Page 78 of The Fanged One

Find her, his wolf begged, panic gnawing through him.

Fenris shifted and ran.

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Linnea's mouth tasted of bile and yeast, no matter how many times she spat in the gray dirt. She dragged the back of her hand across her lips and started to walk back the way she had come because the dead country offered nowhere else to go.

Find Loki. Go home. She would be done playing games with gods. They could find someone else to help them in the future.

There is something wrong…in the air, her wolf told her, pacing and circling anxiously in her mind.

"Everything in Niflheim is wrong," she told it, a headache building behind her eyes.

The black pines stood stripped where the scream had gone through them, raw wood showing under the bark like something skinned. She didn't feel better seeing them. She didn't feel anything at all now.

Linnea knew she just had to keep moving, one step at a time. She counted the steps under her breath, the way she had counted in the bad years, when counting was better than thinking, and nobody could beat it out of her.

A hulking shape came out of the trees ahead, low and soundless. The huge black wolf shifted. Fenris's eyes went to her face and read all of it in a single pass. Whatever he found there pulled his brows together.

He took a breath to speak, and the air beside them peeled open. The shade from the hall poured itself upright between them before he got a word out.

Linnea could have wept with relief. She didn't want to talk to Fenris or anyone else. She was afraid of what would come out screaming from her mouth.

"It is time for you to depart, wanderers." The shade's face moved like a reflection breaking on water. "The hall has given what it had to give. Stay longer, and the hall will think you belong to it and never let you leave."

"Thank you for the warning. We will collect our things and be on our way," Fenris said, his eyes still on Linnea.

Behind the shade, the hall doors stood open, and the others were already coming down the slope. Ciara had her arm hooked hard through Layla's, both of them talking fast, and Ciara trying to hide that she had been crying. Tor came after with Arne, both looking gray from Skari's bullshit. Von brought up the rear, smiling but with his eyes sad and uneasy. Linnea didn't know how everything had gone with them, and she didn't have the emotional capacity to ask. She just wanted to go home.

Tor reached her first. His hand came down warm on the back of her neck, and his eyes moved over her face the way Fenris's had. "Lin…"

"I'll tell you later," she said, flat and final. "We have to keep moving. The dead are getting hungry, and if we don't leave now, the hall won't let us go."

Tor's hand tightened once, then he let go. He knew better than to dig at a wound while it was open.

They grabbed their gear, which had been piled up outside the door, as if the hall was evicting them. It was a relief not to have to go back to the room they had shared together. Linnea pulled on her coat and shouldered her pack, her eyes fixed on nothing.

She put Ciara between herself and Fenris and kept her there as a buffer. The helpful shade drifted ahead to show the way before fading away. After that, there was only the gray cold and the long downward tilt of the land.

Fenris tried to catch Linnea's eye more than once, and she pretended not to notice. He was too decent to corner her in front of the others and make her talk. She used that decency against him hour after hour, because the alternative was to look at him and see the careful way he was being kind to her, and she couldn't survive being handled gently right now.

"You want some water?" Ciara asked her.

"No."

"You should drink something."

"I'm okay."

"You want to talk about it?"

"Not even a fucking little bit."

Layla tried later. She bumped her shoulder softly against Linnea's. "Hey, talk to me about literally anything. Tell me your worst haircut. I'll go first. I had a fringe at fourteen that haunts me to this day."

"I'm just tired, Lay Lay." Linnea attempted to smile. "Let me just walk and think, or I'm going to lay down and refuse to move."

Layla let her be after that, and the small hurt that crossed her friend's face was its own little knife, made worse because Linnea couldn't make herself fix it.