Page 25 of Soothsayer

Fine. No Bobby, I could deal with that. I could deal with everything once I’d had a little time to sleep. I reclined Electra’s front seat and let the dizziness and fatigue I’d been repressingroll over me like a wave. It was an odd sensation, the feeling of turning like you were on a spit while lying still. I cracked the window to let in a little breeze, draped one of my hands over my eyes, and tried to ignore the vertigo long enough to fall asleep.

It must have worked, because the next thing I knew, it was twilight and the car was shaking. Like, literally bouncing forward and backward, rocking on its suspension like someone was jumping on the hood. Or—

Fuck,Sören.

“I’m coming!” I called out, fumbling for the keys and almost tripping over my legs as I practically fell out of the car. “I’m coming, hang on, I’m coming!” The sound of pounding against the trunk was intense, so loud I was surprised the metal hadn’t sprung up with dents yet. “Hang on, just let me open it!” It took three tries to get the key into the lock, the car and my hand were both shaking so badly, but I managed eventually and threw the trunk open. “Sören—”

I don’t know what hit me. It could have been feet. Maybe it was a hand—Sören had big hands. Whatever it was, one second I was bent over the trunk, the next I was flying backward. It felt like I was airborne forever, long enough for me to catalog every purple cloud in the sky, long enough for me to feel the creak of impact in my rib cage and wonder if any of them had cracked, long enough to know that hitting the ground was going tohurt. And it did.

I hit with the back of my shoulders, just below my neck. The ground was unexpectedly yielding, but it still knocked the last of my breath out of me and left me gasping, paralyzed with pain. The gun was in the car, with my bag. The gun—fuck the gun, this wasSören; I wasn’t going to shoot him, but what…what…

Standing above me, Sören was tall enough that my blurry vision couldn’t quite make out his face. I turned my head and focused on the toe of his shoe: black leather with tiny, meticulous stitching. Handmade, maybe. Definitely too nice tobe edged with mud and manure. He bent down, and now I could see him. Weird, how his eyes reflected the clouds when he wasn’t even looking at them. Purple, kind of murky and dark…but he had blue eyes. I remembered he had blue eyes.

Sören said something in, well, it had to be Icelandic, but the cadence was weird. Hardly distinguishable as words, more like he was singing it. He repeated it more insistently, and I just shook my head. It hurt to move, but I needed him to know I wasn’t his enemy. Didn’t he recognize me?

“Sör—” My voice was a thready wheeze. “S’ren.”

“Þú veist hann?”

“English,” I managed. “I know you—speak it, please—Sören.”

His pale lips thinned as he stared at me. Sören shut his dark eyes for a moment, and when he opened them again, they were blue and horribly bloodshot. He stared down like he couldn’t see me, his whole body trembling like a leaf in the wind. If I thought he was hard to understand before, that was infinitely preferable to the scream of complete horror that emerged from his throat now.

“Sören!” I reached for him, pain be damned, and he almost fell down into my arms before the scream suddenly cut off. The blue faded back to purple, he straightened up, and this time when our eyes met, it was with a new understanding on his part.

“Framsýnir,” he murmured, and then his cold hand touched the base of my throat, just above my collar. His chill spread across me like a blanket, and I felt my heart flutter weakly for a moment before my mind just stopped trying and let me go unconscious.

Chapter Fourteen

Iwoke up and realized I couldn’t feel my arms. It said something about my state of mind that the first thing I thought was,Where is Sören?It was quickly followed by,Oh fuck, what the hell is wrong with my arms?

It took a few seconds for my mind to clear enough that I could figure things out. I was still outside, although the sky was completely dark now, the sun gone, and the moon obscured by cloud cover. I wasn’t in the dark, though. The car was about ten feet in front of me, well into the field—how had it gotten there? Had Sören driven it there? Had hedraggedit? Either way, the car was facing me, headlights on, so bright it hurt to look at them. I could barely make out the silhouette of a man crouched in front of them, rifling through a bag—my bag.

I tried to move forward and realized what was going on with me. I was tied to the base of the tree. Tied with—I craned my head back to get a glimpse of my wrists—jumper cables. Disassembled jumper cables. They were wrapped tight aroundmy wrists, and I leaned back as close to the tree as I could, groaning when the pins and needles started in my shoulders. Good sign—that was a good sign. Hopefully I hadn’t been cutting off my circulation for too long.

“Sören?”

The backlit creature going through my back glanced over at me, the reflective purple sheen of his eyes the only thing clearly visible. “Framsýnir,” he said pleasantly, then, “Visionary. That is what you are, isn’t it?”

“Ah…no. I’m just a soothsayer.”

“Liar.”

“No,” I said, more than a little desperate. “I’m not lying, that’s one of the words for what I am. Visionary implies things I’m not comfortable with, so please, just soothsayer.”

“Interesting. You’d rather be associated with charlatans than with the greatest of your kind.”

“I’m not that great.”

“Sören thinks you are.”

The pins crept into my elbows. My shoulders ached terribly. “I don’t understand,” I confessed, gritting my teeth and trying to think. C’mon,think—what could I do to turn this to my advantage? What could anyone do? I needed information, I needed to be interesting but harmless. I needed to make this whatever-it-was listen to me. I needed him to talk. “What are you, if you’re not Sören?”

“I’m his fate.” The bright white of his teeth shined in the yellow glare of the headlights. “You saw that, didn’t you? It’s why he gave himself to me so sweetly.”

“You’re possessing him.”

“Iamhim,” the creature corrected, abandoning my bag and coming to sit in front of me. He blocked some of the light so I could stop squinting and focus on seeing. “Let me help you understand,” the creature said and leaned forward until thosepurple eyes were only inches from mine, and I couldn’t help looking deep. I saw—

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