Page 179 of Veil of Blood and Bone

Jötunheim rot spreads over Midgard like an infection. Black veins web through the frozen ground every time lightning flashes overhead, there and vanished. I almost think I imagined them.

Almost.

My shadows hate this place, and damned, if I don’t, too.

Magic slips strange and awkward over snowbanks and lash against my control. Too long gone one moment and snapping short the next.

Is this world rejecting them now? Or is the frost realm trying to eat them?

Somewhere ahead of us, Helene is trapped in the middle of both.

She did exactly what any sane person would have in an insane situation and cut and bolted. Who could blame her?

The force of the memory knocked us all on our asses. The onus is on us. We failed her. Again.

I run beside Nicholas, spurred on by shadows. “Please don’t be dead,” he whispers.

Dangerous prayer.

But the words punch through me harder than any of this unnatural cold. Of course, the bond reacts. Immediate. Instinctual.

A vicious tug lances beneath my ribs and hooks me. Yoking me. Shadows and magic explode outward in a pulsing wave and scatter through the storm. In the emptiness, Nicholas’s panic bleeds into me.

Forest’s too, but it’s distant and frantic, somewhere overhead.

These mate bonds were never meant to stretch this far but there they are—Nicholas balancing on the knife edge of his bloodlust, Forest spiraling toward something primal, feral.

And underneath them all our poor little mortal. Faint. Terrified. And pissed the fuck off.

We should have known better. We shouldn’t have fallen asleep, or allowed the sex coma to make us useless. We should have put some kind of layered protections on the house. Rather than focusing spells on keeping things out, we should have added another wall to keep things in.

But the sheets had still been warm when I woke, the indentation of her body between ours and the scent of sweat and her skin still present.

All the while she’d been heading for the hills, gone. Carving herself out of the center of us and leaving the wound gaping. Then, of course, Forest going on a tear, shifting, feathers exploding out of his physical form in a panic he couldn’t control.

Nicholas pretending to have his shit on lockdown. And me. Standing there a rotten second too long staring at the imprint on the bed.

A single second where every terrible, awful loss slams into me at the same time. Again.

We keep finding her only to lose her.

“It’s pressing closer.” Nicholas's warning is an arrow through my temple and shadows seethe.

“We have company?”

He shakes his head. “I’m not sure. I feel it, everywhere, in the flakes, in the sky. This storm⁠—”

I pick up speed to get ahead of him, an endless line of footprints imprinting the path behind us. They’re swallowed quickly, fancy fluffs of snow marking even more dangerous black ice underneath.

Nicholas nearly cracked through.

I’m such a softie. I won’t let it happen again.

“They’re coming for her.” He picks up the pace, blurring, forcing me to stop dragging ass and use my magic to match him.

If she’s hurt, if something happened to her, the gods will pay. But is she finally too important for them to lose?

Unease rides the air, and rot slithers beneath the cold. Frost realm rot.