I felt lost to my own sense of things. I saw Frieda watching me in my peripheral vision, saw her shaking her head back and forth, her lips parted. I couldn’t look at her. The fact that she had known was a soft, tender bruise in my chest.

  “I should’ve told you this morning." Bren said. "I just…” He let his arms fall to his sides, shook his head. “I didn’t know how to tell you. After what you’d gone through last night…I didn’t want you to have to think about it anymore. I was trying to protect you.”

  His words rose against me like a dark wave in a recurring nightmare. I felt the familiar saline prick behind my eyes, but this time bitterness corked the tears. I let my focus blur, let everything go numb.

  “You know what?” I said, backing toward the door now, my hand searching for the knob behind me. “My father cheated on my mother for three years before she found out. And when she asked him how he could have lived in the house with us all that time, could have slept in their bed, could have eaten dinner with us every night, all without telling her a thing, do you know what he said?”

  Bren’s expression was stiff as he waited.

  “’I was trying to protect you.’” I pulled the door open, heard Bren call my name, and slammed it behind me.

  I regretted saying it all out loud as soon as I hit the cold air. I had been walking a precarious line, trying to fit in with them, and now they knew I was broken and crazy. The fear of losing Bren for good was seeping back into me now, but I was too angry to figure out how to forgive him.

  I stopped after a few paces and let my head fall back. The day had grown dark. The sky was a roiling sea, the snow drifting down toward my face like volcanic ash.

  “I can’t let her go like this,” I heard Bren say from the other side of the screen. Why was their door always open?

  “It’s for the best.” Val’s voice, quiet and rough.

  “Best for whom?”

  “For all of us,” Val said. “We agreed not to get involved with them.”

  Them?

  “And we haven’t all stuck to that plan have we?” Bren said.

  “You and Frey have had your share of women,” Val said, and I winced, tried to squeeze the image from my mind. “But this is not the same and you know it.”

  “What about the woman in Colorado?” Bren asked.

  “That was for a short time. I left my wife behind for gods’ sake.” Val was just short of yelling now.

  “You did that long before we left Asgard,” Bren shot back.

  “You’re misdirecting your anger. I understand your feelings for Jenna, but you were all incredibly careless today, both on the raceway and in the park. We're lucky she didn’t notice how the world yields to your brand of play.”

  I didn’t understand this at first, but then my breath caught. I thought about the things I had seen in the terrain park that morning. The rise and fall of the hills, the bending of the trees, the ground stretching like taffy.

  “Skye could have made her forget,” Dag said.

  This, too, was a mystery to me. What, was Skye their henchman? When I thought of what she had done to Tyler, I could almost believe it. A bump on the head like that could have given anyone amnesia.

  There was a moment of quiet. Then Bren said, “I’m going to find her.”

  “If you stalk her, she’ll feel pressured.” Frey’s voice, but closer to the door. “Just give her some space. She cares about you. It’ll all be well.”

  Their speech sounded different to me now, more formal, with a touch of an accent that I hadn’t heard before.

  “Besides,” Frieda said, “I don’t know if it’s such a good ide
a for her to be close to us now. The earthquakes…”

  “It could be nothing,” Dag said, “We’re near a fault line, aren’t we?”

  “We are, but they’ve gotten closer and more frequent,” Frey said. “I think we should speak with Sif. Just to be safe.”

  I remembered Bren asking Frieda about the earthquakes on the news. Why were they worried about earthquakes? Were they some secret society of seismologists? Is that what the rings with the cracks were about? Or maybe they were some extreme, tree-hugging protest group.

  “We’ll speak with Sif,” Bren said. “But now I need to find Jenna.”

  “She’s here.”

  I stiffened. It was the first time Skye had spoken.

  “She’s been listening.”

  Every muscle in my body gave. I turned away from the screen, afraid to see one of them step up to peer out at me. When I heard the apartment door open, I ran, tripping over my clunky boots, the rhythm of my own heavy breathing and the footsteps behind me mingling in fearsome counterpoint. I didn’t know what I was running from, didn’t know exactly what I’d heard, but the urge to escape this strange scene turned to panic as I took a long stride to make the first wooden plank of the bridge. The footsteps behind me sped, overtaking mine, and then a hand grabbed my upper arm. Bren spun me and backed me against the rail. The snow whirled around us.

  “I can’t let you leave like this,” he said.

  “I need to get out of here.” My eyes shifted frantically. I tried to pull away from him.

  “No.” He took my face in his hands. “Look at me.”

  When I avoided his gaze, he tightened his grip. “Look at me, Jenna.”

  I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to look into his face and see that I couldn’t lose him, that I would’ve done anything, forgotten anything, to be with him, but his voice had taken on the imposing tone I had heard the night before, and I felt like a magnet giving in to force.

  I raised my eyes to his and his face softened.

  “Do you really think I wanted to hurt you?” His hair lifted with a small breeze and settled around his face again.

  “No,” I said, my voice no more than a whisper. Hating the weak sound of it, I cleared my throat. “But keeping something from me is as good as a lie.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “And you didn’t respect what I wanted.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “And what you did to Tyler makes me sick.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Is that all you think you need to tell me?” It was an effort to keep the goose bumps from rising when I felt his hands on my neck. I pulled back.

  “No,” he said. “It looks like I’m going to have to tell you a lot more than that.”

  Chapter 13