“Sunshine?”
I pried open my eyes but wrenched them shut again when a blinding light stabbed into my field of vision. “Ow!”
“Sorry.” Thorin clicked off his flashlight, and darkness enveloped me again.
I was zipped up in my sleeping bag, snug as a bug in a rug—a bare-naked bug. After freeing an arm from my mummy bag, I raked damp tendrils of hair from my face and asked, “Why am I wet?”
“I put out your fire. Is that how it happened at the lake in New York?”
“Yes.” I heaved a sigh. “I gotta work on it. I can control it up to a certain point, but after that…” I puffed out my cheeks, made an explosion noise, and spread apart my fingers, miming the disbursement of smoke and flames. “It’s all or nothing.”
The fire had burned away my clothing, and yet again, Thorin had seen to the defense of my modesty—what little of it was left.
“Oh God,” I groaned.
“What?”
“I was just realizing…” Realizing I’ve lost count of the number of times you’ve seen my bare behind.
Thorin crouched beside me and watched a pot of water bubbling on my butane stove. He kept his face turned, showing only his profile. Good. Talking was easier without the discomfort of his direct stare.
“Would you mind getting a shirt from my bag for me?” I asked.
Thorin’s lips curled, and even from the side, I could tell he was smirking.
“Already ahead of you.” He pointed at a stack of clothes lying on the ground between us.
I snatched the pile and slithered farther into the sleeping bag. “What do you mean you put me out?” I asked as I wriggled into the leggings and a long-sleeved thermal. “This is a desert. Where did you find—” I remembered the storm. “You went all God of Thunder, didn’t you? Wish I had been aware of it. I bet it was awesome.”
“You weren’t so bad yourself.” Thorin lifted the pot, poured steaming water into a mug, gave it a stir with a spoon from my mess kit, and presented it to me.
I scooted out of the sleeping bag, took the mug, and sniffed—hot chocolate.
“I’ve never seen anything like what you did, not since the days of the original Sol.”
Fresh from the pan like that, the hot chocolate should have scalded me, but I drained it in a couple of giant gulps and held it out for a refill, doing my best Oliver Twist impression: “Please, sir, I want some more.”
Thorin filled my mug again, dumped in two Swiss Miss packets, and stirred it into a thick, sugary mess.
“You knew the real Sol?” I asked.
Thorin looked up at the stars. “I knew her.”
“What was she like?”
His Adam’s apple bobbed a few times before he answered. “Lovely. Radiant, I guess you could say. She wasn’t around much. Things were more literal where I come from. When the legends say Sol rode in a chariot around the world, it was truth in Asgard. Her husband, Glenr, was her driver. Maybe the humans perceived her as the sun, but to us she was real. She was always a little frantic and tired, but she had a fiery personality.” He chuckled. “A lot like you.”
I ran my finger around the bottom of the mug to dig up the fudgy bits that hadn’t quite dissolved. “You liked her?”
“Yes. I liked her a lot.”
If I pried further, he would probably shut down as he usually did, so I changed the subject. “Where are the wolves?”
In reply, Thorin clicked on his flashlight. The beam landed on a lumpy, bloody pile of fur. I sucked in a breath and almost choked. “Are any of them Skoll?”
“No. It’s the group he was with. I think they were sick. Rabies or something. It might explain their behavior.”
“And Skoll?”
“Your fire chased him away. He was burnt pretty badly. He looked like a blistered lab rat.”
“You didn’t go after him?”
“And let you go shooting star and risk losing you again for another month? I don’t think so. Don’t worry, Sunshine. He’s going to be licking his wounds for a while. We’ll find him again soon enough.”
Going after Skoll and killing him would have guaranteed the failure of Helen’s plans and removed the threat to Thorin and his kind, but Thorin had chosen to let the wolf go and take care of me, instead. My heart twitched, and another crack shot through my walls. If he keeps this up, I’ll have nothing left to resist him with.
I studied the dead wolves again and pitied them, regretting their deaths. “You really think they were sick? Or are you just saying that to make me feel better?”
“Look at them. They’re skin and bones, missing patches of hair. They smell terrible, and not just wolf musk but something rotten. They weren’t far from death, anyway.”
“And Skoll could control them?”
Thorin shrugged. “I suppose.”
I gnawed my bottom lip and replayed the fight in my mind. Skoll’s escape embittered me and stoked my ire. If not for the loss of my self-control, we might have succeeded in killing him. My failure tasted as bitter as old coffee grounds. I resisted the urge to spit.
“Sunshine?” Thorin asked, as if sensing my distress.
