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Ithan held out his hand and willed the thing under his skin to come forward. Ice and snow appeared in his palm. They did not melt against his skin.
He could fucking summon snow. The magic sang in him, an old and strange melody.
Wolves didn’t have magic like this. Never had, as far as he’d heard. Shifting and strength, yes, but this elemental power … it shouldn’t exist in a wolf, yet there it was. Rising in him, filling the place where he’d never realized the parasite had existed.
Ithan said roughly, “We need to get this to our friends.”
Hypaxia smiled grimly. “What are you going to do?”
Ithan eyed the door to the hall. “I think it’s time for me to start making some plans.”
* * *
“Only my daughter would drag us up to Nena,” Ember groused, shivering against the cold that stole even Hunt’s breath away. “You couldn’t have done this in, oh, I don’t know, the Coronal Islands?”
“The Northern Rift, Mom,” Bryce said through chattering teeth, “is in the north.”
“There’s a southern one,” Ember muttered.
“It’s even colder down there,” Bryce said, and looked to Hunt and Randall for help.
Hunt chuckled despite the frigid temperatures and howling wind that had hit them from the moment they’d stepped out of the helicopter.
They could fly no further. The massive black wall stretched for miles in either direction before curving northward, with wards protecting the airspace above it. Hunt knew from maps that the area the wall encircled was forty-nine miles in diameter—seven times seven, the holiest of numbers—and that at its center, somewhere in the barren, snow-blasted terrain, lay the Northern Rift, shrouded in mist. Barriers upon barriers protected Midgard from the Rift, and Hel beyond it.
“We better get going,” Randall said, nodding to the lead doors in the wall before them.
“There aren’t any sentries,” Hunt observed, falling into step beside the male, grateful for the snow gear Axtar had somehow procured for all of them. “There should be at least fifteen here.”
“Maybe they bailed because it was too fucking cold,” Bryce said, shivering miserably.
“An angelic guard never bails,” Randall said, tugging the faux-fur-lined hood of his parka further over his face. “If they’re not here … it’s not a good sign.”
Hunt nodded to the rifle in Randall’s gloved hands. “That work in these temperatures?”
“It’d better,” Ember grumbled.
But Hunt caught Bryce’s look, and summoned his lightning to the ready. He knew her starfire was already warming beneath her gloves. With Theia’s power now united within her … he couldn’t decide if he was eager to see what that starfire could do, or dreading it.
“Is it a trap?” Ember said as they approached the towering, sealed gates and abandoned guard post.
Hunt peered into the frosted window of the booth, then yanked open the door. The ice was crusted so thickly he had to use a considerable amount of strength to pry it free. A swift examination of the interior revealed rime coating the controls, the chairs, the water station. “No one’s been here for a while.”
“I don’t like this,” Ember said. “It’s too easy.”
Hunt glanced to Bryce, her eyes teary with cold, the tip of her nose bright red. In these temperatures, they wouldn’t last ten more minutes before frostbite set in. He and his mate would recover, but Ember and Randall, with their human blood …
“Let’s get this booth warmed up,” Bryce said. She stepped inside and began brushing frost off the switches. “Maybe the heater still works.”
Ember gave her daughter a look that said she was well aware Bryce and Hunt had avoided addressing her concerns, but stepped inside as well.
* * *
They got the heater working—just one of them. The others were too frosted over to sputter to life. But it was enough to warm the small space and offer her parents a sliver of shelter as Bryce and Hunt again explored the frigid terrain, studying the wall and its gate.
“You think it’s a trap?” Bryce said through the scarf she’d tugged up over her mouth and nose. She’d found some pairs of snow goggles in the booth, and the world was sharp through the stark clarity of the lenses. Was this how it had looked through Hunt’s Umbra Mortis helmet?
Hunt said, wearing polarized goggles of his own, “I’ve never known the guard station at the Northern Rift to be empty, so … something’s up, for sure.”
