Between the Blade and the Heart

by Amanda Hocking

  I set the stone down on my stomach so I could look up at her. “Yeah, why wouldn’t I be?”

  She shrugged. “This is the first time I’m leaving you alone since … you know.”

  “I’ll be fine, Oona. I’m just in mourning—I’m not suddenly a toddler.”

  She rolled her eyes, and she started walking toward the door. “Just don’t do anything stupid while I’m gone, okay? And I’ll be home in five hours.”

  “I never do anything stupid,” I insisted, but she just laughed as she left.

  If Oona was right, and the reason the sólarsteinn wasn’t working was because Tamerlane was out of range, then I didn’t know if the stone would ever really be of help. How could I ever get close enough to Tamerlane to find him, if I didn’t know where he was? I’d be stuck in cyclical reasoning forever.

  But if I couldn’t get to Tamerlane, maybe I could get to someone close to him. I closed my eyes and tried to redefine my greatest want. I’d been trying to focus directly on Tamerlane, but now I broadened it to include anyone I felt was responsible for my mother’s death, which included Eisheth Levanon.

  If Eisheth hadn’t been abetting Tamerlane, he wouldn’t have gotten away so quickly, and maybe Oona and I could’ve stopped him. Or at the very least held him until Samael got there, and he could’ve done something.

  I squeezed my eyes shut tighter, focusing on her face and her name, and since I wasn’t entirely sure how the sólarsteinn worked, I started chanting inside my head, Show me where the fallen angel Eisheth Levanon is. Bring me to her.

  Then I took a deep breath and opened my eyes. Bowie had sat up beside me and leaned forward, sniffing the stone with his big ears cocked at odd angles below his antlers.

  “Here goes nothing, Bo,” I said as I picked up the stone and held it toward the window. My wolpertinger sat up on his hind legs, sniffing the air, which I decided to take as a good sign that something magical would happen.

  A sliver of sun broke through the clouds and passed through the skyscrapers that surrounded us, perfectly striking the sólarsteinn. For a moment nothing happened, but then slowly a prism of color began to grow inside it.

  I closed one eye, so I could see it better, and very clearly a rainbow of light was cast out from it, pointing back toward the inner city. It was pointing me where to go.

  I leapt to my feet, panicking that the stone might change its mind and stop working. I ran around the apartment in a flurry, scribbling a note for Oona so she wouldn’t worry, dumping a cup of food in Bowie’s bowl, and filling my messenger bag with knives and my baton.

  “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” I told Bowie as I pulled on my boots. “Stay out of trouble, and if I don’t come back, be good for Oona.”

  With the sólarsteinn in my pocket, I raced down to the street and hopped on my luft. Every few blocks, whenever I was stopped at a red light, I’d pull out my stone and check it. The prism of light remained pointed in the same direction.

  It led me deep into the heart of the city, a few blocks away from the Evig Riksdag. The light began to glow brighter, and I decided to finish the journey on foot, so I could keep my eye on the stone. I parked my luft and hurried along the sidewalk.

  Downtown was buried in darkness, since the sun had dipped low enough past the horizon that the buildings blocked out its last rays. But the city was never truly dark—buildings and streetlights and traffic kept it twinkling at all hours.

  Then I spotted her. Her big leathery wings stood out on the crowded street. She was waiting at a crosswalk, and I pushed through the other pedestrians, running as fast as I could to reach her.

  Eisheth’s gaze was focused on light across the street, waiting for the walk signal to flash green, and she didn’t even notice me at first.

  “Can we talk?” I asked.

  She looked over, and when she realized it was me, she sneered and shook her head. “We’ve got nothing to talk about.”

  “We’ve got lots to discuss.”

  “Well, I don’t agree, so get lost,” she replied dismissively, and started across the street, a split second before the light turned green.

  I reached into my pocket, holding on to the dagger I had stashed there, and ran across the street after her. As soon as I caught up to her, I grabbed her by the arm and threw her against the plate glass of the storefront beside her.

  Through the window I could see people getting their hair and nails done, and they all gasped when Eisheth’s big wings were splayed out against the glass, but I didn’t care.

  “Ow!” Eisheth winced as I held her pressed against the salon window. “What the hell are you doing, you little freak?”

  I don’t know why she called me “little,” since I was bigger and stronger than her, and I slammed her again to remind her of that. Then I pressed the dagger against her ribs, which were exposed underneath her cropped shirt. Angels had hearts that were larger and lower in their chest cavity than humans, and it would be easy to drive the knife between her ribs, into her massive heart.

  Before she had fallen, I would’ve needed my Valkyrie sword to slay her (along with specific orders from an Eralim to do so), but now all it took was a dagger made of forged iron, which I just happened to have in my hand. The blade was ancient and dull, but I would easily be able to slide it through her flesh and into her oversized black heart.

  “You think I won’t I kill you, right here and right now?” I asked. “But I don’t care anymore. You can scream for help, but you’ll be dead the second the words escape your lips.”

  Her eyes darted around at the people passing by. Some had slowed, but nobody stopped. That was the wonderful and terrible thing about living in a city as crowded as this—you were often alone and unnoticed on the busiest of streets.

  Eisheth finally relented and glared at me. “What do you want?”

  “Where is Tamerlane?” I demanded.

  She scoffed. “How the hell should I know? After you showed up, he ditched me and skipped town. I haven’t heard from him since.”

  I pressed the blade harder against her skin, enough to draw blood, and she cringed back against the glass. “I don’t believe you.”

  “You think I like admitting to you that he used me and threw me away like some piece of trash?” Her lip curled in disgust, trembling slightly, and it looked like tears were forming in her brown eyes.

  I might’ve felt bad for her, if she hadn’t been laughing while she watched her boyfriend kill my mother.

  “Did he have you convinced that you were some special snowflake?” I mocked her.

  Eisheth blinked back tears as she confessed, “He told me he loved me. He promised me that when the new world was established, I would be by his side. He would make all the humans and useless immortals bow before the one true queen.”

  I smirked. “You thought he was going to make you queen?”

  Now she laughed, that same unstable giggling she’d done in her loft. “No, not me. We would serve her.”

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw a woman come out of the salon. She leaned against the open door and held out her phone toward me, as if threatening me with it. “What’s going on out there?” she asked in an authoritative voice.

  “Mind your own business!” I barked at her.

  “I’m calling the cops!” she announced.

  “Stop talking about it and call them, then!” I yelled. The woman huffed at me, then went back into the salon, presumably calling the police as she did, and I turned my attention back to Eisheth, whose full lips had twisted into a bitter smile.

  The buzzing had started growing around my heart, and electricity raged through my veins as my pulse quickened. The urge to kill her was growing inside me by the second.

  “Her who? Who are you going to serve?” I asked, barely able to restrain myself.

  “You don’t know anything, do you?” Eisheth asked.

  “I know that I’ll kill you if you keep playing these games with me,” I warned her, digging my knife deeper into
her skin, and I could feel her blood warm on my fingers.

  Eisheth pulled her shoulders back and stared at me defiantly. “Go ahead and kill me. You think I even care if I live or die? This life means nothing to me anymore.”

  “If that’s as you wish,” I said, twisting the knife, and Eisheth grimaced in pain.

  “Don’t,” a woman commanded beside me.

  “I already told you to mind—” I began, but it wasn’t the woman from the salon.

  Quinn had somehow snuck up, and she was standing right beside me. Her eyes were grave, and she put her hand on my arm, strong and unyielding.

  “Don’t,” Quinn repeated. “This isn’t your job. This is murder. And there’s a ton of witnesses.”

  I stared at Eisheth, into her dark eyes, knowing that I could take the light from them with the simple push of my wrist. But, using all my willpower, I lowered the knife and stepped back from her. “Go on. Get lost.”

  Eisheth put one hand over her wound and used the other to flick me off before disappearing into the crowded street. I wiped the blood off on my black shirt, and then put the knife back into my messenger bag.

  It would only be a matter of time before the cops arrived, so I started walking quickly in the opposite direction that Eisheth had gone. Besides that, walking fast helped lessen the buzzing around my heart, so I didn’t feel quite as much like I would explode if I didn’t kill Eisheth.

  “What are you doing here? How did you find me?” I asked as Quinn easily kept pace beside me.

  “I’ve been trying to keep tabs on you,” Quinn said. “I wanted to make sure you were safe.”

  I raised an eyebrow at her. “You mean you’ve been following me?”

  She raised a shoulder, shrugging it coolly. “On and off. I lost you a few blocks back, but I’m glad I found you when I did.”

  “I guess it was probably for the best,” I reluctantly agreed.

  The world would most likely be a better place without Eisheth Levanon in it, but one of the main tenets of being a Valkyrie was that that kind of thing wasn’t my call to make. I didn’t get to decide who lived or died.

  “Actually, I was going to come get you around now anyway,” Quinn said. “I just needed to wait for the sun to go down.”

  I stopped walking so I could look at her directly. “What for?”

  “Come on.” She smiled and took my hand. “I’ll show you.”

  FORTY-ONE

  The alley led to a dilapidated stairway leading underground, then to an old subway system that had long since been shut down. The awning above was rusted, and most of the glass had been broken out.

  Quinn let go of my hand to hang on to the rail as she led the way down the steps, explaining as she went, “I couldn’t stop thinking about that thing that Asher read yesterday: From whence the draugr rose, only that will make the draugr fall. If his master waits in Helheim, it is his sword that makes the call.”

  “Right, but we have no idea who his master is,” I said. “Eisheth did just say something about a queen.”

  We’d reached the platform underground, which was filthy and full of leaves, trash, and presumably any number of vermin. Even though the subway had been closed for decades, it was brightly lit by kerosene torches hung up on the wall.

  “A queen?” Quinn asked, stopping just before the turnstiles to look back at me.

  “Yeah. She said she and Tamerlane serve one true queen, whoever that is.”

  She scowled. “Oh.”

  “What? Why do you seem so disappointed?” I asked.

  I mean, I wasn’t exactly thrilled about the idea of tracking down this one true queen who had some sort of plan for world domination, but I didn’t know how that specific piece of information could put a wrench in any of Quinn’s plans.

  She shook her head and jumped over the turnstile, apparently deciding that her disappointment wasn’t enough to halt our travels.

  “Because I was looking into things, and I discovered who I thought was Tamerlane’s master,” she explained as I jumped over the turnstiles behind her. “But he’s male.”

  “Who’s his master?” I asked.

  Quinn reached the edge of the platform and jumped down onto the tracks. When I got to the edge, I hesitated, so she held her hand out to me.

  “You’ll be okay,” she promised me. “I’m here.”

  I took her hand, then leapt down. I stumbled in my landing, but Quinn was there to catch me, pulling me into her arms. For a moment I was pressed against her, with her arms wrapped around me, and heat flushed over me before I managed to untangle myself from her. I cleared my throat and started walking slowly down the tracks.

  “As for Tamerlane’s master,” Quinn said, “I was thinking more of who created him in the first place, and less of who he works for since he’s become a draugr. From whence he rose to me implied at first that it was your mother—who didn’t kill him, thus making him a draugr—but since she wasn’t able to kill him when she tried, I was thinking that line was referencing something further back.”

  “You mean like going back into the Petro Loa lineage?” I asked.

  She nodded, and the flames from the kerosene lamps made her silver hair glow like a halo. “Exactly. And I discovered this guy Kalfu was the first true Petro Loa, and he spawned all the other Petro Loas that exist today.”

  “Great. So where is this Kalfu?” I asked.

  “Well, he died,” she replied matter-of-factly. “A Valkyrie returned him around seven hundred years ago.”

  “So you’re saying that there’s no one alive that can kill Tamerlane? This all seems like terrible news.” I glanced over at Quinn, who was stepping carefully along the tracks while smiling her lopsided grin. “I don’t understand why you look so happy.”

  She waved me off. “No, I’m not saying that. I started putting out feelers, and I contacted this old friend of mine, Gable Tawfik.”

  Ahead of us, the subway tunnel descended into total darkness, but there was a well-lit hole in the side of the tunnel, with another set of cement stairs leading even farther down. Quinn started going down them, but I stopped short.

  “Where are we going, by the way?” I asked, for the third time since I’d started following her away from my confrontation with Eisheth Levanon. So far, Quinn had avoided answering me, but it was getting to the point where I wouldn’t keep following her without an answer.

  She must’ve realized that, because she stopped and told me, “To the Avondmarkt.”

  “You mean the black market?” I asked.

  “It’s not the black market. It’s a night market,” Quinn corrected me. “Where they just happen to sell illicit and difficult-to-find antiquities, potions, and other various properties.”

  “Uh-huh. And why exactly are you dragging me there?” I asked.

  “To meet Gable. He found something.”

  With that, she turned and jogged down the stairs, and I hurried to keep up with her. As I reached the bottom, I could already hear the noise—talking, laughing, movement, the sounds of a marketplace.

  At the bottom of the stairs, a narrow hallway opened into a spacious underground bazaar. The high ceilings were two stories above us, and they were covered in backlit glass that gave the airy impression of having a skylight for a roof.

  It was as busy as any marketplace I’d ever seen, with people crowding the walkways and vendors with stands taking up every available inch. As Quinn descended into the crowd, I reached out and grabbed her hand so I wouldn’t lose her.

  Every booth was overflowing with exotic and strange wares, like dragon’s breath in a bottle, bones that allegedly belonged to Hercules, and the quills of a thunderbird. Someone was selling a smelly paste that they claimed was made from the liver of the Batutut, a Bigfoot-like creature that was protected under the Endangered Cryptids Act by the Evig Riksdag.

  There was even a living Kting Voar calf for sale. It was a small, fluffy baby cow with a mouthful of angry-looking fangs. The man selling the calf had it on a l
eash as he proclaimed, “Get your Kting Voar, and all your snake and vermin problems will be gone forever! This Kting Voar will eat anything pestering your household!”

  Quinn took us to a table covered in antiquities, with weapons and jewelry that appeared to be hundreds of years old. The jinn standing behind the table had his back to us when we approached, but when he saw us, he broke out in a wide smile.

  He was very striking, with thick lashes and deep olive skin. In another realm, he probably would’ve been a model, if it wasn’t for his height. He couldn’t have been more than five feet tall, if that.

  “Hello, Quinn Devane!” He grinned broadly at her, his dark eyes sparkling. “You are looking especially lovely today.”

  “Thank you, Gable. You’re as handsome as ever,” she said with her smile that could charm anyone, and his cheeks reddened a bit as she motioned to me. “This is my friend Malin.”

  “Any friend of Quinn’s is a friend of mine,” Gable assured me.

  “It’s nice to meet you,” I said.

  “I think I have found what you are looking for.” He bent down and pulled a small trunk out from underneath the table. He set the box on the table, then opened it, revealing an oblong object wrapped in a burgundy satin cloth.

  “Can we see it?” Quinn asked.

  He gestured toward it. “But of course.”

  She carefully pulled back the cloth, and there sat a dagger with a jagged blade of black tourmaline. It looked like it had been broken from a chunk of stone, with sharp angular edges. The hilt was a deep red, with a symbol carved into it, right in the center of the quillons.

  I wasn’t sure if I had seen this exact symbol before, but in researching Tamerlane and Petro Loas, I’d learned enough to know that this appeared to be a Vévé symbol. This sword had definitely belonged to a Loa of some kind.

  “You’re certain this was Kalfu’s dagger?” Quinn asked.

  “I am as certain as you are beautiful,” Gable told her, making Quinn smile.

  “This does look real,” I agreed.

  “You will be taking it, then?” Gable asked hopefully.

  “How much is it?” I asked.