Page 68 of The Fanged One

Tears pricked at Linnea's eyes, and she pressed her face in the groove of his chest. She had spent her whole life certain that she was an accident, a broken thing that not even her own mother could love.

She had never been someone's miracle, and if anyone else had said it, she would have made some flippant joke about it. Fenris meant what he said and it shook her to her core.

"Come on," she said when she had pulled herself together. "Whatever's next, let's hope it's easier."

She doubted it, but she was determined to be positive. How much worse could it be after a river of blades?

They turned together and walked on into the mist to catch up with the others, the roar of the river fading behind them.

Somewhere ahead, the next trial was waiting in the fog. They couldn't see it yet, but it wasn't long before they could feel it.

33

They hadn't traveled far from the cacophony of the river when the mist rose up from the ground around them.

The smell reached Fenris before the others slowed. Stagnant water and rot and the sweet-foul reek of a thing that had died in the shallows and been left to soften. Under it, the old cold of standing graves.

I hate it here, his wolf said. Even the dirt is dead.

The flat, colorless country gave way to one pocked with small black pools, still as poured tar, running out into the fog farther than the eye could follow.

Linnea stopped at his shoulder and looked out at the nearest pool, her hand finding the back of his coat.

"I just saw something moving in the water," she said, her voice coming out as a whisper.

Under the black, sticky surface of the pool, a pale shape rolled over slowly, the way a dead fish floats belly up.

Another surfaced beside it before the whole field began to move at once.

The dead came up out of the pools without breaking the surface, faces first, pressed up against the underside of the water like swimmers under ice. Old men and young women and children, gray and waterlogged, their mouths working.

Behind him, Layla made a small, whimpering sound. Ciara swore. Tor's arm came across his mate without taking his eyes away from the closest pool.

The voices started as a whisper on the wind and got louder with every step they took. They were not the drowned gurgle the faces should have made. Each one was a person somebody had known and loved, and was so eager to greet them.

"Help me," a woman's voice called from the pool nearest Ciara, and Ciara turned the color of the fog.

"Please, I'm so cold," another said, and Tor took one step toward the bank before Arne caught the back of his coat.

Hands pressed up under the surface, palms flat, reaching for the warm living things on the bank.

"Nobody touch the water." Layla's voice shook, and she held a hand out to them. "Listen to me. This is totally like the Dead Marshes in The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien stole it from the Norse myths, and this is the real deal. The rules are you don't look at or go near the water. They can't come out. They can only call. We keep walking until we are on the other side. If we don't listen, they can't touch us."

"Anyone got any earplugs?" Von asked, staring at the face of a young man in the water that he seemed to recognize.

They tore strips of wool and cloth from their clothes and packed their ears tight with it. Arne pulled out a climbing rope, and they threaded it waist to waist, Tor at the front, Fenris at the back with Linnea knotted three lengths from him. The dead wailed louder the more they were ignored.

"Eyes down. Walk where the one in front of you walked," Tor said and started picking his way through the higher ground where they wouldn't sink straight down.

They went out across the field one careful step at a time, cold mud sucking at their boots, the pools to either side crowded with reaching hands. The wool dulled the wailing to a drone.

It did nothing for the voice that came up inside Fenris's skull. It was a woman's voice, singing softly.

He knew it the way he knew his own name, from before the years and the dark. Low and a little off the note, the way his mother had always sung. She had big, scarred hands and a booming laugh. She was singing over a fire in a hall he had not stood in for longer than men had been counting time.

Angrbothr.

He had been so small in the memory that all he remembered was her voice and the smell of food cooking on the fire.