Nika wiped at her eyes. “I don’t know.” She took a deep breath, trying to settle herself, but it made her chest hurt and she could feel another crying jag beginning. “I just don’t know.”

  She kissed Nika’s cheek and said, “Well, think about it, dearling. I know what a bad position you’re in, abandoned as you are without your sire.”

  Magda was almost out of the room when Nika stopped her with a question. “Did he suffer?”

  She paused. “No, Nika. He didn’t suffer at all.”

  ***

  When the night had nearly faded into dawn and the others were tangled in slumber in their shared room, Nika left the cabin and walked alone toward the wood. There were Ulfen in those woods, and probably faery creatures who wished her ill. She desperately wished that she could encounter one of them on the foot path through the trees. Maybe, if they were violent enough, the pain she was feeling would somehow end.

  She had given up everything to come to Sweden and be with Erik. They were supposed to have had forever. Now that he was gone, she simply couldn’t wrap her mind around the thought of life without him. His absence had created a hole in her heart that she was certain would never be filled again, ever. The ache of it was constant, a dull and weighty pain that dragged her down into listless staring. Life would never be the same without Erik. Life would never be life without Erik.

  She was weeping again, but the wind dried the tears on her cheeks as they fell. The air was crisp tonight, feeling more like autumn than summer, and the chill seemed suitable. A sunny day or a warm, sensual night would have been insulting in the wake of Erik’s death.

  She heard something on the path behind her, a soft sound that barely registered above her own aching heart. She stopped and turned, but there was nothing there when she looked. There were only shadows. Nika took a deep breath and turned back into the wood, continuing her walk.

  Another sound reached her, but this time it was beside her, to her left, just off of the path. Something brushed through the trees, because she could see the branches of a low-reaching fir tree swaying. She stopped.

  “Who’s there?” she asked.

  “If my father finds you, you’ll be killed,” a rich masculine voice said from the shadow.

  She strained her eyes, trying to see, but for some reason she could not explain, her usually infallible Draugr sight was failing her. She wrapped her arms around herself.

  “Who is your father?”

  Something dodged across the path right in front of her, but she couldn’t see anything at all. There was a whiff of magic and musk, and then the moonlight seemed to shimmer into solidity, revealing Dominic, the Ulfen from the resort. He seemed to take form out of the silvery illumination, suddenly real where he’d been only a whisper before. He was still wearing his leather jacket and blue jeans, and the bright light from the moon gleamed off of his jet-black hair.

  “My father is Ardrik,” he answered. “Our alpha.”

  She squared her shoulders. “Well, introduce us so we can get this over with.”

  She lowered her head as if she meant to walk through him, and he caught her with his hands on her shoulders. “What are you doing?”

  He sounded honestly confounded. She pulled away from his hands. “I want to see your father. Where is he?”

  Dominic looked into the woods, then shook his head. “No. This is wrong.”

  Nika began to cry. “Just take me to him! Please!”

  “He will kill you,” he repeated.

  “I know!” she sobbed. “I want him to!”

  The shifter looked into her tear-streaked face and desperate eyes, and he put his arm around her. “No. I’m not sure what’s happening here, but…no. Just, no.”

  He steered her around to face back out of the forest.

  “Go back to your cabin, Rune Master. Life is not to be thrown away so easily.”

  She shook off his arm and turned toward him, her eyes glowing green and her long fangs ready to bite. “What do you know about it? What do you know about anything? My Huntsman is dead. I want to join him.”

  She fell into broken sobs, and Dominic stood awkwardly, staring at her in confusion. Finally, he spoke, and it was as if he was thinking aloud. “I have no love for the Draugr. I have no reason to want you to live.” He frowned. “What do you mean, your Huntsman is dead? Who killed him?”

  “The First,” she answered, wiping her eyes with the heel of her hand. “They murdered him in Stockholm.”

  “Why?”

  She crossed her arms again, holding her stomach against the bottomless pit of dark despair inside of her. “He wanted to make them stop raiding the faery.”

  Dominic raised an eyebrow. “He sacrificed himself to save them? Why?”

  She let her fangs sink back into their hiding places above her normal teeth. “Because he was a good man.”

  “He didn’t want the destruction of the faery?”

  “He didn’t want the destruction of anyone.” She began to shake again. “He only wanted to live in peace and quiet in our house by the bay. He didn’t want to hurt anyone.”

  The Ulfen looked skeptical. “He was a Huntsman and a soldier,” he said. “I doubt he didn’t want to hurt people.”

  “Just because he was good at it doesn’t mean that he loved it. He was actually very kind.”

  “To his own kind.”

  “To everyone.”

  He took a step backward, and the moonlight shimmered over him again, obscuring him like a cloak. “Get out of the forest, Rune Master. Go home.” The magical camouflage completely hid him, leaving only his voice. “I am sorry for your grief…but go home.”

  She heard him leaving through the woods, and she dropped to her knees, her head hanging as she cried.

  ***

  He woke to raging thirst and a pounding head. His eyes were hot, as if coals and not irises lurked behind his eyelids. He put his hands over his face, and the effort of moving his arms was immense. He was so very weak.

  Erik could hear water against wood, and he was rocking slightly. He had been a Viking long enough to know what waking on a ship felt like. He tried to sit up, but his head struck wood very quickly, and the hard rap to the head helped to clear his senses.

  He was in a wooden box. It was just large enough for him to lie in stretched out, and beneath him was a layer of pine boughs and furs. He pushed up against the wooden plank above his head, and it would not budge. He pushed out against the sides of the box, but to no avail. He was just too weak to break through, and something in the pine boughs was keeping him rooted in place. He couldn’t even turn onto his side.

  His throat was parched, and his lips were cracked. He was desperate for blood. His belly twisted on itself in its emptiness, and he felt hollow.

  It was the hollowness that helped him to remember. He remembered the fight in Snake Eyes, and Magda’s hands above his heart, and the shattering of the Chosen bond. The pain of that breakage still echoed in his chest now, and he pressed his hand to the hurting place within his chest.

  Why? He was unable to form any more of the thought, but that seemed to cover the subject of his focus well enough.

  The ship pitched, and his box slid a few inches in the direction of his feet. He remembered high seas in the drekars of his youth, the pitching and rolling that sent most of his raiding companions to the edge to empty their stomachs into the water. He closed his eyes, and for a moment, he was back in those long-ago ships, heading for Scotland or to Spain. The memory of those raids and the pleasure of conquest stirred in his mind, and he smiled. Those had been good days.

  He thought that he should have been taking a dimmer view of these memories, but he could not remember why. His mind was fuzzy, and he was confused. Something was missing, but in his addled state, he could not say what it was. It was something precious, though, and despite the fact that he could not name it, he ached for its absence.

  The pine bough scent rose around him, and he inhaled the fragrance deeply. It was the smell of the old days, of fir trees and forest hunts. Within him, Vidar stirred, and the two of them, god and vessel, united in dreams of hunts and horseback rides through meadows of high grass and brushwood.

  ***

  Lars found Nika on the forest path, lying on her side with her knees drawn up to her chest, staring ahead in utter despondence. He crouched beside her and put a hand on her shoulder. She did not respond.

  “Nika,” he said. “Come on. You have to come in. Erik wouldn’t want this.”

  At the sound of her lover’s name, her green eyes shifted to look up at Lars. They filled with tears. “I miss him,” she said.

  He gathered her into his arms and held her. “I do, too. But the ones who did this are going to pay, I promise you.”

  She sat like a stone in his embrace for a long moment, then finally returned the hug, clinging to his neck for comfort like a child. He stroked her back and held her tightly.

  They stayed that way for a long while, and finally he rose, picking her up in his arms. Without a word, he carried her back to the cabin.

  He brought her to her bedroom and put her on the bed, where she resumed her fetal position. He put his hands on his hips and considered her for a long moment.

  “Nika.” He could not get her to look at him, and he sighed. “Nika, I know you’re hurting, but this isn’t going to help anything. Giving up isn’t going to bring Erik back. You haven’t fed in days. Let me get you something to drink.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t want any.”

  He sat beside her. “I know it hurts to lose him. Erik wouldn’t want this. He would want you to continue to live, to be happy...you have to know that.”

  She turned away from him. He gave up and went downstairs.

  Sif looked up when he entered the living room. “How is the princess?”

  “She wants to die, I think.”

  “I’m not surprised. She was his Chosen.”

  He shook his head. “So?”

  “When the Chosen bond is broken when one of the partners dies, the survivor pines away. She’s not going to survive him for long.” She turned a page in the magazine she was reading. “They can reunite in their next incarnations and try again.”

  Lars looked at her, aghast. “You’re just - we have to do something. We can’t just let her go.”

  “There’s nothing to do,” Magda said, strolling out of the kitchen with a glass of dreyri. She handed it to Sif. “The Chosen bond is very powerful, and the damage caused by its loss is just as great.”

  He frowned, looking at the drink in her hand. “Where did that come from? The keg went missing.”

  “I reserved it,” she said, sitting beside Sif. “I didn’t want to share any longer.”

  “You reserved it,” he echoed, shaking his head. “Wow.”

  He went into the kitchen and found that the keg had been returned to its former place on the counter. His distrust of Magda skipped up another notch. With a sour expression on his face, he filled two glasses, one for himself and one for Nika. He took them both upstairs.

  Nika was still lying on the bed when he came in. He sat beside her and nudged her. “Get up.” She did not respond, so he repeated the light shove and spoke again, this time more stridently. “Get up.”

  Reluctantly, she obeyed. He trusted that the scent of the dreyri would pique her interest, but she seemed immune to its delights. He pushed one of the glasses into her hand.

  “Drink this, or I’ll force it down your throat.”

  She finally reacted. Her face creased in an angry glare, and her eyes flashed green. “You wouldn’t dare!”

  “Wouldn’t I?”

  They stared at each other for a long moment, and she finally took him at his word. She swallowed the enchanted blood, then put the glass aside. “Happy now?”

  “Immensely.” He drained his own glass, then said, “The keg is back on the counter. You have two choices. You can feed yourself, either from the dreyri or by hunting, or I will force feed you. Understand?”

  She turned away from him. “You’re not very nice.”

  “I don’t have to be nice. I just have to keep you alive.”

  “Why? Why do you have to do that?” She looked back at him, and tears were standing in her eyes again. “Why can’t you just let me go?”

  “Because I promised Erik that I would keep you safe, no matter what.” He picked up her empty glass. “I mean to keep that promise, even if you fight me.”

  Her voice quavered as she said, “I hate you.”

  “Go right ahead.”

  He took the empty glasses back down into the kitchen, heavy-hearted but determined.

  ***

  Dominic found his father in their pack’s den, lounging with his mate. Ardrik was half-asleep, and he barely noticed when his third son rejoined them. His mate, though, the lovely Ardella, looked up and flipped her blonde hair out of her eyes, smiling.

  “Hello, Dom,” she said.

  “I met the Rune Master.”

  That was enough to shake Ardrik out of his contentment. He sat up straight, unseating Ardella from using his chest as a pillow. “Did you kill her?”

  Dominic hesitated. “No.”

  His father’s eyes narrowed. “No?”

  “She was despondent. She wanted to die.” He realized now how stupid it sounded, and how displaced his notion of honor was in the view of his pack. His father was going to murder him. “It didn’t seem right.”

  Ardrik rose, towering over Dominic. He was intimidating, and Dominic had always been afraid of him. He took a step back.

  “It didn’t seem right?” his alpha echoed.

  “No, sir.”

  Ardella tried to salvage the situation. “Why was she despondent?”

  Dominic looked at her, then back to his father. “She said that the last Huntsman was dead, killed by the rest of the First in Stockholm.”

  “Why would they kill him?” Ardrik asked, dubious.

  “I don’t know. She didn’t say.”

  His alpha nodded. “This is good news. This is very good news. I will take this to our contact.” He shifted into his full wolf form and raced out of the den.

  Ardella rose and slinked over the Dominic, putting her hands on his chest, rubbing them beneath the open folds of his unzipped jacket. “You’ve done well, my dear,” she said. “If the Huntsman is dead and the Rune Master is in mourning, our job is that much easier.” She buried her hands in the black hair at the nape of his neck, and she smiled up into his eyes. “Maybe I can reward you.”

  He took a step away from her, disentangling himself from her touch. “You are my alpha’s mate,” he said.

  “So? He’s not here, and I’m not your mother.”

  “It’s wrong.” He took another step back. “And my father would kill me if he found out. I’m already out of his favor. I don’t want to make things worse.”

  Ardella laughed airily and shrugged one slender shoulder. “Suit yourself. This was your one chance.”

  One corner of his mouth turned down. “I’ll learn to live with that.”

  She laughed again and strolled toward the back of the den where the rest of the pack were resting. She found Alaric, his older brother, who was sleeping in his wolf form. Ardella shifted into the four-legged version of herself and curled up against Alaric’s side. His brother did not wake.

  Dominic sat at the mouth of the den, knowing he was not welcome to lie with the rest of the pack. He turned his back on the pile of Ulfen and looked out the den opening, waiting for his father to return.

  Chapter Eight

  He dreamed of a woman with red hair and woke with a deep pain in his chest, as if he had been stabbed. He put a hand to his heart and opened his eyes.

  He was no longer in the wooden box, and the rolling of the sea had been replaced by the solidity of the earth. He was lying in a bed covered with furs, warm and comfortable even though his head was muddy. The room he was in was dark, but he could make out the wooden plank walls and the heavily-curtained windows. A fire was burning brightly in a fireplace on the other side of the room. There was one door, and it was tightly closed.

  Erik sat up slowly, and his head decried the motion in the strongest possible terms. He swung his legs over the side of the bed and let his feet hit the floor and stay there for a moment, helping him focus on what was real. Reality, it turned out, was nauseatingly fluid, and he felt disoriented and ill. He gripped the edges of the bed and tried to will his head to stop spinning.

  The door to the room opened, and Bjorn walked in, a canteen in his hand. He grinned when he saw Erik. “It lives!” he said jovially. He held out the canteen. “Hair of the dog?”

  Erik accepted the canteen suspiciously. When he opened the stopper, the scent of powerful dreyri filled his nose, and his stomach lurched in response. He burned for blood, and despite the nausea, he gulped the elixir greedily. Bjorn watched in approving satisfaction.

  When he had consumed the entire canteen, he handed it back to Bjorn and asked, “This is a stupid thing to say, but where am I?”

  Bjorn laughed. “In my house,” he said.

  Erik put a hand to his aching head. “What happened to me?” His hand moved to his chest, hovering over his heart. “What hurt me?”

  “Too much dreyri,” the other Draugr answered. “Magda uncovered some potent ancient vintage and you drank it like it was water. You’re going to be hungover for days.”

  He knew that young Draugr could be overcome by drinking dreyri that was too strong for them, but he was one of the First. There should have been no blood too powerful for him to drink. He rubbed his hand over his face. “I don’t remember anything.”

  Bjorn beamed. “Well, why don’t you join us out in the living room so we can fill you in?”

  Erik rose unsteadily, and his companion put an arm around his shoulders to support him. “I feel terrible.”

  “It’ll pass,” Bjorn assured. “Just need to drink a little bit more dreyri, and you’ll be right as rain.”

  They made their slow way into the main room of the house. The room was bright, the decor overwhelmingly white and chrome, and the rest of the First sat together as if they’d been having a conference. They looked up in surprise, and Dag’s expression was guarded as Bjorn cheerily announced, “Look who’s up?”