Rinda Elliott - Foresworn

“ Old Mrs. Northrup’s heat went out last night in one of the power outages. Her daughter found her this morning. Froze in her own bed... ”

“ Did you hear that they ran out of gas already at the Exxon station over on... ”

“ One of the park rangers told my husband he saw one of those aurora borealis things twice in the past week. Right over the lake. They’ve only happened a few times before and never when it’s this overcast. My husband got so scared , he went up and bought all the beans at the grocery store. Can you believe it? Beans! If it’s end times , the last thing I want is to be holed up in my home with a man on a steady diet of musical fruit. Might as well shoot me now before the misery starts ”

I had to turn away because I choked on a laugh. Death and farting—true end of the world conversation. It wasn’t the first strange topic I’d heard in these sorts of places. I decided to go ahead and get what road food I could instead of eating here, so I stepped out of line. As I walked down the few aisles, I was surprised to see anything left on the ratty shelves. With the snow getting worse, the shelves would empty fast, and who knew what I’d find on the drive to Oklahoma.

After grabbing crackers, canned chicken and iffy-dated peanut butter, I got into the checkout line. My vision blurred from exhaustion. I should be finding a motel, but I didn’t trust Dru. And unfortunately I didn’t trust either of my sisters to send her butt to jail, either. They always gave our mother the benefit of the doubt. Not me. Not since I’d watched her sit and pee herself as she surrendered to the lure of her inner catatonic world when she had three small children living in a freaking tent. That was around the time Coral had started having nightmares about a silver-haired man crouching over us at night.

I’d never seen him, but I’d barely slept for weeks after that, keeping watch. Something in her expression—her absolute certainty—had scared the crap out of me.

“Hey, you’re next.”

I blinked my gritty eyes and looked down at the person sitting in the booth next to the checkout line. “Huh?”

“The line moved without you.” She pointed.

Right then it felt like someone stabbed a hot poker through my chest.

“Oh no, not now,” I whispered through gritted teeth.

But as usual, the She Leech did whatever she wanted. I frantically looked around for a place to hide and realized sitting in an empty booth would draw less attention. I set my items on the table, then looked up at the wall menu like I planned to buy a meal. The red letters smeared hard to the left, and I squeezed my eyes tight and tried to not look as the world went into chaos around me. It wasn’t so hard lately because the pain that came with my rune tempus sort of obliterated everything else, anyway. Everything around me—the diner, the people, the shelves—would be in a spin. When I was younger, this was the only part of the process I liked because it felt like jumping into a kaleidoscope and watching the colors swirl around me. Or like being on my favorite ride at the fair. The one with the huge steering wheel in the middle so people could get a good spin in the hooded seats big enough for me and both sisters.

But the next part of my rune tempus ripped my soul out.

Being a host. Being forced to write messages against my will. Being at someone else’s mercy. It was like each and every time took away a little more of me. Broke down what made me feel like me. And what made me feel like me was being in control of my own damned life.

I peeked to see if the world had shuddered to a halt and found what I expected. The people in the booth next to me had been frozen midbite. The lady held a pickle over her mouth like she was dangling spaghetti into it. The man across from her had his nose wrinkled in distaste as he picked something off an onion ring. I squinted. Oh gods , was that a hair?

Something moved, and my heart stuttered to a stop. I slowly looked around, eyeing the people in front and behind the counter, but everyone was frozen like a statue. If I were to go outside, even the wind wouldn’t be moving. I’d always wondered why I just didn’t walk into it. I mean, wind is a thing, right? So why only feel it when it moves?

Shaking my head at my own silliness, I told myself to stop channeling Coral. That was just the sort of thing she would think. My heart tightened. I missed her. Missed her and Raven both.

My hand started to tingle, and I reached into my pocket for the small notebook I kept in it. It wasn’t there. Panicked, I stood to scan the shelves for a notebook and a pen, but before I could move, my norn forced my hand. I grabbed the ketchup bottle and began to squirt it onto the table in thin, long lines.

Music on the lake.

This is what our norns did—the Norse goddesses my sisters and I carried inside us. They gave us stupid cryptic messages in ways that disrupted our lives, caused our mother to pull us from school and made keeping a job ridiculously hard. Though Raven managed to keep two most of the time. I’d actually been fired from my last one. I hadn’t told my family. Hadn’t told them that my boss had been totally freaked over talking to me one moment and seeing me trying to wipe permanent marker off a nice new white refrigerator the next.

My table didn’t have napkins and neither did the next few. I finally went into the bathroom in the back, realized I was glad I’d decided not to eat here when I saw the condition of the sink and grabbed a handful of paper towels. I was back in my seat, ready to clean up the ketchup runes, when the norn spun the world again.

Gods! She usually gave me a bit more breathing room.

Groaning, I held on to the edge of the table with one hand and tried to wipe at the runes with the other. But the spin always threw me off if I kept my eyes open and all I got were the last two runes before everything stopped spinning.

To everyone else in the truck stop, nothing had happened. They all continued their movements, their conversations. The man in the next booth held up the hair he’d pulled from the onion rings. I hurriedly swiped the ketchup runes into a smeared mess and flinched when someone cleared his throat next to me.

I looked up into the most fascinating face on a boy I’d ever seen. He had a charcoal-colored beanie pulled so far down his head, I couldn’t tell his hair color, but his narrow features looked like they belonged on a magazine. Sleepy, slightly slanted eyes that were a dark, dark brown stared down at my table in amusement. They were like the seal brown on a color wheel—that last shade before black. With eyes that dark, he should have had black hair under that hat, but his eyebrows were blond. He had thin, elegant, wide lips over a square jaw and sharp cheekbones. All that too-pretty sat atop broad shoulders and a long, rangy body. I guessed him to be about six feet tall.

“Hi.” His voice surprised me. It was deep and warm when I’d been expecting something higher, with clipped accents. I’d been expecting British...in Wyoming.

Okay, I really, really needed some sleep.

“Hi,” I replied, drawing the word out because he just stood there, staring down at me. My norn sort of moved. She didn’t have a physical body—gods, I was pretty hopeful on that one because I had no desire to physically experience a reenactment of Alien —but her essence could sometimes feel physical. This boy agitated her. Not in a bad way, either. Not like the guy in the parking lot earlier. No, this was warmer...like interest. Sheesh , does she think he’s hot or something?