Page 2 of The Fanged One

Fenris knew that scent the way a man knew his own heartbeat. The singer.

Mate, the wolf said, and it was no longer a small voice but a roar in his bones. MATE.

The man inside the wolf didn't know how to respond to that statement. The wolf had said 'hers' of his human wife, 'pack' of their children, 'den' of the place they had built together before Asgard's prophecy and fear had taken it from them.

Never mate, because the word meant only one thing to the wolf. The wolf had loved before, in its blunt animal way, but the wolf had not been the one picking a bride; the man had. The wolf had gone along with it because it was fed, and the man seemed happy, and that had been enough.

The wolf now had thousands of years of waking and sleeping and waking again. It had a long, dark time to sit and covet impossible things, because it was Loki's son and had inherited certain bad habits.

The wolf didn't try to explain as it ran toward the smell. The pines flickered past him on either side. The icy air raked the inside of his throat, his blood roared in his ears, and the Great Wolf finally panted a single word through his fangs, "Mine."

2

The last of the silver bindings was crumbling in Linnea's fist as she climbed the winding stone stairs. Thousands of years of binding magic, the sound of a cat's footfall, the beard of a woman, the roots of a mountain, and the rest of the impossible recipe, all of it reduced to dust and the lingering traces of Fenris's scent.

She couldn't make herself open her hand. If she did, the wind would take the last of him, and she wasn't ready to let go yet. She had spent a long time on her knees in the void below, singing lullabies to an empty stone slab and trying not to throw up.

Lady Freya had told her she needed to keep Fenris asleep for another year. It was winter, not midsummer. She had failed, and he was gone.

Her throat was raw, her cheeks sticky from crying, and the stone steps under her boots were the only thing about the Hall of Nowhere that felt real.

He is gone, her wolf whined. He is gone. He is gone. He is gone.

I know.

Find him.

I'm going to try.

Try harder.

Linnea ignored the wolf because she didn't understand the enormity of the task. Fenris was a god. They weren't found unless they chose to be. She had to tell Lady Freya and prepare for whatever happened next.

Linnea finally reached the top step. The carved door stood open above her in the rock face, the runes around its edges glowing faintly. She walked through, and the runes flared once, the door went silent behind her, and the stone reformed itself, smooth and flawless, the seam invisible. Like she had never been there. Like he had never been there.

Linnea stepped onto the forest path and stopped to take a few clear breaths. Her legs trembled from the climb. She was a little out of breath, and she still wanted to scream at the winter moon.

That was when she noticed that the forest was hushed around her. Her wolf senses prickled in awareness because it was a silence that meant something large was close, and the small creatures had hidden so they wouldn't draw its attention.

The moon was high. The pines were silvered. The air smelled of frost and, faintly, of something metallic like a freshly forged sword. The back of her skull tingled in warning, her magic alerting her to another's close by.

Linnea took three steps along the path before a wolf melted out of the darkness. He was black as ink and the size of her car. He was already smaller than the form he had in the cavern, and yet he was still bigger than anything that had any business existing on a forest path at midnight.

His head was lowered. One eye was the color of a summer sea, and the other's iris was paler, milky in a single wedge where a thin silver scar ran from brow to cheek. He was watching her the way a wolf stalked something small and fluffy.

Her wolf was no longer whining or pricking ears but doing a full-body tail wag, with the entire happy bounding choreography of a dog who had just heard the front door opening.

Stop it, Linnea demanded in a shocked whisper. Stop. We are about to die.

He's here, her wolf said joyously.

Oh, my gods. He's going to eat us.

Linnea didn't move. The first thing she had learned growing up around wolves had been: never run from a wolf because to run is to be prey.

Linnea had been kidnapped, marked for sacrifice, dragged into a god's prison, and assigned a wyrd she didn't feel even slightly equipped to carry. Linnea had survived all of it, and she wasn't going to die because she ran from anything ever again.

She certainly would never run from this wolf, who smelled like the silver dust crumbling in her fist and forged steel.