Except he’d already tried that. Odin had laughed in his face. Told Tyr he’d seen what was coming. And with a cold, dead look in his eyes—lifted the bottle to his lips again.
Even if things were hopeless, they needed Odin. Even blind, their king was clever and ruthless, two talents Tyr could use right now. But apparently his blindness, and the tailspin this vulnerability precipitated, wasn’t going to be solved overnight. Still…
“Great timing, asshole.”
“Tell me about it.” Behind him, Mir leaned into the doorway, his face grave, dust covering his Kevlar jacket, something looking suspiciously like dried blood crusting his side.
“Ah, you’re back.” Tyr measured up the red haired god, recognized the approaching burnout in those blue eyes. “You look beat to hell. But damn, I’m glad you’re here. How are we doing out there?”
“Yeah. Got home a couple hours ago. Checked in on Balder and the others. The lines are holding at the moment, but no telling how much longer. One thing’s for sure, I didn’t expect to come back to a ghost town.”
“Yeah, well, I didn’t expect to be living in one.” Tyr rubbed the knot on the back of his neck, despising the faint tremor of exhaustion lacing his voice. “Sydney’ll be thrilled you’re back. I couldn’t have run things without her.”
Mir’s blue eyes flashed. “Of course you couldn’t. She’s smarter than you. Gods, I’ve missed her. And once I head upstairs, you probably won’t see either of us for a couple of days.” Mir rubbed his face, leaving long smears of dirt. “Any sign Odin’s decided to sober up and join the ranks of those who give two shits about the world?”
Tyr sliced his head back and forth. “Won’t even leave his Throne Room. I’m thinking drastic measures are called for. I’ve tried once. Maybe you’ll have better luck, now that…”
It was hard to say what tipped Tyr off first, that inward tightening in his gut, or the prickling on the back of his neck, as if a predator were watching. Whatever the feeling was, when he turned, it did nothing to brace him against the chill in Hunter Wallace’s gleaming eyes when they found his own. His breath exploded out of him in disbelief, as he gazed, for the first time in centuries at the woman who had both captured and broken his heart.
Standing in front of him, head raised defiantly, black hair flowing down her back, knives and clothing bloodied, Hunter looked every bit as proud and reckless as the first day he’d seen her. Tyr didn’t know how long he’d been staring, but when Mir cleared his throat, he was sure it had been too long.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” Tyr managed, the mere sight of her causing him to flounder for words.
“Trying to figure out how you idiots could be so careless to let that monster get away from you and destroy my city.” Her voice was still husky, low, and her shrewd gaze didn’t miss a thing, taking in the maps, the War Room’s general clutter, the disarray of failure.
Mir gave Hunter his own disapproving once-over before spinning away on his heel without a single word, slamming the door behind him, just to make his point. Tyr waited until the sound faded away before asking, “Your city?”
Her eyes turned into glittering lakes of amber, as she snarled, “That’s right. New York City. My city.”
Hunter might have been born a thousand years ago, but clearly, she’d lost none of her sharp edges. “Eight hundred miles away from you, which, as it turns out, wasn’t nearly far enough.”
And so it had always been between them. Endless stand offs. Endless silences. Endless, pointless stretches of time. Hundreds of years, in fact, where time slipped by without either of them taking a step forward or a step back.
Tyr leaned his hip against the table in what he hoped was a casual pose and pasted the same look over his face. “Back to my original question. What are you doing here, when the Orobus is in New York? Shouldn’t you be defending your city with your team?” And because Hunter’s team was the New York equivalent of their band of elite, immortal warriors, Tyr didn’t understand why she’d come all this way.
“You truly are a bastard.”
“Nope, my bloodline’s as blue as the ocean’s deep. Can’t say the same about you, though.”
He had to give her credit, she kept her weapons holstered and her talons sheathed. But those eyes grew darker, and her mouth took on a rigid, intractable set that made him realize his troubles were only beginning.
When she spoke, her voice was soft, and a lesser man might have shuddered. “Once the monster you allowed to roam free in our world is shackled and contained, we can debate our dubious, respective ancestries all you want, Tyr. Until then…” She leaned in until she stared deeply into his eyes. “I suggest you work really, really hard and use what little brain power you possess to come up with a means to kill him. And do it fast, because you’re running out of time.”
Here in the flesh, there was a subtlety to the woman that his memories failed to capture, a delicacy to her scent, a burnished gold in the texture of her skin which he’d forgotten, and the sight of her cracked him open like an egg. Memories, he thought, were such deceitful things. “I’m here because New York City is gone, Tyr. Completely gone.” Her lips trembled. So much so that he stopped the smart ass retort on his tongue and kept quiet while she laid everything out for him.
The Orobus’s brutal attack.
The loss of her team.
Her messy, bloody scramble towards Chicago.
When Hunter finished she blew out a shaky breath before marshalling herself. “Nothing left of the major cities—those are gone. Some smaller towns survived, and I ran across a few rural areas that are relatively unscathed, but it looks as if the creature’s armies followed the main highways, picking off the bigger cities one by one.”
Tyr offered a shallow nod while his head spun at the revelation NYC was destroyed. “We call him the Orobus. And that’s what I gleaned from my reports, too. A blueprint to conquest. And we handed it to them.”
She didn’t disabuse him of his theory.
“The creature’s power…” She turned away, and her voice faltered. “Killed everything in its path. Forests turned skeletal, cattle bloated and rotting in the fields. Birds fallen from the sky. This creature…wiped out whatever it touched. Hel, the Grim, the Dark Elves…they’re just clean up.”
“Hunter.” He knew exactly where she’d gone to in her head. Hadn’t seen her in a thousand years.
But still knew, in a heartbeat, exactly what she was thinking.
But before he figured out what to say next, she’d marshalled herself. And that was Hunter Wallace. Job first, personal shit second. Always.
“The city’s gone, Tyr.” This time, her mouth didn’t tremble. “I stayed long enough to get the rest of my team out, every survivor. Most of them headed north. Following the contingency plan.” Her eyes turned distant. “You know, the one we never thought we’d have to use?”
“How many made it out?”
“Including me? Thirty one.” She didn’t have to say anything else. There’d been over a hundred of their kind posted in the New York organization. Immortals. Haflings. And a few like Hunter. Mortals touched by the otherworldly. All of them warriors fighting the Grim. Tasked with keeping Hel’s minions under control.
“He’s right behind me. Which is the only reason I’m here. To warn you.”
For a second, Tyr wasn’t sure he heard her right. “You’re here to warn us?”
She paused a moment before replying. “To warn you. He’s already destroyed New York. Now he’s coming back, probably to finish off Chicago. I’d say you have two, possibly three days before he arrives. Hel’s a day behind him with her horde of Grim.”
Her eyes narrowed down to slivers as she measured him up, before shaking her head. “You know, for a long time I’ve wondered what it’d be like to see you again. But I never expected you to look like this.”
His spine popping, Tyr threw his shoulders back. “Like what, exactly?”
“Defeated.”
Tha
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The Banished Gods Box Set: Books 1-3 Page 76
