Page 26 of Soul of Shadow #1

They spent almost a half hour in the lake waiting for the goblins to give up. They were persistent creatures, Elias explained—always hungry, never enough human flesh to go around.

“Can they see humans?” she asked as they sat in the water, soft waves splashing against her shoulders. “Even though humans can’t see them, I mean.”

Shortly after they had entered the lake, Charlie heard her backpack unzipping. The v?tte dove into the water and swam in small circles around them, clearly enjoying himself.

“They can,” Elias said, watching as two of the goblins got into a fistfight on the shoreline.

“It’s torture for the more carnivorous spirits.

They can see their dinner, but they can’t reach it.

When they try to touch humans, their claws turn to mist. It would be like a cloud trying to grab hold of an airplane. ”

“Can’t say I feel bad for them.” The fighting goblins rolled around on the sand, trying to claw out each other’s eyes. “Why didn’t you shift into your shadow form earlier? They couldn’t have touched you, right?”

“No, they couldn’t have. But my human body would’ve been left lying around in that clearing; they could have fed on that. ”

“Because you’ve eaten an eyaerberry,” she filled in, “and Asgardian creatures can only interact with humans who have done that.”

“Correct. The Seal cuts off Asgardian creatures and their magic from touching humans who cannot see them. Once you consume the eyaerberry, you gain the ability to see them, but they also gain the ability to touch—and subsequently hurt—you.”

“I see. And where did you find an eyaerberry to eat?”

Elias said nothing.

She changed subjects. “What happens if your human form dies when you’re in shadow?”

Again, he didn’t respond. He kept his eyes on the goblins, whose fight had spread from two creatures to twenty, all scrabbling about in the sand and screeching at each other.

“Right.” She nodded as the v?tte paddled toward her, climbing up the damp cloth of her T-shirt to nestle on her shoulder. “I see. More information that is need to know only.”

He only glanced at her and smirked.

They were sitting very close in the water.

Close enough for their shoulders to brush every couple of minutes.

When they did, she couldn’t help but notice that his skin still wasn’t overly hot.

That it was only comfortably warm, the way it had been when he put on her necklace.

She wondered if the lake had dampened his temperature, or if he was merely keeping it low as a courtesy to her.

She touched the necklace on her chest. “Shouldn’t this have protected me from the goblins?”

“From one or two vittra, sure,” said Elias. “But from a group that size? Or against something far more powerful, like a draugar?” He shook his head, saying nothing else .

Charlie shivered.

A half hour later, the sun had set and the goblins had finally trickled back into the forest. After a further twenty minutes of waiting, Elias deemed it safe enough for them to leave the lake.They moved quickly through the trees, winding their way back to the old house.

Once inside, Elias lit a candle in the front hallway.

“The towels are this way,” he said, picking up the candle and holding it aloft.

The house was as dank and dusty as the last time Charlie was there, but for whatever reason, it didn’t feel as creepy.

Maybe it was because Elias had explained to her on the way over all the ways he protected its interior from the spirits: steel rods hammered into the frame of every door and window, gold coins littered about the front yard as offerings of appeasement.

The house was about as safe as any space could be.

Elias led them past the Nordic letter–covered dining room she saw on her first visit.

It must have been past eight by then, since the sun had already set.

Charlie’s mother would be frantic. Not to mention that her cell phone had been in her backpack when she dove into the lake.

She could only hope that it wouldn’t be too waterlogged to send a text message.

Just before the end of the hallway, Elias paused at a door.

He twisted the handle and pushed it open, holding up his candle to illuminate the closet within.

It was surprisingly tidy, a dust-free set of shelves stacked with folded linens and fluffy towels.

He selected a set of icy-blue towels and handed one to Charlie.

Then he bent over and reached deep into the bottom shelf, emerging with a red and white first aid kit.

He shook it like a maraca. “For your leg.”

Charlie’s heart expanded and contracted in her chest. After the madness of the chase and almost an hour sitting in the lake, she hadn’t even remembered that her leg was injured.

Once she tuned into the spot that the vittra had scratched—a long, burning line on the back of her calf—it was impossible to ignore, but until that moment, she’d truly forgotten that she might need medical attention.

But Elias hadn’t.

“Wait,” she said as he started to shut the closet. He paused, and she nodded at the v?tte shivering on her shoulder. “Do you have any hand towels?”

Once she and the v?tte were both wrapped in soft cotton, Elias led them to the sitting room at the end of the hallway.

She sat on the sofa, setting the v?tte on one of the pillows.

He made a nest of his hand towel and snuggled down into it until just the tip of his red hat pointed out of the fabric.

As Charlie dug her cell phone out of her waterlogged backpack, Elias set the first aid kit on the floor and knelt on the dusty carpet in front of the fireplace, busying himself building a fire.

The water had definitely damaged her phone. The screen was painfully slow, as if it were barely holding on. Still, she managed to type out a text to her mom, letting her know that she was fine and would be home soon.

Text sent, she looked around the living room.

At first glance, it was as shabby and unwelcoming as the rest of the house.

But as Elias lit the fire, warm brushstrokes of orange spilling out into the space, she noticed some touches that clearly spoke of home: clean pillows, half-drunk mugs of coffee, a honey-colored knit blanket draped over the back of an armchair, a stack of paperbacks on a side table.

As the fire burned brighter, warming her bones and filling the room with light, she began to suspect that, with a bit of dusting and tidying, the space could feel very homey indeed.

“Do you really live here?” Charlie asked.

Fire built, Elias turned around on his knees. He looked around the room as if seeing it for the first time—or perhaps seeing it through the eyes of an outsider for the first time.

“I do,” he said. “For now, at least.”

“How have the cops not run you out? This must have been the first place they looked when they started investigating the disappearances.”

Elias picked up the first aid kit and moved to the foot of the couch, pulling over a low stool to sit on.

He set the first aid kit on the floor to his right and opened its lid to reveal an assortment of the usual materials: bandages, alcohol wipes, tweezers, gauze, hand sanitizer, ibuprofen.

Elias reached for Charlie’s injured leg, pausing a half inch from her ankle.

He looked up at her through his eyelashes, waiting for permission to touch her.

Charlie’s heart did that funny contraction thing again. Not trusting herself to speak, she nodded.

Elias slipped his fingers around her ankle, gently lifting it from the floor. His fingers were warm again, not hot, though Charlie could swear the warmth they gave off somehow ended up in her stomach. He set her ankle on his knee, turning it slightly so he could inspect her calf.

He cleared his throat. “I made a deal with the ash wives when I moved in,” he said, and Charlie had to rake her mind to remember what it was they’d been talking about before he touched her.

Oh, yes—the old house and the police. Why they haven’t kicked him out yet .

“Ash wives aren’t as powerful as wood wives, at least when it comes to anything other than ash magic,” Elias went on, and even though Charlie had no idea what ash magic was, she kept her mouth shut, because he had unwrapped an alcohol wipe and was now cleaning around her wound with a tenderness that made the warmth in her stomach grow uncomfortably hot.

“But if you get enough on your side, they can cast a spell over a stretch of land. Play tricks with human eyes.” He opened another wipe and started to dab at the gash itself.

Charlie bit back a hiss. “If the police drew near, they would have seen something else. A house burned down long ago, or leveled to dust for some later project.”

“But I saw it,” she said. “And that was before I ate the eyaerberry.”

“You saw my home,” he said, reaching the bottom of the cut and dropping the dirty wipe to the floor, “because I wanted you to see it.”

“Wait.” The towel slipped from one of her shoulders. “You knew I was following you?”

Elias snorted as he bent down to pick up a roll of bandage. “Of course I knew. You’re about as sneaky as a hippopotamus, Charlotte.”

She reached over, snatched one of the pillows, and whacked him lightly on the side of his head. He laughed, batting it away.

“And you have the temper of one, too.” He shook his head.

He was grinning, but it wasn’t one of the sarcastic smiles that he normally wore.

It was genuine, filled with mirth, and it made him look younger.

Much younger, like he was actually an eighteen-year-old boy instead of a dark spirit on an even darker mission.

The heat in Charlie’s stomach became a dull ache, the twisting of her insides around each other.

She averted her eyes before the feeling could grow.