by Eva Chase
We raced over the rainbow bridge and across the land below, passing over the terrain so quickly I couldn’t make out more than a blur. It wasn’t that long before Loki slowed. He came to an abrupt halt but landed with his usual grace on a rooftop on a residential street.
A familiar rooftop. A familiar street. I’d perched here with Hod to watch Loki and Baldur escort Petey into his new home: that two-story house with light blue clapboard I was staring at right now. He might still be playing with his dinosaurs in the backyard. It couldn’t have been more than an hour since I’d seen him from Odin’s high seat.
My stomach flipped over, and my legs wobbled under me as the trickster set me down. “Loki?”
“No one can see us,” he said. “Not a single dark elf eye will make us out. But if you want, we can let your brother see you. You can tell him—whatever you like. Whatever you need to. Be there for him. Damn the rest.”
My jaw dropped. I turned from Loki to the house, a queasy sensation uncoiling in my gut.
I’d thought about asking him to bring me here, concealed, so many times. I’d dreamed about walking back into Petey’s life. The longing shot through my heart with a painful throb.
I took a step toward the edge of the roof, and my stomach churned harder. I swallowed thickly. The longing was there, but so were all the reasons I’d had to hesitate.
“I can’t,” I said. “I hate what we did to him, but I hate what could have happened to him if we hadn’t even more. It’s better… It’s better that he be sad than be dead. He’ll get past it. It’s only been a week.” He’d get past me, the me he couldn’t remember, in time. A fresh lump rose in my throat. “I have to do what’s best for him, and what’s best for him is putting all my energy into stopping Surt.”
Loki slid his arm around my shoulders. The almost manic urgency that had seemed to be driving him earlier had dissipated. I couldn’t help leaning into him, letting him take some of my weight. My whole body abruptly felt very heavy.
“And they thought the valkyrie I’d bring them wouldn’t be noble,” he muttered.
I made a dismissive sound. “You picked someone like you, didn’t you? How many times did you ignore what you wanted for what you thought was the greater good?”
That hoarse laugh escaped him again. “Maybe I was trying to rewrite a little of that history today.” He stroked his thumb up and down the side of my arm. “Are you sure?”
The word caught in my throat for a second, but I knew what I had to say. “Yeah. I’m sure.”
He bowed his head toward mine, his lips grazing my forehead. “Do you mind if I show you something else, while we’re down here?”
“Of course not. What is it?”
“It’ll be easier to explain when we’re there.”
I let him heft me up piggyback-style this time, now that I had more choice in the matter. The trickster god set off at a somewhat less frantic pace, but the city fell away behind us in the space of a few beats of my heart. Loki sped on, over fields and forests, towns and more cities, until a broad expanse of shimmering blue came into view ahead of us.
The trickster came to earth on a rocky beach. We were immediately buffeted by a wet salty wind. There was no one else in sight, just us and the gray stones and the paler gray of the ocean.
“You know I can change my shape,” Loki said after a moment of silence.
“You demonstrated that very vividly the first day we met,” I said, remembering the way he’d shifted his face to look like a woman’s. Since then I’d also seen him transform into a wolf nearly big enough to rival the wargs we’d battled.
He nodded. “It seems because of that… when I have children, they don’t always turn out quite as you’d expect.”
I glanced at him. “How do they turn out?”
He gazed across the sea for a minute, his expression as serious as I’d ever seen him. “I had another wife, a giant wife, before my wife in Asgard—ages ago. She gave me three children. One of them, the girl, looked human enough, but deathly-dark all down one side. My sons came in the form of a wolf and a serpent. All of them as aware and intelligent as you or me, mind you.”
I’d seen enough craziness in the last month to take that information in stride. “Where are they now?” I asked, thinking of Freya’s quest to find her daughter.
“My daughter, you could say, was the lucky one,” Loki said. “The gods couldn’t stand the sight of her, so Odin cast her down to the realm of the dead, to oversee the souls who find themselves there.”
He swiped his hand across his mouth, his voice going carefully flat. “My sons died in Ragnarok. Attacking the gods by my side. They weren’t really monsters, you know. But that was how Asgard saw them, how Asgard treated them… They chained up Fenrir, the wolf, and kept him prisoner. And Jormungandr, the serpent, they hurled into this ocean on pain of death should he emerge. A promise Thor saw through when the time came.”
I winced. “I’m sorry,” I said. How much of his children’s torments had Muninn taunted him with?
I turned to him, hugging him. Loki tipped my face up with a brush of his fingers over my jaw, and I welcomed his kiss. With the chilly wind whipping around us, for a moment it felt as if he were the only warmth in the whole world.
When I drew back, he was smiling. “It’s all ancient history now, as they say,” he said, his usual flippant tone returning. “I’m told it builds character to remind oneself of sacrifices made and pains endured.”
No, he’d brought me out here for more than that. “Are you okay?” I asked.
He dismissed the question with a flick of his finger. “My dear Ari, when am I ever anything else? Come on now, I’ve had my fill of playing the maudlin for today. You want to defeat Surt? We’d best get back to our training before the others sound the alarm.”
He scooped me onto his back easily, and I rested my head against his neck as he leapt up toward the sky. My gut was knotted tight. He’d snapped himself out of his melancholy, but I didn’t believe for a second that the “ancient history” he’d talked about didn’t haunt him.
If this was the message he’d wanted to convey to me, he could consider it received: It’d be over my dead body before Petey faced even a fragment of what Odin’s scheming had done to Loki and his children.
14
Baldur
I was halfway to the practice field when my father’s path converged with mine. I glanced at Odin as he fell into step beside me. His cloak looked even more faded than usual, the peak of his hat more crumpled, but his brown eye gleamed brightly.
“My son,” he said with the warmth he always offered me. I’d never really thought before about the fact that he didn’t use the same tone with everyone. Not even with my twin. But now, after the raw conversations Hod and I had been propelled into, the difference niggled at me. Why should I get that preferential treatment?
“Father,” I replied with a dip of my head.
“How do you feel your training is coming along?” he asked. “This joint power the four of you have found, is it coalescing?”
“Five,” I said automatically. “The five of us.”
“The valkyrie. Yes. Although it seems she is more of a conduit than a force in herself.”
I choked on a laugh. He wouldn’t have said that if he’d ever seen Aria in real action. “She might not have godly strength or magic,” I said, “but she’s a fighter to be reckoned with. She’s had much less time than the rest of us to stretch her powers.”
Odin hummed to himself. A skeptical sound. Part of me wanted to insist he give Aria her due respect, and another part balked. Deserved or not, I had my father’s favor. Did I really want to find out what it might be like to lose it?
Of course, even with his favor, he’d let me die and linger for ages in that void, as part of the grand plan he’d never bothered to share with the rest of us. A ripple of shadow passed through me, bleeding tendrils from my fingertips. I swiped them away against my shirt, feeling the threads fray in their wake.
This wasn’t the time for bringing up all that history. Not when the giant who’d once slaughtered so many of us meant to repeat the job. I brought my mind back to Odin’s question.
“I think the cohesion between us is becoming more instinctive,” I said. “For now we’ve been relying on one of us—usually Thor—giving our cue to move in unison, but the moments of natural harmony are coming more frequently. Freya has been providing some ‘surprise’ elements to keep us on our toes.”
My father chuckled. “I can imagine she’s enjoying that. From what I’ve gathered, you handled your last encounter with the dark elves well. Do you think you’d soon be ready to confront a larger foe?”
Our last encounter with the dark elves, when we’d sealed the second gate on Midgard, had felt far too easy. Less like a battle and more like an extermination. The shadows seeping from behind my ribs twitched. Every day, more of them wriggled free, searing through the light that normally filled my chest.
“It’s difficult to say,” I said. “Do you think we need to take the battle to Surt already? We’ve hindered his supply of draugr soldiers. I’m not sure it’d be wise to launch an offensive on his home ground until our combined powers are completely in sync.” And perhaps not even then. The five of us—seven, if Freya and Odin joined the fight as well—against the giant of flames and his entire army in the realm he’d claimed as his own? Surely we needed more preparation before we attempted that.
“The longer he remains active, the greater the scourge,” Odin murmured in his vague way. “Well, I will see your progress for myself, I think.”
The others were already standing in the practice area where the field’s grass was alternately trampled, gouged, and burnt from our previous efforts. Several physical targets stood at various points around our group, but after the number we’d destroyed, Freya had taken to conjuring the illusion of other attackers around those with her magic. “More fighting, less crafting,” she’d said yesterday.
Odin halted at the edge of the field as I loped over to join my companions. Thor and Loki were talking, Thor letting out a bellow of laughter at something the trickster had said. Aria shot me a welcoming smile. My twin smiled too, but Hod’s eyes stayed dark. I studied him, wondering if he looked grimmer than usual or if I’d simply become more affected by his moods now that I wasn’t wrapping myself in a gauze of dreaminess to escape anything that might provoke distress.
“The gang’s all here now,” Freya called from the sidelines. “Shall we get started?”
The truth was that despite my hesitation with my father, the style of combat we’d been discovering between the five of us was becoming second nature. My gaze caught Thor’s and then Loki’s as Aria took her position in our midst. A tingle of connection passed over my skin from every direction. I felt as much as heard our breaths fall into rhythm with each other, our movements start to sync up without any conscious effort.
It was becoming natural here on the practice field where we’d worked on that harmony so much. How organically would we slide into these patterns with an army of draugr coming at us?
Hod came up beside me, and along with the sense of our unified connection, a shudder of tension wafted off of him. I frowned. Something was bothering him, clearly. He was trying to stand loosely, but that tension was wound through the muscles of his shoulders and down his back. Was it only having our father here watching us that had affected him? He might not be able to see Odin, but I had no doubt he’d picked up the Allfather’s voice as we’d approached.
I could hardly ask him about that with Odin right there to overhear. Later I could offer my ear, if he wanted to talk. It was the least I could offer after how long I’d spent avoiding any of the conversations that might have given him a little more peace.
We arranged ourselves before the first target. Freya’s conjured figures wavered into being around it, a swarm of filmy dark elves. Thor raised his hammer as our signal, and we all leapt forward.
I never knew quite how the light I cast out would twine with the others. Our magic seemed to find its way of its own accord. This time it collided with Loki’s slash of fire, sparking the flames brighter and hotter. Thor’s hammer flew through them, sending them even higher with a crackle of lightning and emerging with a glowing blaze to smash into the one solid target. The illusionary figures hissed out of existence in the wake of the flames.
Freya wasn’t done yet. I’d only just registered our “victory” when several bolts of magic screamed down at us from above. We whipped around with a common heartbeat. A flash of lightning burst from Aria’s hands, smaller than Thor’s but still potent. I hurled a blazing glow upward in unison with the others and watched those beams spin around Hod’s shadowy missile before both split apart to shatter through our “attackers.”
The torn strands of Freya’s magic dispelled as they cascaded harmlessly down. Thor let out a triumphant shout and raised his hand for a high five that Aria jumped up to return. From across the field, Odin applauded us with a slow clap.
“This is how we’ll defeat those villains,” he said in a pleased voice. “See how much farther you can hone that power.”
He turned to meander off again, and Freya picked that moment to hurl a couple of the other straw targets our way. I flinched and spun at the rustling, the others jerking around in turn.
Thor’s shout to direct us was more instinctive than calculated, but it served as a cue all the same. We blasted the targets together. Singed straw rained down over us.
“Villains,” Hod repeated under his breath as he swiped at a few shreds of straw that had clung to his shirt. He turned his head the way Odin had gone, cocking it as if listening. Our father had already disappeared between the city’s buildings.
“He’s gone,” Aria said. “What’s bothering you?”
Hod’s jaw set. He swiveled back to face the rest of us. “I went down to Nidavellir to talk to the dark elves this morning.”
“What?” Thor exclaimed, and Aria’s eyes widened.
Loki’s eyebrows arched. “So, Mr. Doom and Gloom does have a few tricks up his sleeve.”
Hod grimaced in the trickster’s direction.
“What did you find out?” I asked, my chest tightening. It obviously wasn’t anything good, from the way he was behaving.
“Oh, there’s resentment there for sure,” he said. “They didn’t apologize for what they’ve been doing. But it didn’t sound as if they were all that happy about the choices available to them either. The realms have become even more unstable than we might have thought. The caves of Nidavellir are crumbling. The dark elves barely able to grow enough food to sustain themselves. The situation for them is clearly ‘Kill or die,’ and I’m not sure I can blame them for taking the former route. Surt’s the only one offering them any way out.”
“Is there anything we can do?” Aria said.
Hod’s head bowed. “I don’t know. I don’t know why the realms are failing at all. But if anyone does, it’s Odin, and he’s pretending he doesn’t know a thing about it. He must have some idea. We brought the matter up with him directly, and he acted as if they had no reason other than spite.”
He bit off the last word, his stance tensing even more. The darkness twisted through my innards spasmed.
My hands clenched against that chilling sensation. A fragment tumbled from my fingers anyway, dappling the grass at my feet with rot. My heart lurched, but everyone’s attention was still fixed on Hod.
“If he knew—” Freya started.
Hod lifted his head toward her. “Do you honestly think there’s any way he doesn’t?”
Her voice faltered. She pulled her posture up straighter. “I’ll speak to him. I don’t need to tell him that you went behind his back. I can simply urge him to consider other possibilities, to dig deeper, to be open at least with me.”
And we’d see how far that got us. A sudden sense of hopelessness pierced my chest. What could we accomplish when even the one who should be guiding us might be leading us
astray?
“We should finish our training,” I heard myself saying without having thought through the words. “We’re all set up now, and we will still need to fight. Then—then we can discuss how to proceed.”
“I’ll agree with that,” Thor said gruffly, which seemed to settle things. We shifted, a little more begrudgingly than before, toward the next target. Freya bit her lip and motioned with her arm to summon forth more of her magic. Not dark elves this time. Draugr.
The sight of their bloated bodies, even hazy as the conjured forms were, dredged up a wrenching memory from Muninn’s prison: that moment when Hod and I had knelt by my own slumped body, and it had risen like a draug itself, accusing my twin with every dark thought I’d tried to burn away.
Thor gave a shout. We all lunged forward. I whipped out a scorching bolt of light—and the dark tendrils inside me wrenched out with it. The blaze stuck the target as I’d intended, but as it flew it flung the dark mass to the side. The tendrils smacked into Loki’s calf with a searing hiss.
The trickster yelped and fell back on his ass as he pawed at the clotted energy clinging to him. Blood was already seeping through the leg of his slacks. My pulse stuttering, I threw myself to him, summoning healing light into my shaking hands.
“What in the nine realms was that about, Freya?” Loki sputtered. “I’m not the sodding target.”
My shoulders stiffened, but I knew it was too late now. I couldn’t hide this any longer.
“It wasn’t Freya,” I said as my magic melted away the trickster’s wound and the vicious energy that had dealt it. “It was me. I didn’t mean to—it slipped out before I could catch it.”
Everyone was staring at me now, including Loki. “If you’re covering for someone, that’s a poor show,” he said. “That shadowy thing didn’t look like anything that could have come from you. It could have been your twin’s doing, though.”
“No.” I tipped back on my heels. The darkness inside me writhed even more insistently than it had before. It took no effort at all, when I wasn’t fighting to suppress it, to raise my hand and let the tendrils seep from my palms.
