I waved him off, rolled out of my sleeping bag, and shuffled into the tent. After rifling through my pack, I found a pair of warm socks and slipped them on. How am I supposed to hike out of here in sock feet? I set that problem aside and set about repacking my things, anything to keep me distracted from dwelling on my mistakes and shortcomings.
Thorin moved around outside, clinking dishes and rattling gear, but that fell away, and silence settled over the desert. Rather, all the people fell silent. Wind whispered, and desert owls screeched and sang their other strange noises. Distant coyotes—not the wolves this time—howled and barked. Their haunting voices provided the perfect accompaniment for my grief.
Maybe Thorin had thought my despair deserved some alone time, because he was absent from camp when I eventually crawled through the tent flaps and shuffled into the moonlight. All traces of Thorin’s deluge had sunk into the dry earth, but the new crevasse remained. I walked over to it, sat down, and dangled my feet over the edge.
Thorin naturally moved as silently as a ghost, but the skitter of rocks and crunch of grit announced his approach, as though he meant for me to hear him coming.
“What do we do next?” I asked.
Thorin crouched beside me and tossed a rock into the chasm, and it tick-tacked all the way to the bottom, bouncing off the walls as it went. “We should go to Vegas. I think Skoll would go back to Helen to give her a report, to hide out until he recovers. We also need to start looking for signs of Surtr’s sword.”
“You want to kick Skoll while he’s down?”
“That would be ideal,” he said, staring into the shadows of his ravine. “What do you want to do?”
“I want to go back to Alaska.”
Thorin’s head jerked up. His eyes cut to me, and the moonlight glowed in their dark depths. “Really?”
“I felt close to Mani there. I’m missing him very badly right now.”
Thorin nodded. “Of course.”
“I don’t have anywhere else to go. I can’t go home—it would bring trouble to my connections there. I’m half surprised Helen hasn’t already used them to get to me.”
“She’s always been single-minded. Now, she has a lot of variables to juggle. She might not risk going after your family for fear of spreading herself too thin. I think we shouldn’t underestimate her, though.” Thorin paused and exhaled. He looked down, found another pebble, and threw it into the ravine. “I would be wrong to dismiss your concerns about your family. They are a weakness for you, and the best way of dealing with that is to end this matter as quickly as possible.”
“Las Vegas is the reasonable choice,” I said. “If you think that’s where we should go, then I won’t argue.”
“We’ll leave in the morning. It’s about six hours until sunrise. You should try to get some sleep.” Thorin stood and held out a hand for me. When I took it, he pulled me to my feet. “When this is over, I’ll take you back to Alaska. We’ll go on one of Mani’s favorite hikes.” Again, that unexpected empathy—Thorin kept me guessing. Always guessing.
“I thought Mani and I would be together forever, that I’d always know everything about him. He wasn’t supposed to be a stranger to me.”
Thorin had the sense to keep quiet rather than offer clichéd prattle to try to comfort me. We walked back to the tent, and I gathered my sleeping bag and laid it out inside. Thorin zipped the flap behind me as I snuggled down into my cocoon of insulation.
“Thank you,” I said through the thin nylon walls.
“For what?”
“Fighting Skoll… saving me from losing myself again.” After pausing to let out a big yawn, I said, “And thanks for letting me sleep. The fire always wipes me out.”
His footstep scraped over the ground. “You don’t have to thank me. Just get some rest. Who knows what tomorrow will bring?”
“Okay,” I said, yawning again. “Good night, Thorin.”
“Goodnight, Sunshine.”
At dawn, Thorin woke me. We put away the entire campsite without a word. Not until we had our packs in place on our backs did he breach the silence.
“I brought the truck close. You won’t make it far in those sock feet.”
“That was nice of you. I appreciate it.”
Thorin shrugged. “Don’t give me too much credit. I was partly being nice and partly not wanting to waste any more time.”
He stepped close to me and pulled something from his pocket. It was Mjölnir, the chain-and-pendant version. He swept my hair aside and fastened it back in place around my neck. It hung down low, the charm falling into the neck of my jacket and settling against my skin as though it belonged there. As though I had always worn it.
“We’re not hunting the desert anymore,” he said. “There’s no need to hike. I’m in a hurry to move on.”
“What did you do with the bodies?” I had noticed when we finished packing up that the wolves were gone.
“Buried them. Seemed the decent thing to do.”
Unshed tears burned in my throat. I said nothing but nodded. The wolves were wild beasts, creatures of the natural world—not my brother, not a friend or a person—but I mourned them anyway. Theirs were three more lives lost to Helen’s scheming. Their deaths weren’t fair, even if they were sick and suffering. At least Thorin had given them quick mercy.
Once we stowed our packs in the back of the Yukon and climbed inside, I jacked up the heater. Thorin maneuvered, slowly and carefully, over the bumpy terrain until we reached pavement. The moment our wheels touched asphalt, he stomped on the accelerator and put the Mojave in our rearview mirror.
Later, when Thorin’s cell phone picked up a signal, it beeped, letting him know it had messages.
“Check those, will you?” He dug the phone from his hip pocket. “It’s probably Skyla wanting you to call her.” He was wrong.
Val’s voice played over the speakerphone: “Baldur’s gone. There is a handbasket on its way to hell, or maybe I should say on its way to Hela, and I’m pretty sure he’s in it.”
“Get to the point,” Thorin grumbled.
“Baldur said something about having found Nina, and he was going to get her. I’ve been calling him ever since. His phone rings straight to voice mail, and he’s refusing to respond to any of my other attempts to contact him. Call me.”
