Rushing across, overwhelming with its enormous, monstrous formation. “What is it?”
She saw the hand then, streaking overhead, and dead birds began falling like black rain around her.
“Not my crows,” she screamed, stunned and sickened that the crows, quite surprisingly, were like her children.
But crows fell. Many, many crows.
And other things.
They splatted loudly upon the ground, hitting the dirt with thick, stomach-turning thumps, creating with shocking quickness a carpet of dead birds.
“Come on,” Jim yelled, and led the way.
Grim’s barking added to the abrupt chaos—barking, screaming, booming of distant explosions, and the dead birds thumping like hail upon a roof.
“Not my crows,” she begged.
Her horse reared, nearly throwing her before he fell to the ground, screaming. A second after she jumped free, he went still and silent.
A piece of metal dropped from the sky, twisting and turning like a deadly windmill, and struck Mel so hard it split his head open. He was dead before he hit the ground.
They rushed into the forest where the trees afforded them some shelter from the falling birds and debris.
And from the colossal, inconceivable hand in the sky.
At least for a little while.
“Okay,” she said, the gun cradled against her chest. She crouched upon the forest floor, her back against a wide tree. No one mentioned Mel. “The fuck is the hand?”
“Pure magic,” Olson said. “Pure, evil magic.”
“Belongs to the witch?” Then Rune realized someone was missing. “Where’s Snow?”
Her people weren’t there yet, but they’d been on foot. It’d take them a while to catch up—if they made it past the hand. Rune and her men crouched at the base of trees, waiting for the hand to pass.
“She went back to see Five,” Jim told her. “Said she’d catch up with us.”
“Fuck me.” Rune ground her teeth. The urge to protect Owen was so strong she’d climbed to her feet and taken a few steps before she stopped herself.
Owen Five was no longer her responsibility.
He was on his own.
When she was once more settled, Olson began to talk about the hand.
“The hand,” he said. “Belongs to no one. If you’re in its path and it reaches down to touch you, you’ll get the true death. It comes, it purges the skies, and it goes away again.”
Rune peered up at it through the thick tree tops. It made her queasy and anxious to see it. Made her feel like she could easily slip out of her own skin. Her own mind.
The hand sparked, and a display of lightning broke it up, for one instant, into a colorful bunch of clouds. She thought she saw something falling from it—not birds, whatever fell was too large for a bird—and then the lightning show ended and the hand began to slide away. Higher into the sky it went, dispersing into—
“Oh shit,” Rune said. “I know that hand.” Voices intruded into her thoughts…no, not voices. One voice.
“Catch the hand when you’re ready. It will bring you back to me.”
Gunnar the Ghoul’s voice. Gunnar’s words.
The words she’d forgotten on the path.
“What do you mean?” Jim asked.
Grim sat at her feet, panting.
“Princess,” Jim prompted. “You know the sky hand?”
“Oh yes,” she said, the daughter of the witch, the daughter of Skyll. Her voice was quiet but her heart jumped. “It’s not just a hand.”
“What is it?” Olson whispered, his eyes round. “What is it, Princess?”
“That hand is the path upon which I traveled to get here.”
And for the briefest of seconds, as the crows continued to drop and the darkening sky began to spit a light rain, her sensitive ears picked up a sound in the distance that reminded her so much of the berserker’s familiar roar she could do nothing but clutch her chest, try to breathe, and wait for the pain to pass.
Chapter Thirty-One
She lay unsettled and sleepless upon the ground, covered with a thin blanket. Grim curled against her and fell asleep almost as soon as he lay down, and occasional whines adding to the distant sounds of fighting.
He slept with the tip of his tongue out, which amused her despite her uneasiness.
Finally she fell asleep, but it wasn’t a good sleep.
Almost as soon as she closed her eyes she dreamed, and in her dream she was visited by…someone she forgot as soon as she left her dream.
When she jerked awake, all she could remember was a vague and terrible warning.