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  The thing inside me snarled.

  “Don’t!” I warned Dace, gripping the arms of the chair when his fear surged sharply upward. I might as well not have spoken at all.

  His wolf slipped his bonds so quickly, so powerfully, Dace didn’t even have a chance to stop him. The animal raced into my mind as if he’d been called to battle.

  My head snapped back on my neck beneath the force of his arrival. I cried out, jarred.

  Dace’s wolf growled, throwing himself between me and the animal inside me as if to shield me from it.

  The thing raging inside me stopped moving, stopped breathing, and then ever so slowly, turned its attention toward Dace’s wolf.

  Their eyes met.

  Recognition slammed into me like a shot from a bow.

  They knew one another. Remembered one another.

  Dace’s wolf and my animal didn’t make a sound or do anything. Both, I think, were too shocked to move. Didn’t matter though. Memory ripped through me, everything my dreams tried telling me sweeping through me like a tsunami.

  Images, feelings, and memories poured through me. A slideshow of still frames, brief moments, and sensation after sensation played behind my eyes. There was Dace’s wolf and my own running together, hunting together, mating. In every life they’d lived, they’d been side by side. And so had Dace and I.

  Those images came, too. Bright, vivid. Burning like the sun. Me and him walking, talking, laughing, crying, making love, and raising children. Always together. Lifetime upon lifetime of us.

  Love poured through me in waves, love for him and his wolf, and theirs for me and the wolf buried inside me. Millenniums’ worth of emotion, locked inside, growing, changing, stronger in each life. Complex, powerful, and beautiful. God, so beautiful.

  I’d always loved Dace. Always.

  The memories flickered faster and faster, the images becoming disturbing. Dace’s wolf roaring as the black twins hamstringed me. Mine screaming in defiance as the black twins attacked Dace. Packs of wolves falling beneath the might of those beasts. Me and Dace shifting to fight Sköll and Hati off. Both of us bleeding, both of us dying.

  The sense of dread washing through me felt like acid eating me from the inside out. Kalei was wrong, so wrong. The wolf buried inside me had tried to show me this for the last two weeks, but I hadn’t understood soon enough. Hadn’t put the pieces together fast enough.

  Sköll and Hati weren’t coming.

  They were already here, and they were here for me and Dace.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The crack between my mind and Dace’s disappeared with so much force, my teeth rattled again. My chair flew backward across the room, pulling a cry from Dace’s lips. I hit the floor hard.

  Dace dropped to his knees beside me, his beautiful emerald eyes full of fear. “Arionna?”

  For a minute, I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t breathe. I could only lie there, staring up at him in stunned silence. I felt shredded, and not like at the rave either. This wasn’t physical, but emotional, visceral.

  The love I felt for Dace and his wolf overwhelmed me. So did theirs for me. And I’d had lifetimes of that. Hundreds upon hundreds of lives by his side. I’d been right on the quad that day: I did know Dace. I’d known him for millennia.

  “I’m okay,” I whispered, holding out my hand for him to help me up.

  He took it carefully, as if uncertain whether he should, and then lifted me to my feet when nothing freaky happened. I swayed as blood rushed through me, and steadied myself against Dace. He pulled me into his chest and held me close, wrapping his frame around mine protectively. His heart hammered beneath my ear, and I knew he felt an eon’s worth of emotion, too; he’d seen everything I’d seen.

  “We were mated,” I whispered, tears in my eyes. Love still coursed through my veins, thick ropes of intricate emotion pulsing in time to my heartbeat, in time to his heartbeat beneath my fingertips. Powerful and beautiful. An aria sung to the heavens and whispered across time, pure and perfect.

  He nodded once. “We were.”

  I closed my eyes, his awe coursing through me alongside mine. Knowing he felt the same thing running through him brought peace and terror at once. Peace because, for once, we were on exactly the same page. Terror because whoever we were, whatever we were … we were tied to Sköll and Hati as tightly as we were to one another.

  We were supposed to stop them, and I was broken. Not who I needed to be. My wolf remained buried in there somewhere, unable to come forward completely. My legs trembled beneath me, and it felt as if the world trembled too.

  “You don’t know that,” Dace whispered, tightening his arms around me. Fear flowed down our bond, his emotions too powerful for him to wall them up and hide them from me.

  “Don’t I?” I asked. I felt Chelle’s and Gage’s eyes on me, but I couldn’t turn around and face them yet. If meeting Dace changed my entire world, what just went through me knocked it completely out of orbit.

  For days, I’d wondered what I was. I’d tried desperately to believe Dace when he said I felt only a memory of who I’d been in some other life. In a way, he’d been right. What I felt in those deep-down places was a memory. But in all the ways that mattered, he’d been dead wrong, too.

  I was supposed to be like him. The world needed me to be like him. And for some reason, I wasn’t.

  That scared me more than anything else ever had.

  “Sköll and Hati are here?” Chelle asked once Dace and I calmed down enough to tell them what happened.

  Dace had his fingers laced securely with mine, and I held on to him as if he were a lifeline. I think he might have been the only thing keeping me grounded. The feel of his skin on mine, and the way he sat at my side as if to shield me with his body, held me together better than anything else. The powerful emotions were less all consuming, but I still felt shaken and stripped bare. How had I never realized what Dace meant to me? And what did that mean for us now?

  I wished I knew the answers to both of those questions, but I didn’t.

  “I thought they were a myth. There’s no way they can swallow the sun and the moon,” Chelle said.

  “They don’t have to swallow the sun and the moon literally,” Dace told her. “When myths are passed down through the ages, what is real and what isn’t gets obscured or embellished. It’s a whole lot more impressive to say that two wolves are going to devour the sun and moon and cause the apocalypse than it is to say that two wolves are destined to kill two humans and cause the world to be reborn.”

  “So they’re going to kill two humans?” Chelle asked him, clearly confused.

  Dace shook his head, half rueful, half impatient. “In Norse mythology, Fenrir is a giant, a Titan. He grew so rapidly that the Norse gods feared him, so they tricked him. They told him they wanted to see if he could break every bond they placed him in. They forged the last bond, Gleipner, from nine intangible objects. When they brought it forth, Fenrir suspected the thin ribbon was magical, so he agreed to be tied only on the condition that at least one of the gods kept his or her hand between his jaws as a show of good faith. Tyr agreed to this and placed his hand in Fenrir’s mouth. When Fenrir realized he couldn’t get free, he bit off Tyr’s arm. The gods then attached the bond to Gelgia and drove it into a rock deep in the heart of the earth. Fenrir swore vengeance upon the gods if he ever got free.”

  I wanted to tell him to stop, to not say any more. I remembered seeing Fenrir in my dreams, and he terrified me. An infuriated and rabid monster, chained by Norse gods in the bowels of Earth. And he was real. Knowing that defied description.

  “According to the myth,” Dace continued, squeezing my fingers as if to soothe me, “when his sons, Sköll and Hati, eventually swallowed the sun and moon, Fenrir would be free and would devour Odin, ushering in the end of the world as we know it, or Ragnarök. Only two humans would survive the destruction, and the world would be reborn. In the myth, the Norse gods all accepted this as an inevitable truth: Sköll and
Hati would free Fenrir, and the world would be destroyed in vengeance of their trickery.

  “But that doesn’t mean the wolves literally have to swallow the sun and moon. The sun and moon were gods and goddesses in most mythology. We know that angels mated with humans thousands of years ago.” Dace nodded at Gage. “The myths are full of stories in which Pagan gods and goddesses did the same. Most of the Greek heroes, for instance, were demigods, mortals born of the union between man and god. In all likelihood, Sköll and Hati are fated to kill the descendants of the children the sun and moon gods bore to man. Whether that’s two humans or twenty though, I don’t know.”

  “What happens if they do?” Chelle demanded, looking green.

  I could sympathize.

  “In Norse mythology, there’s never been any question of it happening,” Dace said. “It’s always simply been a matter of when. In the myth, Odin knew Ragnarök couldn’t be stopped, so he instead sought a way to hold it off. There are different variations of that myth, but they typically agree that he sacrificed his eye to Mimir, the Well of Knowing, in exchange for the knowledge he required.”

  “What did he have to do to hold it off?” Gage asked.

  “No one knows,” Dace said, playing with my fingers. “There are as many myths about what Mimir showed him as there are about why he sought Mimir in the first place.” Dace paused for a minute, looking at Chelle and Gage. When they didn’t speak, he continued, “Eventually Sutur killed Odin, but those who believe the myths think he and the other gods will be resurrected in time to stand against Fenrir and the giants at Ragnarök. With him dead, Sköll and Hati should have free reign to free their father and end the world, but it hasn’t happened yet.”

  “And we’re why,” I whispered, shuddering.

  “You don’t know that,” Dace said.

  I didn’t argue with him, but we both knew I wasn’t wrong. All of this felt so damned familiar to us for a reason. We’d done it before. Over and over, if what I’d seen was any indication. We’d stood against Sköll and Hati and beat them back time and again over the millennia. The myths might not have agreed on what Mimir had shown Odin, but I knew. We were what Mimir showed Odin. Two powerful shapeshifters, reborn time and again to stand against Sköll and Hati, to stop them. Dace might not have believed that, but I did. I’d felt it. I’d been feeling it for weeks now, but I hadn’t put the pieces together like I should have.

  “So if they do what they’re supposed to do … .”

  ”Fenrir will break free,” I whispered, “and the apocalypse will come.”

  Dace eyed me oddly. He’d made it clear he didn’t think that part of the myth should be taken literally either, but I knew better. I’d seen that monster chained in the bowels of the earth. If ever Hell had a hound ready to set loose upon the world, it would be that giant.

  “Who are Sköll and Hati?” Chelle asked.

  “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” Dace said.

  “Me?” Her eyes widened. “You know more about all of this than I do.” She didn’t say obviously, but her tone implied it.

  He waved her protest away with the flick of a wrist. “Have you ever seen Silence of the Lambs?”

  Oh, good grief!

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you remember the …” He hesitated as though he was trying to remember something. “Hannibal?” He looked to me for confirmation.

  I nodded reluctantly.

  “Hannibal Lecter?” Dace asked, turning back to Chelle.

  “He’s the villain. Or the psychopath. Why?”

  “Does Ronan ever remind you of him?”

  My cheeks warmed from his question.

  “Ronan?” Chelle’s brows furrowed. “I haven’t thought about it. Why?”

  Dace hesitated.

  I groaned. “I told him the way Ronan looks at me reminds me of Hannibal’s expression when he asks to see Clarice’s badge when they first meet. You know how his eyes are devoid of anything resembling human emotion?” My cheeks warmed even more as both Chelle and Gage turned their eyes on me. Thank God I hadn’t told Dace that Ronan reminded me of a bird, too. If he’d heard that thought, he hadn’t brought it up. I wouldn’t be doing it for him.

  Chelle pursed her lips and then nodded. “I guess I can see that.” She shivered slightly.

  Gage slid an arm around her shoulder. He didn’t even look in her direction before responding, he was so in sync with her emotions. “But what does that have to do with anything?”

  “I’m not sure,” Dace said again.

  How many times had I heard him say the same thing? Irritating.

  “But it reminded me”—he looked at me and away so quickly I wasn’t sure he’d looked at me at all—”of the dreams she’s having of Sköll and Hati.”

  “How so?” I demanded, my heart trembling a little. I knew where this conversation was leading now. Nowhere good. Nowhere good at all.

  “The way you dream them,” he said, clearly uncomfortable. “Their eyes are the same.”

  I tried to digest that, but couldn’t. I didn’t remember their eyes. I only remembered how they made me feel. Dread. Terror. Apparently that’s what dreams of the apocalypse did to me.

  “I don’t understand.” Gage frowned, first at Dace and then at me. “Are you saying Ronan is Sköll or Hati?”

  As soon as he connected them together in the same sentence like that, something else dawned on me. This wasn’t something that had come from the wolves, but from somewhere else: the countless hours I’d spent pouring over volumes of poetry.

  “The moving moon went up the sky, and nowhere did abide; softly she was going up, and a star or two beside,” I quoted, looking at Dace.

  He quirked a brow, tilted his head, and then frowned as if he couldn’t quite find the thought in the jumble racing through my mind. “What are you thinking, love?”

  “It’s a poem by Coleridge,” I said. “It reminded me of something. The faces of the moon.” I shifted, uncomfortable again. “I’m not sure.”

  “The faces of the moon?” Gage glanced between Dace and me again.

  “Maiden, Mother, and Crone,” I explained. “In Neo-Pagan faiths, the Triple Goddess is represented by the three phases, or faces, of the moon. Waxing, full and waning, or Maiden, Mother, and Crone.”

  “The three sisters,” Dace murmured.

  “The three sisters?” Gage repeated, his arm tightening around Chelle as he said the words. “Don’t Neo-Pagans view the Triple Goddess as aspects of the same being?”

  “Depends on who you ask,” I said.

  Gage arched a brow at my comment.

  “Some view the Triple Goddess as the same person or deity. The Hecate Sisters, for instance,” I explained, my mind sifting through what I’d learned of Paganism in my World Religions class, “are often believed to be aspects of the same goddess. Others don’t view it quite the same way. They believe the Triple Goddess isn’t a representation of a single goddess, but of three completely separate entities. The Norns, the Fates.” I ticked them off on my fingers. “Both are sets of sisters who have been represented by the Triple Goddess, or Maiden, Mother, and Crone, over the years.” Having them focused on me so intently unnerved me.

  Chelle frowned between the three of us, looking lost and apprehensive at once. “What are you getting at?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said, beginning to understand why Dace always told me the same thing. When you didn’t have all the answers, saying as much was far easier than admitting to the frightening things you thought might be true. “That part of Coleridge’s poem always brings the Maiden, Mother, and Crone aspects to mind for me.”

  “It makes sense,” Dace muttered, looking at Gage.

  Gage scowled. The dark expression didn’t look natural on him, but it got the point across. He and Dace had already worked out what I thought, and Gage didn’t like it at all.

  I didn’t blame him in the least. If I was right, Sköll and Hati were already fulfilling their destinies.
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br />   “What makes sense?” Chelle demanded, scowling in obvious frustration.

  Dace hesitated then sighed. “If Sköll and Hati are meant to kill human descendants versus literally swallowing the sun and moon, it’s possible the descendants of the moon god would be three sisters. Triplets.”

  Gage shook his head, his jaw clenched. “No.”

  Chelle didn’t say anything. She simply stared, her mouth slightly parted, and her face paling to a sickly shade of white. Her hands shook.

  I knew exactly how she felt. I’d been feeling pretty much exactly the same fear for weeks.

  “No,” Gage said again.

  “I’m not saying that’s the case,” Dace hurried to assure him. “I’m only saying it’s a possibility.”

  “What are the other possibilities?” Chelle whispered.

  “There could be a million of them,” Dace said, looking away from Gage. “The Norse people viewed Fenrir’s mate Angrboda as a representation of Maiden, Mother and Crone, too. So we could be completely wrong. Arionna has never been a Dreamer before.” He put enough emphasis on the word that I immediately understood he didn’t mean that I wasn’t the head in the clouds type. “Maybe we’re seeing connections where they don’t exist.” He didn’t sound much like he believed that to be true.

  “How do we find out if there’s a connection or not?” Chelle asked after a minute, her voice strained.

  My heart went out to her. Losing Dani might have been only the beginning for her. If we were right, Chelle and Beth were in as much danger as Dace and me. That sucked. Big time.

  “We start with Ronan,” I answered when Dace said nothing. I don’t think he wanted to consider the possibility that this was honestly happening, that it had already started. I didn’t blame him for that, but we couldn’t pretend just because pretending made us feel better. There were too many coincidences to believe Ronan wasn’t involved in some way, particularly since he’d been dating Dani.

  “If he was a wolf, I’d know,” Dace argued right on cue.

  “Who says he has to be a wolf?” I demanded, frustrated he’d come here with this in mind and balked now that we were talking about the possibility. I didn’t understand him. I truly didn’t.