“If you’re headed to town,” I tried hopefully, and when she didn’t deny it, I added, “Anywhere close to State Street would do us.”

She nodded, her eyes on the black strip of asphalt. Wind threw streaks of powdery snow across the road where it slithered like snakes, twisting and turning before merging with the drifts on the opposite side. “You kids off on a date?”

“His birthday.”

She nodded as if considering something. I braced myself for a Christmas comment or joke. Finally, she simply said dryly, “Nice day for it.”

Thunder rolled outside, strangely synchronous with her tone.

Sebastian roused himself from his brood enough to inquire, “Was there supposed to be a storm coming in?”

“Oh yeah,” said the driver, in a pitch-perfect Minnesotan accent. “National Weather Service issued a winter storm warning.”

“This just gets better and better,” Sebastian grumbled.

I gave him a punch in the arm, as if to say, “Be nice!”

“I feel terrible,” I said. “I should really have introduced myself. I’m Garnet Lacey, and my delightful companion here is my boyfriend, Sebastian Von Traum.”

She nodded her greeting. “Fonn Hyrokkin.” In the flash of a passing car’s headlight, something sparkled in her eyes like ice.

Hyrokkin sounded a lot like the Finnish surnames I’d grown up with in northern Minnesota, but something about the way she said it, as though it were more of a title, made me pause.

I looked with my magical vision, but it was too dark to get a good read of her aura. Auras are like halos of refracted light around a person or an object, and they can’t be seen without some kind of illumination. I’ve found artificial fluorescents work best, but light of some kind is an absolute must. The glow of the dashboard just wasn’t cutting it.

Despite my growing unease about our driver, we fell into a silence.

You can’t live in the upper Midwest without having to deal with quietness. I grew up in Minnesota, so I should be used to it: but I’m a chronic chatterer. I even commit the cardinal sin of enticing strangers into conversation in elevators. When I can’t talk, I tap my toes and drum my fingers. It was strange, but one of the things I like about my adoptive state of Wisconsin is that people around here seem to be much more willing to engage in copious amounts of small talk. Just my luck, the one Norwegian in all of Wisconsin would have to pick us up.

I glanced at Sebastian for support as my feet started their nervousness dance. He just glumly watched the darkness roll past the window.

Pulling at the fingers of my gloves, I looked back at Fonn. She stared resolutely ahead. Our shoulders touched when the truck bounced over uneven patches in the road, and each time they did I would have sworn I could smell dog more sharply. I told myself that maybe her golden retriever liked to nap on her coat. I mean, I was sure some of my clothes smelled of cat. Barney snoozed in my dresser drawer any time I accidentally left it open. Anyway, why should that make me so nervous? As someone who kept a pet, I tended to see animal ownership as a positive personality trait. The people who didn’t have animals when they could always seemed a little suspect. So what bothered me? Was it that the dog wasn’t anywhere in sight?

I listened to the sound of the engine growling as we continued to bump along the deserted county road. I wanted to ask Fonn about the dog I could smell but couldn’t think of a polite way to bring it up. “Say, I notice your truck stinks of wet pooch. So what kind is it, and where is it anyway?! Oh, that’s actually your body odor? My bad,” seemed just a little bit tactless.

On the side of the road, Christmas lights festooned a one-story ranch whose lawn was littered with illuminated and motorized reindeer, elves, snowmen, and a glow-in-the-dark plastic crèche. Three pairs of eyes turned to watch the extravaganza disappear behind us, but, in true Midwestern fashion, we kept our own counsel.

Lightning flashed across the sky. Snow sprinkled the windshield.

“What the heck?” I said, looking at tiny kernels of snow that the wiper brushed away. “It’s far too cold to snow.” I might have failed winter safety, but I knew that there were temperatures at which snow couldn’t form. It was simply not possible.

Something very strange was happening outside. Something unnatural.

“Storm,” Fonn whispered reverently. “It’s going to be a big one.”

Deep in my belly, Lilith grumbled.

Sharing a body with the Goddess Lilith meant that sometimes She felt free to editorialize. The snarl surprised me, however. It struck me as threatened…or even territorial. Though I knew it wasn’t audible to anyone else, I put my hand over my stomach.

I glanced over at Sebastian to see if he registered Lilith’s complaint. Thanks to a blood-bonding spell, Sebastian could sense Lilith’s moods.

He inspected Fonn with sudden interest. I followed his gaze to see what it was about her that suddenly fascinated him and concerned Lilith. In the bluish glow of the dashboard lights, her facial features were sharp, yet broad, and her skin stretched tightly across high cheekbones. She had a certain regalness about her, but nothing I hadn’t seen in countless faces of the farmers in Finlayson, Minnesota, where I grew up.

The only thing that struck me as particularly odd was the faint hint of a smile. She stared out at the wind and snow like something about it tickled her fancy…or made her proud. Yeah, that was it. She was staring at the growing storm like a mother would watch a baby taking its first steps.

Creepy.

Sebastian and I shared a look that said, Something here isn’t right. After all the silence, I was grateful to be communicating with Sebastian again, even if it was only about the bizarreness of our situation. He flashed me a crooked smile which seemed to say, Isn’t this just our luck? I nodded in quiet agreement.

Wind pushed against the truck hard enough to cause us to coast slightly toward the center line. Fonn corrected for it with a twinkle in her eye.

So, my first thought was that Fonn was some kind of demented storm chaser, except that Lilith rarely gave me the nudge when people were just plain odd. If She did, I’d be getting poked a lot, given the type I tended to attract. No, there had to be something supernatural going on here, but what?

If Fonn wasn’t a deranged meteorologist, what else could she be? Severe weather made her ecstatic, she was out on a cold night alone, and her truck smelled like dog. Seemed to me it was time to play twenty questions. Yet how to interrogate her without raising suspicion? “So, Fonn,” I said, trying to affect the vaguely disinterested conversation style of a church basement social gathering. “You from around here?”

“Nope.”

Argh! Foiled by a yes-no question and a wily yet taciturn respondent.

“Where are you from?” Sebastian asked, picking up the dropped ball.

“Came over from the Old Country.”

“Me, too,” Sebastian said. “I was born in Austria. You?”

“Norway.”

Okay, we had something on her. Not that it helped much. I looked to Sebastian, but he just shrugged. He didn’t have a clue what sort of magical being she might be, either.

The wind howled around the truck. Sheets of snow spattered against the windows. That was another oddity. The snow had changed from tiny ice pellets into large, fluffy flakes. The temperature must have shifted dramatically. It was just plain strange to see that kind of snow transformation so quickly. Normally, you saw one kind of flake or another, or if they changed at all, it was gradual, like over the course of several hours. Not minutes.

This storm challenged all my well-honed Midwestern senses. It was seriously freaking me out. Somehow Fonn was behind it, I was certain.

So, okay, maybe Fonn wielded some kind of weather magic. Did I know any Old Norse otherworldly beings in charge of snow? To be honest, the only Norwegian female baddie I could think of was a Valkyrie, and somehow I sensed that wasn’t right. It seemed to me that you had to die in battle to meet one of those—oh, and you should probably also be a Viking. Unless something really weird had happened without my knowledge, neither Sebastian nor I fit that particular bill. Well, okay, Sebastian was dead. And he had died in a battle, like the Crusades or against the Huns or something, but that was a long time ago and he definitely wasn’t Norse.