9

Present day

Light dwindled to dusk as my Jeep covered the sometimes gravel, sometimes dirt road between the Cox farmhouse and my own cabin, tucked into the ashes and elms surrounding Cox Lake. The cabin was part of my wage for working the rental office. Further from the lake than the rest of the guest cabins, I imagined the loss of its rental income to Maureen and Everett was less due to the lack of lake view.

A gray fog of confused thoughts and even more confused feelings whirled around me. This time, though, I could paint for real instead of merely pretending as an attempt to distract myself. I followed the stone-paved path from where I parked the Jeep to my front door, flung the door open like a refugee seeking shelter, and quickly shut it behind me. After tossing my keys onto the counter that divided my galley kitchen from the cabin’s single living area, I went directly to the back of the cabin.

My easel sat before a row of tall windows. The warm stink of turpentine and oils filled my senses like holy incense.

Just for an hour. I’ll paint for an hour, and then I’ll decide.

Burnt sienna and Phthalo blue. Cad red and viridian and ochre. The colors soothed, and the brush in my hand stroked away the pack of growling uncertainties about whether I should stay here at Cox Lake Resort.

While I painted, the sky’s dusk sank to darkness. Inside the cabin, I continued to paint long after the sun’s light had faded. I didn’t need it, not for painting. Asgard had taken my magic, but they couldn’t change who or what I was. I could feel the colors of the paints, choosing them as much by the sensation of the wavelengths of light bouncing back from them as by visibly witnessing them.

I painted for far longer than an hour, past midnight and into the wee hours of the morning. By the time I drew back from the canvas, I could feel the northern lights, the speeding solar winds a distant roar in my consciousness. With a sigh deeper than simple weariness, I cleaned my brush and left my painting.

A strip of decking ran along the back of the cabin, accessible through casement doors at one end of the windowed wall. I stepped outside into the night’s chill and closed the door behind me.

The southerly pull of the magnetic field tingled against my fingertips. As I waited for the ethereal colors to appear in the field of black overhanging the trees, I longed to feel the colors of my magic around me, too. Even after so long without it, its absence was as keen as pain.

The lights wouldn’t become visible for another fifteen minutes or more, but I leaned against the deck’s railing, content to simply be still and wait for the undulating curtain of ghostly color to paint itself above me. Each ribbon of green or orange or deep red felt like a strand of the rainbow bridges I used to be able to create. Sometimes, I imagined that through the dancing colors, I could catch a glimpse of Asgard’s distant halls.

It’s better that I can’t see.

I saw enough, as it was. I saw more in the lights than any mortal ever would. I felt a tension in the aurora borealis that echoed my long-lost magic, a magic that could become a bridge between the gods’ Asgard and the mortal-populated Midgard where I stood. All it needed was the right touch.

My touch. Except I no longer had that power, did I?

Every time I’d moved in the last six years, I’d told myself I’d go south. Away from cold and snow and all the things that reminded me of Asgard—of Heimdal and Loki and all the things that had gone wrong. Surely staying where everything reminded me so much of that place and those men did nothing to mitigate my homesickness. But I couldn’t bear to leave behind the lights entirely, no matter the ache they created in my chest.

Asgard, and a man I should not miss.

More clear-headed now that I’d had time at my easel, I again considered the thought that had occurred to me so many times over the course of the day.

Is it time to go?

Traveling to a new place held little appeal in and of itself. However enamored I’d been of stories about Midgard in the past, it held much less appeal now that I lived here. Maybe the gods hadn’t treated me as harshly as they could have. But there were many ways to inflict pain. What they’d taken from me was as painful as anything they could have done to me.

Recalled humiliation and the agony of betrayal crashed anew into my chest. Oh, what I would do to never feel that pain again.

I should go.

That felt like a decision. I thought it should make me feel lighter with relief—I would never again stand in Maureen Cox’s kitchen and listen to her dying husband’s struggle to breathe. I wouldn’t feel obligated to offer a sympathetic ear to Claire Wenham.

I would never again stand on this deck with my face toward the sky.

A breeze ran teasing fingers through my hair and lifted it in moon-stained streamers around my head. I followed the breeze off the deck, down the steps and nearer to the lake, where the cabin blocked less of the sky. I made it two paces out from the bottom step onto the spongy, dew-soaked grass.

My magic, distant and silent as the sky for six years, whispered directly against my skin.

I froze where I stood and peered sightlessly into the dark that lay between the trees around the cabin. Listening. Waiting.

Again. Not a far-off promise of power, but filling the air around me. In the tight darkness of early morning, wispy streamers of color danced. I felt the single spark of white brilliance I’d thought snuffed out forever, just there inside my head.

My magic. Not distant. Not blocked.

Here.