by C. R. Jane
My lips twitched. I found myself smiling back at him. Ah. So this was what it felt like to exchange one of those fond glances I’d observed only from a distance before. It brought a glow into my chest that rivaled the crystals overhead.
Memories still drifted around all three of the men. The flavor of a couple settled on my tongue, flashes of images blinking by behind my eyes. The glow tightened, squeezing my heart.
“But you won’t go home. To Alfheim, I mean.”
Jerrik’s smile faded. “I can’t. They’d send me off again. I’m happy enough with Midgard.”
“You have people back there that you miss,” I said. Faces had swum by in those streaks of memory: an older man and woman who shared some of Jerrik’s features—his parents, I assumed. A teenaged girl who could have been a female version of him—a sister or a close cousin.
He shrugged, dropping his gaze. “I expect everyone in this place does, Miss Raven. Except someone like you who was sent on a temporary mission, not banished.”
He sounded so resigned it sent a spark of anger through me. “It’s cruel, shunting people they don’t approve of out into this place. You didn’t deserve this. None of you did.”
“You don’t need to rally on my behalf.”
“I’m just saying what I think.”
He paused, studying my face. “It really bothers you.”
“Why shouldn’t it?” I said. “I’ve seen enough callousness to recognize it when I see it. The world certainly doesn’t need more.” The endless battles stringing into endless wars… Would mortal kind ever be done with savaging each other?
But then, it wasn’t as if immortal kind were exempt from viciousness either.
“You worry that much about strangers and you’ll never find the end of it,” Jerrik said.
I met his gaze and held it. “You’re not a stranger anymore.” I exchanged more conversation with him than anyone other than Odin or Huginn by now.
For a second, we just looked at each other as we trudged on through the tunnel. Then Jerrik looked ahead again.
“Well, it’s not as simple as plain cruelty,” he said. “Muspelheim isn’t the only realm that’s become unstable, you know. All the lesser realms have been… deteriorating since Ragnarok shook their foundations. Asgard holds steady, I assume, and Midgard has always been the solid centerpiece, but the rest... Anything or anyone who throws off the balance can make the situation even worse. I don’t blame them for casting me off.”
Didn’t he? I thought I caught a note of something more fraught under that flat statement. But he changed the subject on me.
“And you—do you always go everywhere Odin sends you? He’s your master?”
That last word sent an uncomfortable shiver through me despite the warmth in the air. “I’ve served him because I chose to,” I said.
The truth was I couldn’t remember a time when I hadn’t. I wasn’t entirely sure what would happen if I tried to stop. Like most of the gods, Odin wasn’t all that good at taking no for an answer. Witness the fact that I was here at all, in this wretched form in this wretched realm.
“I suppose it’s an honor, serving the father of the gods,” Jerrik said. Again, I wasn’t completely sure he wasn’t jerking my chain.
“I’ve seen a lot, heard a lot.” But not everything I wanted to know right now. Curiosity niggled at me. “If the accident hadn’t happened,” I said. “If you’d been able to stay in Alfheim, what sort of life had you been planning there?”
Jerrik’s expression shuttered. “I told you to stay out of my memories, Miss Raven,” he said sharply, and picked up his pace enough to leave me at his heels.
I blinked at his back. The question had risen up because I hadn’t gleaned enough to know from the shreds I’d let myself take in. But clearly I’d hit a sore spot.
Gunnar, who’d been keeping pace just behind us, stepped forward to join me. “Don’t mind Jerrik,” he said quietly. “You can never tell with his moods. But it’ll lift again soon enough.”
“Are the two of you friends?” I asked. Jerrik had called the giant an acquaintance. They hadn’t behaved all that warmly toward each other.
Gunnar chuckled. “Of a sort. If you’re not trying to kill each other over a better cave or a bit of food in this place, that’s pretty friendly right there. Are you doing all right? Your cuts aren’t hurting you? If you start to tire out—”
“I’m fine,” I interrupted, shortly but softly. I didn’t need Gunnar’s concern, but it was touching all the same. I couldn’t actually remember anyone ever bothering to check in about my state of being before. “The dressing you put on the wounds seems to have done the trick. And I can walk a long while. I might not be used to this body, but I’m still just as strong.”
His gaze skimmed my body. “I can see that,” he said. A faint huskiness had crept into his voice that made my nipples pebble against the fabric of my dress.
Okay, now it was my turn to do some subject changing. “You obviously like tending to people’s health,” I said, a little too brightly. “Do you figure you’ll set yourself up as a doctor when you get to Midgard?”
A smile crossed Gunnar’s face. “Maybe something like that. I have to blend in, but if there’s any way I can help people somehow…” The smile faltered. “I’d like to make up for some of the chaos my people have caused. If it hadn’t been for the great war…”
His apparent guilt prickled at me. “Ragnarok was a long time ago,” I said. “And it all happened the way it was meant to. The gods played as much of a role as anyone.” Odin with his prophecies and scrying, watching everything and everyone fall into place. He never showed the slightest bit of guilt over the agony so many had gone through in that end that had become a new beginning.
“The jotun still have a taste for violence,” Gunnar said. A flicker of a memory brushed over me: a group of other giants jeering at him. Won’t even pick up a spear or an axe. What a defective you are.
My jaw clenched. I reached out instinctively and grasped his large hand in my much more slender one. “There’s nothing wrong with you, you know,” I said. “You’re not missing anything. You have something that the rest of them don’t.” A compassion an awful lot of other beings could have used more of too.
Gunnar’s head snapped around. He started at me for a second with those kind gray eyes. They suddenly looked stormy.
“Thank you,” he said.
“I just say what I see.”
“Well, then I’m glad you ended up here to see me.”
The moment seemed to swell between us with more intensity than I’d been prepared for. I slipped my hand from his with a bob of my head. When I fell back to walk on my own for a time, he let me.
My feet rasped against the rough stone. The light wavered brighter and darker as we passed each glowing crystal. My spirit itched to fly, to sweep straight through this place, but of course, my body refused to budge.
As soon as I made it back to my raven form again, I’d weld myself to it if I could.
A thicker wave of heat wafted over me. I looked up. A stark glow stood out in the floor several paces ahead: an underground channel funneling magma past us.
“Not a problem at all,” Svend said cheerfully as we gathered at the stream’s edge. “I’ve forded this one dozens of times. Here, Muninn, I believe ladies should go first.”
I snorted at that, but I let him take my hand. He helped me keep my balance as we eased down a small ridge in the side of the stream bed. A stone jutted in the middle of the searing liquid.
“Now, my family didn’t want to see me leave Nidavellir,” the dark elf said. He hopped onto the stone, still clasping my hand, and gave me a tug as I jumped to pull me over. “They talked about accommodations this, renovations that. But the rest of town protested, and you do have to consider the greater good. All that chipping away at the ceilings to make room for this gallant figure of mine could have taken its toll on the caves. And I wasn’t going to live with a permanent crick in my
neck.”
With a hiss, a globby shape shot out of the magma at my leg. A yelp broke from my throat, but Svend didn’t even flinch. He kicked the lizard-like creature back into the flow of molten lava.
“Fire salamander,” he said. “For all we know, The Blaze has sent them after you too.” He punted away another that scrambled up the other side of the rock. “Shall we?”
He leapt to the far side of the stream where the edge protruded a little farther. I sprang after him in a hasty attempt to avoid any more of those monstrous salamanders.
My feet skidded on the smooth stone there. Svend yanked me to him, our chests colliding. My heart stuttered in the moment his arm held me against him before he was stepping back and giving me room.
“There,” he said, grinning. “Safe passage.” But at the same moment a wisp of the memories lingering around him tickled my notice. A woman’s sobs. Another voice, shouting. A distant rumble and a flash of steel.
“Do I have to ferry the two of you across?” Svend called back in a jaunty tone, disrupting my attention. I peered at him as he eased over to the edge in case Jerrik or Gunnar did need help.
That was what he did, wasn’t it? He chattered on as if he were being open, sparing me the need to consider the memories that clung to him, but it wasn’t the whole story. It was only the parts he wanted me to hear. He must be hoping I wouldn’t notice the rest if he kept up enough talk to cover it.
“There’s lodging I sometimes make use of not far from here,” he was saying now as the others joined us. “A few rooms, a stash of food. We’d better rest while we have the chance. It’s still a long hike to the fortress.”
And Norns only knew what we’d meet along the way.
Chapter 6
Svend’s “lodging” looked a lot like the caves that he and the others had used as their homes above. He’d shifted a few stones to open a passage and shown us a common room with a few low boulders as seats and the smaller rooms down a narrow sort-of hall, each doorway hung with a strip of cloth.
I’d claimed the room at the very end, with a blanket Svend had handed to me. The strain of the walk on these unfamiliar legs was starting to catch up with me, a dull ache prickling through my calves. I’d thought I’d curl up on the blanket and nod off the way I normally did so easily on a branch or a rooftop or sometimes even Odin’s shoulder.
But apparently this human body didn’t sleep as easily as a raven could either. I rolled from one side to the other, cushioning my head on my arm. My hair tickled the inside of my elbow. My dress shifted against my breasts. The friction of the fabric tingled through my nipples, and suddenly I was thinking about Svend’s arm around me, about Gunnar’s hand in mine, about the gleam in Jerrik’s striking eyes. Heat quivered under my skin.
I wet my lips. I was alone now, really alone and relatively uninjured, for the first time since I’d transformed into this odd encasing. Why shouldn’t I explore it a little? Maybe if I gave this body some of the stimulation it was apparently craving, it’d settle down and let me rest.
I squirmed onto my back. My dress moved against me again, and my intention only heightened the giddy energy that ran over my skin. I raised my hand to my chest and cupped my breast.
At first I only grazed the soft flesh lightly through the fabric, tracing the shape of it, the slope. Easing closer and closer to the peak that begged almost painfully for attention. I flicked my thumb over the nipple, and a jolt of pleasure shot through me. My breath quickened.
I’d never felt anything like that before. Maybe humans had one or two advantages over raven-kind.
The tingling was building between my thighs as well. As I circled my nipple with my thumb, drawing out the sensation, I let my other hand travel lower, over the rumpled folds of my dress, to what in this moment felt like the core of my being.
My fingers settled over the cleft between my legs. Even that light contact provoked a pulse of bliss. My breath caught with a gasp. Oh. Oh, yes, that was good.
I slid my hand lower in a gentle stroke, my eyelids fluttering and my lips parting as a heady wave of pleasure rolled through me.
“It’s more fun with company, you know.”
My hand snapped up at Jerrik’s dry voice. I shoved myself around to find him standing at the doorway, the curtain pushed to the side, a plate in his grasp. His eyes glimmered with a wanting so potent it echoed through me, stirring ripples of need. Then he jerked his gaze away.
“Sorry,” he said. “I was bringing your food, and I heard a sound—I’ll leave you to it.”
He bent to set down the plate. A question leapt up my throat and caught there. My heart thudded.
“Were you offering?”
Jerrik froze. He looked at me again. “What?”
“Were you offering?” I said, gratified to hear my voice come out even, if with that hoarseness I could never quite lose. “To be that company?”
He straightened up so fast he nearly knocked his head on the arch of the doorway. His jaw worked. “You wouldn’t want mine.”
I frowned, pushing myself to my feet to face him properly. “Why—”
A tendril of memory wavered by. My gaze followed it, and Jerrik stiffened even more than he already had. “Don’t.”
But I already was. I was seeing the girl that a Jerrik who couldn’t have been more than fifteen or sixteen had held and kissed and made gasp in the night. I was seeing her stare at his torn face, her lips clamped tight against a grimace of horror she couldn’t completely contain. The turn of her head, the swish of her hair, her back as she left him behind.
What a stupid, stupid girl.
I stepped toward Jerrik, and he winced. “No,” I said when he started to pull away. “Stay here.”
He let go of the curtain, letting it drift past his shoulders. His hand came down to brace against the doorway. “Muninn…”
I stopped in front of him and reached to touch his face. Not the perfectly chiseled side anyone would have called handsome. The side rent through with that ridged scar. Like one of the streams cutting through the landscape outside. A feature of his geography, as much him as the clear blue eyes and the leanly muscled chest just inches from me.
I traced my fingers down the edge of the scar like I’d wanted to the first time I’d seen him. Jerrik closed his eyes with a hitch of breath.
“I like it,” I said. “It doesn’t make you worse, only different. More interesting, if you ask me.”
My fingertips brushed the corner of his mouth. A strangled sound escaped Jerrik. Then he was tangling his fingers in my hair and pulling my lips to his.
He tasted tart and sweet like the apples we’d been eating earlier. The hot press of his mouth against mine set every nerve in my body jittering with delight. I’d never totally understood this mashing together of faces that humans appeared to be so fond of, but oh, the slide of his lips, the graze of his fingers over my scalp, the heated rush of this coming together—it was already ten times as much bliss as I’d found in my tentative explorations a few minutes ago.
I kissed him hungrily, probably as clumsily as this body did everything, but he didn’t seem to care. He groaned and kissed me back harder. His tongue flicked over the seam of my lips and delved past them when they parted. I gripped his shoulders, the rough fabric of his shirt, clinging on through the waves of sensation.
Jerrik tipped his head to release my mouth. His breath rasped. “You’re shaking,” he said in a low raw voice. “Are you—”
“With anticipation,” I said as another tremor ran through me. “With need. Don’t stop. Gods, don’t stop.”
He made a sound somewhere between a chuckle and another groan, and then he’d captured my lips again. With a few weaving steps, we reached the blanket I’d left on the floor. Jerrik tucked his arm around my back and lowered me onto it with him, leaning his weight to one side so he didn’t pin me.
I traced my fingers over his chest, the lines of those taut muscles, the shallow jagged indent where he was scarred there to
o. Jerrik eased his hand down my back and then up over my belly to the curve of my breasts. He stroked his thumb lightly over the peak, and my nipple hardened in an instant. I whimpered against his mouth.
He caressed and teased one side and then the other until I was panting between kisses. I arched into him with an impulse I’d never felt before but that this body came to instinctively. Wrenching up his shirt, I worked my hands over the heat of his chest skin to skin. He squeezed one nipple, and I gasped. My hips canted toward him again.
“Please.”
His breath stuttered against my mouth. “You want this?” he said. His fingers skimmed down over my side to the hem of my dress and eased it up my thigh. The glint in his eyes was both eager and awed.
“Yes,” I mumbled. “Yes—” His hand came to rest between my legs, and all I could do then was moan.
Jerrik reclaimed my mouth as he rubbed his hand gently against my sex. I rocked with him, every bit of friction sending pulses of pleasure through my entire body. A sharper swelling of bliss was building inside me, from depths I hadn’t known I had.
He curled one finger up inside me, and I shivered at the rush of delight. Another, plunging farther. My whimper was muffled by our kiss. His lips seared from my mouth to the crook of my jaw, the sensitive skin of my throat, as I trembled against him.
“You have no idea how much I want…” he murmured. “But Norns only know how long I’ll last, with you, like this. You deserve better for your first time. So this is just for you. I’ll take you all the way there.”
The heel of his hand rubbed against the base of my sex, where a little nub sent heady sparks radiating through my core. He added a third finger inside, filling me, stretching me. The faint burn of the pressure only sent my pleasure spiraling higher.
I kissed him wildly. My hands fluttered against him as if they’d turned back into wings, wanting to touch, to hold, not sure where to find purchase. There was no holding on in the wave of ecstasy rising through me. Jerrik’s fingers plunged even deeper, and the rush of sensation crashed over me, splintering in a burst of bliss.
