by T. G. Ayer
Again with the silence.
I'd just decided Joshua was best left to his own company and started to rise when he said, "Yeah. I suppose I'll live." He didn't shrug; his shoulders just drooped as if gravity worked especially hard to keep his body, mind and spirit down.
"I'm sorry." I snuck a glance at his face, but all I saw was a cheekbone and hair hiding his eyes. "Are you going to be okay?"
No response.
"You still angry with me?" I stared at his face; tears threatening to overflow.
"Why would I be angry with you?"
I did a double take at Joshua's question, the dam of threatening tears no longer an issue. "I thought . . . the way you looked at me in the hall when I revealed Mi—" I fumbled, trying not to mention her name. "When I revealed . . . what happened. You looked like you hated me."
"I was upset." He spoke so matter-of-factly, as if the whole Mika episode wasn't that big a deal at all. I wasn't buying it.
"I can imagine. I was furious and hurt, myself." I touched his arm. "Can't imagine how you felt."
Nothing.
At least he didn't shrug my hand off.
"When did you figure it out? Her real agenda?" At last Joshua threw me a questioning scowl.
"When we left the dwarf palace. I hadn't paid much attention to Mika; my mind was focused on the goblet, not to mention a tad creeped out by the queen's stone head. Then when Mika attacked me, everything sort of fell into place. Like how she refused to leave my side when Steinn came to tell me about his daughter. And how she insisted she come with me to find the goblet. I would never have imagined her intention was to steal the thing, or to destroy it." I shook my head, still not quite accepting what Mika had done.
"Yeah. She would've known that no elixir meant Aidan would die," Joshua said softly.
"I'm sorry." And I was. I hated hearing the sadness in his voice. Since when did Joshua's feelings affect me this much?
"No. I am sorry. I should never have trusted her." Joshua shook his head, the sharp, sudden movement emphasizing his anger.
"We all made the mistake to trust her. Look at Fen." As I spoke, I realized how true my words were. If she could pull the wool over her own father's eyes, why should we feel in any way obligated or responsible for her?
Joshua shrugged. "I guess."
Silence.
"Will you go to see her?" I asked, tentatively offering a neutral standpoint, and hoping like hell he would say no.
"What? Are you kidding?" His voice fairly vibrated with rage, the skin on his cheeks pink with anger.
"I just thought . . ."
"I liked her, okay. And she liked me—or so I thought. Didn't mean I was about to marry her. And why the hell would I want a relationship with a girl who betrayed me, who tried to hurt someone I. . . someone I care about? Why would I care about a girl who thought it would be okay to let my friend die a slow and painful death in Hel?" Despite his anger-tinged bravado, his voice held an edge of sadness. I understood his pain. But I didn't say anything.
No words could erase how Joshua felt.
***
An hour later, we were just finishing up a lunch of steak sandwiches and mocha lattes when Karl strode into the room, asking for Aidan.
Aidan looked around the table at each of us, eyebrows raised in question. He swiped a towel over his mouth and followed Karl out the room.
Ten minutes later, a tense and harried Karl rushed into the room again. "We have an address—the location of the remote estate where we will quite likely find einherjar Brody." He went to Joshua and pressed a copy of the address into his hand.
At that moment, I noticed two things. One, that Aidan hadn't come back, and two, that I didn't particularly like the fact that Karl had walked straight past me to hand the paper to Joshua, the only other male in the room. "Thanks, Karl," said Joshua as he raised a dark eyebrow and promptly and deliberately handed me the paper.
Karl watched the exchange, a cool expression in his eyes. How did he manage that? Harried, geeky and yet cool? I met his gaze with an equally cold one, chin raised just the tiniest bit. Flustered, the geek turned away and exited the lounge without a word.
In my annoyance at Karl's outright rudeness, I forgot to ask where Aidan had run off to, only remembering as the team filed out of the office to head back to the Bifrost.
I rushed past a startled Betty, popping my head back into the office. "Karl, where is Aidan?"
The Warrior wrinkled his nose in puzzlement, but the expression of surprise seemed strange when his eyes contained so little emotion. "Erik needed him. I didn't ask why." He folded his arms as if daring me to push the issue.
"I need to speak to Erik, then. Without Aidan we're short on numbers in our team."
"I'm sorry. Erik and Aidan are no longer in the building. And Erik requested that he not be disturbed." The smug expression on his face made me want to punch him in the mouth.
I frowned. No longer in the building? Erik had taken Aidan off somewhere without telling us, and now they were gone and incommunicado? But I really didn't have the time to waste arguing with Karl.
"Fine then, guess we'll have to do this without him." I didn't wait for him to respond, just shut the door and hurried back to my team to fill them in.
Strangely, I found I was angry with Aidan. He could have let the team know where he was running off to in the middle of a mission. Not that I wanted to go all chain-of-command on him, but a little bit of information would've been nice.
Now we hurried to our stinky alleyway and gathered beside the putrid blue dumpster. The midday sun, despite its bleakness, still held the power of putrefaction in its rays. Yuck.
Behind us, a dog rooted inside a garbage can that had tipped onto its side. The animal looked up, his mournful black eyes bringing to mind the little Labrador, Rex, who'd almost caught me retrieving Aidan's body in the park in Craven. Aidan had been dead then, a Warrior-to-be, but still just a corpse awaiting his turn to get his life back.
The dog watched as we gathered in a loose circle, a curl of rotting lettuce hanging from his mouth, liquid eyes staring. Then we disappeared into thin air.
To the keening, mournful wail of a New York stray.
Chapter 40
Icy air grabbed the breath from my mouth, curling and twisting the warmth until it melted away in ethereal tendrils.
The house sat in the palm of a small valley, hemmed in by snow-laden trees on three sides. The property rose at the edge of the mountainside, a sentinel of civilization within the lush greenery.
It looked empty.
Abandoned.
And yet Brody was imprisoned somewhere within this dark sentinel that pretended abandonment. Not a light shone from any of the multi-paned windows on the mansion's two floors.
Our heat sensors claimed otherwise, though. I studied the panel. Four deep orange blobs floated around in small concentric patterns, while a single smudge circled around the other side of the estate.
I frowned as one blob glowed, unmoving, in a corner of the basement beneath the silent house.
Brody?
Joshua, Aimee and the two other Valkyries spread out, strategically positioned in the shadows at one side of the property. Both Warriors glowed, a pale golden gleam, so beautiful on this moonless night.
How come I’d never noticed this moonlit einherjar beauty?
We were in position only a few minutes when a rustling in the shrubs beside me made me brandish my sword. The intruder shoved the bushes aside, revealing the silhouette of his spiky hair, and I halted my swing just in time.
Karl.
His eyes widened with consternation, and a touch of fear. He set my teeth on edge with his very presence.
What was Karl doing here anyway?
Worse, he'd come alone. No Aidan.
Karl squatted beside me, only the outline of his face and the whites of his eyes visible in the thick darkness. He didn't waste time with pleasantries. "We have one guard outside, who should be coming this way in
—" he examined his watch. "—about ten seconds." We fell silent until the guard trudged into view around the far corner of the grand house. Karl strained his neck toward Joshua, a few feet to our left. "Einherjar Joshua, could you get to him fast, knock him out quietly?"
I gritted my teeth, because Karl had once again dissed my authority.
"You okay with that, Bryn?" Joshua asked pointedly over Karl's shoulder. I shrugged, as if it didn't bother me at all, but I guess Joshua knew me better than that. He stared at me a moment, scowling, then flitted off into the darkness. A grunt and a groan later he returned, crouching beside me. "I don't know, Bryn. This all seems too easy," he said, and from his voice I could just picture a frown drawing lines across his forehead.
"I think so too. Their security seems way too light if they're holding a Warrior hostage." We shared a worried glance. "It could just as easily be a trap."
Joshua nodded. "I agree, and—"
Karl cut him off. "So do I. You should tell your team to keep a close eye out, not to get complacent." Karl again pointedly addressed Joshua, and then, not even sparing me a backward glance, he scrambled away into the shadows behind us. I glared after him, the urge to shake him still running thick and fast in my veins. That was the second time he'd deliberately bypassed my authority.
"What the hell is his problem?" Joshua whispered, scowling in Karl's direction. "Do I look like I'm in charge?"
"You didn't jump up and deny his assumption, now did you?" I asked, a slight bite to my tone. I knew I was being unfair, but Karl's not-so-subtle insult still dug at me. Was good old Karl trying to tell me something? Maybe he didn't think I was worthy of being in charge. I clenched my jaw. Once Fen arrived, he'd be in charge anyway, so I didn't need to get overly miffed at the guy. If he was a bit dense, then he'd be the one to pay for his own stupidity. Fen didn't suffer fools easily.
"Hey." Joshua raised his hands, shaking his head. "I didn't want to cause any problems. You should know that. Besides, why didn't you put him in his place yourself? It's your right."
I glared at Joshua, but he was pretty much on target. Why hadn't I defended my authority? Because it wasn't rightly earned. Leader by default, that was me. How could I go throwing my weight around when I knew I'd gotten the job only because Sigrun, who was way more experienced in all things Valkyrie, had decided to stay with Fen?
Joshua scuttled in closer to pull me out of my avalanching self-pity. "No Aidan yet, I see," he said, craning his neck past me to get a better view into the dense tree line behind us.
"He'd better have a good reason for ditching us," I mumbled, only then realizing how annoyed I was with Aidan.
"He'd better get his ass here ASAP," Joshua grunted, shuffling beside me. "I don't fancy storming the castle there with so few of us."
"I don't see how having one more person's going to make much of a difference. And, to be honest, I'd feel much better with our Ulfr." I suddenly felt bereft without my partner. Then again, my Ulfr partner had betrayed me. Guess I was better off with no partner than with one who was waiting for the next opportunity to either kill me or to sabotage my mission.
The chilly night squeezed the warmth out of us, and Joshua shivered. "Why are we the ones doing the breaking and entering anyway?" Joshua whispered. He threw me a pointed nod. "You're about the most experienced member on our team right now. We're really just a bunch of rookies."
He'd asked a question that had been playing in my own mind for a while now. I wanted to deny it, but Joshua had a point. With no senior Valkyries or Ulfr with us, we were just what Joshua had said—a bunch of rookies. "We're so short on team members in Asgard that they had to use us," I answered. "Especially since all our Ulfr have suddenly up and disappeared. They kinda had no choice. We were all they had left, really." I shrugged. The thought wasn't very comforting at all.
The soft hoot of an owl emanated from the Valkyrie Pia at our far left, and Joshua responded with single hoot, acknowledging the all clear. Time for us to close in on the basement. Like a wave of darkness, our group of shadows flitted across the close-cropped lawn toward the side of the enormous mansion. We huddled against the walls to wait for the next signal.
Cold stone ate into my back, burrowing deep into my bones. My heart thumped a tattoo against my ribs. Aimee and the other Valkyrie, Enja, were colorless shades marking the wall alongside me.
Another low hoot cleared us to enter the basement, and our small group of dark grey shadows slipped inside the building, leaving Enja on watch outside, her tiny dark eyes and pixie haircut all business-like and efficient. The airlock door whispered shut behind us. I waited, tensing for the scream of whatever expensive alarm system the owners of this fabulous monstrosity had installed to protect their property.
Nothing.
Our pathetic little army crept along the basement wall, silent and aware of the slightest creak of the house above us, of the faintest faraway drip of water. A voice echoed in the distance, dulled and distorted by the concrete walls. A quick glance at the tablet allayed my fears—we were in no imminent danger of being caught.
Before us, the concrete corridor wended its way ahead, matching the vaguely mapped basement area on our heat sensor tablet. Soon we reached the corner. Aimee stayed behind on guard. Pia and Joshua turned left into the corridor, while I followed close on their heels.
When they paused again at the next corner, I stopped in my tracks, and someone walked right smack into my back, pressing my wings into me and dislodging a few feathers.
A quick glance confirmed it was Karl. What a surprise. Since he wasn't a threat, I didn't need to gut him with the dagger I'd instinctively pulled from my boot. "Watch it!" I hissed at him, throwing him a disgusted glare. Karl blinked at the knife, probably shocked at how close he'd just come to being disemboweled.
Where the hell had he come from anyway? I ground my teeth, not wanting him along for the ride. The dude rubbed me the wrong way. But so what? Maybe he didn't like me much either. Calm down, Bryn.
I tucked the knife away as I squatted to retrieve my fallen feathers. No sense in alerting a random guard that there were intruders around. I tucked the feathers into my coat pocket and snapped, "Watch where you're going, Karl. We can't afford for you to bungle this whole mission."
The skin at his eyes tightened at the reprimand, while his jaw clenched. His fury didn't bother me in the least.
He really should have stayed at HQ, and I wanted to tell him that. But despite my annoyance with his attitude and his clumsy bumbling, I couldn't bring myself to be nasty. So I refocused on the darkened passage, lit every few yards by a weak and sickly green fluorescent light. The flicker of light from the tablet reassured me we were heading the right way. Silence greeted our ears as we moved forward again, stopping at each corner. Karl bumped into me twice more, and I seriously considered sending him back outside. If it weren't for maintaining a good team relationship, I really would've told him to get the hell out. He was getting on my nerves!
The monitor still showed the four red blobs, three inside and the one outside the building who hadn't moved since Joshua clobbered him. The screen also now revealed six more splodges, which I assumed represented us. We were close—the first of the guards waited just around the corner, pacing back and forth.
"What are we going to do?" Karl whispered, a tad too loudly. I suppressed the urge to smack him.
"You just stay here and be quiet. We have this sorted." I leaned back and met Pia's eye, beckoning her forward. She tiptoed toward me and peered at the tablet screen. I tapped the red dot that was our target.
"We need to get to him and knock him out."
"You would like him unconscious and not dead?" Pia asked. I nodded and hid a smile at her matter-of-fact tone. Hard to imagine this dainty Valkyrie snuffing out the unknowing guard as if she did it all the time. We were seasoned warriors, not seasoned killers.
"Ready?"
In a blink, we were both glamored. Pia and I stepped into the passage. Backs to the wall, we e
dged closer to the guard as he paced back and forth in front of a steel door. Dressed head to toe in black, his head remained bare, revealing his gleaming bald pate, underlined by a series of troubled furrows on his forehead.
We bracketed him, and he remained blissfully unaware that we were both within breathing distance, invading his personal space big time. Pia drew a short sword from the leather scabbard at her waist; the steel left its leather glove so silently I stared in wonder. Then I tensed, not daring to breathe, as she brought the thick hilt down on the back of the poor guard's neck. His eyes rolled back in his head and he dropped. I caught him smoothly as he fell, laying him beside the wall, out of our way. I wished I could glamor him, but we had no time to waste.
Pia bent to scrabble in the guard's pockets and then threw me a bleak look. "No keys," she whispered.
Great. So the door had to be opened from the inside. I glared at the door. No keyhole. Not that Fen's training sessions had including lock-picking. Probably a remote locking and unlocking system, then. I gritted my teeth, making a mental note to ask Karl why we didn't know about this. Very sloppy, Karl. Very sloppy.
We faced the door, a metal and pretty much impenetrable barrier. I sighed a silent sigh and shared an exasperated glance with Pia. She backed against the wall beside the door, knife at the ready. I knocked heavily, belatedly hoping whoever waited on the other side didn't have some sort of secret code. The guard on the floor moaned and shifted, but remained out for the count.
The lock clicked and the door soughed open. Another guard in similar dark garb, this time with a generous amount of bleach-blond spikes, looked out expectantly. Pia and I waited, still glamored. When nothing happened, the guard popped his head out of the doorway and glanced left and right with a confused frown on his face. He stiffened as he spotted his colleague, unconscious along the wall.
"Hey, Mick!" he yelled. He stepped across the threshold, one hand remaining on the heavy metal door behind him. When he didn't get a response he grasped his walkie-talkie, his fingers stiff, about to call for help.
