“I know.”
“On a scale of one to ten,” he said, “how much power do you think a creature has to have to drag a once-in-a-century storm down on a couple of hundred thousand square miles?”
“The kind of creature that most of Northern Europe thought could bring about the end of the world,” I said, remembering the power of the magic that had tried to consume me. “Ragnarok.”
I should have been more afraid, but knowing that there was a being, presumably Ymir’s brother frost giant, out here calling the storm—that made me think saving my brother was a possibility.
Adam drove for a bit. Then he said, in a voice that was more thoughtful than worried, “I guess we better not tick off Ymir’s brother, then. Look, there’s the first sign.”
It was painted on the side of a dilapidated barn with a roof that would be lucky to survive this storm. Unlike the barn, the sign looked like someone was keeping it in good shape. Looking Glass Hot Springs, it read, Established 1894. Exit two miles ahead.
Two point two miles later there was a much, much smaller sign poking bravely out of the snowbank that read just Hot Springs with an arrow directing us to take a left turn.
Adam slowed to a stop on the highway. He was probably safe doing that. There had been no one on the road since Libby, even though I’d been assured the snowplows were out doing their thing. Somewhere that wasn’t here.
Impossible to tell if the road was in front of the sign or on the far side. There really wasn’t much of a way to tell where the highway was, either, except that it was a suspiciously wide space without trees or brush. Adam had been driving right down the middle of that space for a while.
I stared at the blowing snow outside for a second, and then popped my door open and jumped out. I paused involuntarily, waiting for the magic to hit me again.
“Mercy—” Adam stopped speaking, his eyes fixed on me.
Though the wind still tasted of magic, it made no effort to crawl through me. Too bad I didn’t know if that first time had been some sort of attack, or if my weird and unreliable immunity to magic had decided to kick in. Or, possibly, the thing the Soul Taker had done to me was relenting for a bit.
“I’ll find the road,” I told him, grabbing my coat out of the backseat and putting it on. I didn’t have to tell him to watch for traffic, because he wasn’t stupid. It was pitch-black outside. Even with the snow falling sideways, we should have some warning of other idiots out driving so long as they had their headlights on.
For lack of any other guide, I trotted through knee-high snow toward the sign. I’d planned on slowing when I got near it, but I misjudged and found myself tripping in the suddenly deeper snow when the ground disappeared under my feet. Shoulder-deep in a drift, I scrambled awkwardly back up the drop.
I made it to higher ground, but everything I wore was covered in a layer of snow. I should have put on the gloves currently sitting, warm and dry, on the floor behind my seat. I pulled my hands into the sleeves of my jacket.
The snow was deeper here than it had been on the road. I guessed the snowplows had helped the highway a bit. Even on the raised flat ground I was wading knee-deep. With a general knowledge of how rural roads and cattle guards interacted in this part of Montana, I shuffled along the edge of the drop until my shins banged into something hard and metal and possessing many different angles. I would have interesting bruises in a few hours.
I turned ninety degrees, putting my back to the sign, the buried thingy that I was pretty sure was one end of the cattle guard my gas station informant had warned me about on my right. I found a hump with the side of my foot that I decided was the first bar of the cattle guard. I wasn’t going to dig down with my bare hands to make sure. If I was correct, I was on the road.
I used the straight line of the hump to guide me across the flat, snow-covered ground that looked very much like the flat, snow-covered ground that had just dumped me in a hidden ditch. My knee found another upright something that ended below the snow level and I stopped.
I turned back to survey the roughly thirty-foot-long line my tracks made in the snow, a line that should cross the road we needed to take, while Adam waited in the middle of the highway. There still hadn’t been a car on the highway in either direction because even truckers and native Montanans didn’t travel in this kind of storm in the dark. You had to be pretty stupid to do that.
I moved to the midpoint in my line and waved Adam over. When the SUV stopped in front of me, bumper skimming the snow, I walked to the driver’s-side door instead of the passenger side.
Adam rolled the window down.
“We can’t follow a road we can’t see up the mountains without falling off the side of a cliff or into a creek,” I informed him, waving vaguely behind me at the path we needed to take, where, about a quarter of a mile away, the rugged foothills of the Cabinet Mountains rose. Between the blizzard and the night, they were almost invisible. “I think we need to go back to Libby and try this in the morning.”
My stomach hurt at the thought. My brother was caught in a trap, and I didn’t know when he was going to start thinking about a way to chew his foot off to get free. He was old, but I knew he wasn’t immortal.
Adam rolled the window back up, then got out of the SUV. He frowned ahead, then brushed the melting snow off the seat of my pants. He lifted me into his seat, which startled me by moving to adjust for the change in drivers without anyone pushing a button. I’d been hijacking Adam’s SUV enough that it recognized me. I needed to get my own daily driver.
“Take this.” Adam handed me his coat.
“What are you doing?”
Adam glanced up at the sky. There wasn’t anything to see, not in the middle of this storm. But Adam, his eyes already full of his wolf, knew where the moon was.
“We don’t know what we will be heading into,” I said. “My brother was on his own. The hot springs are supposed to be open now, but I don’t know if anyone actually lives there—and no one has been over this road in the time it took for more than a couple of feet of snow to fall. It makes more sense to turn around and come back in the morning.” The snow would still be here in the morning. “Maybe the spring.”
My brother would not last until spring. I wasn’t sure he would last a week.
Adam pulled his shirt off with less care than he’d used on his coat, and I could hear stitches give way. His knuckles were a little more defined when he gave me the shirt.
“Camping gear in the back of the SUV,” Adam’s wolf said. He breathed the frigid air with joy. “If we need it. I can find the road. Just follow me.”
In snow this deep, my coyote self would not sink to the ground. I could have run on top of the snow—but I couldn’t have been sure of the road. Adam’s wolf was nearly ten times heavier than a coyote and his paws were armed with large retractable claws that would dig down beneath the snow.
“We could drive back to Libby and bribe a snowplow,” I persisted.
“Spoilsport.” The wolf laughed, though Adam was still mostly human-shaped. “Don’t want to be trapped with me in a snowstorm?”
I rolled my eyes in a fashion his daughter had taught me. “Fine. When they shovel our frozen corpses out next spring, they can put ‘They thought it would be fun’ on our gravestone.” But inside, I was grateful. I needed to find Ymir’s brother and get him to release the spell on my brother—and the thought of retreat when we might be close to our goal felt like I was failing Gary.
Adam pulled off his boots without untying them. Rather than giving me his snowy boots, he tossed them over my shoulder into the back. His jeans ripped when he tried to unzip them with transforming hands now more suited to rending the flesh of his enemies than manipulating delicate things.