Hexed

you won’t object. You’ll want to be part of this—and I want you to be. You’re my love, my soul mate, my chosen one. Pirkitta, let me show you what I have discovered.”
    I sighed. He wouldn’t be content until I said yes, and I decided that maybe this was the best way to keep him out of trouble. If I knew what I was fighting, I’d know how to engage it.
    “All right, then. Show me what you’ve learned from the White Forest.”
    “Come here, then. Come and let me enter your thoughts. Let me show you what I’ve been learning. What I plan to teach you.”
    He held out his arms again and I moved into them, shivering as he wrapped them around me in an embrace so tight I could not break it. He began to turn me, to spin me—or at least it felt like it—and we whirled onto the astral, our souls joined together.
    “Look—look what I’ve found how to do . . .”
    And then I entered his mind. The brilliant flames were there, flames of ice, so violent they rocked his soul. I screamed, trying to avoid the wash of the burning ice as the spiraling flames took shape into dancers, who spun around us in a circle of madness. Ishonar . . . the most dangerous of elements—somehow Vikkommin had tapped into the elemental power of ishonar.
    “No—ishonar is reserved for punishment only. It is the most powerful form of ice, and we are never to touch it unless it be in urgent need with approval of the Elders.” I tried to break away, but the ishonar Elementals rushed at me and I stopped. “My gods, Vikkommin, you have control over them.”
    It couldn’t be—no mortal could control this power. No sane mortal tried. It was like controlling dragons—it just wasn’t done. In fact, the ability to tap into the icy fires of ishonar had been passed to the silver dragons, and they were the only creatures alive who could use the magic as they wished without losing themselves to it. For there was a madness in the extreme cold, a fury when unleashed, that could bring the worst of nature’s wars—the ice ages—upon the world.
    “You can’t control this! You can’t possibly hope to control this power.”
    Vikkommin laughed and held me tighter. “Oh, on the contrary—I can control it. I have learned how to use it, and I will use it. Once we are in control of the temple, we will wage holy wars upon our enemies. We will freeze our enemies in Pohjola to the core. We will eradicate the fire giants. We will raise ourselves to be at the side of Lady Undutar herself. We will become gods with this power .”
    And then I felt her—the Lady herself—coming through me.
    “This is madness,” she whispered, and I spoke the words for her. “You dare to compare yourself to the gods? You will pay for this, and you will pay mightily.”
    Without a second thought, I reached out—or perhaps Undutar did, or the both of us—and we ripped Vikkommin’s soul off the astral and thrust it into the nearest shadow form. To prevent him returning to his body, I leapt off the astral back into the room. And I gazed on my love one last time, before turning his body inside out. Everything faded, and the next thing I knew, I was screaming, and my world turned upside down from then on.
     
    “OH, GREAT MOTHER. Vikkommin, how could you? How could you hope to ever . . .”
    The memories kept flooding back. The sound of his body ripping as I tore him apart. The mad laughter of his soul as he nestled into the shadow. The scream caught in my throat as I killed the love of my life to prevent him from hurting others. He’d gone mad with power and there would be no stopping him.
    In that brief glimpse of his soul, I’d recognized that he was even more powerful than the Priestess-Mother and he would rampage across the land and tear it asunder with the ishonar.
    But how could I tell the Elders Council? How could I make the Elders believe, when even I was in shock and disbelief? And so the memories retreated, fading back into a little corner of my heart, and I locked them away.
    Because I also knew there was danger to myself. For when Vikkommin had entered my mind to show me what he could do, he’d not only shown me how to use the ishonar myself.
    Now, as the memories flooded back, I realized I also knew how to control the ishonar—I could make the ice burn and I could shift the weather in ways no mortal or Fae should be capable of. If the Elders had known what I could do, they would have instantly put me to death. Somewhere deep in my subconscious, I