ELSKER: THE ELSKER SAGA *complete*

CHAPTER ONE

Chapter One

I MOVED FASTER THAN a salmon down a chute in bear season. It was my only option. If the giant wolf biting at my heels didn’t kill me, then the tree-trunk of a snake twining between my feet was going to finish the job. I pumped my legs harder, exerting every modicum of strength I had left, and in the process, I stepped on the snake’s head. It hissed, a guttural reverberation bouncing around the darkness. I pushed harder. My chest burned, but I’d managed to put a little space between my attackers and me. The wolf growled angrily, but I didn’t look back. I couldn’t spare the movement.

Since it was pitch black, I couldn’t see what I was running towards, and I certainly didn’t see the fissures beginning to form in the dirt beneath my Nikes. My size six sneaker slid into one and I could hear the crack of my ankle breaking before I hit the damp earth. The chasm was getting bigger and soon my whole leg slipped through. My fingernails clung to the soil as it separated from itself, and I felt the chill creep over the ground as the terrible frost settled like a blanket onto everything it could reach. I started to shake -- it would be death by freezing, then. But I knew chilled human wouldn’t be the worst thing the wolf and snake had eaten that day.

“Earth to Kristia! Hello? Are you even listening?” I rubbed my eyes and focused on the frowning face of my best friend since kindergarten. A sprightly brunette, Ardis was everything I wasn’t -- adventurous, perky, self-confident. And at the moment, highly irritated.

“Sorry.” I shook off the remnants of last night’s bad dream. Ardis Behrman didn’t often grace our hometown of Nehalem, Oregon. Three hundred residents and a solitary stoplight didn’t hold much excitement for a girl studying acting at NYU. I treasured any conversation we had that didn’t require text or Skype.

“Vision?” She cocked her head.

“Hardly. Just tired. Nightmare last night.”

“The weird one about the animals hunting you down?” Ardis wrinkled her nose.

“That’s the one.” My favorite grandmother’s dark stories from the North were never far from my subconscious. I never understood how any woman in her right mind could lovingly recount the end of the mythological Norse world to an eight-year-old girl. Mormor always had a wicked sense of humor, so I liked to think her intentions were good. Or maybe she suffered from a touch of the crazy. The fact that, at eighteen, I still had vivid nightmares about Ragnarok; well, that spoke more about my own sensitivities than anything else. They were just stories.

“That dream’s just creepy, Kristia.”

“Tell me about it.”

“So.” Ardis rested her hands on the table. The metallic blue sparkles on her nails caught the light of the coffee shop where we’d had countless heart-to-hearts. “What’s new in Nehalem?”

I stopped just short of rolling my eyes. “Good one Ardis.” Nothing changed around here but the weather, and even that was freakishly consistent.

“And the University of the Pacific Northwest?”

“You mean High School, Part Deux?”

“C’mon, it can’t be that bad.”

“You do realize you’re the only member of our graduating class who doesn’t go there, right? The only one who isn’t going to end up married to someone they’ve known since kindergarten. And spend eternity working in the boring log mill or tourist traps.” It would be the latter for me. My parents’ antique shop was popular with the summer crowd and I was expected to begin fulltime work when I graduated. Not exactly the stuff of dreams.