every minute counts. I gotta go. Promise to call you again later.”
She hung up, and I sat in the near silence of my car, the only sound the engines outside and the steady thump of snow pattering the Jeep. What if everything Dru changed wasn’t really a change? Just trying to wrap my head around that crazy woo-woo stuff made it hurt.
Someone banged on my driver’s window and I jumped.
“You okay in there?” A bearded face appeared. It was the man from the diesel truck. His breath fogged the frozen window. “You really shouldn’t be sleeping in your car in this cold.” He knocked again. “Do you need help?”
He actually tried to open the car door.
My eyes flew open wide. “No!” I yelled and held up my cell phone to show him I could call for help—whether it had to do with the car or him. “Was just taking a break!”
He frowned a moment longer, eyeing the huge mound of blankets packed into the front seat of my Jeep with me, then looking in the back. I knew exactly when he spotted the suitcase because his eyes turned into slits. His face was so close to the glass, I could see up his nose. Gross. “Seriously, I’m fine,” I yelled at the window. “I’ll leave now, okay? As soon as my car warms back up!” Ever heard of nose clippers? I continued silently.
He nodded and moved away. Just not far enough.
So much for breakfast here.
Groaning, I started the Jeep again and hoped the heat would kick on fast. It usually did. Unlike my sister Coral, I’d picked a car that had an actual working heater. Though I wished I’d thought of how cold it could get with the partially removable top. Of course, I lived in Florida and planning for subzero temperatures hadn’t been on my agenda. College had been my first goal. The second—keeping my sisters safe. I didn’t even know what I planned to study yet. Raven wanted some kind of history or anthropology—something or another. Coral was interested in plants, so she’d know everything about them for spells. Me? I planned to take the basics wherever my sisters ended up. What I wanted to do would eventually come to me. I hoped. I peeked out the window only to see that scary nose-hair man was still watching me.
He had the same shaggy brown do as the guy in that movie The Stepfather. Right before he killed the family and shaved his beard.
That’s it, Kat. No more freaking scary movies!
My skin started to crawl. I picked up the pepper spray because I knew better than to ignore that feeling. I had once, and that once had been enough to make me overvigilant when it came to me and my sisters from then on. Insidious black fear began to creep into my bones. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.
Calm down, Kat. You’re in control here. You’re eighteen. Not thirteen and stuck in the woods with an older boy you shouldn’t have trusted. You. Are. In. Control.
And I was. My car was locked and I had a weapon. But I couldn’t shake the discomfort and realized it was probably coming from my norn. She’d been shoving her own feelings into me more often lately. The emotion could be coming from my sisters. We had a weird connection as triplets and it was probably one hundred times stronger because we also all carried the souls of the norn sisters—the three goddesses who had lived beneath the world tree called Yggdrasil.
Those shared feelings had helped us out more times than I could count. And my sisters had no idea I’d sort of made it my life’s work to watch out for them. Raven was always too busy working and trying to keep things together. Coral spent her time studying and fretting. It was an old-fashioned word, but the first time I’d read it, I’d stuck it to Coral because it fit. She was the softest one of us. The quickest to tears. When we were little, sometimes all I had to do was look at her a certain way and her eyes would fill up.
Eyeing my phone, I thought about calling her. Checking in. She’d sounded funny during our last call, and I’d had the distinct feeling she’d been keeping something from me.
The three of us had split up for the first time in our lives, each going after a boy who could possibly carry the soul of a Norse god. A future warrior who needed to make it to the final battles—one who didn’t deserve problems from Dru.
Nose-hair man started toward my car again, and my unease kicked into high gear. I held up my pepper spray, watched with real satisfaction as his eyes grew wide; then I jammed my Jeep into Reverse and peeled out so fast, he had to jump away from my car.
He could have been harmless, but it was better not to take that chance.
Me and cynicism. BFFs.
As I drove back to the truck stop I’d passed on my way into this town, something Raven had said on the phone kept replaying my mind—kind of like one of those earworms that crawls deep into the brain to eat all the good songs.
“Mom changed things, so maybe she’s altered all of it and fate is now in our hands.”
Ha! Our fate had never been in our hands. We’d all grown up in fear, moving from one place to another, watching the woman who called herself our mother slowly coast along the edges of the Loony Bin Highway. Then, after years of manic ups and downs, Dru had finally steered herself directly onto it. Full speed ahead. She was out there somewhere, terrorizing someone who might or might not carry a Norse god’s soul.
Like me.
But after this morning’s phone call with Raven, I now knew she was in Oklahoma.
Driving all the way to Oklahoma after coming straight here from Florida was probably a dumb-ass move, but I wasn’t leaving Raven alone to deal with Dru.
Lately, she’d been so weird, who knew? It was possible she’d moved into murderer territory. Recently, my norn had given me a message that said “mother berserker.” I’d shown it to my sisters.
But I hadn’t told them about the time I’d seen her standing in the backyard, a swarm of snakes writhing around her ankles, with this creepy, creepy smile that had made her mouth seem out of proportion. She’d looked at those snakes like they were her children.
Though the first spine-chilling word that had whispered through my mind had been something entirely different.
Minions.
I got in the small line for food at the truck stop, barely looking at my surroundings. I’d stopped in a bunch of places like this on the way here from Florida. The trip had taken me days because of the weather. But like everywhere else, the fear coming off the people made me slightly nauseas. I’d expected it to be easier up here. People this far north were used to early snowstorms, but even they knew this was too early and not exactly natural. Not when it was snowing everywhere in the world. I caught snatches of quiet conversations coming from those in line and in the small booths.
“Old Mrs. Northrup’s heat went out last night in one of the power outages. Her daughter found her this morning. Froze in her own bed...”
“Did you hear that they ran out of gas already at the Exxon station over on...”
“One
