“They smell like wax.”
“Did neither of you ever cook at home, before you got married?” I ask.
Ella shrugs and reaches for the plate with the biscuits. “Not really. We had a cook there, too.”
Lucas looks bemused. “I have eight brothers and sisters back in Ellison. We weren’t allowed anywhere near the kitchen when our mom was making dinner—she’d chase us out with a spatula. And when I moved out, I pretty much exclusively ate Chinese takeout. Lots and lots of Chinese takeout. And Hot Pockets.”
“Gross,” Ella mutters.
“Eight?” I ask, probably too excited to hear about Lucas’s family. The idea of growing up surrounded by sisters and brothers delights me.
He nods. “Eight. Three sisters, five brothers. We lived in this tiny house for ages, and then my dad implemented this rule—if you want your own bedroom, you have to build it.” My eyes widen; Lucas laughs at the expression, then continues. “My dad’s a woodsman. His dad was a woodsman. His dad’s dad was a woodsman. Most of my brothers are woodsmen, even. So building a room isn’t that crazy.”
“Did you build one for yourself?” I ask.
Lucas hesitates. “As it turns out, I’m a pretty crappy woodsman. I didn’t really fit in with my brothers, and my sisters went to boarding school early on. My brothers were big on fighting Fenris, actually. It was like this weird, twisted game they played, hunting them down, trapping them, killing them. I wasn’t exactly cut out for it, but I could track them. I could track them anywhere, through any weather. It was the only thing that made me fit in.” He says this with a smile, but there’s a cool tone to his voice.
“I think it’s pretty impressive,” I say.
“Why? I haven’t tracked anything for you just yet. Wait till I do. Then be impressed,” Lucas says, grinning again. “Speaking of Fenris—all that talk of the beasts from this Grandma Dalia, and you never actually saw one till yesterday?”
“Not really—I mean, I’d never seen one like that,” I say slowly, pausing to take a bite of bacon. “But when I was little, there was a man at the grocery store. There was something about his eyes that was wrong, and Grandma Dalia pulled me away from him.”
“How old?” Lucas asks.
“Seven. Maybe eight.”
Lucas tsks, shaking his head. “Must have been hungry. That’s young.” He pauses and leans back in his chair. “What I can’t work out, though, to be honest, is how an old woman with a cookbook knows about this Snow Queen, yet I’ve never heard of her.”
“Well, you heard of her, when she was dating Larson. You just didn’t know she was some sort of evil ice witch,” Ella points out.
“Fair point,” Lucas says. They look to me.
I shrug. “I don’t know. Grandma Dalia hated me—she never told me how she knew about any of this stuff. We hardly ever spoke, and when we did I was usually getting snapped at. It was like that from the moment we met.”
“Grandparents are tricky,” Ella says. “Maybe worse than parents. Though Lucas’s father loathes me.”
“My father has Alzheimer’s. He doesn’t even know who you are,” Lucas says, waving a biscuit at her.
“He thought I was a hooker.”
“He can’t see well, and you were wearing that dress thing!”
“He offered me a hundred dollars to—”
“Stop!” Lucas says, slamming his hands over his ears, and I laugh with them. Ella leans over and kisses Lucas on the cheek as their laughter dies down. I hope she appreciates what it is to have him here, to kiss him whenever she wants. She does. I know she does—I can see it in her eyes. I inhale. Kai. Focus. Figure out how to find Kai. Figure out how to find Mora.
After a few moments, I look at my hands and ask, “What was Mora like, when she was with your opera singer?”
“Larson?” Ella says, frowning at the subject change. “She was pretty. Confident—but fake confidence. I know it when I see it; it’s practically an airborne illness at pageants. You smile, show lots of teeth, touch people on the arm or shoulder and laugh loud and answer everything in complete sentences, but it’s not real. It’s just a pretty package to hide whatever you’re really all about. Mora was oozing with that sort of confidence. Which is especially strange now—I mean, she can control the weather, but she’s fake confident? Does that cookbook have anything else in it that might explain things?”
I shrug. “I’ve looked through it before, but it’s hard to read and hard to tell what’s real.” I rise, retrieve the book, and set it down in the middle of the table. Lucas and I open it and flip through a few pages, but it doesn’t take them long to see what I mean.
“There’s a section on luck charms in here,” Ella says, looking doubtful.
“Are luck charms any crazier than werewolves?” Lucas says, but he shakes his head and turns the page. “This is right,” he says, tapping some text. “That wearing red attracts monsters. The wolves love it.”
Ella flips to the last page of the book and, after reading a few inspirational quotes aloud, looks at the paper on the back cover. Her eyebrows shoot up as she traces the paper with her finger.
“How long has she had this?” Ella asks.
I shake my head. “As long as I can remember. Probably before Kai was born. Why?”
“Because,” Ella says, “this book looks like it’s, what, fifties or so? But this type of paper, all earth tones and stuff, is newer. Seventies, I think. Once my family bought a mountain house near Vail, and the kitchen wallpaper looked like this.”
“So she repapered it?” Lucas asks.
“No,” Ella says, wiping her butter knife with a napkin. She looks up at me. “Can I try something?”
“Um, sure,” I say, hesitant.
Ella slides the knife between the paper and the back cover. “She didn’t repaper the front or the pages or anything. Why just this interior?” I hear the glue giving as Ella seesaws the knife around the edges. When she’s made her way around, she sets the knife down and slowly, carefully peels the paper back.
“Yes!” Ella says, grinning. She tugs something and finally removes a photograph, hidden between the paper and back cover. She lays it down on the counter; the three of us hunch over to study it. It’s Grandma Dalia—a very, very young Grandma Dalia, maybe ten or eleven years old—standing next to a boy with bright red hair. His clothing makes him look poor, next to her, but their arms are wrapped around each other in a sweet way. She leans her hip into him, and he’s grinning so widely that his eyes are little lines. I look over to his eyes, trying to discern the color, but they’re hidden behind long lashes—