Most of the snow had melted. Dripping icicles hung from the roofline over the cottage’s big window, each glistening in the early evening sun. The remainder of a drift leaned against the cottage, and every time melt water landed in the crispy snow, it crackled and cracked like an iceberg.
Bloodyhoof pawed at the mud and nibbled on the little bit of grass still available. Up in the tree, a jay called. Somewhere out in the woods, a raven answered. The cottage’s ash rustled in the slow, cold breeze. And Ellie shimmered like a goddess of chaos.
She stared at the gate as if waiting for the kelpie to crawl back on his hands and knees begging her to rip him to pieces.
“Ellie,” I said.
She twitched and continued to stare at the gate. “Kelpie’s blood burns bright,” she muttered.
A century ago I watched the same thing happen to Rose. The same fires. The same mutterings about blood and magic. The elves helped then. They couldn’t now.
“Hey. Hey, honey. Look at me.” I touched her shoulder.
Her overheating witch power ripped up my arm and into my shoulder socket, and I pulled back my hand as if I’d just touched a hot stove.
Dark power pulsed out the sides of her eyes. She looked at my hand, blinked twice, and her face contorted into the same mask of pain and self-hate I’d seen on Hrokr.
Her body resisted her natural fae power and it was eating her alive.
Fire blipped through my mind, not as a word or a memory or anything that made conscious sense. Fire surfaced uncalled and unwanted from the feral depths as tunnel vision and a pounding heart.
But the part of my mind that sits just under the part that overthinks the world knew this particular flashback all too well, and took its own immediate action—I jerked back not from Ellie, but from myself.
She didn’t notice. She stared at her own hand as if she also could see the power swirling around her body. “The cottage is confused.” She blinked again. “It made a decision. It minimized part of the concealments to let in the horse and the axe. It’s never made a decision before.”
Hello?… Calm down.… Sal called.
She wasn’t talking to me.
Ellie’s brow furrowed.
In my head, Sal’s voice stammered. He’s mine!
Ellie lifted her face to the sky. “No, Salvation,” she snapped.
Sal didn’t answer. Her attention wasn’t on us.
“She’s talking to the cottage.” I put my axe back in her scabbard. “Honey, you’re burning up.” Fire flitted through my mind again. Keep it together, I thought. “Did you block the cottage from draining away your power?” Without her power, the cottage couldn’t move. But holding back that power was killing her.
She was breathing too fast. “Mom told the cottage to take me home. She touched it and she told it to take me to her realm if I got away from her because she does that. She’s a trickster. She’s terrible and she can make anyone and anything do whatever she wants!” She stomped her foot. “The cottage doesn’t have a choice. It has to play out the spell, but it doesn’t want to. It wants to stay here. We landed in this land, and it touched you, and suddenly it’s thinking. It’s alive. It’s afraid that if we leave, it’ll lose its new awareness. It needs you, Frank, as much as it needs me. So it stopped siphoning.” She looked down at her hands. “It’s only been a few minutes. I… I hid the bridle and the cottage asked what to do and we agreed.”
I pulled her against my chest. Her power screamed through me like I’d just hooked jumper cables to my hands and it took significant concentration not to twitch or yell or push away.
Flames blipped through my mind again, along with another flash of an even deeper trauma—a cold slab, blinding lightning, thunder as pulsing as the electricity through my dead nerves.
My mind knew this particular flashback. It also knew what it was about to dredge up.
“I’m here,” I said, through the haze of glare reflecting off my own charged-up, dithering, foaming life of rejection. Off the byproducts of the scars and the scariness, and the ugly and the lumbering. Every bit of the fear generated by the sucking away of my mate magic.
Understanding my traumas didn’t stop them from surfacing. All it ever did was give me words to describe the episodes after the fact.
A sob burst from deep in Ellie’s chest. “Frank!”
“If the cottage restarts its siphoning, it’ll move, won’t it?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said into my chest. “I want to burn things,” she whispered.
My axe had been talking to the cottage. “Salvation! A little help here, please.”
She wanted us to know that the cottage had a thick accent and they weren’t communicating well but they were trying.
I pressed my cheek against Ellie’s head and a new electrical jolt spread a thick coat of metallic-tasting buzz across my tongue. I fought back the need to spit. “It’ll be okay,” I said.
“No, it won’t.” She buried her face in my neck. “We wanted to stay. We wanted to say good-bye.” She hiccupped. “I thought… I thought if you knew for sure that she’d taken us to her realm the elves might be able to help you find me.”
“You’re not going anywhere.” She was not going back to Titania’s realm. Not alone. I hoisted her up and curled her legs around my waist. The jolts increased in frequency and strength, but I held on anyway. “Can the cottage move Sal and me?” I wasn’t going to lose Ellie, too.
You, perhaps, Salvation said. Me, no. We don’t have enough time to do the necessary magical translations.
“Salvation, if I put you on Bloodyhoof, can you guide him to the cabin?” She’d be safe with the elves.
I will not be defeated, she yelled in my head.
“Sal…” My fears also radiated off my axe—the fear of rejection from the one I loved. The fear that I was not worthy of the life I had built in the community in which I’d built it. The fear that I wasn’t nearly as alive as I thought I was. All the emotions my knotted flashbacks had tied up in their unwanted blips and bursts.
All those things that gave others reasons to reject a semi-dead thing.
Damn it, I thought.
Go, Blodughofi! Salvation yelled. Go to Maura Dagsdottir.
The stallion reared up. Then he galloped through the gate and into the trees beyond.
Frustration rode in on the back of my shocked and terrified nerves. Frustration with my own brain, with Sal’s mirroring of my pain, with the very real possibility of losing Ellie because I wasn’t smart enough to figure this out.
But also frustration because this punishment had descended onto Ellie because she’d tried to stay with me.
My mate magic might be gone, but we still had what we’d built despite the concealments keeping us apart. She trusted me. I needed to trust that I could trust her.
And all of a sudden, my body rolled up all the events of the past month and honed them into a sharp, terrible animosity toward all things royal and fae.
Was it misdirected? Yes. But it also cut through the buzzing, distracting haze in my brain. No one stole my faith.
Salvation yanked up my anger and added it to her own. We will not be defeated, she said again.
“We will not,” I looked around. “There has to be some way to anchor the cottage.” Nothing in the yard stood out. “Should we go inside?” Maybe something inside would let us anchor.
The magic swirling around Ellie brightened to near blinding. “I’ve tried to build an anchor. I tried in Tokyo and when it moved, it hurt Chihiro. She was inside with me. We can’t go in.”
“Okay. Okay,” I said. We’d stay outside. “If only I still had my tracer spells, huh?” I said. I’d be able to find her easily no matter what her mother did.
Ellie hiccupped again. “I’m glad they’re gone. Those damned things hurt.”
They interacted with her concealments. The vampires stole all of them anyway when they used me to…
Dracula used me as a siphon to concentrate his spells and stabilize Vampland.
I could do it again. I could drain off her extra energy.
“Salvation! Will it work?”
You will not, she said.
“You want to better Titania, don’t you?” We both wanted to beat Titania at her own game. We will not be defeated, I thought at my axe. So it would work. It had to work. “What—”
“Blood magic,” Ellie said.
You will not, Sal repeated. I will not cause you harm.
“Cut you. Drain you. Kill you.” Ellie held tight to my neck and waist. “No no no no no no no!”
Blood magic is too dangerous.
We didn’t have time to argue. Ellie’s magic burned my eyes and set every hair on my body on end. She wasn’t that far from burning out. “I’ll be all right.” I was always all right. “What’s the point of being half-dead if I can’t use it to our benefit?”
“You are not half-dead,” Ellie said. “I know you had mate magic in the truck.” She pulled her face away from my neck. “I know Mom stole it from you.” She leaned her forehead against my chest. “Mine manifested the night after the elves got you out of Vampland.”
She held up her hand and there, inside the torrent of her overheating witch magic, spun bright blue mate magic dust.
All this time, the cottage must have been draining it off with all her other magic.
“You will not sacrifice yourself for us, Frank Victorsson,” Ellie said. “Even if we are apart, I need to know you’re okay.” She inhaled sharply. “You have to be okay.”
Now was not the time of death and sacrifice. I wouldn’t allow it to be. I was done with the loss and the pain.
I kissed her deeply. “We’re going to be okay.”
A new sob broke free and she clung to me as I looked around the yard again.
Blood magic, I thought. Would a little blood on the cottage wall work? There had to be something other than Sal I could use to cut my arm. I looked back at the ash tree. Even a pointy stick might work.
“Your tattoo…” Ellie pulled away from my neck again.
“What?” Fire crept up my neck and into the spaces inside my Yggdrasil tattoo as if Ellie’s magic was filling all the spaces the cottage emptied of St. Martin’s magic.
“It’s glowing,” she said.
Blood magic transcended the elves and the fae. It touched the ancient beating heart of the planet, which was why it held so much power. Blood magic might be what I needed to siphon off enough of Ellie’s magic to allow the cottage to stay in Alfheim.
I touched the side of my face. Then I turned, still holding Ellie, toward the ash tree.
I’ve sat at a bar with the World Raven. I’ve stood in a magic place—one not all that different from the elves’ Great Hall—in the presence of a Wolf that was almost-but-not-quite the World Wolf. And I had the Norse version of the World Tree tattooed onto the side of my head.
The night I walked through the blizzard and into this very yard, I’d seen the stag under that tree’s branches. I’d seen the squirrel, eagle, and hawk in her canopy. Deep down, I’d understood.
I’d understood later, too, in the dream.
There were other magicks here. Magicks older than elves and fae. Magicks that touched the seasons, night and day, life and death equally.
And yet I could not describe what I felt. It sat under words, in that feral place where I controlled nothing, and it swirled up into my consciousness only when it wanted to. Just like all the stress generated by the uncalled memories.
I lifted Salvation off my back.
Do not—
“Trust me, Salvation,” I said.
I set Ellie down next to the ash’s trunk. “I need both hands for this,” I said, as I nicked the inner forearm of my dominant arm with Sal’s blade before transferring her back into my hand.
“Frank. Don’t.” Fire trickled out the edges of her eyes. “Let me go.” She gritted her teeth. “The cottage can’t hold off any longer. If you hurt yourself—”
I kissed her again. “I love you,” I said against her lips. Ellie needed to hear me say it. Honestly, I needed to hear myself say it. I should have told her earlier, but I had my rules. Insta-romance chaos wasn’t going to break the steps I’d built to me—except me needed to be more than my ways of being.
She wrapped her arms around me and I hoisted her up against the trunk, leaning in and holding her in place with my hips.
“Unzip our jackets,” I said.
She blinked.
“More contact.”
She wiggled in her hand and pulled down first her zipper, then mine. Then she threaded her cold hands under my t-shirt and placed them in the middle of my back.
I was the warm one in all this, and I was about to get warmer.
“Forgive us,” I said to the tree.
Ellie sucked in her breath. She closed her eyes.
I slammed Salvation’s blade into the trunk of the ash.