Dance of the Crystal by Cris Anson Read Free Book Online Page A

turned and walked to the pocket doors. A flick of a lever and she pulled the doors ajar an inch. “Happy?”
    Soren swallowed. Or tried to. His mouth felt dryer than the Sahara at noon. “That’s not quite the word I would use, but yes, that’s better.”
    “So,” she said primly, strolling to the Louis Quatorze desk and sitting in the plush leather chair, “let’s do the other thing Grandma is expecting us to do.”
    He gave her a blank look.
    “Where would you like to have dinner? I’m buying.”

Chapter Four
    “Okay, Soren, out with it.”
    Magnus guzzled half the bottle of iced tea he’d pulled out of the cooler then looked at his younger brother. Soren’s T-shirt was plastered to his back and chest from sweat, just like his own. They were taking a break from cutting a slab off a valuable black walnut log with a two-man saw.
    “Huh? Out with what?”
    “I can’t remember the last time you took an afternoon off from Thor’s Hammer to help me. Yet you’ve been slaving away for three hours without saying a word. What’s bugging you?”
    Soren leaned against the tree stump and rolled a frosty bottle against his forehead. It did little to cool the hot blood pumping in his veins. Hell, Magnus was in much better shape than he, hauling slabs of wood around his atelier while Soren himself only wrestled with a keg now and then.
    He set down the bottle and pulled out a red handkerchief from his jeans pocket. Swiping it over his face and neck, he squinted into the woods surrounding Magnus’ barn. “You ever think about Mom?”
    He’d caught Magnus unaware, Soren saw, if the breath whooshing out of his brother was any indication.
    Magnus settled himself on the forest duff away from the pile of sawdust and stared into the distance, much as Soren was doing.
    “Yeah. She’s living in Alaska. Did you know that?”
    It was Soren’s turn to take a sharp breath. “No, I didn’t. How did you find out?”
    “Kat. She’s an Internet whiz.”
    Kat. Soren still couldn’t get over the fact that his big brother was marrying Kat Donaldson in a few weeks. They’d started out as such antagonists—Kat a sexually active, aggressive art gallery owner, Magnus a reclusive sculptor with a big stick up his ass—that he wondered if it would last. But then, what did he, Soren, know about relationships with women? His view had been tainted by the woman who’d up and walked out on three young boys and a heartbroken husband.
    “Kat kept asking me questions about her,” Magnus continued. “I told her what little I knew about her after she disappeared. At least, we think it’s her. I haven’t gotten up the nerve to contact her yet.”
    After twenty-some years, Soren wasn’t sure he’d have the nerve to, either. What would he say? Why did you leave? Who was the guy that made you carry on so?
    Maybe he was better off not knowing.
    Magnus looked at him with a sober expression. “What brought this on?”
    Soren picked up a piece of bark and began shredding it with his fingernails. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m just wondering if she’s the reason I’ve never had, you know, a relationship.”
    “You mean with a woman?”

    Soren sighed. “Yeah.”
    A beat went by before Magnus asked, “You found someone?”
    “Yes. No. Maybe. I don’t know.”
    Magnus snorted. “Well, that covers all the bases.”
    “Seriously, Mags. I’ve been thinking about Mom. What she did to Pop. Remember how all the spark went out of him when she left?”
    “Yeah, and then a couple of years later he has a fatal accident.”
    “Think it was an accident?”
    Their somber gazes met. Erik Thorvald’s truck had smashed into a railroad abutment at a high rate of speed. It had taken the Jaws of Life to pry his mangled body out of the cab. “I always wondered,”
    Magnus admitted.
    Soren had been nine, Magnus a year older, when Alana Hall Thorvald dropped her bomb on their family. In his mind Soren could still hear the harsh words between his parents