by Eva Chase
Claimed by Gods
Their Dark Valkyrie #1
Eva Chase
Ink Spark Press
Claimed by Gods
Book 1 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: 978-1-989096-11-6
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-989096-12-3
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
I’d like to tell you that I died in epic fashion, guns blazing in the middle of a vast street brawl, or at least something scandalously hot, like falling off a balcony during the most incredible sex of my life. The truth? My death was cringingly mundane.
I hopped off my moped on the grungy Philly street and loped across the road to the doggy daycare where a client was waiting. The blazing July sun made the asphalt stink, and chances were ten to one the guys on the corner had crack and pistols underneath those baggy jerseys. It was hard to say which was more dangerous: the neighborhood or the package stashed in my shoulder bag. A well-paid courier doesn’t ask what she’s carrying; she just delivers the goods on time.
One of the toughs whose name I’d never had to learn stood behind the front desk, and Gene was leaning against the wall nearby. Oh joy. He straightened up and gave me a greasy smile as I tugged the taped-up parcel out of my bag.
“Ari. Always a pleasure.”
“Wish I could say the same, Gene,” I said brightly, handing the parcel over to the tough. He examined it with a brisk nod and reached under the desk to get my money. Whines and yips emanated from the inner room where their few doggy charges hung out, providing a front for whatever their real business was. I didn’t ask questions about that stuff.
Gene blinked at me. I’d learned a long time ago that you could be as insultingly honest as you’d like as long as you made the words sound cheery enough. Brains like his just didn’t know how to process both the meaning and the tone at the same time.
Unfortunately, the dimness of his brain also meant he never gave up on hitting on me, even though he was old enough to be my dad and so smarmy I doubt I’d have had the slightest interest when he’d been in his twenties either. He was also the cousin of one of my biggest clients, so I couldn’t just stab him a few times to get the point across, as much as I’d sometimes wanted to.
Not fatally, of course. Just somewhere painful enough that message would stick.
Instead, when he sidled over to me and tried to put his arm around my waist, I had to simply dodge to the side, pasting a stiff smile on my face. My hand dropped to the pocket of my jeans, taking comfort in tracing the lump of the switchblade I would use if I absolutely had to.
“Aw, come on, honey,” Gene said. “You can’t come in here lookin’ like that and deny a guy a little fun. I’d show you a good time.”
I had on my jeans—fitted but not that tight—and a loose white T-shirt with a neckline that barely grazed my collarbone. No makeup, my shoulder-length blond hair rumpled from the moped ride. By looking like that he meant existing while young and female.
“I’m sure you would, Gene,” I said, still smiling. “And I could show you my fist breaking your nose. But I think it’s probably better if we avoid all that and just stay friends, huh?”
Gene put his puzzled face on again. He took another shuffle at me, and I raised that fist, arching an eyebrow.
“Three-time high school boxing champion,” I added. “You really want to try me?” My voice was still sweet, but I let a hint of a glare harden my gaze.
Gene took me in and decided that backing off was in the best interest of maintaining his delusion that I’d be chomping at the bit for him any day now.
I’d never actually boxed in my life, but I’d landed enough effective punches that it didn’t feel like a total lie.
The tough finally handed over my damn envelope. I flicked through the bills, tossed a “Thank you!” at him, and stuffed the money in my bag as I headed out the door.
It was a good payout, and I’d already done a decent run this week. I could pick up something for Petey this weekend. Not half the things I wanted to get him, since it had to be small enough that Mom wouldn’t notice. A pack of those trading cards he was hooked on, and some snacks—maybe better shoes to replace the ratty sneakers she should have realized he’d grown out of? If I dirtied them up some first, she might not realize they were new…
Picturing my little brother’s grinning face was the best antidote for Gene’s unwelcome attention. A real smile crossed my face, but at the same time my heart squeezed.
Trading cards and shoes weren’t enough. Nothing was going to be enough while Mom was… the way she was. If Petey’s life there turned into even half the nightmare mine had been…
I shook those thoughts away. I was doing everything I could despite her. I wouldn’t let anyone hurt him. And as soon as I’d saved up enough to get a nice house and the sharpest lawyer in the city, I’d fight until he could live under my roof instead.
The hooky beat of a pop song spilled from the open doorway of the mini-mart next door. A little sway crept into my stride as I made for my moped. Maybe I’d go dancing tonight, blow off some steam before I was pounding the street again. It’d been a while.
I wasn’t looking left as I walked across, because it was a one-way street. But just as I hit the middle of the road, a yellow jeep came roaring around the corner, faster than any sane person should have been driving even going the right way.
The driver gave a shout. The tires screeched. I threw myself toward the opposite sidewalk.
Which might have saved me, if the guy behind the wheel hadn’t been so high he decided to try to avoid me by veering in the same direction I was going.
The grill slammed into my side with a sickening crunch I heard as well as felt. Agony exploded all through my body. My legs crumpled. The corner of the bumper bashed my head with a skull-splitting crack.
The jumbled noises around me were swallowed up by a wave of pain. As my vision shrank to a pinhole and the light contracted with it, I had enough consciousness left to think, Fucking jackass and his fucking jackass jeep. And then, Who’s going to take care of Petey? He won’t even know why I’m gone.
A sharper, frantic jab of distress cut through the surging pain. But it wasn’t enough to keep me there.
The wave cras
hed through me and over me and pulled me under, down into the dark where there was simply nothing.
Eyelids twitched.
My eyelids twitched.
Awareness crept through my body from there, sensation prickling through numbness across my cheeks and forehead, down my neck and over my chest and limbs.
I had limbs. I had a chest. A chest that was no longer a flaming mass of pain.
My head was still foggy. I blinked, and colors swam before my eyes. A chill tingled over my skin and my back felt weirdly heavy, but otherwise I didn’t seem to be in bad shape. Had someone gotten me to a hospital? Maybe it was drugs making my mind and my vision so loopy.
I blinked again, and the colors merged into shapes. The shapes moved. Two of them, close by, came into focus.
Two men, both tall and muscular, though one was as beefy as anything with dark auburn hair and the other leanly slim, his hair pale red. And those perfectly chiseled faces, broad and square-jawed on one and gracefully angular on the other… If this was a hospital, it was more like the Hollywood movie set version.
Both of them were peering at me intently. Beefy took another step closer, holding out a white sheet as if to give it to me. To me? Because…
My awareness sharpened, my mind settling deeper into my body. Into my lightly chilled skin, which was chilled because I was wearing nothing over it. I was lying completely naked on some kind of padded surface in the middle of this big yellow room, with two strange men twice as big as me looming closer.
An icy jab of panic shot through my nerves. My arms and legs jerked as I got control of them through my daze. I scrambled against the floor, pushing myself away from the two men.
No, not just two. There were two others standing farther back, and a woman also, all of them watching me. The strange drag on my back made me wobble as I pulled my legs under me, bracing my hands and feet against the floor.
“Hey, there,” Beefy said in a rumbling baritone, shaking the sheet as if to tempt me with it. As if I were a dog he was beckoning with a treat. “It’s all right. No one here is going to hurt you.”
Uh, yeah right. Because you could always trust anyone who made promises like that.
“What the fuck is going on?” I said, hunching lower to cover myself. “Where the hell am I?”
“Quite a different experience from the other ones, isn’t she?” Slim glanced around at the others, his voice lightly amused. His gaze came back to me, and he cocked his head. “A little smaller than I realized she’d be. A regular pixie.”
I had no clue what the hell he was talking about, but I knew I didn’t like that comment. I gritted my teeth, the muscles in my shoulders flexing. “Just try me.”
“And such spirit!” He grinned as if he expected me to join in the joke.
“Give her time to adjust,” Beefy said. “We’ve got to let her get comfortable.” He frowned, motioning with the sheet again. “Are you sure you don’t want this?”
“I want you to tell me how I got here and what the fuck you think you’re doing,” I said.
My gaze darted past them and landed on a door at the far end of the room. I could make a run for it. They were stronger and bigger than me, sure, but I was fast. And they didn’t seem to be expecting me to bolt, so I’d have surprise on my side.
“That’s a little complicated,” Slim said. “Why don’t you relax and get your bearings for a minute, and then we can get into the nitty gritty details?”
A rough laugh burst out of my throat. Relax? Was he kidding?
I looked to the woman again—almost as tall as the guys and just as striking in looks, her face smooth as a supermodel’s amid her waves of honey-brown hair. Who the hell were these people?
Would she help me, or was she planning on leaving me to the mercy of these men? Or on joining in with whatever they had planned?
She stared back at me, her mouth tightening. I thought I saw sympathy in her expression, but she didn’t speak, didn’t budge an inch.
I was on my own then.
The other guys were still hanging back near the room’s big arched windows. Not too close to the door. Beefy took another step toward me.
How long until he forced the issue? I had to get out of here, and I had to go now. I shoved myself forward off the polished hardwood.
If my body had been working properly, that effort would have propelled me halfway across the room in just a few quick strides. But my shoulder blades twinged as if something had yanked on them and that weight on my back threw me to the side. What the hell was hanging off of me?
My shoulder glanced off the wall. Slim was in front of me in an instant, blocking the way. He was still fucking smiling.
My fist swung out, more out of instinct than because any part of me thought I had a chance in a hand to hand fight with him, and he outright laughed. I teetered backward and fumbled at my back in an attempt to detach whatever was dragging on me. My fingers brushed a softly rippled surface that my mind couldn’t make any sense of.
Beefy closed in on me from the other side, brandishing that damned sheet. “Fuck off!” I said in what was practically a snarl. I dodged to the side, and Slim followed, his eyes sparkling with pleasure.
“Very different from the others,” he murmured. “Good, good.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Oh, nephew, I think you’d better mellow her out for a bit so we can give introductions another try later.”
Mellow me out? One of the other guys, a little shorter than Beefy and Slim but still powerfully built, drifted across the room toward us. Beneath the fall of his shaggy white-blond hair, his eyes were crystal blue and weirdly dreamy. He met my eyes, but his expression didn’t give any sign he’d noticed how freaked out I was. A shiver rippled through me.
No. I couldn’t let them trap me here. I wouldn’t let myself be helpless.
I hurled myself toward the door again, compensating better for the burden on my back now that I was getting used to it. Slim snatched out. But he didn’t touch me—at least, not anything that should have been me. A jolt of sensation shot through me to my back, as if he’d grasped onto a limb I hadn’t known I had. It jarred me to a stop.
My head spun. None of this made sense. “What the hell did you do to me?” I said, lashing out with another fist.
Slim sidestepped neatly, still holding onto that part of my body that shouldn’t exist, that never had before. He gave me a smaller smile.
“We made you alive again, pixie,” he said. “We made you a valkyrie.”
He tugged that alien limb, and then I saw it at the corner of my eye: the unfurling of a huge silver-white feathered wing. A wing his fingers were curled around with a pressure I could feel along the length of it, all the way to where its flesh met my back.
A choked cry broke from my lips, and then the dreamy-eyed man filled my vision. His hands cupped my head. Before I had a chance to struggle, fluffy numbness enveloped my mind, washing the men and the room and all my frantic thoughts away into a warm bright void.
2
Thor
The girl slumped at Baldur’s touch, her eyelids sliding shut and her head sagging. I pushed in to catch her before her body hit the floor.
She’d looked so tough a moment ago—small, yes, but wiry with muscle and blazing with rage—that the softness of her slack arms surprised me. I eased her down to the floor and draped the sheet I’d tried to offer her over her. She hadn’t liked being naked in front of us. I’d been able to tell that much without her saying it.
Her wings were already shrinking with a faint rustling of the feathers, contracting back into her body where they’d stay until she urged them out again. If she ever got to that point. My mouth twisted as I brushed a lock of her dark blond hair away from her closed eyes.
She looked peaceful now, but she’d been terrified on top of furious a minute ago. We had terrified her. Why in Asgard’s name hadn’t I been prepared for that? Maybe the ones before had been the strange ones, holding still in their initial confusion, patient enough
to hear our story and witness who and what we were.
But humans, all of them, were my charges more than that of any of the others here. I was the guardian of humankind. And the last five minutes had been a pretty epic failure of that duty.
Loki came up beside me, rubbing his narrow chin as he studied the girl. His eyes twinkled. “Well, I did promise something different, didn’t I? She’s a fighter, all right.”
“A good one,” I allowed. I’d been in enough battles to know experience and skill when I saw it, even in rough mortal form. “Which was promising to see. Of course, it’d have been better if she’d been aiming to fight our enemies and not us.”
“I’m sure once we’ve established ourselves and our enemies properly, we can get her on the right track.”
“Oh, you’re sure, are you?” Hod said where he was standing with arms crossed near the windows. His expression was as dark as his short black hair. “Just like you were sure this ‘brilliant’ new idea of yours would go off without a hitch? From the moment she came to, it’s looked like one giant hitch to me.”
The light in Loki’s eyes flared momentarily hotter, but he replied in his usual wry tone. “I’d imagine it didn’t look like anything at all to you.”
Hod’s scowled deepened. After centuries of practice, he could aim his blind glower based on Loki’s voice so accurately you’d almost believe he could see the trickster. “You know what I mean. Semantics don’t change anything.”
