Between the Blade and the Heart

by Amanda Hocking

  Asher put his hand on my arm, stopping me just as I was about to enter the bar. “He killed my mother, too. I’m going in there with you.”

  I nodded. “Let’s finish this.”

  I walked into the bar first, Asher a step behind me. The pianist continued playing, and the bartender wiped the wooden bar with an old rag, either not noticing or not caring about my or Asher’s presence.

  “Tamerlane Fayette,” I said loudly; neither of the angels of death paid us any mind.

  Still with his back to us, Tamerlane took a long drink of red wine from a crystal goblet. “I must admit I’m surprised that you haven’t given up by now.” Slowly, he turned the barstool around so he faced us. “You know this is pointless, don’t you?”

  My hand hovered above the dagger on my hip. “You don’t know what I’m capable of.”

  He smirked. “You traveled all this way for nothing. You can’t kill me.”

  “Is that why you’re hiding out here?” Asher shot back, his voice dripping with venom.

  “I’m not hiding—I’m waiting,” Tamerlane corrected him.

  I raised an eyebrow. “For us?”

  Tamerlane let out a low, joyless laugh. “Don’t be so arrogant. For her.”

  “Her who?” I asked.

  “The only true queen.” Tamerlane gestured vaguely around, to the air, to the floor, as if she were everywhere. “The one who I serve. The one who took me under her wing after your mother left me to live in a world that I no longer belonged in.”

  “The one who killed your family?” I asked sharply, hoping to hit the same nerve my mother had, just before Tamerlane killed her.

  It worked. His smile fell away and he stood up, stepping away from the bar and closer to where Asher and I stood in the center of the room.

  “Why do you even want to avenge your mother?” he asked, looking at me directly. “You should hate her for what she did. She’s the one that brought this all on.”

  “I do hate her.” It was the first time I’d ever said this aloud, but that didn’t make it any less true. I hated Marlow, and I loved her. She had good in her, buried beneath so much bad. But in spite of everything, she was my mother and I was grateful to have called her mine. “But it wasn’t for you to decide whether she lived or died.”

  “Just as it isn’t for you to decide who lives and dies, and yet you do it all the time,” Tamerlane countered.

  “No, I am only following my orders,” I insisted.

  “As was I!” Tamerlane said, almost jovially, and he motioned between himself and me. “The two of us, all of us, really, we’re only pawns in the games of the gods.”

  “Maybe,” I allowed. “But I’m not about to let you win.”

  “It’s already too late. Haven’t you been listening?” Tamerlane asked.

  “It’s never too late,” Asher replied with more conviction than I felt.

  “I can help you,” Tamerlane offered, then motioned toward the door, where Oona, Quinn, and Atlas were waiting just around the corner. “And I can help your friends. Let me put you out of your misery before my queen arrives. Humans won’t survive long with what she has planned for this earth.”

  “We won’t let her,” Asher said.

  Tamerlane looked at the two of us. “Do you think that if she could be stopped I would’ve let her slaughter my entire family?” Then his dark eyes settled on me. “When your mother failed to slay me, I became a draugr, one of the most powerful beings on earth. And yet, I could not stop the queen. I could only fall in line.”

  “Everything can be stopped,” I told him as I pulled Kalfu’s dagger from its sheath. “Even death dies.”

  “That’s how you plan to stop me?” Tamerlane chuckled at the sight of it. “With that tiny little knife?”

  “We’ll see,” I said.

  “Let’s dance, then, shall we?” He motioned for me to come at him. “I’ll make it easy for you.”

  He spread his arms wide, leaving himself exposed, and while I couldn’t be certain that it wasn’t a trap, I had to take my chance. I walked right up to him, taking careful deliberate steps, and he merely smiled down at me as I drove the dagger straight into his heart.

  Tamerlane laughed again, more boisterously this time. “I barely even felt it.” He reached down to pull the dagger out, but his expression faltered. “I told you I couldn’t…” He stumbled back, his skin growing more ashen. “I couldn’t…”

  Then he fell to the floor, slumped back against the bar, and his black eyes met mine, filled with confused indignation. “I can’t die,” he whispered, and then his head lolled to the side and he fell silent.

  The raven suddenly flew into the room, cawing like mad, and Quinn, Oona, and Atlas raced in after it. The entire bar began to rumble. Dirt pushed up from the floor, like giant gophers were pushing their way to the surface, but the reality was much worse.

  Skeletal hands broke free, followed by entire bodies. A dozen or more reanimated skeletons came up through the floor, each one of them brandishing a rusty sword.

  FIFTY-FIVE

  “You really thought you could just waltz in here and kill him, and it would be that easy?” Quinn asked, standing behind me as the skeletons circled around us.

  “No,” I admitted. “But I had hoped.”

  The five of us stood with our backs together, and once the skeletons finally stopped pouring out of the earth, they charged at us. Sigrún, my sword, began glowing dull purple, and I felt the surge of Valkyrie rushing through me.

  I knocked them back just as quickly as they came at me, slicing through their bones like they were made of ash. For every one I killed, two more rose up in their place, but I kept fighting, moving on instinct, as I dodged and sliced until their numbers finally seemed to be dwindling.

  Behind me, I heard Oona cry out in pain, but I couldn’t let that distract me—if I wanted her to survive this, I needed to stop the skeletons from overtaking us. From the corner of my eye, I saw Quinn taking three skeletons down in one fell swoop, and I heard Atlas grunting as he fought.

  Finally, the skeletons lay in a pile of bones around us, with mounds of freshly overturned dirt beneath them. And still, the bartender kept wiping down the bar, and the pianist kept on playing, undisturbed by the battle for life and death that had been raging around them.

  Oona was crouched down in the skeletal pile with a bloodied arm, so I rushed over to her.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “What?” She glanced at her arm, as if she hadn’t even noticed she was wounded. “Yeah, I’m fine.” And then she immediately turned her attention back to the rusted sword she was holding. “There’s an inscription on their weapons, and I know I’ve seen it somewhere.”

  As Oona studied the blade, I unzipped her bag and pulled out a gauze bandage.

  “Well, Tamerlane’s dead, so we should probably just get out of here before more terrible things happen,” I suggested as I wrapped up her arm.

  “Atlas?” Oona asked, too preoccupied to listen to me. “You said you knew some Akkadian?”

  “Not really,” he said, but he bent over to inspect the sword. “But that definitely looks like the Akkadian writing I’ve seen.”

  The room began rumbling again, harder this time, and the bones around us rattled.

  “Oona, can we do this later?” I asked, getting to my feet. “We should get out of here.”

  “I know, I know.” She ran her hands over the encryption on the blade. “This just doesn’t feel over to me.”

  “Okay, we need to get out of here,” Quinn commanded as the quaking intensified, and the raven squawked again before taking off down the hall in the opposite direction from which we’d come, away from the ossuary. “Now!”

  I grabbed Oona’s good arm and yanked her to her feet. She carried the sword with her as we ran out to the hallway just in time to see the ceiling collapsing. Our path back the way we’d come was blocked, so the only way out now was to keep following the long hallway to wherever it migh
t lead.

  “Hurry!” Atlas shouted, not that he needed to. We were already running, and the tremors stopped as soon as the ceiling caved in.

  The hallway quickly stopped feeling like any kind of formal structure but rather like a cave. Bones were still scattered about, but less in a decorative way. Complete skeletons lay sprawled, as if someone had lain bodies out for everyone to see—as a sacrifice, maybe—and that’s as they had been ever since. They had become calcified, which made them look thicker and glittery, like they were made of crystal.

  Opaque stalactites hung from the ceiling, like icy teeth reaching out for us, and still we walked deeper into the cave. Somewhere ahead of us, light was shining, casting light down the tunnel. The cold air—which had gotten frigid—started to warm as we walked.

  Finally, we saw the mouth of the cave, opening to a large pond filled with bright aquamarine water. Above it, the cave opened to the sun, which shone brightly on us. Not red or dark the way it had been before we entered the ossuary, but like full daylight.

  Quinn walked to the edge of the lake first and stared up. The walls surrounding it weren’t that high, and the far wall on the other side of the water even had a mossy staircase carved into the side.

  “Well, it looks like we’re going for a swim,” she said. “Assuming we all want to get out of here.”

  “Do you have any idea where this will lead?” I asked Asher.

  He shook his head, crouching down to inspect water. “I’m not sure. The maps I looked at never showed this place.” He cupped some water in his hand, smelling it. “I think this is fresh water.”

  “We should rest for a moment,” Atlas said. “But then we should leave as fast as we can.”

  Oona sat cross-legged on the ground, still running her fingers over the rusty sword as if it could channel all the answers to her, when she excitedly yelled, “I got it! It’s a name!”

  “A name?” Quinn asked. “Of who?”

  Oona rubbed her forehead, concentrating. “One of the underworld goddesses. It’s something.… Shush? Or Rash? Something?”

  “Ereshkigal?” I whispered, as if saying her name louder would somehow summon her.

  Oona snapped her fingers. “Yes! That’s it!”

  The hair on the back of my neck stood up, and I realized dismally that I should’ve known sooner. The past few days, I had been seeing her face everywhere—her eyes following me from posters on the street, entrancing me at the hotel, even waiting for me with open arms at the Merchants of Death.

  It had all seemed like coincidence, like nothing to pay any mind to, but she’d slowly been raising herself in the consciousness of everyone as she gained power. She was an obscure underworld goddess, banished to Kurnugia centuries ago. Why should her name be on everyone’s tongue?

  Because she wanted it there. Because her underlings were working to prepare the world for her, to ready us all to bow down and say her name, so they plastered her face everywhere, her name on everything, for us all to see and remember.

  The water in the lake began to ripple and quake before us. Everyone moved backward, hurrying away from the edge and into the cave, except for me. Because I knew it was already too late.

  The crystal-clear lake, which seemed like an oasis in the harsh world of the Gates, was actually something far more sinister. It was the mouth to Kurnugia, a watery portal through which immortals could pass from one world to the next.

  FIFTY-SIX

  A man arose slowly, breathing in deeply as his head first broke through the water. He had two massive horns from the sides of his head, but beyond that he was handsome, if not slightly unremarkable, with dark waves of hair dripping down his back. When he shook his head, droplets of water flew around him like a halo.

  He smiled as he moved forward, and the dark patch of hair on his chest trailed down his bronze skin … and that’s when I saw he was no man at all. From his waist down, he was all bull, with four muscular legs covered in thick black fur, and hefty cloven hooves trudging through the water toward us.

  “I didn’t expect a welcoming party to greet me when I finally arrived,” he said, running a hand through his thick hair.

  “Who are you?” Quinn demanded from behind me, but I already knew the answer.

  I recognized him from paintings and textbooks. Often depicted in the background behind Ereshkigal or sometimes seated at her side, he was her consort, her lover, her partner in crime. Gugalanna, the Bull of Hell.

  “I have been called many, many names over the centuries,” he admitted. “But the one I am most known by is Gugalanna, and since we are going to be friends…”

  He paused in his own introduction to give his most winning smile and motion toward us all as he towered over us. In a conspiratorial tone, he leaned down and said, “I can already tell we’re going to be bonded together for a long time. I mean, this is a special moment, isn’t it?”

  Then he straightened up, still grinning, and finished with, “Well, since we’ll be friends, you can call me Guga.”

  “Guga?” Quinn asked with an arched eyebrow.

  “I know, I know,” he said with a sigh. “It’s a terrible name, but my parents were so last millennium, so what are you gonna do?”

  “What do you want with us?” I asked.

  “Right now I’m just checking out this ragtag group we’ve got here.” With his hands on his hips, Gugalanna looked from one to the other of us. “So what have we got here? Valkyrie, Valkyrie, mortal but … powerful? Yes? Sorceress, maybe?”

  “Sorceress-in-training,” Oona corrected him, standing a bit taller.

  “Son of a Valkyrie, son of a Valkyrie,” he continued down the line, looking rather impressed. “Wow. We’ve really got a lot of great blood here. I feel like I won the lottery, I truly do, and I cannot thank you all enough for making this so much easier for me. I was afraid I was going to have to go traipsing off into your world, knocking on everyone’s doors and asking if they have any old Valkyries just lying around.

  “But see, Resh—that’s what I call my wife, Ereshkigal—she got this great idea,” he went on. “She said we could just bait a trap for some Valkyries, and it would be far easier than fighting them on their own turf, where it would be nearly impossible for us to take them all on at once, and we just had to wait for one to screw up. All we needed was a little mistake, one tiny crack in the wall of perfect order that surrounds your world—like, say, a Valkyrie creating a draugr.”

  My mouth felt dry, and a familiar tension grew around my heart. He was talking about Marlow, and Tamerlane. Tamerlane had warned me that we were all pawns, and I had believed him, but I hadn’t realized the full extent of it, and I don’t think he had, either.

  Somehow, they’d gotten Marlow to spare Tamerlane, upsetting the balance so they could get an upper hand and grow more powerful as things began to unravel on earth. And then they had used Tamerlane himself as bait to bring us here.

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  “And you know, I’ll be honest,” Gugalanna was going on. “It took so long, I started to doubt that it was even going to happen. I was just saying to her, ‘Resh, my darling, you are the smartest woman I know, but this just isn’t happening.’ But then, it did! And boy, do I feel foolish.

  “So who was it that screwed up?” he asked, his eyes bouncing over us. “It wasn’t any of you, was it? No. It was one of your mothers.” Then his gaze settled on me. “Yours, I’m guessing, based on that pissed-off but guilty look on your face.”

  I could hear my blood pounding in my ears, and my muscles ached to fight, but I kept myself in check. I forced myself to stay calm, to wait, even as Gugalanna admitted that everything terrible, everything that threatened to end the world, was his and Ereshkigal’s doing.

  “You made my mother do that? How?” I asked, barely keeping my voice even.

  “We didn’t make her, exactly, but…” He waved his hands. “You know what, I’m already saying too much. I can’t give away all the secrets about how Resh works, because her pla
n is still in action. Don’t get me wrong—it’s almost done. She’s almost ready to come back up here, but not quite. So I better not spoil things just yet.”

  “What are you doing here?” Oona asked. “What exactly do you want with us?”

  “I want nothing with you, actually,” he said, gesturing to Oona. “I’m just getting one of the last things on Resh’s list. The blood of a child of a Valkyrie.”

  He let that sink in for a beat before continuing. “It can be from either a son or a daughter, but in our experience, the daughters are harder to control, and I’ve already had a long day, so I think I’ll go with one of you two boys. I don’t care which. You can fight among yourselves, if you’d like.”

  I drew Sigrún and moved, blocking Asher. “You’re not taking any of us!”

  “Really? You’re going to try to fight me on this?” Gugalanna pretended to pout. “I thought we could all be friends.”

  “You really thought we’d just let you kill one of us without a fight?” Quinn asked, drawing her own sword.

  “Whoa, whoa! Who said anything about killing?” He shook his head. “I’m just taking him down to Kurnugia, and, well, we’ve got some stuff planned for him that I’m really not at liberty to discuss right now.”

  The cave began to rumble, making the stalactites above us tremble and the water in the lake ripple around Gugalanna’s hooves.

  “All right, all right,” Gugalanna shouted toward the water, as if someone down below could hear him. “The missus says I’m taking too long, so I better get back down there. These portals don’t stay open forever, you know.”

  I charged at him first, but he kicked me back with his powerful legs like I was nothing. He was much larger than us, and too strong—even for a Valkyrie like me. We didn’t stand a chance.

  As I scrambled to my feet again, he’d already sent Quinn and Atlas flying into the cave walls. Asher was standing his ground, attempting to fight him off with his flaming sword, while Oona pulled a potion out of her bag.