River of Shadows (Underworld Gods #1)(27)

He continues to glare at me, then turns and starts walking along the riverbank. “Come on. Vellamo is right. We need to make a fire, get warm and dry, then have something to eat.”

Brush my teeth, take a warm shower, put on deodorant, I continue wistfully in my head, trudging after him. Get a fresh change of clothes, slap on some moisturizer, do my hair.

We walk for a while—time seems too fluid here to keep track of—and eventually we come to a stop by a thicket of birch trees. As we walked, the land became less barren, with shrubs and bushes populating the low hills, eventually leading to scattered trees that look extra creepy in the ever-present mist, their bare branches skeletal. The snow has faded away too, only leaving a light dusting, like walking in icing sugar.

“This will do,” he says, putting his backpack down in the middle of the birch trees, moss covering the ground. “Can you go and find some flame ferns? They look like regular ferns. Just don’t touch the mushrooms.”

We hadn’t been speaking to each other for the walk and now I’m a bit wary of him sending me out into the forest alone to go collect some ferns.

“Are the mushrooms poisonous?” I ask.

“No, but they are sleeping. You don’t want them to wake up.” He turns his back to me and starts rummaging through his stuff. “Just don’t go far and bring your sword, just in case.”

I sigh, having not let go of my sword for a moment, and walk beyond the stand of birch trees, their knotted eyes on the white bark seeming to follow my every move.

“Fuck this place,” I mutter under my breath. I’m cold, tired, hungry, a little scared, and I have to be afraid of waking up sentient mushrooms now. I have to wonder how they would cause any harm but I’m not about to find out.

Once I’m far enough away from Rasmus, I lower my pants and pee on a bare patch of ground, hoping I don’t wake up some sentient rock that’s napping or something, shuddering as I pull my wet jeans back on. So gross.

I’m already feeling a little disoriented, the forest seeming to press in on me from all directions. Here the birch gives away to towering cedars and pine, with ferns and flowers peppered amongst the moss and rocks. Though the air is still cold, the snow is gone and everything is green.

“Rasmus?” I call out uneasily, afraid that I’m lost already.

“Yeah?” he answers, the sound coming from the trees behind me, the opposite way I thought I came.

“Just checking!” I yell back. Something tells me I shouldn’t yell much in the forest, so I quickly go about collecting as many ferns as I can. There’s nothing about them that seems to warrant the name “flame fern.” In fact, they look similar to the ones I’ve seen growing in the Pacific Northwest. I’ve gathered as much as I can when I finally notice the mushrooms. They’re of all shapes and sizes, including the classic toadstools with the red caps and white dots, growing at the base of cedar trees and on fallen logs. At home they’d probably kill you or get you high as fuck, though here it would be the former.

Thankfully they seem to be asleep and the more I stare at them, the more they seem to move, like they’re all breathing in unison.

Okay, creepy as fuck. Time to move on.

I head back in the direction of Rasmus’ voice and luckily I’m back at camp in no time. He’s been busy, creating beds out of piles of moss and placing cairns of stones around the moss, like he’s creating a giant circle, with a few fallen logs in the very middle.

“Are these the right ferns?” I ask, holding them out. “Because it’s all I found.”

His eyes light up. “Perfect,” he says, taking them from me. He places most of them in the logs and branches, then hands me a few. “Here, stuff them in between the stones I’ve laid out.”

I do as he says, then join him in the middle when he brings a pack of matches out of his backpack and lights one. He drops the match on top of the ferns in the fire pit and it immediately goes up in flames, enough that I have to jump back.

“Whoa!” I cry out, the heat fanning my face.

“Watch,” he says and grabs my arm. “And stay still.”

One part of the fire starts to reach higher in the sky right above us and I want to step back, but Rasmus holds me in place. It slowly starts to curve over us, creating an arc of fire that has me both terrified and mesmerized, the flames so close to our heads. Then the reaching tip of the flame makes contact with one of the fern-stuffed cairns and it lights itself on fire, creating another arc of fire that connects each cairn to each other until all the ferns around us are lit.

The flames then retreat back to a manageable size, the show over.

“Flame ferns,” Rasmus says, clapping his hands together. “One of my favorite things about this place. I’ve brought them back to our world, but they aren’t flammable at all. Here they only burn if they’ve been cut or taken up from the ground, and the fire it creates will only ignite other flame ferns. Watch.”

He suddenly puts his hand straight into the fire and I gasp as he removes it completely unharmed, his sleeve untouched. “It’s hot enough but it’s no danger. You try it.”

“I don’t know…” I muse. Rasmus made it look safe, but every human instinct tells you not to put yourself in a fire.

“Chicken?” Rasmus goads.

I exhale shakily and square my shoulders. “Fine.”