Page 45 of His Human Believer

“I didn’t help him,” Dagr wails. “I just stood there.”

“There wasn’t anything you could have done,” Hannibal responds. “The poacher had a very powerful weapon. You did what you had to do until we came to get you. Your job was to stay alive until rescue.”

“Are you able to continue with your statement?” I ask. “Or do you want to wait to finish this until tomorrow?”

Dagr swallows. “I want to keep going. After he shot Skylo, Vail ordered me to start walking. He walked me in, really deep. He kept talking the whole time, saying nothing was going to happen to me and I’d be home in a few hours and he only needed me to do one small thing to help him get the Skyggjar to show itself.”

“And then?” I ask.

“And then he told me to flame. He said that I was the thing that makes the Skyggjar come out in the open. I’m the bait. That’s why he took me and not one of the little kids, because it had already came to me once. So I hummed.”

“The whole time?” I ask.

“The whole time.” He shrugs. “Vail thought I was luring the Skyggjar by flash flaming but really, I was humming, telling it to stay away. Warning it that this was a trap. I was trying to protect it.” And then his face crumples for the first time all night. “It came anyway. I did it for four hours. I did it right, exactly like the first time.” His voice cracks. “So why did it come?”

“I’m not certain,” I say, “but I think what happened is that you were making a distress sound in its territory for four hours straight, in a voice it already knew, and it came to check on you.”

Avery reaches over and pulls him into a tight hug.

Dagr’s asleep on the couch inside twenty minutes.

Avery gets a blanket. Hannibal sits down on the floor beside him with his back against the couch and doesn’t move.

And I go to find Vidar because I need to talk with him and decompress and also, I really, really need a hug.

But he isn’t in the kitchen anymore.

“Ave? Where’d Vidar go?”

Avery looks up from the sink.

“He left,” she says.

“Left where?”

“I don’t know. Twenty minutes ago, maybe? He took one of Hannibal’s vehicles.” She frowns. “He didn’t really say anything specific, just asked me for the loan of it and said thank you and then he went out the front.”

“He didn’t say where he was going?”

“No, sorry, and I was too brain dead to question him too much.”

So I stand in a kitchen at dawn covered in a tattered Halloween costume, with a pout on my lips.

Dagr is rescued and asleep on the couch. Skylo is being cared for in a med lab. A poacher is in Molten Lava custody. And an actual Skyggjar with golden eyes has returned to the wildlands, hopefully remaining remote.

And the one male on this planet I wanted to meet up with after all this chaos drove off without a word.

I do not cry, because I am extremely good at not crying. And I go upstairs to shower and change out of these filthy clothes.

Chapter Fourteen

Vidar

Ileft that kitchen while Dagr Hellstone was still giving his statement. I did not explain myself to any being in the room, and I am aware of precisely how that will have looked.

Particularly to Margaret.

I did it anyway, because while Dagr was speaking I was growing aware of the enormity of the situation concerning the Legend of the Skyggjar and that there are immediate concerns to assure this creature’s safety in the wildlands. Dagr was safe and surrounded by beings who love him and there was nothing further I could contribute to that room.