“I hate when you guys do that!” Leigh snarled.

“Yeah.” Ski smirked and cracked his neck. “We know.”

Ormi returned with the Ravens and Crows, the new girl’s landing more than a little wobbly when she almost crashed into a tree. But she veered in time and Amsel caught her before she hit the house.

“What’s wrong?” Leigh asked Erin once she and the new girl were safe on the ground.

“We need to talk to Chloe,” Erin announced.

“That bad?”

“It wasn’t good.”

“We’ll talk to Josef.” Rolf pulled out a chair and sat down. “Does anyone have aspirin?”

“Chloe and Alexandersen working together on anything?” Maeve asked everyone. “Really?”

“Maeve has a point,” Vig said.

“Let’s wait until we have everything we need,” Rolf announced, gratefully accepting the small bottle of aspirin that Maeve put in his hand. Leigh handed him a bottle of water. “Once we have everything, we go to Chloe and Joe. If we go to them now, they’ll just start arguing and nothing will happen. Okay?”

The Crows and Ravens agreed, then turned to Ormi. He nodded. “That’s fine.”

“What about the other Clans?” the new girl asked. “Should we involve them?”

“No,” everyone said together, making the new girl take a step back.

“It was just a question.”

“Involving all the Clans can be a bit of a challenge,” Vig stated.

“That is,” Ormi noted, “an amazing amount of understatement.”

Ormi glanced up. “The sun will be up soon. Let’s go, Ski.”

Vig watched the Protectors fly off. And, as they passed the trees, Vig saw twenty other Protectors follow behind. They’d never made a sound, but Vig wasn’t surprised they’d been nearby.

“Hey.” Kera tugged on his hand and Vig smiled down at her.

“I’m going back to the house,” she told him. “Get some sleep. Change of clothes.”

“I’ll call you later.”

Kera went up on her toes and kissed him. “Later.”

“Later.”

Vig watched Kera and the other Crows take off, then turned back to Rolf, who had his head buried in his hands.

“You going to be all right?” he asked his friend and brother-Raven.

“It’s just a headache.”

“You haven’t gotten a headache from reading runes in decades.”

“How bad is this?” Stieg asked.

Rolf lifted his head. “It ain’t good.”

“It wants in,” a soft voice said, and that’s when Vig realized that Jacinda hadn’t left with the others.

Stieg, his eyes wide, mouthed, I thought she left.

So did I!

“It wants in and it’s not going to stop until it gets in.”

Vig walked over to Jace. She was still sitting by that tree, holding on to Kera’s foster puppy. Vig had the feeling Kera would not be getting that puppy back . . . ever. But she would be helping to take care of it.

Vig crouched by Jace, smiled at her. “What’s trying to get in, Jace?”

“An ancient power. A very old god that is very pissed off. And if we don’t work together, and stop it . . . it’ll lay waste to everything.”

The silence that followed Jace’s proclamation was brutal, but then she suddenly jumped up, startling them.

“Okay. ’Night, guys!” She waved and walked off with her new dog.

“She never speaks,” Rolf said, “but when she does, she’s absolutely horrifying.”

“What do you dudes expect?” Stieg asked around a yawn, heading back to the main house. “She’s a Crow.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Erin knew as soon as she walked into the Bird House kitchen the next morning that trouble was afoot, as her grandmother used to say.

She’d just spent the last thirty minutes bringing Tessa up to speed about what had happened the night before with the Ravens and Protectors. Tee had immediately committed to dealing with Chloe, keeping her distracted.

“Trust me,” she’d said. “Our neighbor has Chloe’s complete attention now that she’s suing Giant Strides and Chloe specifically.”

“She is?”

“She had her served at the gym. Chloe’s head almost exploded off her body. And now she wants to countersue, so she wants me to deal with that P.I.”

“He’s still in the hospital, right?”

“Yeah. Will be for a while. His face was crushed in the fall and he’s now in a medically induced coma. So I’ll need you to handle this and the Crows. I do have one question, though.”

“Yeah?”

“Why did Ormi Bentsen want Kera to go along with them to see this cave?”

“Honestly? I think he just wanted to see her reaction. See if she glowed red or something, proving she’s somehow pure evil sent to start Ragnarok.”

“Well . . . did she?”

“Did she what?”

“Glow red?”

That was when Erin had walked away. She just didn’t have patience for ridiculous questions.

But it didn’t seem like things in the kitchen were any better. One Crow, Sherri, was crying, six—including Annalisa—were trying to calm her down, and Yardley was ordering everyone to “calm down! We can fix this! Calm down!”