Page 47 of Winter Lost

“Why don’t you know what they do?” That seemed a bit out of character for my Adam. He was a real believer in “knowledge is power.”

He sent a faint grin my way, though he didn’t take his eyes off the road. “I am not sure Sherwood knew what they were supposed to do. He wasn’t about to admit it, though, so I let it go.”

Sherwood’s fragmented memories made his magic somewhat odd. And dangerous. Ben told me a few days ago that Warren and Kyle were still finding alarm clock pieces in random places in their house. The clock had exploded in Sherwood’s house a couple of weeks ago. Sherwood did not know why the pieces ended up at Warren’s house. Darryl postulated that there might be some analogue of quantum physics in magic—I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. Darryl’s multiple PhDs could make it difficult to follow his humor.

“This storm has engulfed all of Montana, parts of Idaho, Washington, and over the border in Canada,” Adam said thoughtfully, distracting me from worrying about the dangers of riding around in a car Sherwood had done something to and back to the dangers of driving in a blizzard. “Montana is what? A hundred thousand square miles?”

“About a hundred and fifty thousand square miles,” I said. Montana history had been a requisite class when I’d been in high school, and some things stuck.

“We were supposed to have bad weather,” Adam said. “This is a storm that has been growing for a few days, but when we left this morning, it wasn’t supposed to be the storm of the century.”

“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.

---