by Eva Chase
Falling for Gods
Their Dark Valkyrie #3
Eva Chase
Ink Spark Press
Falling for Gods
Book 3 in the Their Dark Valkyrie series
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner without the express written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
First Digital Edition, 2018
Copyright © 2018 Eva Chase
Cover design: Rebecca Frank
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-989096-20-8
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-989096-21-5
Created with Vellum
Contents
Free Story!
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Consort of Secrets excerpt
About the Author
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1
Aria
It was a little unsettling how distant the world of humans felt to me as I soared over the highway-split landscape. That world, the realm I was starting to think of as Midgard, had been my home for the twenty-two years I’d been a human. It’d been the only world I’d had any clue existed.
But anyone could have told you that I wasn’t human anymore. The gigantic silver-white wings sprouting from my back were a pretty big tip-off. Also, the fact that I was flying through the air accompanied by five divine figures who’d never been human at all, who were coasting along in whichever way their godly magic allowed.
A month ago, I’d have been hustling through Philly’s streets making a delivery for the gang that had most recently hired my courier services. Today I was on my way to seal a supernatural gateway that dark elves had been using to carry out horrible deeds on behalf of an evil giant.
All in a day’s work for Asgard’s only current valkyrie.
Even this high up, the summer wind was warm as it rippled over my wings and flicked a few strands of my rumpled blond hair across my cheek. The sun lit the fields below with a fierce glow and filled the air with the smell of baking grass. A trickle of sweat ran down the back of my neck. We’d decided to tackle the gate at midday because the dark elves, used to their dim caves in their own realm, weren’t super keen on sunlight. At the moment, I wasn’t feeling super keen on it myself.
The sights and smells of my former home sent my thoughts in other directions. What would Petey be up to today? Were his foster parents getting him out to the park or the swimming pool so he could enjoy the summer like he’d rarely gotten to under our mom’s roof? Or maybe he was in school. I’d kind of lost track of the days of the week since the whole dying and valkyrie resurrection thing.
This was the first time I’d been back in Midgard since I’d left my little brother behind the hopefully safe-keeping of his new foster family. The dark elves had threatened to kill him if I’d kept helping the gods around me. The elves had been killing people for who knew how long, dragging them off to the realm of fire where the giant Surt was transforming their bodies into draugr—ghoulishly bloated zombies.
My hands clenched at the memory of the bodies I’d seen in their caves, of the one elf’s laughter when she’d talked about hurting Petey. If they laid one finger on him, I’d wring all of their stumpy little necks without a hint of regret.
Hod, the god of darkness, turned his dark green eyes toward me from where he was gliding along on a patch of shadow like some kind of bizarre flying carpet. He couldn’t actually see me with his blind gaze, but it mustn’t have been too hard for him to guess what I might be thinking about on our return to this place.
“The elves have no idea where your brother is now,” he said. “And they haven’t been taking children—kids wouldn’t be much use for Surt’s army.”
“Small mercies,” I muttered, but a twinge of emotion ran through my chest at his attempted reassurance. It wasn’t like me to want to lean on anybody, but Hod had managed to uncover a softer side I hadn’t realized I even had—one that left me in tears at inopportune moments, and one that now and then gave me the urge to hide away in his embrace. Maybe that wasn’t so surprising when he’d been so clear about how deep his affections for me ran.
That thought sent a different sort of shiver through me, one both giddy and nervous. This wasn’t a good time for me to get soft. We were embarking on the next phase of a realm-crossing war.
“We could always take a little detour on the way home,” Loki said in his usual wry voice, shooting me a grin. The trickster was striding along on his enchanted shoes of flight, the wind whipping his light red hair back from his pale face like the flames he could summon with a snap of his fingers.
Would it be easier seeing Petey without being able to talk to him, to touch him, or simply holding on to my memories? Just a few days ago I’d come face to face with an illusion of him that had flinched away from me. It’d only been imaginary, a construct meant to break my will in the prison we’d found ourselves trapped in, but the moment had wrenched at me anyway.
My little brother was safer if I kept my distance. “When all the gates are sealed,” I said. “When the dark elves can’t get to him anymore.”
“If you ever change your mind…” Loki said with a sweeping gesture. His amber eyes shone brighter. “This should be an interesting errand, in any case. It’s difficult to believe that in all my time across the realms, I’ve never attempted to close off a gate between them.”
“We made it through the gate easily enough before,” Thor said, swinging the magical hammer he already had in his grasp. The brawny thunder god tipped his head to the fourth god with us: Hod’s twin Baldur, light to the other’s darkness. “One blast of Baldur’s powers should send any guards who braved the sun running.”
The bright god smiled, looking more assured and less dreamy than he’d been most of the time I’d known him. “I’ll clear the way.” His tone sounded more present too. I’d been with him through some painful moments in the prison Odin’s raven of memory had constructed, reliving the chilling void of his death, but he seemed to have come out of that torment stronger. More determined to face the horrors that might still lie ahead of us.
Almost from the start, I’d been drawn to all four of the gods who’d combined their powers to bring me back from the dead in valkyrie form. But I couldn’t deny that this more confident Baldur made my pulse kick up even faster than before.
“Let’s not assume this will be easy, boys,” Freya said with an imperious flap of her falcon cloak. The goddess of love and war peered toward the horizon, a fierce light glowing from her beautiful face. The golden waves of her hair glitt
ered like an exquisite battle helm. Then she winked at me. “As usual, I expect the two of us have to keep this bunch on track.”
Thor gave a bellow of a laugh, tossing his hammer from one hand to the other as if it weighed nothing at all. “The cave-dwellers should be very familiar with Mjolnir by now. They’ll run. Just watch.”
His warm brown gaze slid to mine with a gentler smile that felt as if it were meant just for me. It brought back the heat of his tender caresses when we’d come together in epic fashion not that long ago. I couldn’t help grinning back.
We might have a war ahead of us, but we were ready for it. Closing this gate was the first step toward seeing Petey safe for good and preventing the invasion Surt was planning. He and his army could forget about taking even one piece of my former realm—or the new home I’d started to find in Asgard, the realm of the gods.
The landscape below us was becoming uncomfortably familiar. The gate we planned to shut was the one where we’d fought a battle with the dark elves last week—a battle in which we’d thought we were retrieving Odin from their clutches but instead had been led by a false version of him into that prison of memories. In those caves, I’d taken more lives with the dark power inside me, the one that valkyries had used to decide the fates of those on battlefields ages ago, than I’d have ever thought I’d be capable of.
They’d threatened my little brother. They’d killed who knew how many people for their master’s army. I wasn’t backing down until they were stopped for good.
The sagging wooden buildings around the gate looked even more decrepit than before. A handful of short dark-haired figures stood in a circle amid a patch of trees on the rocky hill at the edge of the ghost town. The oily energy the dark elves gave off made me shudder even from this distance.
Baldur raised his hands without waiting for an order. Light streamed from his skin and twined around his forearms and fingers. His gaze intent, he whipped the blaze forward.
With a high-pitched quavering, the wave of light crashed over the town and the gate beyond it. The guards around the gate toppled, their eyes searing pure black. No other figures stirred amid the buildings.
“Let’s go, let’s go,” Loki said with a clap of his hands. He leapt down toward the trees. I swooped after him. The thick crack in the hillside came into view, like a black scar between the rocks and roots. That slick but sluggish energy wafted out of the gate from the realm it led into.
But we weren’t looking to pay a visit this time. We wanted to make sure no one did, in either direction, ever again.
“See if you can work on it with those powers of yours,” Loki said with a flippant gesture toward Hod. “The gate stinks of darkness.”
Hod shot him a grimace, but only a faint one. They’d come to some kind of broader truce since our paths had tangled on our way through Muninn’s prison.
The dark god leaned over to test his palms against the opening. The power he’d given me as part of my resurrection reverberated in time with the energy emanating from the gate.
“There’s magic woven across it, but I don’t think I can use that to completely cut them off,” Hod said. “They’re creatures of darkness too. A clot of shadow isn’t going to stop them for long.”
“Can we close it physically?” I asked. “Does it have to be magic? Why not just plug it up with a bunch of these rocks?” I nodded to the hillside.
Loki tapped his lips. “I think they’d need to be magically fused into place to be sure of holding, but that’s still a start. Oh, Thunderer, how about lending a little of your storminess to the proceedings? A thunderclap should do nicely to reorganize the landscape in a fitting fashion.”
Thor heaved back his arm to hurl his hammer at the rocky terrain above the gate.
Before he could let it fly, a surge of bodies burst from the opening.
Dozens of dark elves charged toward us, faster than I’d have thought those stocky legs could have carried anyone. Spears and swords flashed in their hands. Thor let out a roar and whipped his hammer forward anyway, right at the mass of our attackers.
Several of the dark elves fell, bashed aside by Mjolnir, but the ones on either side of its path sprang at us unfazed. A wavering orange light danced along the blades of their weapons. I tried to wrench one from the hands of a man who lunged at me, and it seared a throbbing line across my palm. I yelped, yanking myself away and into the air with my wings.
“They’ve got magic on their weapons,” I shouted. Magic they’d never had when we’d fought them before—a fiery magic that reminded me of Surt’s realm. Had he offered them extra power to battle us with?
It wasn’t going to save them. The other gods had drawn back as I had, but only to momentarily regroup. Thor’s hammer flew back into his grasp. A burst of fire flared in Loki’s hands. Hod’s shadows whirled up around him. In that instant, I could taste all of it: the crackle of lightning and the hiss of fire, the warble of the dark and the keening of the light, all rushing through me together. I snapped my switchblade open in my hand.
We lashed out in the same moment. As I hurtled forward, my breath rushed out alongside the gods’—and their powers blasted into the swarm of dark elves like a series of earth-shaking fireworks. Shadow and fire merged into a dark wash of flame that consumed several bodies in its path. With a boom, light splintered into a hundred lightning bolts, dropping every dark elf they touched. In an instant, nothing was left of our enemies except bodies strewn around the gate. There wasn’t even one left for me to claim with my blade and my valkyrie pull.
I jerked to a stop, hovering just over the gate with a sweep of my wings. My heart skipped a beat. That merging of the gods’ powers had happened before, hadn’t it? When we’d rushed in to save the real Odin from Surt’s cage. The fighting then had been so quick and brutal I hadn’t stopped to think about it at the time, but I couldn’t ignore it now. Something was going on, something that hadn’t happened the first few times I’d fought beside the gods.
What the hell did it mean? And more importantly, could we use it again if we wanted to, to kick every dark elf ass to Kingdom Come?
2
Baldur
A rush of electricity sang through my veins as my hurled light melded around Thor’s hammer. With a shriek, it exploded into a hail of lightning.
I glanced at my older brother, and he grinned back at me with his eyebrows raised. Neither of us knew what had just happened, but it had repelled the dark elves, so the “what” didn’t really matter just yet.
“Wasn’t that interesting?” Loki said, studying his hands. Before we could have a real conversation about that strange merging of our powers, another swarm of attackers burst from the gate.
Aria let out a cry and sprang forward. My pulse stuttered in fear for her as I leapt into the fray with the others. But our valkyrie could hold her own. A splinter of lightning sparked from the tip of her switchblade, and her other hand brushed one elf’s forehead, yanking the life from him with her valkyrie powers.
The echo of my fellow gods’ movements washed over me as I moved in turn. It wasn’t just our magic that appeared to have merged. Without even trying, I found myself heaving forward a burst of power alongside Loki, Hod, and Thor, all of us together. Ari spun around with another slash of her knife at the same moment.
All the energy we cast out twined together and ripped through the charge of dark elves. Fiery light, shadowy sizzling bolts, and a flaming crash of thunder sent their bodies flying. Freya rushed in with a slash of her sword, but there was barely anyone left to duel.
A rush of exhilaration tickled up from my chest. I might not know what was happening, but it was clear we were connecting in some way we never had before. My brothers and the trickster were as invested in this fight as I was, and we would win it together.
A few of the elves managed to dodge to the side quickly enough to escape our magic. I lunged after one—and through the light shimmering in and around my body, a cold tendril unfurled. A dark icy finger like a stri
p of the void that had enclosed me in death, both centuries ago and just a few days ago in Muninn’s prison. It snaked around my stomach.
My chest clenched, and my jaw tightened. I slammed my fist into the dark elf’s head with an extra smash of light. The shiver of darkness inside me tugged at my gut, and I smacked him again, sending him reeling into a tree.
My lips twitched as he groaned. Yes, let him suffer a little before he died, after everything his people had—
I caught myself, snapping my fingers shut just a second shy of searing his skin with light that would have wounded but not ended his misery. A sharper rush of cold flooded me.
What was I doing? What was I thinking? Torturing this man wouldn’t be justice.
I ended his life with a quick blast of light to his forehead, searing through his mind. My legs felt steady enough as I turned back to the others, but that slip of shadow had coiled even more insistently around my gut.
The void had crept into me while I’d floated there in that endless chilling nothingness. I’d felt it crawl down my throat and seep through my skin. Had some of it stayed with me when I’d come back into the light? I’d spent so long avoiding even thinking about my death and the torment that had come with it, I’d never looked inside myself for it all that closely. Perhaps it had been there all along, without the chance to awaken.
