Chapter Fourteen
Chapter One
Three days after the end of the world began I had two choices—drive into a river or hit a deer. The light of the full moon reflected off the snow; the white stuff falling from the sky came in thick, noisy sheets that slammed the roof of my Honda Civic and coated the windshield.
Snow, in my experience, had always been soft. This version was pissed, spitting at the world with a vengeance. It made clear vision impossible.
Didn’t do much for traction, either.
I had to go so slowly. Exhaustion burned my eyes, dragged at my lungs. I’d lost hope of finding a cheap hotel. The last one had been so full; people had actually been sharing rooms with strangers. I’d had two offers while scurrying back to my car in the parking lot. Hadn’t taken them. If I’d learned one thing on this long trip, it was that people turned into complete freaks when they were scared and a sudden Earth-wide snowstorm made for one wicked fear catalyst. I’d seen fights in grocery stores, fights in snowdrifts on the sides of highways and had even watched one lady jump into a car and drive off while the owner stood holding the gas pump nozzle.
And the directions I’d printed sucked.
It had taken me three days longer than expected to get here from Florida. I’d always wanted to come to this supposed place of great magic nestled on the edge of the Ouachita Mountains in eastern Oklahoma, but Mom freaked every time I brought it up. Too much magic, she said. Plus, the rumors of a real gloaming meadow upset her. As far as the Norse knew, there were only a couple in the United States. My two sisters and I had been conceived in the one up north. Nothing like knowing exactly where your mother had sex with a stranger.
The snow let up slightly and I leaned forward like that would help me see well. I slowed even more, the car going barely faster than a crawl. I’d known what this snow was all about the second it had started.
When my sisters and I were kids, my mother’s idea of a bedtime story had been a creepy Norse rendition of the end of the world. Ragnarok. Three years of winter, a great tidal wave and then fire burning across the land. And during all this, there would be battles between warriors who carried the souls of the old gods. Blood and death—my mother’s idea of a nurturing bedtime story.
Kat, Coral and I hadn’t believed her until the souls of the norns inside us made themselves known. I was nine the first time I felt mine. Triplets like us, the norns had been goddess sisters, similar to the Greek fates, but they hadn’t woven threads of prophecy as some stories told; they’d carved runes into wood. The Norse called them the Wyrd Sisters. Kat, Coral and I preferred to think of them as the sisters of fate because the whole damned situation was weird enough.
The car swerved, causing my hands to sweat as my hold on the steering wheel turned to a death grip. My cell phone buzzed in the front pocket of my jeans but I ignored it, too scared to reach for it because I was pretty sure I’d left actual road at some point.
Plus, every time the thing rang lately it was bad news. Especially three days before.
“You need to come home. Now.” My sister Kat’s voice barked out flat and hard.
Scurrying into the short hall by the diner’s restrooms, I growled into the phone. “You know I’m not supposed to have my cell out at work!” I peeked around the corner at my boss, Daddy Mac, still transfixed on the television.
“Have you been outside? Coral thinks it’s happening. She’s pretty freaked out.”
So was I. Like all the people stuffed into booths in the diner, I’d been watching that approaching storm blob on the news, my stomach in knots. “I thought you didn’t believe in it.”
“You gotta come home. Dru’s worse today. She took an iron skillet into her room and spelled the door closed. We can’t get in.”
I didn’t know as much about regular magic as Mom and my sister Coral but even I knew that iron was used in hexing spells. My magic came with the norn inside me.
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath of oily air. “Do you smell lavender?”
Kat snorted. “House reeks of it.”
A woman passed me on the way to the restroom. I clasped the phone closer and turned toward the corner to whisper. “Then she’s doing spells. Has Coral tried a counter for the door?”
“Yeah. The backlash gave her a headache.”
“Look, I’ll try to get off work. Turn on the news and see if all the channels are using the same storm image. Maybe this is only a freak snowstorm.”
“Raven, it’s Florida. It’s August. And we turn nineteen in three months.” Her voice held a thread of fear I’d never heard from Kat, who thought all the prophecies were a load of bunk. She sighed in that loud I’m-totally-put-out way of hers—the one that never failed to get my back up. “I hope the rest of what our crazy progenitor has said is wrong,” she continued. “But it looks like she got this part right.”
“Gods, Kat.” I shut my eyes again, and rubbed them until they hurt.
“Just come home.” Her voice had lost the attitude. “Sometimes our mother listens to you.”
More like she relied on me. As the oldest of the triplets, I guess she thought I would be the most responsible. Like a few extra minutes on my time line gave me a maturity my sisters lacked. Unfortunately, it kind of had. Not that I’d had much of a choice.
Thinking about my mom made me sick because of the last time I’d seen her. The cruel curl of her lip after she’d shoved me. Shoved me. The past few years had been bad, but she’d never hurt me before. She used to be a pretty cool mother but our bond had cracked over the years, and something in her eyes before she disappeared had ripped my heart to shreds. She’d looked right through me—like the loving mother who’d sacrificed a regular life to keep us safe had finally been swallowed by years of fear.
And madness.
“Where did she go?” Kat had placed her palm against the window of Mom’s empty room. Mom had always been off but the past month or so things had been worse than usual. She’d lost her job—which had made me extra glad I’d taken a second one.
“Who knows? But look at this!” I crouched next to the papers scattered all over the floor. No wonder we ran out of printer supplies
