Wolves of the Thousandth Winter novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Nine Hundred and Thirty-One

Gunnar proves what he is and tells her to refuse the page; she refuses to be told, and wolves wait outside.

I laughed, and it came out thin.

"Nine hundred and thirty-one."

"Yes."

"You look about thirty-six."

"I was thirty-six when I stopped," he said. "The Alpha line slows there and doesn't go on."

He let go of my wrist.

The place where his hand had been felt cold, and I hated that I noticed.

"Show me something," I said. "Anything. I have a master's degree and a very low tolerance for men in wet jackets."

He looked at me for a long moment, and then he held his right hand out between us, palm up, under the lamp.

The skin of his knuckles rippled.

Dark hair ran up the back of his fingers, and the nails thickened and curved and turned the color of old horn.

Five claws, each as long as my little finger, lay open in the light.

Then the hand went back to a man's hand, wide and scarred, with a tan line where a watch should have been.

I sat down on the edge of the table because my knees had made the decision for me.

"Okay," I said.

"Okay?"

"I'm not screaming. Give me credit."

The corner of his mouth moved.

It was not quite a smile, but it changed his whole face, and I looked away at the book.

"The ledger is the pack's record," he said. "Seers kept it for a thousand years. Whatever they wrote came true."

"All of it?"

"Every birth. Every death. Every mate."

"And the seer wrote you a mate in 1126."

"I was thirty-one. I was in the hall with the pack, and the seer read my page aloud." His voice stayed flat. "She read your name."

"And you left."

"I left the room, and then the country. I've been refusing that page for nine hundred years."

"Why?"

"My mother was handed to my father by the book," he said. "They hated each other for forty years, and the book said they were right to stay."

His jaw worked.

"I will not be handed a wife."

"That makes two of us," I said.

He blinked.

"I'm not offended," I went on. "I'm just saying, I have never once liked being told what's good for me."

"Then you'll refuse."

"I haven't decided."

"The margin says you will."

"The margin says a lot of things." I tapped the Latin. "A margin note is a scribe's opinion. I have read two hundred of them and half were wrong about the weather."

"Ms. Asplund."

"Thora."

"Thora." He said it carefully, and the sound of it did something to the back of my neck. "I gave this book to your museum sixty years ago so no one would read it. I came tonight because Edna told me she had found someone who reads Norse."

"You gave it to the museum to hide it."

"Yes."

"In a place where someone like me would eventually open it."

He was quiet.

"It's a very good plan," I said, "for nine hundred years of experience."

"I didn't expect the book to be opened this year." He put a hand on the table beside my hip. "This is the Thousandth Winter, Thora. The first page of this ledger was written in the winter of 1026."

"A thousand winters."

"The page you read is read aloud at the solstice. By law."

"Whose law?"

"Ours."

That was when I understood he was standing very close.

I had to tilt my head back to see his face.

He smelled of rain and cedar and a warmth I had no name for, and my pulse was going so hard I could hear it in my ears.

"Tell me to leave," he said quietly.

"Why would I do that?"

"Because the page says you won't."

"Then maybe," I said, "I want to see what it takes."

His eyes had gone gold again.

He lifted his hand and, very slowly, touched one strand of my hair, the long silver fall of it that has been white since I was nineteen.

He turned it between two fingers.

"It was white in the entry," he said. "I didn't believe it."

"You're making that up."

"The seer wrote it. Silver hair, a book in her hands, a way of arguing that would drive a saint to the wall." His thumb brushed my cheek. "She was right about that."

I should have stepped back.

I leaned in.

His breath touched my mouth, and I closed my eyes, and for one second the whole thousand years narrowed to the inch between us.

Then my brain, my stubborn, bookish, punishing brain, said clearly: someone wrote this down.

I put two fingers on his chest and pushed.

He stepped back at once.

"No," I said. My voice shook. "Not like this. Not because a book says so."

Something moved across his face that looked a lot like relief.

"That's the right answer," he said.

"Don't you dare tell me it's right."

"Thora."

"I'm not refusing because you asked me to," I said. "I'm refusing because it's mine to refuse."

He nodded once.

Outside, a sound rose over the rain, long and low.

It was not a dog, and I knew it, and so did every nerve in my back.

Gunnar went to the window in two strides.

He turned the blinds with one finger.

In the museum parking lot, under the single yellow light, six pairs of eyes shone back at us through the rain.

They were the size of a man's shoulder, and they were all looking at my window.

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