He chewed his lip for a moment, but then he said, “Look, my shift is over in a couple more hours. If you don’t mind hanging out, I’ll give you a lift. You can sack out in our break room. We have a cot.”

“Really? You wouldn’t mind? It would save a lot of awkward questions.”

Terrence shook his head as he stood to clear my dishes. “Sabrina, I think you’re hiding something. But whatever it is, I don’t think it poses any real threat. Besides, if I take you home, I’ll know where to find you if I need to ask you any more questions, right?”

“Right,” I said, smiling. Drop me off at my house, sure, but don’t expect to find me there tomorrow.

Chapter Thirty-nine

It might have been a stupid risk, letting Ranger Holt take me all the way to my house, but he had balked when I suggested he drop me off at the entrance to my neighborhood. “How far you gonna get without any shoes?” he said, pointing to my bare toes. I didn’t argue because his delivering me to my house had been part of the deal for agreeing to drive me home in the first place, and I knew he could make things hard for me if he wanted to.

Terrence pulled his truck into the empty driveway of my parents’ house an hour or so after sunup. The absence of their cars meant they were already at the bakery, gearing up for another day of business. Still half asleep, my body cried for my old familiar bed. No rest for the wicked, though. On the drive from Lake Norman to my house, I had formed a rudimentary plan. It started and ended with me packing my things, grabbing some food, cash, and other necessities, and making a quick getaway.

If I were Helen, I would keep eyes on this place around the clock. But without money and wheels, I didn’t know what else to do. Make it quick, Mundy. It wasn’t my voice in my head, but Skyla’s. My heart cramped again at the thought of her. Had Nate and the wolves finished her off like they had Inyoni and Kalani?

I paused. Not the wolves. Just Skoll. Hati was dead. Thorin had asked me what I would do if he brought me Hati on a silver platter, and I had told him I wasn’t sure. Now I knew the answer: I’d char him to bits.

“Thanks for the ride, Terrence,” I said and bailed out of the truck.

“It’s no problem,” he said, smiling. “Happy to do it. Protect and serve, you know. It’s my job.”

I smiled, closed the truck door, and ambled down the driveway to the side entrance of my house. Only guests used the front door. My parents kept a spare key hidden in the porch light fixture. I snagged it and unlocked the deadbolt without looking back at the park ranger. Run, you mere mortal, you man of flesh and bone.

Run while you still can.

I giggled at my morbidity, stepped through the doorway, and closed the door behind me. I waited until I was certain the ranger had left before I moved into the house. The interior was dark and silent. Mom’s potpourri, something cinnamon and woodsy, filled the air, a connotation of fall and Thanksgiving, which was a few weeks away. I imagined the menu at the bakery—pumpkin, pecan, and Dutch apple pies with crumbly crusts.

On a regular day, Mom and Dad would be rolling dough, measuring sugar, and sprinkling spices in preparation for the holidays. But were they there now, going about their normal routine? The house had a closed-up feeling about it, like it had sat empty for a while. Maybe they weren’t at the bakery. Maybe they had gone looking for me.

My stomach grumbled again. Ramen noodles only went so far in a body that hadn’t eaten in a month. I went to the fridge, intending to raid it, but found nothing more than a collection of condiments and several shriveling stalks of celery. Another indication that my parents might have gone somewhere farther away than the bakery—Mom never left the fridge that empty. I found crackers and peanut butter in the pantry, though, so I sat down at the kitchen table and gobbled what was left of a jar of double-crunch Peter Pan.

With my appetite appeased, I washed peanut butter and cracker crumbs from my hands and face. Then I climbed the stairs up to my bedroom. I was on a mission: get in, get my stuff, and get out in a hurry. I went to my closet to search out my luggage. Then I remembered my suitcases were gone, destroyed weeks ago by the wolves when they had vandalized Mani’s apartment. No worry, I had a random assortment of tote bags and duffels collected from food service trade shows and conferences I had attended over the years.

I pulled out one bearing the logo of a dairy product manufacturer and stuffed it full of socks, underwear, leggings, jeans, yoga pants, and pajamas. Another tote bag strained at the seams, trying to contain T-shirts, sweaters, and hoodies. I left behind anything resembling fashion in favor of boring utility and nothing easy to identify, nothing to linger in anyone’s memory. I zipped up another duffel full of sneakers, boots, and a comfy pair of flip-flops for balmy weather or for avoiding the kind of foot fungus that liked to cling to tiles in hotel bathrooms.

I toted my bags downstairs and piled them by the front door. Then I called a cab to pick me up and take me to the closest bus station.

While waiting for the taxi, I hurried down the hall to my parents’ room and fell to my knees beside their bed. I rifled under the dust ruffle until my fingers brushed over a hard surface. After latching onto the handle, I dragged out a fireproof lockbox. In this box my parents stored important documents: birth certificates, car titles, passports. They also kept a fat wad of $100 dollar bills rolled up in a rubber band.

I studied the roll and guessed it totaled around $3,000 dollars. Emergency money, they called it. If this wasn’t an emergency, then I didn’t know what was.

Did I suffer a pang of guilt about stealing from my parents? Sure, somewhere deep down my old, parent-pleasing self cringed. But wolves snacked on good girls, and today I was wearing my pragmatist panties. Practical people suffered moral quandaries only at appropriate times. This was not one of those times.

I intended to be a practical person, at least for as long as it took to find Skyla, kill Skoll, and save the world. I considered writing my parents a note, but at this point I thought it was better for everyone’s safety if they assumed I was missing or dead. Cold logic, heartless even, but I had convinced myself I didn’t care so long as it kept everyone alive.

After I returned the lockbox to its place under the bed, I ducked into my parents’ office and logged onto our computer. I needed to know what had happened, if Skyla had survived the fight at Lake Oneida. I searched her name and found references to her all over the Thorin Adventure Outfitters website, but nothing in the news other than some minor mention of her in a small paper in New York. “Local Soldier Returns from Deployment,” stated the caption below a picture of Skyla in uniform, disembarking from a military airplane among a group of soldiers. A crowd surrounded her, smiling and waving tiny American flags. I was right. She did look awesome in uniform.

I searched for news about violence or fires or bodies found at Oneida Lake, but the Internet was silent. I didn’t know if the lack of information was a good thing or not. Maybe if Nate and Skoll killed Skyla, Helen had covered it up. Was she powerful enough to do that? Or maybe Skyla had survived and there was nothing for the news to report. The not-knowing hurt. It cramped in my chest like a knife gouging my heart. As much as I wanted to sit at the desk in my parents’ office feeling sorry for Skyla and myself, the voice in my head urged me back into action. I logged off the computer and turned out the desk lamp.

I had saved a visit to the pantry for last, and I filled a reusable shopping bag with another jar of peanut butter, crackers, a bag of chips, and a box of my dad’s beloved Slim Jims. Some people might turn up their noses, but a desperate girl is neither picky nor choosy. Okay, and I sort of harbored a secret addiction to Slim Jims. Blame my brother. He hooked me and then enabled my habit until I turned into a Slim-Jim junkie.

I was tossing several bottles of water into the bag when the taxi arrived. The driver honked, and I gathered up all my things. I pushed open the door but stopped and looked back. My mother stood at the stove, stirring a pot of spaghetti sauce. Dad sat at the kitchen table, sipping iced tea and cussing at the bills he still paid with paper checks.

I couldn’t call them ghosts because my parents were still alive, or they were the last time I checked. I had lost a month, so I supposed anything was possible. But the house was standing and still full of all their things, food in the pantry and dirty clothes in the laundry room. Pictures of me and Mani hung on the living-room walls, a documentary of progress through childhood and adolescence.

I shook off the chill creeping up my neck, and the shades disappeared. No, not ghosts, just powerful memories, my subconscious assembling stumbling blocks in my path. If you want to keep them safe, I told myself, then you have to stay invisible. Considering the conditions of my disappearance from Oneida Lake, I had to believe no one knew where I was, or even if I was.

I couldn’t run forever—didn’t want to run forever. What’s the value of that kind of life? But the solution to the Helen Locke problem was not in my house; it was not in a place where my presence would jeopardize my family and everything I loved and had dedicated my life to for the past twenty-five years. The answer was somewhere out there, on the road.

I would never find it if I didn’t start looking.

ARCTIC DAWN

For my Myrtle Beach Girls

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

—Robert Frost (1874-1963)

Harper’s Magazine,

December 1920.

Chapter One

Oneida Lake looked almost the same as I remembered. The water was dark and glassy, the perfect mirror for a giant or a god. Late fall had come to northern New York. The surrounding trees had shed their fiery fall cloaks and encircled the lake as skeletal sentries, silent witnesses to what happened there all those weeks before. A blast of wind sent the trees swaying, and they creaked and groaned but gave away no secrets. They told me nothing about what had happened to Skyla.

The bits of detritus scattered throughout the Ramirez family’s cabin maintained the silence as well. Our sleeping gear and luggage lay undisturbed. Empty wine bottles adorned the counter, and dishes collected dust in the drying rack. I ignored the cooler squatting on the kitchen floor. The ice had certainly melted over the past five weeks, and whatever was left inside had probably bred several mold cultures I was happy to never know about. If only mold could talk. Then again, the stuff growing inside that cooler probably could.

Outside, in the front yard, a smear of burnt grass indicated the place where I had gone stellar, transmuting into that other state, but no rusty stains showed where Inyoni had bled out from a fatal cut to her throat. No remains proved Khalani, the Valkyries’ Mistress of the Blade, had existed. No ash pile signified the gravesite of Hati, the mythological wolf who’d killed my brother. No monument to my vengeance, no memorial to commemorate the place where I’d fulfilled my promises.

I had found Mani’s killer and brought him justice. Still, a hollow place lingered inside me: the hole that had formed after Mani’s death. Killing Hati had not healed it. Perhaps it restored some sense of balance, though, because I no longer felt so much like a broken-keeled ship, listing to one side.