“I wish it was,” I said, pulling the smithy door shut behind me. “Vasily and his party saw something in the water.”
“Coming up through the ice,” he said. “Broken ice, all along the shore. I don’t think the water’s very deep where we saw the cracks, either.”
Matt frowned, setting down his hammer and cleaning his hands with a soot-stained rag. “How far out?”
Vasily shrugged, his gaze drifting away from my brother and homing in on Thordin. “We thought that you and Lady Sif might be able to help us identify it.”
“Really,” Thordin said, his expression darkening as his voice dropped to a rumble. “What’s that?”
“I’ve only heard tales of serpents like what I think we saw,” Vasily said, his accent thickening as he spoke, as if fear was having more of an effect on him than he was trying to let on, bleeding into his voice. “We didn’t see much, only that it was big and it had eyes like ice, big and crystal and blue-white, like sun on a glacier.”
Thordin sat quietly for a long moment, his eyes growing distant.
Without a word, he stood up, handed J.T. the axe head he’d been honing, and slipped past Vasily and I. I watched his retreating back as he headed for the bridge, bile pooling deep in my belly.
He was scared, and that was enough to terrify me.
“I’ll find Phelan,” Thom said, abandoning the bellows. He pecked me on the cheek on his way out the door. “Maybe he’ll be able to shed some light on this, too.”
“How close to camp?” Matt asked Vasily, frowning. I could see the wheels turning behind my brother’s eyes. He’d been majoring in geology before the end of everything, and his classes had resulted in at least a passing understanding of the underwater geography of Lake Michigan. He was trying to figure out how big thing could be based on its proximity to where we were standing now.
Vasily shrugged. “Hard to say. A few miles.”
“Across the ice?” J.T. asked, eyes gleaming in the forge’s glow.
Vasily nodded. “Aye. We rode out onto the pack to see what we could. Our orders were to see if we could still cross the lake on horseback to the other side.”
“I’m guessing we can’t,” I said, stomach sinking. We knew that there was another settlement on the far side of Lake Michigan from where we were standing thanks to a report from a friendly werewolf pack. Some of them had stayed behind in that settlement for the winter, while a few had braved the frozen lake to return to us on its eastern shore.
“Not unless you want to get eaten by the creature beneath the ice,” Vasily said quietly. “Don’t go dance where angels fear to tread, koldun’ya. It’s the very best way to get yourself killed.”
“Trust me,” I said quietly. “I know.”
