We were out of my house, coffee in hand, by four in the morning.

As I locked the front door, I had a sudden, irrational urge to call someone and tell them where I was going and what I was doing. I couldn’t tell John, of course. I’d lose my job if the other Natural Science professors at Montana State heard I was looking for a dragon in Yellowstone. And Susan would think I’d lost my mind.

Strangely enough, the one person in the entire world I actually wanted to call was Barry fucking Richardson. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and stared at it as my breath escaped my lips in billowing white clouds. I hadn’t talked to Barry since we’d finalized the sale of the condo in Florida. What time was it in Chicago? Almost five in the morning? He’d be awake, I bet. He’d be at his desk, hunched over his computer.

Would he answer the phone?

“Is there a problem?” Loki asked.

I shook my head and shoved my phone back in my pocket. “Sorry. No problem.”

****

WE WERE THE ONLY CAR on the highway.

The moon set over the horizon as we left Bozeman, and the winking stars felt very close, almost pressing down against the windshield of my Subaru. Loki and Caroline sat together in the backseat, and the driver’s seat felt like its own little world as my Subaru crested the pass through the Gallatin mountains and began to drop into Paradise Valley. I remembered Vali, and the way the wind lifted his hair off his neck. He’d looked so strong and proud the last time I saw him. The familiar slow heat of arousal spread through my body.

“Don’t,” Loki growled from the backseat.

“Excuse me?” I said.

“Don’t think about it,” he said. “We don’t want to draw its attention.”

“Oh, come on! How the hell would you know what I’m thinking?” I checked my rearview mirror, but it was too dark to make out Loki’s expression.

“I don’t, of course,” he said. “But I can smell you.”

“Smell...?” My voice trailed off as his words registered. I shifted, suddenly painfully aware of my damp underwear.

“Unless you were thinking about someone else when you got so turned on?”

“Loki!” Caroline hissed.

“And if you’re thinking of Vali, you’d also be thinking of Níðhöggr, no?” Loki murmured. I didn’t need to see him to know he was smiling.

A cold knot of fear settled low in my stomach. “Fine,” I muttered. “I won’t.”

“I cannot read thoughts, but Níðhöggr can,” Loki said. “And it would be best not to warn it of our approach.”

I tried to bring my mind back to Vali, to his strong body and easy smile. Not to the monster who might be waiting for us in the wilderness, just past the black, yawning maw of that cave.

And I was thinking about the dragon again.

I smacked my steering wheel in frustration. “Damn it, you can’t say, ‘Don’t think of something!’ Then it’s all I can think about! It’s like telling someone not to think of an elephant. Boom! Now everyone’s thinking of a fucking elephant!”

Caroline laughed from the backseat.

“Talk about something,” I said. “Please. Let’s talk about something that’s not batshit crazy.”

“Fine,” Loki said. “What would you like to talk about?”

“I don’t know!” I snapped.

“Do you want to hear how I met my wife?” he asked.

“Oh, don’t you dare,” Caroline said.

“No!” I said. “No, God, no. Just tell me something, I don’t know. Something happy.”

Loki sighed. And then he told a story. I tried to remember it, even as he was telling it and the miles spooled away beneath my tires and the stars shivered above my dashboard. It was a story about elves and dwarves, wickedness and heroism, sacrifice and love. But even then, even as I drove my Subaru through the sweeping vastness of Paradise Valley, between the great mountain ranges, I couldn’t quite grasp it. Somehow I knew, even then, that parts of the story would come back to me, over and over, for my entire life. Sometimes even now, when I’m falling asleep or just upon awakening, I swear I’ve remembered it. But then I blink, and the story vanishes again.

By the time Loki fell silent, we’d been traveling through Yellowstone National Park for over an hour. The sky was an opalescent gray above the Absaroka mountains, and only a handful of stars remained in the indigo sky to dance above us. Thick silence rippled from the backseat, filling the car.

“Is that the end of the story?” I asked, finally.

Loki laughed. I realized I could just make out his reflection in my rearview mirror. “Of course not,” he said. “No story ends. Now pull over just up here.”

My tires crunched over the snow as I slowed and turned off the road.

“Hey, I remember this place. This is where I picked you up in November,” I said.

I turned to the back seat. Loki gave me a distracted smile. Caroline’s eyes were closed, and her pale, furrowed brow gleamed with sweat.

“You go ahead,” she said, leaning her forehead against the door frame.

I shrugged and opened my door, bracing myself against the cold. The snow underfoot squealed in protest as I followed Loki to the edge of the highway. We’d parked in front of a low sagebrush-dotted rise. Loki took off, climbing the slope despite the knee-deep snowdrifts. I was panting by the time I caught up with him, and the cuffs of my jeans were frozen.

He stood at the top of the rise, his arms outstretched, his palms up. The clouds above us were streaked with pink; the cold air tore at my throat.

“It’s too far,” he muttered. “We’ll never make it on foot.”

“What’s too far?”

Loki turned to me, narrowing his odd, pale eyes. “Can you sense it?”

I tried to ignore the cold and remember the last time I’d seen Vali. Can’t you feel it? Vali had asked me. I closed my eyes, reaching for that feeling, that sense of something gone wrong.

Yes, there it was. The frozen air held an angry, burnt scent. It was the same acrid smell that had drifted from the looming darkness of the cave in my dreams.

“There,” I said, opening my eyes and pointing into the gloaming. “What direction is that? South, south-west?”

Loki nodded. “Very good. I was right about you. But it’s miles away, and I can’t travel with these damn wards—”

He froze and turned back to the road. Then he ran down the hill, vanishing faster than I would have thought possible. By the time I made it halfway down the hill, he was already at my car. Caroline leaned against the roof with Loki at her side. As I crunched through the snowdrifts on my frozen feet, I heard Caroline’s wavering voice. Counting. My stomach lurched, and my legs felt painfully heavy.

Caroline looked up as I approached. Her eyes seemed very large in her pale face. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I think...I think my water broke.”

My chest tightened. I remembered that fear. Before the pain, before my contractions felt like anything more serious than a runner’s cramp, there was a cold, hard fear. And the struggle to keep fear from turning to sheer panic.

“Hey, it’s okay,” I said, putting my arm around her shoulders. She felt very small under my huge down jacket. “You’re going to be just fine. I can help.”

She took a deep breath. “They’re still a few minutes apart.”

“Great,” I said. “Let’s get in the car.”

Loki helped her to the backseat and closed the door gently. Then he turned to me, his pale eyes wide.

“We’re at least three hours from the nearest hospital,” I whispered. “Can’t you whoosh her away?”

“No, I cannot,” he snapped. “These are the most powerful wards I’ve encountered.”

“She can’t have a baby in Yellowstone, Loki!” I hissed, squeezing my fingers into a fist.

“Damn it.” Loki shook his head. “Take us to Artemis. Please.”

“What?”

“Oh, whatever you call her. The moon. The huntress. The one in charge of childbirth.”

“Diana?”

Loki nodded and I climbed in the car, trying not to listen to Caroline’s low, animal whimpers.

“Just hang in there,” I said as the engine revved to life. “We’re not far.”

My knuckles blazed white on the steering wheel as we climbed into the jagged Absaroka mountains. Away from the hospital.

“Fuck,” I muttered under my breath. “I hope you know what you’re doing, Loki.”