Between the Blade and the Heart

by Amanda Hocking

  It was not because I was ashamed or I didn’t want Jude to know—I didn’t really care what he’d think, but I also knew he wouldn’t care at all.

  I just wasn’t ready to talk about it. It had only been six months since we’d broken up, and I still didn’t know how I felt about any of that.

  “How do you two know each other?” Jude asked, probably since it seemed like I might not say anything ever again. He pulled his arm from around my waist so he could lean forward, and when Quinn crossed her legs, her foot brushed against mine, so I sat up straighter.

  “I’m a Valkyrie,” Quinn explained, not lowering her voice when she said that, the way I always did when I was in mixed company like this. “I was licensed a few years ago, so I was helping show Malin the ropes.”

  “Is Malin any good?” Jude asked, teasing.

  Quinn’s eyes were on me, sparkling underneath the veil of her dark lashes. “She’s very good.”

  “It was nice seeing you, but I think we were just heading out.” I stumbled to my feet. The heady intoxication from the liliplum was mixing with the muddled exhilaration I felt whenever I was around Quinn, and I couldn’t handle the combination anymore.

  Quinn was on her feet in a flash, blocking my path. “I was hoping we could talk.”

  “Not today.” I shook my head. “I can’t today.”

  “When?” she pressed as I walked around her.

  “Later,” I called back over my shoulder, and I’d taken Jude’s hand so I could pull him through the bar and out into the street.

  It wasn’t until we were outside, in the pouring rain, that I felt like I could breathe again. The cold helped push away some of the haze, sobering me up.

  “So what’s with you and that Valkyrie back there?” Jude asked. “You were acting like she was a monster or an ex-girlfriend or something.”

  “She is my ex-girlfriend,” I muttered.

  “Oh. Well, that explains that, then.” He stood beside me for a second, not saying anything. “Do you want to get out of this rain and come back to my place?”

  “I would be happy to go anywhere with you, as long as it’s not here.”

  Jude laughed as we started walking in the rain toward his apartment over the garage. “That’s the kind of thing every guy can’t wait to hear.”

  SIX

  My phone pulsated on the nightstand. The table was made out of bones—Jude claimed they were bones from his own ancestors—with a plate of glass on top, and the screen of my phone made the skulls glow blue.

  I picked up my phone to see about a dozen text messages from my best friend/roommate Oona Warren.

  Are you coming home tonight?

  Where are you even?

  I’m guessing you’re not coming home tonight, so I went ahead and fed Bowie. I’m assuming that you went home with Jude again.

  Just so I know you’re not murdered or dead in the lake, you should text me and let me know.

  Seriously, Mal. It’s morning now. What are you doing?

  You have class this morning.

  Malin. Text me so I can stop worrying.

  “Shit.” I groaned, and, pushing the fog of sleep and a burgeoning hangover aside, I got out of bed.

  In the darkness of Jude’s bedroom, I scrambled to pull on my pants. I’d just gotten my bra on when Jude began to rouse in the bed.

  “Where are you going so early?” Jude suppressed a yawn.

  I sat on the edge of his bed, yanking on my moto boots and brushing back the tangles of long hair from my face. “It’s not early. It’s a quarter past eight, and I’m gonna be late for class.”

  “Class?” Jude asked, sounding more alert. “Wait, you aren’t in high school, are you?”

  “College,” I replied, but Ravenswood Academy was much more of a trade school than a university. It was only for kids studying to work for the Evig Riksdag or other government agencies that dealt with the supernatural elements of our world.

  I stood up and grabbed my jacket from the floor. “I still have to get my luft out of the shop.”

  “Just go in and tell my dad that I sent you to get it.”

  “Thanks.” I dug in my jacket pocket and pulled out a small handful of twenties, and I set it on the nightstand. “I’m leaving the money here for you.”

  “Damn, Malin, you really know how to make a guy feel like a prostitute,” Jude said with his rumbling laughter, but I was already on my way out the door, hurriedly texting Oona before she gave herself a heart attack worrying about me.

  At the garage, Jude’s dad wasn’t so keen on letting me just run off with the luft, but after a quick call to Jude, he grudgingly let me go. The luft started hard, grumbling angrily at me, before kicking out a plume of mist and exhaust, and the wheel-like propulsion fans glowed a dull blue beneath the carriage.

  Finally, it levitated off the ground, just above the six inches it would need to be street-legal. I throttled it back and flew down the road toward the academy. At this time of day, traffic could get locked up in the Ravenswood District, but with my luft I was able to swerve around a stalled-out bus and go up on the curb.

  The sidewalks were crowded with merchants selling their wares, along with patrons and pedestrians just trying to get by. I narrowly slid past a woman selling brightly colored rainbow snakes out of tubs, claiming they were the mystical descendants of the Wagyl.

  I managed to hit the brakes just before crashing into a food cart with a man selling sambusa. Sambusa were fried triangular pastry filled with delicious lentils and potatoes, and even though I was running late, my stomach warned me that I needed to eat something.

  “I’ll take one,” I said as I rummaged in my pocket for money.

  The man stood there glaring at me for a moment, but finally he took my money and handed me a sambusa, before muttering, “Sharmoto.”

  “If you’re gonna call me names, then give me my tip back.” I held my hand out to him.

  “You almost killed me, you crazy woman!” He waved his hands wildly at me. “Get out of here with your stupid bike!”

  I didn’t really have time to argue, and he was right, so maybe I should’ve tipped him more. I held the sambusa in my mouth, offered the merchant a small wave, then revved up my luft and sped off down the road to Ravenswood.

  The whole area around Ravenswood was high-rise low-income apartment complexes, with a few offices and shops on the lower levels. And there was the Ravenswood Academy. It was an Elizabethan Prodigy house—a massive Tudor-style mansion that looked more like it belonged in the English countryside than in the slums of the city.

  While the exterior was all the original architecture, meticulously maintained, the interior was more high-tech. Starting with the underground garage, where I had to pass through a blue wall of light to be certain I wasn’t carrying any unapproved weapons, and then scan my school ID to get into the garage, and then scan my retinas to get into the building.

  The hallway was relatively empty, and despite the high enrollment of the academy it always felt strangely quiet. The flooring was a mosaic inlay of black and white marble, and the walls were stark white with garishly bright crystal light fixtures in the ceiling.

  Paintings and artwork adorned the walls, mostly from previous students and alumni, depicting some aspect of life they might be working toward here at Ravenswood, like careers or the beings they might serve.

  There were several I always passed on my way up from the parking garage. One was a hanging mobile, looking a bit like a natural chandelier. Birch branches hung down, with horses carved into the white bark. According to the plaque on the wall beneath it, it was created as an offering for Bai-Ülgen.

  Another was a large statue made of marble, titled Ereshkigal of the Netherworld. It showed a regal woman elegantly perched on a throne made of bones. The bones and the fabric that draped her body were stark white, while her skin was a darker veined gray. Her mouth was curved slightly into a smile, and even though she was made of stone, it felt like her eyes followed me whe
never I walked by.

  The final picture in the long hall, before I turned off to go toward my class, always made me pause. It depicted a woman in a chain-mail bikini, her body rippling with muscles and strength, and her hands covered in blood. Her hair blew out behind her, and she stared up at the sky with a smile on her face as a single red tear slid down her cheek.

  The plaque on the bottom read:

  “THE DESIRE OF THE VALKYRIE”

  PAINTED BY MARLOW KRIGARE DURING HER SENIOR YEAR

  My mother had painted it.

  I made it to Intro to Divinity and Immortality only five minutes late, which really didn’t seem that bad, considering. Fortunately, I’d had my messenger bag with me when I went to Jude’s last night, which had my e-reader with my textbooks in it and my laptop for taking notes.

  I opened the door as quietly as possible, but a girl—an alchemy major named Sloane Kothari—still turned to glare at me. As the daughter of a Deva, she took her divine disposition very seriously, and unfortunately I had three courses with her this semester.

  The professor, Cashel Wu, paused in his lecture to watch me take my seat at a long stainless steel table in the back. He stood in front of the classroom, with the large screen at the front displaying a huge photo of a hieroglyph.

  I mouthed, Sorry, and got situated as quickly and quietly as I possibly could. By now plenty of other students had turned to look at me. Most of them were human, but a few obviously had more exotic parentage, with wings and tails and horns.

  But even those with more prestigious pedigrees came from some sort of mixed background, for them to be accepted into Ravenswood Academy, with usually one parent being human. Almost all offspring of immortals—even from the commingling of two different types of immortals—were mere mortals, with little or none of their parents’ powers.

  Ravenswood was designed to educate and train mortals for careers in handling the supernatural, which made it the go-to school for mortal children who had no hope of following in their immortal parents’ more elite footsteps.

  Sloane Kothari didn’t have any obvious signs of her parentage, other than the cold smile and the contempt in her dark eyes whenever she looked at me.

  “As we were discussing last week,” Professor Wu began once I was settled in, “immortality doesn’t make one divine or superior, the same way that mortality doesn’t make one weak or inferior.

  “In past societies, those with longer life spans or different appearances than humans were often either revered as gods or feared as monsters and forced into exile,” Professor Wu continued, and as he spoke, he clicked through photos on the screen.

  The pictures changed to a depiction of men bent forward, worshipping feline-headed Bastet; then to the multi-armed Vishnu, adorned in gold and jewels; to the wolf-humanoid Lobishomen, with massive fangs, being stabbed with bloody spears; and the birdlike witch Baba Yaga, being burned alive as she cried out.

  “But now, in our civilized society, that is not the case. We realize immortality is no more divine than having brown eyes or a short stature.” He looked back at the screen, his gaze lingering on the intense agony in Baba Yaga’s face, and he frowned.

  “We will be looking back through history,” Professor Wu continued. “Learning the mistakes that our ancestors made when confronted with immortality, so that we don’t make the mistakes ourselves.”

  SEVEN

  “Malin Krigare?” Professor Wu called out, stopping me as I attempted to make my escape out of the classroom. “Can I speak to you for a moment?”

  The other students continued their shuffle out of the room, and Sloane snickered at me as she walked out. I took a deep breath and trudged toward the front of class, to where Professor Wu was hunched over his desk making a few notes on his tablet.

  “Sorry I was late. I missed my alarm, but I hurried as fast as I could,” I began my apology.

  “I understand that you’re close to getting your license,” the professor said, finally looking up at me.

  Professor Wu appeared to be in his early thirties, and his well-tailored suits made him one of the more dapper members of the teaching staff here. His black hair was cropped short, and his Vandyke goatee added an additional air of nobility.

  “Yeah, it should be soon.” I picked absently at my chipped indigo nail polish before adding, “Hopefully.”

  “Actually, I saw that your Eralim sent a glowing message to the headmaster yesterday.” Professor Wu leaned back and folded his arms over his chest. “He thinks your performance is absolutely exemplary.”

  “That’s great,” I said, smiling a little, but there was something about Wu’s tone that made me worry there was a “but” coming.

  “But,” Wu said, and I grimaced inwardly, “you’ve been late to my class three times, and school’s only been in session for a few weeks.”

  “I know. I’ve just been having trouble with my luft—”

  “There’s always public transportation,” Wu cut me off. “But that’s not even the point. I’ve seen plenty of good kids like you, excellent students with bright futures ahead of them, who lose sight of the goal.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think I’m losing sight of anything.”

  “I checked. Your grades have been slipping this semester,” Wu said, and I lowered my eyes. “You know that even if you get your preliminary license now, it will be revoked if you don’t graduate.”

  Sighing, I nodded. “I know.”

  “And the Valkyrie program isn’t like some of the others here at Ravenswood. You need to pass with high marks or you don’t pass at all,” Wu lectured. “You still have a whole year left of your courses here. I would just hate for you to lose your career over a bout of senioritis.”

  “You’re right,” I said, hating that he was. “I’ll start applying myself more and taking my attendance more seriously.”

  Wu smiled. “That’s all I ask for as your professor, Malin.”

  After I left, I spent my next three classes sucking up, since I knew Wu wouldn’t be the only one noticing my recent flakiness, and ended up working on an extracurricular project down in the stacks. Somehow, I’d gotten suckered into annotating a book on medieval demigods, but finally a reprieve came in the form of a text from Oona.

  Bowie’s out of food. That was all she wrote, but the time on my phone flashing 5:47 P.M. meant that I had been at school long enough for one day.

  As quickly as I could without literally running, I rushed down to the parking garage—which was now fairly deserted—got on my luft, and raced out onto the street. The sky was overcast, the way it always seemed to be these days, and the air was cold, but nothing ever felt as good as the wind blowing in my hair as I drove through the city.

  I pulled into the cramped parking lot outside Dillinger’s Corner Market & Apothecary, and my luft dropped unceremoniously to the pavement. Jude hadn’t quite gotten the bug out of the dismount yet.

  The market’s door beeped as I stepped inside, and Oona looked up at me from where she sat behind the counter. An ancient textbook was spread out before her, which was typical for her, since she usually tried to get as much studying done at work as she could.

  “So I guess I can call the search off,” Oona replied dryly. Her thick brows were arched downward in an attempt to look angry, but her lips were already curving up into a smile.

  I offered her an apologetic smile. “Sorry for worrying you.”

  She shrugged her slender shoulders, and an easy grin lit up her face, making her eyes sparkle. “I just get bored when you’re gone for too long.” To emphasize her point, she ran her hand through her new haircut.

  The last time I’d seen her—which had been yesterday morning—her jet-black hair had been a little longer, but now it had been cut into a jagged pixie cut, with the curls straightened out. Oona always planned to grow her hair out, but inevitably she’d get impatient or bored and cut it all off again.

  “It looks good,” I said, but her hair always looked good.

&
nbsp; Oona may have been just a human—though she took great exception to the word just—but she was one of the most beautiful people I’d ever seen. Her flawless complexion was creamy brown, with high cheekbones above full lips, and her eyes were the color of black walnut. Even under the unforgiving cheap fluorescent lighting she was undeniably gorgeous.

  “Thanks.” She beamed at me, and the light glinted off her piercings. She had two small metal studs—one on either side of her mouth, just above her lips—colloquially known as Angelbites.

  We’d been best friends since the fourth grade, when her family moved down the street from me. While we’d never had a ton in common, we always made each other laugh, and I knew that I could count on her no matter what.

  Since Oona was just barely over five feet tall, I liked to joke that she’d stopped growing the day we met, so I grew twice as much for her.

  “How was school?” Oona asked.

  “Same old, same old,” I said with a sigh.

  I grabbed a basket and began strolling the cramped aisles of the tiny bodega. Despite the colorful addition of Apothecary in the name, the market mostly stocked overpriced food and toiletries, but there was a shelf in the back with crystals, amulets, and various enchanted herbs and potions.

  “How about you?” I asked, grabbing a bag of carrots for Bowie.

  Bowie was my six-year-old wolpertinger, which basically meant that he was a chubby fawn-colored rabbit with large wings and a tiny pair of antlers between his big ears. Some wolpertingers could fly, but Bowie had always been too fat and preferred doing as little as possible.

  She groaned. “I had a pop quiz in Laws of Intercession, which I’m fairly certain I bombed.”

  Oona was a thaumaturgy major with the goal of a being a great sorceress someday. Even though she went to Ravenswood, we didn’t have any classes together. Her area of study tended to be more mystical, while mine was more practical.

  “So, anyway, you never did tell me where you were last night,” Oona reminded me.