Arctic Dawn (The Norse Chronicles Book 2) Read Online Free Page A

reach. If Val or Thorin had answered, I would have hung up. The thought of hearing either of their voices again, even after all we had been through… It pained me. In a way, I missed them—even Val. He was an oaf, overbearing and manipulative, but I refused to believe he was unredeemable. He was complicated and screwed up, but we all were. And Thorin… Gah! I couldn’t wrap my brain around him, much less my heart.
    “Hi,” I said, trying to flatten my southern accent into something less distinguishable. “I was wondering if Skyla Ramirez was around. I did a kayaking trip with her a while ago, and I wanted to talk to her about planning a group outing for me and some friends in the spring.”
    “Skyla is on an extended sabbatical,” Hugh said.
    That was the same excuse he had given me when I called the week before and asked to speak to her. That time, I had posed as a journalist wanting to interview Skyla for an article about women making a living in the sporting industry. I had made up some excuse every week, for the past four weeks, to call Thorin’s store and ask about her. In all that time, Hugh’s story never changed. Thorin Adventure Outfitter’s official statement on Skyla’s whereabouts may have meant Thorin thought she was alive but missing. Or maybe he thought she was dead but wouldn’t admit it without official evidence.
    “Do you know when she’ll be back?” I asked.
    “I don’t, but I can take a message.”
    “No,” I said, throwing a little annoyance into my tone, the better to fool him into thinking I was a disgruntled customer. “Maybe I’ll just try to find another guide.”
    After I hung up with Hugh, I disassembled my phone and went into the library and logged onto a public computer. Logging in required a library account number. Library account numbers required photo IDs and physical addresses, but in my experience, librarians were a softhearted bunch who easily succumbed to young women bearing sob stories about broken California dreams and unstable living conditions. The librarian on whose shoulder I cried had offered me a temporary account number that would last until I brought back my credentials and registered for a permanent account. Until then, they wouldn’t lend me books, but I could access the Internet.
    Just as I did every week, I conducted an exhaustive online search for anything that might lead me to Skyla—or as exhaustive as could be performed in the hour the library allotted for computer use. So far, I had found nothing but old history: a brief mention of Kara North’s marriage to Neron Ramirez in the San Diego Tribune . Vital records showed Skyla and her brother, Paul, had been born there too, but military families moved around a lot, and I lost track of the Ramirezes in New York. I had already followed my few New York leads to dead ends in conjunction with my visit to Oneida Lake. After those fruitless searches, I backtracked the Ramirezes’ trail to its start with hopes of finding a new thread.
    Paul Ramirez, Skyla’s brother, had disappeared after high-school graduation, and he seemed to have no social presence online. Skyla’s parents, Neron and Kara, had vanished similarly. Was the cause of their disappearance magic, malice, or something more common, such as sickness or death? Asking questions while constructing an in-depth investigation was difficult when trying to remain anonymous. The United States military and government-records offices tended to shrug off young women who wouldn’t give contact information or personal details.
    My searches resulted in more of the same disappointments, and I was running out of ideas.
    In the past weeks, I had discovered plenty of news about my own disappearance. Not long after my transformative experience at Oneida Lake, my parents had issued a missing-person notice, and the Siqiniq Police and Alaska State Troopers circulated a press release asking for information about my possible whereabouts. No one had put as much effort