Page 28 of Winter Lost

His scowl deepened, the wrinkles on his face growing to crags. He took two steps toward me and touched my forehead with his crooked finger.

“Is it worse?” asked Adam. He was sitting on the island, trying to give Gary as much room as possible. Gary was more agitated when Adam got too near.

“With Mercy, everything that can be worse is. Always.” Zee’s voice was a grumble, and I couldn’t help but snort a laugh.

He dropped his hand from my face and told me, “I do not like how you have been left wandering through the world with your senses wide open like this. Vulnerable.” He pursed his lips. “I keep hoping what that artifact did to you will correct itself.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Me, too.” But talking about it wasn’t going to change things. “Am I right about Gary? Is it fae magic doing this to him?”

He shook his head. “No. But I understand why you would think so. My own power, metal based as it is, has as much in common with the Jötnar as it does with other fae.” He used the German pronunciation: Yoot-nahr, rolling the final “r.” “But the Jötnar are mages of great power and greater stealthiness. And you shouldn’t be able to feel this spell at all.”

“The who?” asked Tad.

“Giants,” said Honey and I.

“Loki,” said Jesse at the same time, her knowledge of Norse mythology owing more to Marvel movies than study. She wrinkled her nose at us. “Loki wasn’t a giant.”

“The Norse giants and the Celtic ones were different,” I told her. “Two words got conjoined when moving them from one language to another.”

Zee snorted, but when I looked at him, he made a rolling gesture with his hand.

I raised an eyebrow, but this wasn’t the time to get lost in translation. “Some of the Jötnar in the stories were larger than human size, but mostly they were antagonists of the Aesir—the Norse gods. They came from different places.”

“The nine realms.” Jesse gave a little nod.

“Those movies have a lot to answer for,” Zee said, flashing Jesse a wry smile. He’d always had a soft spot for her. “More truth than they know and more ridiculousness, too. And the pronunciation. Bifrost. Odin.” He mimicked the way they were pronounced in the movie, hitting the long “i” in “Bifrost” and the “d” in “Odin.” Which was how I’d always pronounced them—apparently incorrectly. “But yes. Sadly for us, the Jötnar were and are powerful mages, not the Pictish giants who became mountains when they lay down to rest.”

“Did they?” asked Jesse. “Really? Mountains?”

Zee just gave her a Cheshire cat sort of smile, lingering and mysterious.

“Can you fix Gary?” asked Adam, pulling the room back to the point.

Zee’s face twisted, but not in its usual sour expression. This expression was wrong. His lids lowered and his eyes darkened to flat deep gray, sending a chill up my spine. I’d been seeing a lot of this part of Zee, the older, more dangerous version of him. Or maybe that was just me and the Soul Taker’s gift. Maybe he’d always been this dimensional and I’d just never noticed. But, I reminded myself again, Tad was worried about him, too.

I shivered even though the kitchen was warm. But no one was watching me.

“It depends.” Oblivious to my doubts, Zee studied my brother, who, after his brief pause at Zee’s entrance, was eating the last half sandwich as if he was afraid someone was about to yank his plate out from under him.

“It’s not that he’s blind,” I told him. “And he can hear things. It’s like he doesn’t understand—”

My brother’s head jerked up and he inhaled sharply, emitting a growl as his lips pulled away from his teeth. Honey moved her free hand to his forearm, a reassuring move that not incidentally gave her leverage on his right arm that would allow her to keep him from doing anything dumb. She was right. He didn’t know Zee. If all that he could interpret was smell—and if he could scent like I could—then this could go badly.

“—what he sees or hears,” I continued. “But it’s not everything. He drove all the way from Montana, and his truck doesn’t have any fresh damage. He sees objects like stairs and doors, but he can’t see people as people. Or hear words as words.”

“Almost like glamour in reverse,” observed Tad to the room. The frying pan he held hissed as Jesse poured the egg mixture in.

His analogy was close, I thought. Glamour very seldom covered up scent entirely. It wasn’t that the fae didn’t have, some of them, a keen sense of smell—it was that most of them didn’t use it. Humans were like that, too. Oh, normal people couldn’t scent as well as I did, but they could have used their noses a lot better than they chose to. It was why blind people’s other senses seemed to gain unexpected strength—they actually started paying attention to them.

“I’ll need to touch him,” said Zee.

But he took no more than two steps closer, and my brother rose to his feet, using the arm that Honey should have had control of to put her behind him, the table upending with a lot of drama—though it was sturdy. It would probably survive. Gary’s plate and glass were toast.

Honey looked at that hand that held hers with an expression of astonishment.

Me, too. I didn’t have any more strength than I would have if I’d been wholly human. I wouldn’t have been able to shove Honey around like that. I knew it, I’d tried a time or two—mostly in training fights. Werewolves are strong.

I understood that walkers, people like me who were descended from avatars—Coyote, Hawk, Raven, and others—all had different abilities depending upon which avatar we were descended from. And also how close the generational relationship was. I hadn’t thought any of us were stronger than the average human, though. Evidently, I was wrong.

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