Turning slowly, she searched for the hill with the trees. And it was there, past the run of the fence. Cold air swept over her; her nose burned when she breathed. And she could feel the snow starting to work its way into her boots. She should have gone inside. Instead, she squared her shoulders and headed for the trees.
Some things had to be real. The iridescent gleam on the snow, that was real. The dark, spindling arms of the trees silhouetted against the sky, those were real, too. And they opened to a clearing, a rough stone standing in the center. It was dark, smooth at the base, but rough at the top.
It looked ancient, like Viking ancient. Like seriously olden times and Thor for really real ancient. A glint of silver caught her eye, and she moved closer. Smoothing a gloved hand down the surface, she wiped haze from a bit of glass. It was a locket—no, a picture frame set into the stone.
The boy from her dream-hallucination-whatever looked back in black and white.
The picture was damaged, water creeping around the edges. It ate the detail in the background and left just his shoulder and his face. But it was him, unmistakably. It wasn’t like Norwegians all looked alike. Her brain hadn’t summoned some stock Scandinavian to play the part of Overactive Imagination Boy.
Dacey sank to her knees, shivering at the cold that closed around her. She didn’t need a phrase book to understand a gravestone. Kristian Dahl, born 1895, died . . . never. There was no final date. He was young in the photo, maybe eighteen? Maybe twenty?
Kristian Dahl, it said. Born and never died. Dacey clasped a hand to her chest, pressure against the tightness there. She didn’t believe in ghosts or vampires, so what was left? The words had probably been cut deep and angular once. Years of elements had softened the stone and the shape of his name.
Someone had left the stone. The photo. Someone had remembered him.
A dog’s barking broke the quiet, and Dacey pushed herself up. Maybe she wasn’t the first girl to spend a night in Kristian’s cottage, alone but not really. If parapsychology wasn’t an option, maybe physics were.
She knew there was a third dimension, space. And a fourth dimension, which was time. And somehow, they got together and caused gravity. . . . If that could happen, could they bend the past toward the future? Or the future toward the past? Or was that completely crackheaded? Dacey sighed and wished she’d paid more attention in class.
Hurrying back to the cottage, Dacey barely noticed the green-blue glow that bathed her. The northern lights flickered on, shaping the permanent-impermanent sky above.
Bounding through the living room, Skadi—a Norwegian elkhound, according to Herr Velten—showed no sign of settling. She leapt and rolled, chasing a rubber ball with bells in it, and occasionally skidded past on the bare wood floors.
A streak of cream and black, she turned after every gambit, as if looking for Dacey’s approval. When she got it, she started over again, filling the cottage with a rumble of motion. Maybe Dad could start taking Zyrtec, she mused, because having a dog was awesome.
As Dacey hooked the camera up to her computer, she smiled when Skadi dropped the ball by her chair.
“You want it?” Dacey asked. She shook the ball to make it jingle. With a cheery yip, Skadi rose on her hind legs, bouncing in excitement.
Considering that the hound was knee high and all muscle, Dacey hesitated to throw the toy very hard. She could only imagine the look on Herr Velten’s face if she trashed his cabin playing with his dog. So she gave the ball a gentle toss, and Skadi lunged after it, curved tail wagging.
“Good girl,” Dacey said, turning to watch the upload bar on her computer grind toward 100 percent.
Skadi carried the ball back, holding it expectantly until Dacey threw it again. Back and forth they went, but when the pictures finished uploading and thumbnails filled the screen, both of them stopped. Dacey cursed under her breath and enlarged one of the images.
The streak was still there.
Paging through the next few pictures, Dacey’s heart sank. It didn’t make any sense. She’d cleaned the camera, she’d worn the scarf, she’d done everything she was supposed to do. Frustration washed over her in waves, tightening until it ached to sit there. Her head ached, too, and she wanted to cry. This trip was not going the way she planned and she was so tired.
When Skadi barked, it startled her. Dacey pushed her chair back and looked around as she buried a hand in Skadi’s warm fur. “Shh, what’s wrong, puppy?”
Skadi barked again and put her paws up on the table.
“It’s just a computer,” Dacey told her. She stroked the dog’s head, trying to soothe her, but Skadi barked again and again. The sound echoed in the cottage, ringing in Dacey’s ears.
Moving to close the laptop, Dacey jumped when Skadi pushed her head beneath her arm and barked again. With a frown, Dacey looked back at the screen. All her warmth drained away because Skadi wasn’t barking at the computer. She was barking at the pictures.
The streak was gone, replaced with the lean, long shape of a boy in suspenders. The boy. Kristian Dahl, born 1895, died never.
“Okay, that’s it!” Dacey clapped the laptop closed and threw herself at the couch. It was crazy. The whole trip was crazy. She hadn’t slept enough to drive away the hallucinations. She must have seen Kristian’s picture somewhere before. Online. In a catalog. Somewhere.
Or! Or the camera was bad. Kristian’s face in the pictures was just pattern recognition. Brains liked to make pictures out of clouds and stars and haze on pictures. That’s all it was. It had to be.
Pulling an afghan over herself, Dacey patted the cushion next to her until the dog hopped up. It would be morning soon. She just had to get to morning.
She wrapped her arms around Skadi’s neck. “I’ll go into town for the day. To the library! Or the festival! And tomorrow night, new cottage. Put this all behind me. You know what? It’ll be fine. It’s all good. We’re so good, aren’t we, Skadi?”
In response, Skadi barked at nothing. Leaping down from the couch, she barked again, then stopped. Her head tipped quizzically. Then, she moved—purposefully. Dacey shivered, because it was unmistakable. Skadi saw something. And whatever it was didn’t scare her.
Curling her toes into the couch, Dacey watched Skadi pad after an unseen guest. The dog sniffed along the baseboards, then dropped to lie in front of the window seat. Whining, she pawed at the rosemaled panels, then nosed at them.
Suddenly, one of them popped open, which startled Dacey and Skadi both. The dog bounded away, then back, barking at the open panel.
“Shh,” Dacey said. “It’s not going to hurt you, shh.”
But Skadi had hunting in her blood, and she’d flushed out something for Dacey to claim. Slowly, Dacey lowered her feet to the floor, then crept to the window seat. It was a thankfully uneventful walk—no ghostly voices, no sudden cups of tea from the ether—which made it easier to kneel down and open a dark cubby. Skadi barked, bowing on her front paws before springing up again.
Inside the cubby was a small package, and she gingerly reached inside to claim it. Covered in thick dust, it was barely bigger than a deck of playing cards. The brown wrapping paper flecked away, aged and soft as ash. The twine was a little hardier, still tied tight, now around a small, leather-bound book.
Sitting back, Dacey carefully slid the string off and opened the first page. The sharp scent of paper turning acid assaulted her, but the pages still felt smooth beneath her fingers. Fading ink sloped across the page, but Dacey couldn’t read it. Her Norwegian was pretty much limited to “Snakker de Engelsk?”