Foresworn Read Online Free Page A

the lake.
    This is what our norns did—the Norse goddesses my sisters and I carried inside us. They gave us stupid cryptic messages in ways that disrupted our lives, caused our mother to pull us from school and made keeping a job ridiculously hard. Though Raven managed to keep two most of the time. I’d actually been fired from my last one. I hadn’t told my family. Hadn’t told them that my boss had been totally freaked over talking to me one moment and seeing me trying to wipe permanent marker off a nice new white refrigerator the next.
    My table didn’t have napkins and neither did the next few. I finally went into the bathroom in the back, realized I was glad I’d decided not to eat here when I saw the condition of the sink and grabbed a handful of paper towels. I was back in my seat, ready to clean up the ketchup runes, when the norn spun the world again.
    Gods!
She usually gave me a bit more breathing room.
    Groaning, I held on to the edge of the table with one hand and tried to wipe at the runes with the other. But the spin always threw me off if I kept my eyes open and all I got were the last two runes before everything stopped spinning.
    To everyone else in the truck stop, nothing had happened. They all continued their movements, their conversations. The man in the next booth held up the hair he’d pulled from the onion rings. I hurriedly swiped the ketchup runes into a smeared mess and flinched when someone cleared his throat next to me.
    I looked up into the most fascinating face on a boy I’d ever seen. He had a charcoal-colored beanie pulled so far down his head, I couldn’t tell his hair color, but his narrow features looked like they belonged on a magazine. Sleepy, slightly slanted eyes that were a dark, dark brown stared down at my table in amusement. They were like the seal brown on a color wheel—that last shade before black. With eyes that dark, he should have had black hair under that hat, but his eyebrows were blond. He had thin, elegant, wide lips over a square jaw and sharp cheekbones. All that too-pretty sat atop broad shoulders and a long, rangy body. I guessed him to be about six feet tall.
    “Hi.” His voice surprised me. It was deep and warm when I’d been expecting something higher, with clipped accents. I’d been expecting British...in Wyoming.
    Okay, I really, really needed some sleep.
    “Hi,” I replied, drawing the word out because he just stood there, staring down at me. My norn sort of moved. She didn’t have a physical body—gods, I was pretty hopeful on that one because I had no desire to physically experience a reenactment of
Alien
—but her essence could sometimes feel physical. This boy agitated her. Not in a bad way, either. Not like the guy in the parking lot earlier. No, this was warmer...like interest.
Sheesh
,
does she think he’s hot or something?
    I studied him, thinking maybe he was the boy I’d come here to find, but wouldn’t that be a coincidence? And he looked nothing like the goofy one in the tabloid picture I had.
    His gaze flicked back to the runes. “Saw you sitting by yourself and wondered if you wanted company for lunch. Looks like you already started.” He picked up the bottle. “I usually prefer mustard on my table. The occasional zip of extra Italian dressing can help even out the Formica flavor, too.”
    “Funny.”
    “Not going to eat?” He held out the ketchup bottle.
    I took it as I shook my head. Not after seeing that bathroom. “Do you work here or something? Are you really here to take my order?”
    He chuckled. “No. I stopped in for a pop, saw you and thought you might like some company. Though, I was going to try to talk you into eating somewhere else. Now that I’m closer, I can tell you’re probably too tired to go anywhere else.”
    “Thanks,” I snapped, then swallowed a groan.
    “I didn’t mean you looked bad.”
    “Being told you look tired is the same as being told you look like crap.” I swiped at the ketchup