She really, really wished someone wasn’t trying to kill them right now.
The car’s spinning began to slow.
Marion felt faintly sick from the motion, but barely noticed as she stared up at that angular face, the vague outline of a broad, muscular chest, his strangely glowing eyes. She was gripping hold of something, she realized, holding it for balance, but she hadn’t really looked at what it was. Whatever she held onto, it was soft and thick and all around her, like a dense blanket made of enormous feathers.
She slowly grew to realize that whatever it was she held on to, it held her back. That blanket wrapped around her firmly, keeping her close to the angular face, the dark, glowing eyes, those muscular arms and the disturbingly perfect chest.
Marion didn’t fully comprehend any of that until the car’s spinning finally slowed.
It froze out of its spin entirely when it hit a hard bump in the road, then skidded a few yards further, skidding and bouncing on the metal driver’s side door before it finally came to a complete stop.
For a few seconds, everything grew strangely quiet.
Their breaths echoed, panting in the dark.
Somewhere in the distance, Marion heard a siren.
Closer, there was shouting, the honking of horns, screams, what might have been gunshots––
But in their little cocoon of metal and darkness, it was nearly silent.
Marion panted, trying to pull her mind back online, trying to think through adrenaline and what had to be shock. She swore she could hear her own heartbeat.
She swore she could hear his.
Then the shadow over her spoke.
As he did, his hands and arms reached for her. He gripped her around the back and waist, carefully pulling her closer to that warm, muscular chest.
“We have to go,” he said.
The familiarity of his voice shocked her, making her breathe harder.
Even now, after both of them nearly dying, covered in broken glass, in a much more broken car, he managed to sound totally unruffled. The person hovering and hanging over her stroked her hair out of her face, caressing her cheek and jaw as he seemed to be warming her with his large hands, or maybe calming her down like one might reassure a panicky animal.
She felt a shock of heat hit her belly at his touch.
She felt another when she looked up, just from the sheer intensity in those glowing, dark-red, coal-like eyes. His deep voice did something to her, even apart from the calmness, the utter assurance she heard there.
Her own confused reactions flustered her, but his presence calmed her down.
When he spoke next, something in the depth there, in that calm, unshakable assurance, also made her feel strangely safe.
“We have to go, Marion,” he repeated. “They’re coming. Now.”
Instead of panicking, she only nodded.
Her fingers wrapped around the hand on her face, and she nodded again.
14
The Least Strange Thing
There was a flex of muscles over her, one Marion tangibly felt.
A sharp wind flashed, ruffling her hair––
––then a piece of the car flew away from her.
It flew straight up and back, leaving their immediate physical proximity in a near-silent rush. Marion found herself looking up over her shoulder, half in alarm, half in wonder as that same piece of car disappeared into the darkness.
Where it had been, she now saw only night sky.
It took her a second more to realize it was the car door.
That same car door had just been thrown off at a speed fast enough to blur its shape as it disappeared into darkness. Displaced air rushed in to fill the void the door left behind.
Marion shivered, both from that wind and the rush of snowy, early-evening air.
Hands wrapped around her again.
She hadn’t noticed those few seconds they left her, but now they felt warm, comforting, and insanely distracting. He gripped her tighter, pulling her closer to him.
“Seat belt,” he said.
His deep voice remained calm as a monk’s.
“…It would be easier if you removed it,” he added. “I can’t see where it’s attached.”
Bewildered, Marion looked down to her lap and shoulder. She found the latch and clicked it, and thankfully, it worked, retracting from around her.
She hadn’t fully comprehended the angle where she and the car hung, suspended in space. She’d forgotten that pressure against her chest and ribs once the car stopped spinning on the icy road. When the belt clicked from around her, however, reality returned.
So did gravity.
Marion fell, straight down, in the direction of the McLaren’s driver’s side door, which had been smashed into the road.
She might have fallen all the way to the pile of glass where the driver’s side window used to be, but her shadowy protector stood in the way.
He caught her, midair.
As soon as the unlatched belt freed her, and she began to fall, his arms encircled her.
He wrapped his arms around her then, and lifted her out of the seat.
“I’ll need to carry you,” he said, his voice a low murmur. “Do you mind? I’ve managed to have the streetlights extinguished, so that should give us some cover.”
Marion shook her head, but she barely heard his words.
He was climbing with her out of the car window, and suddenly, she was fully comprehending everything that surrounded her, even as her eyes widened in shock.
When he stood on the passenger side of the electric orange car, in the freezing night air, surrounded by snow, somewhere in Washington D.C., she looked around at the scene that greeted them, sure she must be dreaming.
That, or maybe she truly was dead.
He was right about the streetlights. They were all out. Every light along the four-lane road near a midtown shopping center had been mysteriously extinguished.
That didn’t mean no one could see them.
Screams and amazed shouts rose as the man holding her grew visible.
Marion was staring at him, too.
He stood there, his black hair ruffled by wind, his coal-black eyes glowing with that strange, otherworldly light. He gazed out over the cars that had piled up in the intersection since they got hit, then shifted his eyes towards the people pointing and staring from restaurants and buildings on the side of the street nearest to the shopping center.
Marion noticed other things––details that wouldn’t come back to her until later.
Like the fact that the McLaren had slammed into a curb, which is likely what stopped it spinning and skidding. Like the piles of snow covering the streets on both sides. Like the fact that it was snowing, even now, the flakes getting caught in her hair, melting on her cheeks and nose, getting stuck in her eyelashes. It was snowing into the hole in the side of the car where the McLaren’s door had been.
She also saw Christmas decorations on all of the buildings, inside restaurants and bars, wrapped around trees along the street. She saw red bows, snowmen, and Christmas messages spray-painted in fake snow across glass storefronts.
Those things all came back to her later, however.
In those endless-seeming few seconds, Marion saw only the people staring at them and pointing, the shock on their faces.
Then, when she turned to look at the man holding her in her arms, she saw only him.
Those faintly glowing eyes were the least strange thing about him.
Much more interesting, to Marion at least, were the enormous wings stretched out to either side of him, made of deep black feathers run through with scarlet, like they were made of fire and blood and volcanic stone.
Staring at those massive wings, staring around at the street––staring at the people screaming and shouting and pointing at them––Marion barely had time to take it all in. She watched in awe as the wings stretched out to their full span. She saw Tyr frown faintly, his angular face as beautiful as a stat
ue as he took in the number of witnesses.
Then she heard something else.
Gunshots.
That didn’t last long, either.
There was another feeling of muscles flexing, tensing, contracting, releasing––
––then Marion’s stomach dropped.
It made the most intense roller coaster she’d ever experienced feel like nothing.
It made the time she’d gone bungee-jumping in Patagonia feel like nothing.
It made those times she’d gone base jumping in New Zealand, in Thailand, in Spain, in Austria, all feel like nothing.
She opened her mouth, maybe to let out a scream, maybe just to yelp in surprise, but the wind rushed in so fast, she couldn’t do anything but press her face into the bare chest between the arms that held her. Snow and cold wind rushed to meet her as they rose soundlessly into the air. Nothing but the wind broke that silence, threaded through with receding screams and sirens.
And gunshots.
She still heard gunshots… but those grew quieter, too.
Marion should have been terrified.
Truthfully, it was pretty scary.
But she snuggled against that warm chest, and strangely, she felt safe.
It might have been the safest she’d felt since her mother and sister died.
It might have been the safest she’d ever felt in her life.
15
I Told You This
She must have blacked out.
She didn’t remember them landing.
She didn’t remember anything about them going back indoors, or about him getting them a room, or a key, or anything about where he might have left her while he was handling all of those things––those real-world, relatively-mundane things.
All she knew was, she was flying…
…Then she was being laid carefully down on something soft.
Marion blinked into the overhead light, shivering as the man over her released her into the mattress and straightened.
He no longer had giant, black and scarlet wings on either side of his muscular upper body, but she stared at him anyway, noting the lines of muscle making up his chest and abdomen, the dark olive of his skin, the strangely glowing, pale-blue and pale-green tattoos that covered his chest and made lines of esoteric-looking script down his ribs.
The tattoos, which all seemed to be made of the same symbols and language, ended just above where his hip bones were visible above the suit pants he still wore.
She wondered what the tattoos meant.
Still staring at him, she pushed herself up to her elbows on the hotel bed’s comforter.
Her jeans squished as she did. So did the thick sweater she wore, and the socks inside the brand new hiking boots.
She grew uncomfortably aware of how wet and cold and… well, dirty… she was.
As for Tyr, he stepped back from the bed, but didn’t stop looking at her.
From the faint frown on his lips, and the way he tilted his head, looking her over, he was evaluating her condition in some way, although she wasn’t quite sure how. If he was trying to decide if she was hurt, trying to determine her mental state, or trying to determine something else about her, she honestly didn’t know.
In the end, she found herself looking away from him and down at herself, trying to see what he saw.
It hit her again just how wet she was.
And cold.
She was probably going to soak through the bedspread if she didn’t get up off it.
Another quick glance around the room told her she was lying on the hotel room’s only bed. While it might be King-sized, it probably wouldn’t be super-great for anyone to sleep on, if she managed to soak a giant wet spot into the middle of the mattress.
She slid off the bedspread at the thought.
Grabbing the edge of the thick fabric once she was standing, she pulled it off the bed before the wet part could soak through to the blankets.
Meanwhile, Tyr moved towards her, his hands out in apparent alarm.
Without speaking, he stopped when he saw her steady on her feet.
He remained standing only a few feet away, lingering close by, as if worried she might lose her balance, or possibly collapse right in front of him, knees buckling. From his expression, he was genuinely worried her legs might not hold her up.
Marion didn’t take offense.
Honestly, face-planting into the carpet felt like a real risk.
After she’d yanked off the gold and red bedspread, she stood there for a few beats longer, trying to decide what came next.
She looked down at herself, at the drenched, cable-knit sweater the nice woman at the clothing store gave her, the hiking boots, also drenched, and now coated in ice and snow, her drenched socks, her drenched jeans.
Not only was everything soaking wet, but the jeans and sweater were decorated with rips and blood. Even the new socks and boots had spots of blood on them.
Her face stung.
Marion touched a few spots that throbbed with pain, and winced.
Glass cuts, most likely.
It hit her again that their car had been totaled, hit by two separate vehicles, right before someone opened fire on them.
She probably needed tweezers and a bottle of disinfectant or alcohol to deal with that. At least a few shards of glass would still be stuck in her skin, given everything, possibly even pieces of metal or plastic from the crunched car.
Sighing, Marion raised her eyes to Tyr’s.
“I think I need a shower,” she said.
He stared at her for another beat, gauging her face warily.
Then he nodded, stepping out of her way.
When he moved, Marion saw the bathroom door behind where he’d been standing.
She took a step away from the bed, wobbled, and her tall friend with the black hair and the beautiful, blue and green tattoos lunged towards her.
That time, he caught hold of her arm, steadying her as she fought to regain her balance.
“Thanks.”
She glanced up at him, feeling her cheeks flush, that time at his nearness.
His voice was gruff as he led her towards the open bathroom door.
“I’ll do something about clothes,” he said.
She looked at him more closely that time, and not just his face. His arms were tattooed too, she realized, with the same type of pale, glowing, blue-green marks. They were also cut up a lot worse than she was. Blood trickled down one of his biceps from a slash across the muscle. His hands were cut, so was the side of his neck and his ribs on one side. She saw bruises forming on the dark skin, and a few areas that looked swollen.
She had to force herself not to try to touch each one of his wounds.
“Are you okay?” she said finally, forcing her eyes back to his.
He blinked, looking briefly as if her question confused him.
The look was there and then gone.
“I’m fine,” he said politely. “I had to find a coat to check us in. I left you on the roof. In the snow. That’s why you’re so wet.”
His voice grew worried, more worried than apologetic.
“I’m sorry, Marion,” he said.
She shook her head, quirking an eyebrow at him. “For what? Saving my life?”
“For leaving you on the roof for longer than I wanted,” he said. “I didn’t want anyone looking for us to see your face. I didn’t want any of the Syndicate people to pick either of us up in a casual scan. I also thought it was better if the front desk thought I was staying in this room alone. I did my best to disguise my appearance while I was in the lobby.”
Marion frowned at that, still limping alongside him towards the bathroom door.
They walked inside.
She gripped the wall in one hand, and he released her, leaning over to switch on three sets of lights, including lights over the mirror, a heat lamp, and an overhead light with a fan.
She winced a little as each one came on, adjusting to the change in i
llumination.
Then she was glancing around at the space in front of her.
Briefly, she forgot what Tyr had said about changing his appearance.
For those first few seconds, she focused only on the bathroom itself, bewildered by the sheer size of it.
After taking it all in, she realized she had to make up her mind. Her eyes went from the sunken bathtub on its raised platform to the enclosed glass shower, which had jets coming out of both sides and a sunflower nozzle on top.
After looking between her two main options to get warm and clean, she decided a bathtub, and a bath, were way, way too complicated right then.
Letting go of the wall, she walked carefully over to the shower.
Tyr let her go, watching her cross the space on her own.
Reaching the glass cubicle with the built-in tile shelves, she leaned on the metal frame once she’d opened the shower door, using the silver handle to turn on the water, pushing it all the way over to crank up the heat.
Only then did she remember what Tyr had said.
He’d said he disguised himself.
Physically.
So the surveillance cameras wouldn’t pick him up.
“How did you do that?” she asked casually.
Still leaning on the metal shower frame, she turned to look at him over her shoulder.
“Disguise your appearance,” she clarified. “How did you do that?”
She knew, somehow, he didn’t mean a putty nose and a Groucho Marx mustache. He meant something else, some supernatural thing.
She wondered if he would tell her, if so.
He must have seen some hint of both things in her expression.
“I have told you the truth about me,” he said. “Up until now. In most respects.” His voice sharpened. “…an Asgardian tankard’s more truth than I tell most mortals. Too much for you to assume I would lie to you now.”
Glancing back at him, Marion nodded.
“Okay,” she said. “So tell me the truth about this. How did you get past the cameras?”
“I told you. I changed my appearance.”
Tyr Page 11
