Page 33 of Wolf, Willow, Witch
Chapter ten
Tehlordreamedofboneand ice.
After an evening spent arguing revival logistics in the living room, she’d wordlessly pulled Lincoln upstairs into her bedroom and tucked herself against him. Despite her racing mind, she’d drifted easily, but sometime in the night, her peaceful, dreamless sleep evaporated. Black sand stretched beneath her bare feet, morphing into golden wheat, then vibrant grass. Thunder cracked and lightning splintered. When the clouds opened, red pelted her naked skin.
Drums pounded from somewhere in the distance, thrumming through her like a second heartbeat. The world moved slowly as if she’d stepped into a place where time lost its footing. Skeletons littered the beach—antlers, skulls, vertebrae—and the rain tasted coppery and biotic. Tehlor tried to walk toward the water, but the tide retreated, flowing backward, upward, until the foam and waves became a shifting, living thing. When she blinked, the sand beneath her feet became snow, and the sea-made creature took a familiar shape.
“Chainbreaker, chosen by Hel,” the black wolf said. His mighty jaws did not move, but Fenrir’s voice shook through her. “Be wise, child of old. Even gods lie; even the faithful face betrayal.”
Tehlor opened her mouth to speak but her lungs were empty, her voice gone.
“Call for me, Völva, and be vigilant. The mighty kneel before no one.”
Fenrir’s breath hit her face. He was a hulking, mountainous beast with eyes like cinders. The ground trembled beneath his paws and behind him where the ocean continued to thrash, scales, fins, and teeth speared the horizon.Hafgúa, sea-serpent, wrecker of ships.Lightning illuminated the sky. In her peripheral, winged soldiers dotted the blackness, and tall, armored beings stood on a rocky spire.Oh, how I’ve chased you, she thought, surrounded by godkin.The things I’ve done to find you.
“The things you’ll do to be kept,” Fenrir snarled. He opened his mouth and closed his jaws around her.
Teeth punctured. Her limbs loosened. Flesh ripped.
Tehlor came to with a shout. She reached beneath her pillow and grasped the handle of her lipstick-shaped pocketknife, swinging it toward the shadow.
Something warm halted her, snatching her wrist in a firm grip.
She blinked, swallowing to wet her scratchy throat, and waited for the dream to disintegrate. Her blurry vision sharpened. The room stopped spinning. Lincoln, upright and propped on one elbow, shook with exertion and craned away from the blade snug against his Adam’s apple.
“Drop it,” he rumbled.
Tehlor immediately opened her hand. The knife thumped on the bed between them.
“Bad dream,” she blurted.
“I can see that.”
“Sorry,” she said, swallowing hard.
Lincoln kept hold of her wrist. In the dark, his sharp, animalistic features deepened. His ears twitched, perked at attention, and his damp nose wiggled. “You good?”
She nodded. “I need to do something.”
He let her go. “Like?”
Tehlor couldn’t describe the urge permeating inside her, as if someone had planted a thought—not her own, not homegrown—and demanded the completion of a task. Maybe it was a leftover directive from the dream; maybe Fenrir had truly granted her an audience. She didn’t know. But what shedidknow was how insistently the thought tugged at her, coaxing her out of bed and across the room where she fumbled on the dresser for her cheap crucifix.
“Give me that knife,” she said, holding her hand out.
Lincoln slapped the tool into her palm. “Don’t do anything stupid.”
She hushed him and set the tip of the blade against the backside of the cross. The inscription was hard to carve, but she did her best, etching each tiny line of the Sowilo rune into the necklace. She finished and set the knife on the dresser, feeling across the carved mark with her thumb.Chainbreaker. Fenrir’s gravelly voice filled her mind. In the old poems and texts, paranoid godkin had bound Fenrir with chains and rope and left him to fester, enraged and deceived, until Ragnarök. If the great wolf deemed herchainbreakerthen she would take his blessing and run with it.
“Rumor has it, Aleister Crowley and Anton LaVey based their sex rituals off seiðr,” she said, fastening the crucifix around her neck. “When they consumed feminine flesh and strapped people to tables, they were following in my ancestors’ footsteps. Wild, huh?”
“That powerful men exploited ancient rituals to get laid? Pretty standard, to be honest.”
“That occultism is older than Christianity.” She climbed onto the bed, sliding her thighs around his hips. “Modesty, submission, obedience. That’s new world shit. Worship used to be violent and sexy and weird.”
“Weird,” Lincoln echoed, laughing under his breath. “What’re we doin’, Tehlor? Talk to me.”
“Pleasing the gods,” she said.
