Page 84 of Katya and the Young God

She stands, shrugging on the jacket, and it’s comically large on her and warm.

“Are they going to be monitoring my place?” She asks, quick, not missing how slow he moves and the way he flinches when he reaches. “We need to figure out if that’s—"

“They came from the opposite direction, they left in the same way,” he says, grimacing as he shrugs into a jacket of his own. “We can’t know, but it’ll be safer than being here.”

He grips her arm, sudden, like he’s about to teleport, and she can see him steeling up energy, steeling up power...

Until he drops her arm again, his jaw tense.

He gathers the magical components from the cupboard, and when they venture out, there’s a soft snow falling, only barely beginning to whiten the ground.

Pieter spares it barely a glance, striding long across his property, and Katya hustles to keep up. The snowflakes fall into his black hair, trapping in the curls, and his breath puffs up around him in clouds.

Stepan bounds ahead, snapping at snowflakes like he’s some sort of goddamn cartoon character, completely unaffected by the tense atmosphere or the danger that has still yet to pass. It would be so easy for Katya to call him back, make him step careful and closer, but the dog’s unbridled joy at the weather stops her tongue from calling out.

“Any hint of them?” Katya asks, and if she’s having to step fast, he must be feeling it in his wound.

“Still going in the opposite direction,” Pieter snaps out, accent thicker than it has been, and his eyes are moving fast, tracking things she cannot see. “They had a car parked outside, along the other road.”

“I don’t like that.” Katya pulls the jacket close, then flinches when a snowflake lands directly on her face, before brushing it aside.

The moment they cross the rune barrier, the moment they leave his property, he sighs and shakes the snowflakes out of his curls. “That should not have happened.”

She picks up on the apology, brushes it away. “Well, it sure shows they don’t actually believe you’re dead,” she points out, and the snowfall picks up, soft fat flakes falling thickly through the trees. “At least we picked a rough day for them to have to come out to see Stepan.”

At his name, Stepan bounds back, and there are flakes in his fur.

“This is nothing,” Pieter scoffs. “You’ll see a hundred days like this if you stay long enough in this area.”

“Joy.”

He quirks an eyebrow at her, then visibly shakes it off. “Right. You lived in Southern California.”

“Only saw snow if we made a trip of it,” Katya affirms. “Didn’t generally make trips of anything.”

He slows again, and Katya is ready for it, waiting for it, and matches his stride without missing a beat. “You should go to Siberia. Then you’ll really see snow.”

And while she knows that the Demigods grew up near there, that Iakov remembers it fondly, that still doesn’t sound like an endorsement. “I’ll pass,” she says, hugging her jacket. “How much—exactly—should I expect to get up here?”

“Last year I got about forty inches? Not at once,” he says, but the lines of tension remain in his eyes as he looks back towards his property. “Most at once was maybe twelve.”

He’s concentrating on something, something off in the distance, so Katya falls silent. Let him do whatever work he needs, with whatever senses she doesn’t have.

That he considers himself as powerless as a human is comedy. Every moment of him is colored by magic, drawn together by power, whether or not it’s something he can actively shape or not.

Her own senses fool her, right now, walking through the woods. Her footsteps fall silent, and there’s no sound but a soft shush of snowflakes against the pine needles. Like she put in earplugs, and the entire world is muted, blended down along the edges.

The snow gives a blur to the trees far away, and if she didn’t know her directions very well, she’d be turned around.

“Did you ever get lost out here?” The words tumble out of her mouth, before she can control them, and she winces. She’s not one for idle conversation, for filling the silence.

He blinks back to himself, quizzical. “Yes?” He says, like he can’t understand her question. “It’s a fucking maze of trees, of course I got lost.”

“It’s disorienting,” she says. “I don’t think I can pick out the correct direction without the sun or a compass.”

Another raised eyebrow. “How many times have you seen snow, Katya?” And there’s no judgment in his voice, instead something carefully cool and collected.

“Maybe five times,” she says, not shrugging into herself because she’s a goddamn adult and more mature than that. “I stayed in New York for a while, but always got lucky and was out of town for any snowstorm.”

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