Free Forecast by Rinda Elliott Page A

pretty spectacular shade of red and actually shuffled his feet a bit.
    Did I say curvy? We’re talking full-on womanly hips, boobs—everything. She was a walking, talking Scandinavian warrior. Named Mist.
    “Valkyries shadow.” I murmured the
rune tempus
from the first night with Taran under my breath, looking for her shadow.
    I didn’t think I said it loud enough for her to hear me, but she turned to face me fully. We stared at each other. This was no kid carrying a Valkyrie soul, but the actual Valkyrie named Mist. I knew it with every fiber of my being. I’d read about her.
    Goose bumps sprang on my arms.
    My norn started shifting about and I didn’t even think about it, I just raised my hand out of habit, hoping to settle her down. Again, my gaze went to the tall, very dark Magnus. He was probably another warrior then. A warrior travelling with a Valkyrie.
    To where?
    “It’s a mess out there, isn’t it?” Mist pointed, and I turned to see that the wind had picked up even more. Trees had nearly bent in two and feathers from the flock of ravens still swirled in the air.
    Someone in the restaurant gasped and the place went silent again as everyone turned toward a small, portable television somebody had set up on one of the corner booth tables. Probably an employee who wanted to keep an eye on the weather. On the small screen, a frantic newscaster was using words like multiple superstorms and evacuations going on in the entire lower half of Florida, Cuba and along the East Coast.
    “Looks like we’re in for quite a ride,” Magnus muttered. “The storm isn’t hitting here, but they said earlier we could get a surge.” He looked at Mist. “Glad we left the Keys, but I guess we should have ignored the urge to stop here after all. I thought the snow was bad enough, but that storm coming in looks rough. Could be worse than they’re predicting.”
    This was the first I’d heard of this—not that I’d had any time to catch the news. I started to ask him what he was talking about when something else in the overly packed restaurant grabbed my attention.
    The same feeling from the night before at Taran’s—the dark, prickly evil—washed over me, and my mouth went dry as my gaze darted around the room, trying to find the source.
    Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a pointy, dark face. Dark, like marble...not skin.
Oh gods
,
it was straight out of my memories.
I twisted my neck to look, but the man sitting in the booth seemed perfectly normal with his inky-black hair and beard. He tilted his head and stared back, a small smile playing about the corners of his red lips. I pulled my gaze away, only to see his dark skin and pointed features again out of the corner of my eye.
    I tried to keep my face still, tried to stare into my peripheral vision without looking directly, but he stood. He moved funny, gracefully, as if his limbs were more liquid than solid, and as he came toward me, my heart started pounding, my hands started sweating.
    He’d moved like that in my nightmares. The ones I’d had as a kid, over and over until I’d gone to bed afraid every night.
    I backed away from him, looked around to see if others were watching him—looking for expressions that would tell me if they saw two different images—and in the blink of an eye, he was in front of me, his hand out as if he wanted to stroke a finger down my cheek.
    Magnus made a startled noise from right behind me. “What the—”
    My norn suddenly twisted and writhed so hard in my chest, it actually hurt. I cried out, put my palm over my heart to calm her, but it almost felt as if she screamed in protest.
    I flashed back to those times in the tent. She must have been with me, but I hadn’t felt her move then—not until I’d turned nine.
    Now it was like having someone stick a billows in my chest—squeezing over and over, sending painful streams of thick air to thrash and fill until it was hard for me to breathe.
    She wanted me nowhere near this