by S. T. Bende
Perfekt Match
The Ære Saga: Book Four
by
S.T. Bende
The Ære Saga
Perfekt Match
Copyright © 2018, S.T. Bende
Edited by: Lauren McKellar
Cover Art by: Alerim
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author.
This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage system without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
First publication: 2018, S.T. Bende
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Table of Contents
Back Cover Copy
Also by S.T. Bende
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Mange Takk
About the Author
Back Cover Copy
For honor. For love. For Asgard.
Valkyrie Brynn Aksel is ready for some downtime. But when an urgent warning arrives from Asgard, heralding the death of a beloved god and the dawn of Ragnarok—the not-so-mythological end of days—it becomes clear there’s no rest for the gods…not when the future of the realms is on the line.
Goddess of Love Freya Skönsten can’t shake the darkness that’s clung to her since her Helheim imprisonment. An unsanctioned romantic connection with a mortal is the only thing keeping her in the light, but Freya’s vow to the Norns prevents her from fully uniting with her perfekt match. When Hel returns to finish what she started, Freya must decide how much she’s ready to sacrifice to save the family she loves…and whether she’s willing to give up everything for the worlds she’s sworn to protect.
With the forces of darkness aligning to destroy the realms, it’s clear more than just Love hangs in the balance. Ragnarok has arrived. And it's shaping up to be the perfekt storm.
Also by S.T. Bende
Revisit War’s Norse crew in THE ÆRE SAGA.
PERFEKT ORDER
PERFEKT CONTROL
PERFEKT BALANCE
PERFEKT MATCH
Meet the other Norse crew (including Henrik’s brother, Gunnar!) in THE ELSKER SAGA.
ELSKER
ENDRE
TRO
TUR (a novella)
THE ELSKER SAGA: COMPLETE BOXED SET
See the crews together in the crossover novella…
SUPERNATURAL CHRONICLES: THE ASGARDIANS
Meet the demigods in NIGHT WAR SAGA.
PROTECTOR
DEFENDER
REDEEMER
And introduce your Padawans to STAR WARS!
Complete list of S.T.’s Star Wars children’s titles
at http://www.stbende.com/star-wars
Stay in touch with S.T. at www.stbende.com.
Stay up to date with the latest news from S.T. by signing up for her NEWSLETTER at http://smarturl.it/BendeNewsletter .
And find pronunciations, translations, and info on all things Asgardian on S.T.’s website at WELCOME TO ASGARD.
Dedication
To my family and friend-family—my absolute, hands down, unconditional perfekt matches.
And to everyone who brings love and ære to our world.
Tusen takk.
“I love you with so much of my heart that none is left to protest.”
–Beatrice, Much Ado About Nothing
CHAPTER ONE
BRYNN
“FIRE IT UP, SÖTNOS. If our estimations are right, soldering red-one to blue-three should get things moving.” Henrik clicked a key on his laptop before crossing the man cave that doubled as our laboratory. He stepped into place behind me, leaning over my shoulder to tap the wires with the tip of his pencil. “These two.”
Instead of focusing on the object of his direction, my attention pinged to the stubbled cheek scratching lightly against my jaw. And the smell of sunshine filling my head. And the battalion of butterflies running Olympic-level sprints across my heart. Good gods, Henrik Andersson was hot. And by the grace of Freya, Goddess of Love, he was all mine.
Finally.
“Here?” I deliberately aimed the soldering iron a quarter inch too high—in the off position, of course.
“Not quite.” Henrik’s muscular chest pressed against my back. Yes.
“How about here?” I over-corrected, earning a chuckle from my longtime lab partner.
“Sötnos, if you need me to show you, just ask.” Henrik placed his hand over mine and guided the soldering iron into position. “Here.”
His cool breath tickled my earlobe, sending a shiver dancing down my spine and a heatwave rocketing through my hips. A light pressure at my fingertip shot a burst of flame from the iron just as Henrik slid his palm across my stomach. Double yes.
It took every ounce of my concentration to not melt the entire interior of the closer together, but after an endless moment of extremely tense soldering, the red and blue wires fused. My boyfriend celebrated by running his thumb along the ridges of my upper abs, and murmuring an appraising, “Nicely done.”
It took all of two seconds for me to turn off the tool, lay it on the smooth surface of the worktop, and spin around in Henrik’s arms. He slid his hand down to palm my butt, upping the heat in my belly to an all-out inferno that rivaled the flame from the iron a moment before.
“Stage two’s complete.” I reached up to run my fingertips through Henrik’s wavy hair. “And since it took us all morning, we probably deserve a break.”
“Probably.” Henrik dropped his head, running his lips along my jawline and sending a fresh surge of shivers traipsing along my spine.
“Definitely,” I agreed. My head tipped back and Henrik moved his mouth to the spot just behind my ear—the one that drove me completely and totally crazy, and made me want to wrap my arms around him and beg him to blur me down the hall and back to—
“Oh. There you are.” The flat voice of the Goddess of Love doused my hormones like a fire hose. Skit. We’re caught. I dropped my hands to Henrik’s chest and pushed, attempting to put distance between us. He wrapped one muscular arm around my back and held tight.
“She signed off on our being together over a year ago,” he murmured. “We don’t have anything to hide.”
“Right.” I exhaled. “Forgot. Again.”
Henrik’s chest rumbled with gentle laughter. He planted one more kiss on my neck before shifting me so we could face my boss. “Hei Freya. What’s up?”
The Goddess of Love—and head of Odin’s High Order of the Battle Goddesses, the Valkyries—stood in the doorway. Her waist-length, strawberry-blonde hair hung in uncharacteristic disarray over her slumped shoulders, and her once warm eyes bore their now telltale look of glazed confusion. “I’m…u
h…”
“Freya,” I said. My friend wrung her fingers together. “How are you feeling?”
“Fine.” Freya raised her chin and pulled her shoulders back. “I’m just fine.”
“Okay.” I kept my voice soft. Henrik squeezed my shoulder, and I angled my gaze to look up at him. When he tilted his head toward the hall, I understood.
Get Freya de-stressed. She’s not herself. Again.
It was a message we exchanged daily. Sometimes twice.
“We just finished up in here, and we’re heading downstairs for tea.” I offered a too-bright smile. “Want to come? I think Mia’s meemaw sent her more cookies yesterday. The red velvet kind.”
“What is it with those people and red velvet?” Henrik muttered. I threw a swift elbow to his ribcage.
“Freya likes the red velvet,” I hissed.
“My snickerdoodles are better. Just saying.”
“So, what do you think?” I spoke over my boyfriend. “Join us for tea?”
“Oh. I suppose…” Freya’s gaze swept the room. She lingered over the closer, still smoking lightly on the countertop. “What’s that?”
Henrik shot me a worried glance. “It’s the closer—the portal-sealing device we’ve been working on all month. We talked about it over breakfast. Remember?”
The corners of Freya’s mouth turned down. “No. I don’t.” My breath caught in my chest as Freya’s bottom lip quivered lightly. “I can’t remember much anymore.”
Oh, gods. If the toughest flicka I knew was crying, this day was definitely going downhill.
“Hey, it’s okay.” I crossed the room in hurried strides, and clasped Freya’s hands in my own. “You’re doing great. Let’s just get that cup of tea. Maybe Elsa can come over and spend some time with us. Watch a movie, maybe check in on you to see how—”
Freya ripped her hands from mine. “I do not want another healing.” Her eyes shot silent daggers. “I just want my life back.”
“We all want that for you.” Henrik stepped forward to place his hand on my lower back. “And we’re all here to help you. Brynn more than anyone. You know that.”
The anger in Freya’s eyes dimmed a notch before snuffing out. Mortification pooled in its place. “Sorry,” she whispered.
“It’s all right.” What else could I say? Freya had been…off since we’d rescued her from Helheim more than a year ago. She never spoke openly about what she’d endured during her time as Hel’s prisoner, but it was painfully obvious that whatever she’d been through had been harrowing at best.
I raked my bottom lip between my teeth and met Henrik’s gaze. Help.
“Okay, ladies, follow me to the kitchen. Meemaw’s cookies aside, Mia was baking me some ‘thanks for being such a great math tutor’ cupcakes. They should be ready now.” He nudged Freya with a playful elbow and she turned to wander down the hallway.
Henrik wrapped his large hand around mine, tugging me gently out of the lab. I followed him into the hall and down the stairs, studying Freya’s downtrodden shuffle for any hint of her once-confident gait.
Nothing.
“Henrik,” I murmured as we hit the bottom of the stairs. “She’s not getting better. We knew it would be rough after she came back from Helheim, but I thought between taking the spring off to focus on healing, and slowly easing back into her high commander duties, that maybe…”
“She just needs time.”
“It’s been over a year, and it’s starting to affect more than just Asgard. You’ve seen the uprising of hate crimes on Midgard—and the string of civil uprisings on Vanaheim. Fear’s taking over the realms. And since fear is the absence of love, it’s pretty clear Freya’s energy isn’t reaching its target audience.”
Or anyone.
Henrik rubbed the back of my hand with his thumb. “That’s why Odin appointed Nanna as interim love goddess, and ordered Freya to move in here—to give her time.”
Nanna was our Goddess of Warmth, and our friend Forse’s mom. Her heart was so full of love and kindness, she was the logical choice to hold the realms while Freya was out of commission. But after months of living with us—and undergoing twice-daily healings with Elsa—Freya still wasn’t fully herself. Elsa couldn’t even pin down a diagnosis. Whatever ailed our friend, it had never been treated in the history of Asgard.
And occasionally, like today, Freya regressed. Big time.
“What if time’s not enough? What if…” I dropped my voice to a whisper. “What if she never gets better?”
Henrik’s anxious eyes betrayed his concern, but he pulled me to his chest and cradled my head in his hand. “We’ll figure it out, sötnos. We always do.”
He wasn’t being arrogant. In the years we’d spent as bodyguards for our friend Tyr, there hadn’t been a problem we couldn’t tase, engineer, or coerce into submission. Henrik and I were so finely attuned as both warriors and lab partners, that very little got past us. We were the perfekt problem-solving force, and we were steely in our determination to protect everything—and everyone—we loved.
Failure had never been a part of our vocabulary. And failing Freya was most definitely not an option. The realms needed love to survive. And our unconventional family needed Love, period. We weren’t complete without her. For this reason alone, we would find a way to bring Freya back, both to the realms and to our family.
Even if we had no idea how.
**
“Say it, Mia.” Henrik’s deep tenor rang through the kitchen. “It doesn’t count if you don’t say it.”
“Seriously? The cupcakes aren’t enough?” Our adorably sweet mortal raked slender fingers through her glossy brown waves.
“Nope.” Henrik leaned back in his chair with a grin. “I’m waiting.”
“Fine.” Mia huffed a long-suffering sigh before reading from the paper Henrik slid across the table. “Henrik Andersson, you are the greatest math tutor in the history of ever. I am so lucky to have been graced with your wisdom, genius, and—you’re kidding, right?”
“Say it, Ahlström,” Henrik warned. “Or you’re on your own next semester. And junior year math is extraordinarily difficult…or so I hear.”
“Ugh. Okay.” Mia picked up the paper. “I am so lucky to have been graced with your wisdom, genius, and…and penultimate hotness. There. Are you happy?”
Henrik sank his teeth into a heavily iced cupcake. “Very,” he mumbled through a mouth full of red velvet crumbs.
A bubble of laughter burst from my throat. “Henrik! You’re so mean!”
“No, I’m not. I’m just making sure due appreciation is paid to the awesomeness that is me.” He finished the cupcake in a second bite, and treated me to an icing-lipped grin. Elsa and Forse chuckled as they settled into their chairs, and even Freya gave a small smile.
Tyr carried the tea kettle from the stove with a hearty eye roll. He poured hot water into our waiting cups, placed the kettle on a trivet, and dropped his six-and-a-half-foot frame into the chair next to Mia’s. “You’ll be more awesome when you finish the closer. How’s it coming?”
“It’s coming. We’re a few days away from being ready to test it, but once we hit beta phase it should be pretty smooth sailing.” Henrik snatched another cupcake from the platter in the center of the table while I added honey to my tea.
“I don’t know why we couldn’t have coffee with our cupcakes.” I shot Elsa a pointed look.
“Because, Brynn.” Her sky blue eyes danced with amusement as she raised her mug. “We are all working on purifying our physical beings.”
“Then why are we eating cupcakes?” I challenged.
“Whoa!” Henrik raised his hands. “Just because Elsa cut off your happy juice, don’t take away mine.”
“I didn’t cut her off.” Elsa shook her head, sending her golden curls tumbling over one shoulder. “I just suggested that Brynn enjoy her morning coffee—or three—and switch to tea after that.”
I added another shot of honey to the lavender tea that so
did not taste as good as the double espresso Henrik snuck into the lab for me earlier, and selected a cupcake from the pile. “Just don’t take away the morning coffee, and we’ll get through.”
Somehow.
Elsa’s delicate laugh filled the kitchen. She reached over to slip her fingers through Forse’s, her engagement diamond sparkling beneath the lights. “Morning coffee is now, and ever shall be, permitted.”
“Thank gods,” Tyr muttered.
I shared a pained look with the God of War. The coffee thing was part of an overall household purification. In her ongoing quest to heal Freya, Elsa had decided to reduce the availability of anxiety-inducing stimulants—like caffeine—from our Arcata cabin, and introduce calming agents some of us could have done without. Since Freya had come to stay, we’d been subjected to aromatherapy (green mandarin made Henrik crazy hyper, but doubly productive), a gluten-free diet that gave me and Tyr level-seven cookie withdrawals and level-ten irritation fits, the vegan diet that had ended the day Henrik threatened to permanently move back to Asgard, and floral essences (upping Mia’s elm intake right before exams made all of our lives easier). Nothing had fixed Freya’s condition, but we’d keep trying until something stuck.
And if we all went crazy in the process, well, it was a price we’d have to pay. The cosmos needed Freya. Desperately.
“How were your exams, Mia?” Forse wrapped the hand not holding Elsa’s around his mug. He studied our mortal from across the table. “Nothing too taxing for you, I presume?”
