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“A portal to where?”
“To here. To New York,” Claire told me urgently. “Caedmon thinks he’s going to try to sell the rune, that he double-crossed Efridís. The thing’s worth a fortune, and I guess it was just too much temptation.”
“That was a lucky break.” An invinciblesubrand was not something I wanted to contemplate. He was already too close to that for comfort.
“Yes, but it still leaves Aiden unprotected! Naudiz is here somewhere, and I have to find it before the damn Svarestri do. It’s the only way to ensure that—”
She stopped, because the temperature plummeted about fifty degrees in an instant, like we’d suddenly stepped into a deep freeze. I looked down to see a pattern of ice creeping over the threshold, curling across the wooden planks of the floor. The day’s absorbed heat had kept them soft and warm against my feet, but suddenly they were hard and cold and slippery with frost.
A glance out at the yard showed a swirl of small flakes spiraling out of the black sky, gilded by the glow from the house. I got up and walked down the steps, catching one on my palm. It melted immediately in the heat from my body, leaving a small wet spot behind. I smelled it, just to be sure. Water, ice.
It was dog days in Brooklyn, and it was snowing.
A few small flakes landed on my lips, feather soft. More drifted in the open side of the porch, collecting in Claire’s hair and shining, golden bright, on her lashes. “What is it?” she asked, frowning.
“Get in the house,” I told her, my heart rate speeding up.
“You said it didn’t matter—that the wards protect the porch as well,” she said, even as she gathered up the kids.
“The wards were designed to stop magic,” I reminded her, a chill spreading through me that had nothing to do with the temperature. “Not the damn weather.”
Like an exclamation point to my sentence, a fist-sized hailstone slammed through the porch roof, punching through the tin like a baseball through paper. It hit the old steps right in front of me, splintering into a thousand shards that flew everywhere. Pieces as long as my finger embedded in the railing,
the side of the house and my flesh.
“Dory!”
My leg buckled, a sliver the size of a penknife sticking out of my knee, blood welling up darkly around it.
“Go!”
I didn’t see if she obeyed, because a wash of hail-laden wind gusted across the porch the next second. It shattered every window behind us, forcing me to dive for the floor. That was just as well, since at least it gave me something to hold on to when the porch whited out the next instant, caught in the grip of a blizzard in the middle of summer.
I felt around blind for maybe a minute, until my hand grabbed something cold and hard. It took me a second to identify it as the chain to the porch swing, because it had already frozen solid. I used it to pull myself into a crouch, turned around and headed for the approximate location of the door—only to have the wind pick me up and throw me through it.
The door opened out, not in, but the force of the gale was enough to punch a Dory-shaped hole through screen, wood and glass, bringing the storm in with it. I slammed into the wall, then skidded on a wash of snow and ice half the length of the hall. I only stopped myself from sailing out the front by grabbing the banister for the stairs.
The icy wind blowing through the back door almost ripped my hands off it, but I held on and struggled to my feet, staring around desperately for any sign of Claire or the kids. Screaming for them was an exercise in futility, but I did it anyway. And couldn’t even hear myself over the screech of the wind and the sound of the house coming down around my ears.
But I heard the earsplitting crash when a hailstone the size of a wrecking ball smashed through the ceiling. It tore through three stories to hit the stairs right beside me, obliterating the bottom steps and the floor beneath them. After it came a swirling mass of snow, filtering down to pile in drifts in the hall, supporting the rectangular mass slowly working its way through the back door.
And not only was it an unnatural storm—it wasn’t a natural cold, either. The air smelled strange, like the updraft from the bottom of a deep ravine, dark and sunless. I could feel the air growing colder around me, the fog of my breath thickening like smoke, my muscles tightening, becoming unresponsive. And I’d been in here all of a minute.
I slipped and slid across the hall to the kitchen. It was a cold, empty blue box, with frost creeping along the counters and ice covering the windows. The kitchen door had held, but the panes of glass had shattered under the pressure, allowing four square snakes of snow to worm their way inside.
I grabbed a flashlight out of a drawer and stumbled back into the hall, heading up. I needed to find Claire and the kids, but I also needed weapons. I couldn’t fight the weather, so we were going to have to run for it. And I didn’t doubt what we’d find waiting outside.
There was only one group I knew of who could control the weather like this, who could bend it to their will and use it as a weapon. I should have known when I glimpsed the face outside, but it hadn’t been human, hadn’t even been flesh—just a collection of leaves shaped in a strangely recognizable way by the wind. Or, I realized now, by fey magic.
The flashlight was all but useless. I could barely see through the white curtain that fell like rain all around, hissing through the air with deadly intent. And even if I had been able to see, the stairs were almost impassable.
Pipes had burst in the wall, unable to handle the abrupt change in temperature, and sprayed cobwebs of water across the stairs. They had flash frozen, creating an obstacle course of deadly sharp spikes and fans of ice. I stared at them, half disbelieving. It was as if the effects of a five-day-long blizzard had been distilled into a few minutes. I had no idea how to fight something like this. I’d never even heard of something like this. But one thing was certain.
We were all going to freeze to death if we didn’t get out.
I made it through the maze courtesy of the hailstorm, which shattered several of the bigger clumps of ice right in front of me. I pulled more shards out of my legs, cursing the damn skirt, and hauled myself through the gap. And into what felt like a war zone.
The three stories of the house were fast becoming one as hailstones punched hole after hole in the floors and ceilings. I dodged down the second-floor hallway, throwing open the doors that hadn’t already burst off their hinges because of the wind. It snatched up papers and clothes and threw them about, and set the overhead light fixtures swaying. All the movement made it hard to tell, but I didn’t think Claire was in any of the rooms.
