Free Wild Hunt by Margaret Ronald Page A

been holding on long enough that releasing him would have been obvious and silly.
    I led him around a corner and into one of the little half-block parks that don’t show up on most Boston maps, that thrive or wither depending on who the neighbors are. I’d locked up my bike here, and I let go of Nate’s hand to dig a book out of my saddlebag. “Okay,” I said, flourishing the book at him. “Sigmund. Volsung saga, loads of other sagas, gets picked up by Wagner later on. Boinks his sister, sneaks off with their son, runs around with him in the forest for a while, gets turned into a wolf for a bit, then does something stupid and ends up killing the kid. In Wagner’s version he doesn’t even make it through the second opera before Siegfried the Idiot takes over. There’s a few other Sigmunds, but Sarah’s the go-to person for those kinds of myths. You want to talk to her.”
    I handed him the book—not Dictionary of Myth , but one of the little ones that Sarah had foisted on me. Nate reached out and took it, looking from me to the book and back. “That’s what you wanted me for?”
    No, I thought. I wanted you to remind me that I’m human and capable of making good decisions. I wanted to make sure you’re all right. I wanted to see you. But if I said, “I needed to talk to you,” it would sound as if there was something life-threatening at stake instead of just my own mental state. Or at the very least I’d sound desperate.
    “Mostly,” I said.
    “Huh.” He gave me a sharp look, then opened the book and flipped through it. An old man with five pugs on their leashes, all snorting and panting, shuffled past, and Nate stepped out of their way, just a bit closer to me. He hadn’t shaved that morning, I noticed, and the last August sun picked out the gleam in the scruff along the line of his jaw. Absently, he licked his finger to turn the page.
    I looked away, silently blessing my summer’s worth of sunburn. “So,” I said, and cleared my throat.
    “Hm?” Red and blue ink streaked the middle finger of his hand. He’s left-handed , I thought, trying to concentrate on that irrelevancy in the face of the full-scale revolt my body was trying to pull on me. My cell rang, and I slapped at it, switching it off.
    The book , I told myself. I just came out here to give him the book . “So. Sigmund. Why did you want to know?”
    A cloud descended over his expression, and he closed the book. For a moment he gazed at the cover, not really seeing anything, then shook his head. “Hell,” he said. “I got a letter—well, a lot of letters, over the past couple of weeks. From my father.”
    I nodded, still gazing at his hands, then blinked. “Wait. What?”
    Nate laughed without smiling. “That’s what I thought.”
    I didn’t know much about Nate’s father, other than he got Nate’s mom pregnant when she was seventeen and promptly skipped town. Nate didn’t talk about him, hadn’t ever since I knew him. Because I’d also had an estranged dad, I knew how easy it was to create an imaginary father, one who was sympathetic and smart and very cool regardless of what you remembered of him in reality, who would always take your side in whatever argument you and your mom were having at the moment, and so on.
    But those ideas fall away early, and from Nate’s expression, his illusions had dissolved a long time ago. “Jesus.” I shook myself, forcing away the disturbing awareness of his body. “What happened?”
    Nate shrugged. “I don’t know. Nothing. He just started writing me letters. Not really harassing me, just writing, a lot. After what happened the…the first time I met him, I figured he wouldn’t want to cross paths again, but in the last few weeks I’ve been getting a lot of mail from him. And he keeps referring to something about ‘Sigmund,’ like I’m supposed to know what it means.” He rubbed at the corners of hiseyes, then glanced at me, trying to smile. “Somehow I don’t think the