“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.

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.