Valkyrie Rising

by Ingrid Paulson

  I was on my feet by the time he finished saying it.

  He just stared at me again, like I was one of the seven wonders of the world. Like I was a stranger, exactly like how I’d felt a few minutes ago, when I’d seen him shed his practiced poise.

  I couldn’t bring myself to meet his eyes, hoping he wouldn’t guess that the source of my new strength was the same as Astrid’s.

  A car door slammed on the street. Three more slams followed in rapid succession. I could sense the tension on the air, the fear in the men as they approached. Margit had called her friends.

  “We should get out of here,” I said. “We don’t have time to fight these guys off too.”

  “What guys?” Tuck demanded, but then he frowned as shouts echoed through the deserted streets. Without asking another question, he grabbed my hand and we started running down the alley in the opposite direction, toward the older part of town, where the roads snaked their way up into the foothills. It was the long route home, weaving through the residential area, but we had no other choice.

  While my mind screamed that I should be hobbling along, barely able to walk, my body said quite the opposite. Strands of moonlight filtered through the trees, soaking through my skin and deep into my veins. They recharged me, fueling every cell until my body nearly shook with the power of it. If I needed to, I could run for hours without tiring. I could do anything.

  Given what we could be facing to get Graham back, I hoped that feeling wasn’t just the head injury talking.

  AS WE APPROACHED my grandmother’s house, there was a sudden shift in the night air; it had faded before, but once again I could taste the bitter edge of danger on the wind. Every nerve in my body hummed to attention as I shifted from a run into a flat sprint. Suddenly I couldn’t get to the house fast enough. Grandmother had said we’d be protected there, but the warning snapping at the corners of my mind told me that might no longer be the case.

  I barely broke a sweat as I sprinted harder and faster up the road. The air vibrated with violence, both recent and close. Violence involving two of us. Valkyries. Whatever power connected us was like a bat’s sonar. Silent communication and coordination that echoed through the night. While I couldn’t interpret it, I could sense it was there.

  By the time I reached the driveway, I knew I was already too late. It was no longer the smell of battle that singed my throat, but its acrid aftertaste.

  I ran up the driveway and slowed to a stop, standing just outside the circle of light cast by the porch lamp.

  “What’s wrong?” Tuck was breathing hard when he finally caught me. He actually looked annoyed that I’d smoked him running home.

  “Something bad happened here,” I told him.

  “Well, things can’t get any worse, can they?” Tuck shrugged and started walking up the stairs toward the door.

  “Careful,” I whispered, grabbing his arm and pulling him back down the stairs. My throat was dry. My legs and hands were trembling from the adrenaline.

  “Easy, Ells,” he said, rubbing his forearm as I released it. “When’d you get so strong—and paranoid?”

  “When I started to realize how much danger you and Graham were in,” I replied. Then, on instinct, I sniffed the air. All was quiet. Whatever had happened here was over. The house was empty. I could sense no one within.

  “It’s safe,” I said.

  “Nice work, Lassie.” It had felt so natural, I didn’t realize how strange it must have looked until I saw the wariness in Tuck’s eyes, the way he hesitated before he put his hand back on my arm.

  “Promise one day you’ll tell me what’s going on with you,” he said. “Because that’s the only way I’m letting it slide right now.”

  I nodded, grateful he understood I didn’t want to talk about it.

  “Hilda?” Tuck’s voice echoed through the deserted rooms. There would be no answer.

  The emptiness of the house was lead in my limbs. Grandmother was gone—she’d said she was leaving in pursuit of Odin. But whatever fight had just ended on these grounds might have changed things. Maybe her mission had been thwarted, or perhaps this meant it was well under way. Who had fought and who had won?

  I didn’t know how to use these new instincts to find the answers I so desperately needed.

  Tuck hurtled up the stairs, two at a time, and I followed more slowly, searching for anything that would give me an idea of what had happened in Grandmother’s house. “She’s not here.” Tuck’s voice broke off abruptly, making me double my pace.

  Tuck tried to intercept me when I reached the top of the stairs. “I don’t think you want to go any farther,” he said, stretching his arms across the hallway, like that would stop me. I pushed past. “There’s a lot of blood.”

  Of course there was.

  That’s what I could sense—the physical aftermath of a brutal victory.

  “I need to see it.”

  “Her room is trashed—broken furniture, the works. It’s like there was a biker brawl in there.” His words were rapid-fire as he followed me down the hallway. When I froze, coming to a stop at my grandmother’s door, he hovered, expecting me to snap and have a meltdown any minute. From the looks of it, he was on the verge of one himself.

  My grandmother’s room was exactly as Tuck had described it: a disaster. The dresser was facedown in the middle of the rug, and the curtains looked like they’d been shredded with a chainsaw. Even more disturbing than the puddle of blood inside the door was the broad gash in the thick oak door frame. It looked like it had been struck with a super-sized ax.

  “We should call the police,” Tuck said.

  “And tell them what, exactly?” I asked. “That we think Valkyries kidnapped my brother? And attacked my grandmother? Maybe we should interrogate all the other fictional creatures, starting with the Easter Bunny?” I knew I wasn’t being helpful, but my frustration was screaming for an out.

  “Leave the Easter Bunny out of it,” Tuck murmured. “I know that dude has an alibi.”

  I wanted to hit him for making a joke just then, but I knew he hated feeling helpless even more than I did. No matter what problem I’d ever run into, he and Graham had had a solution at the ready. And I knew when it came down to it, Tuck relied on Graham as much as I did. These were uncharted waters for us both.

  I knelt down by the blood. It smelled different from the nauseating metallic tang of raw meat in the grocery store. The blood on my grandmother’s floor was familiar and distinct, the way a slept-in sweatshirt can smell like the boy it belongs to. Before I really knew what I was doing, I reached forward until my fingertips hovered above the blood. Suddenly I knew it wasn’t smell I was responding to, it was something else—a signal of pure energy that my brain was still struggling to unscramble.

  “What are you doing?” Tuck wrinkled his nose in disgust.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But this isn’t my grandmother’s blood.”

  “How do you know that?” he asked. “Whose blood is it, then?”

  “I don’t know,” I repeated. “But I know it’s from one of us.” I felt strange, almost dizzy.

  “One of who?” His scrutiny of my face couldn’t have been more thorough if he’d used a microscope.

  I’d said too much. “It just slipped out,” I hedged. “Something’s wrong with me, Tuck. I feel strange.” And I did. I rocked back against the door frame as the room spun slowly around me like I’d boarded a lazy merry-go-round.

  “It’s probably that head injury,” Tuck said, concern creasing his forehead as he leaned in for a closer look. Fortunately, it seemed to distract him completely from the other things I’d said. His fingers trailed along my hairline, igniting a totally inappropriate spark of warmth across my skin. “Come here a sec—lemme see.” He pulled me into the bright light of the bathroom, where I took my first look in a mirror. And wished I hadn’t. Who knew I could bleed so much without needing a transfusion?

  Tuck put his hands on my shoulders. “It’s probably not as
bad as it looks.”

  He moved my hair aside, searching for the wound.

  “I don’t get it,” he muttered, right as I was getting worried that his silence meant it was really bad and I’d be ending the night in a hospital bed instead of searching for Graham. “You’re fine. There’s nothing here. No cut, no bruise, nothing. I can’t find anything wrong with you.”

  “And you won’t,” a deep voice said, coming from my left.

  Tuck and I jumped. A tiny scream slipped out—I couldn’t help it.

  I whipped around to see a strange boy standing in the hallway, watching us through the open bathroom door. He took a step back, leaning against the wall and crossing one leg over the other—the classic James Dean pose. And that was hardly where the resemblance ended.

  But as I looked at the boy, stunned by his beauty, his features seemed to shift until he was no longer recognizable as the same person. I rubbed my eyes, trying to force them into focus, but his face was a spinning kaleidoscope, unwilling to settle for too long on any one set of features.

  My head injury must have been worse than I’d thought.

  The boy looked past me, at Tuck. “Her kind heals quickly,” he said. “And she’s still young. She’ll get stronger.”

  Tuck and I were both too shocked to speak. But Tuck recovered first. He stepped in front of me and said, “What are you doing here? Who are you?”

  The boy smiled. The way his lips curled up into dimples in each corner was oddly familiar. “One question at a time.”

  “I know you,” I said slowly. “I don’t know how, but I do.”

  “Of course you do,” he said softly. And his face changed completely. I gasped.

  “Grandfather?” I asked in a tiny voice. “But—but you’re dead.”

  “Yes, yes, he is,” the boy’s voice said, coming from my grandfather’s weather-beaten face. “That wasn’t very nice of me, dredging up those memories. Can you give me someone else? Let me check for something better.” He tipped his head to the side and stared at me without blinking, like he was reading something etched on my forehead.

  Suddenly, Mrs. Sherman, my second-grade teacher, was standing in front of me, exactly where my grandfather had been an instant before.

  “Tuck,” I said, burying my face in his shoulder. “I need an MRI. That guy changed into Mrs. Sherman. I’m going crazy.”

  “Possibly,” Tuck said. “But that isn’t one of your symptoms. I see her too. Hated Mrs. Sherman. Always smelled like mothballs.”

  I looked at Tuck. Even though he was doing his best to sound brave, there was fear in the way he held his shoulders back, in the new line between his eyebrows.

  Mrs. Sherman’s mouth twisted into a dry smile. “Hard to rattle, aren’t you?” The strange boy’s smooth voice slid from between Mrs. Sherman’s lips. “I wonder why that is.”

  Then Mrs. Sherman was gone. In her place was the boy again. Now that his features were still enough for me to get a good look at him, I realized he was about our age. But that was the only detail I could truly remember. It was a face that could be lost in crowd even if I was holding a picture of it. Yet when he smiled, it was the same curl I’d seen before. Framed by the same symmetrical dimples that looked like they’d been sculpted by a plastic surgeon.

  And the boy smiled now, larger than life. “Let’s start again.” He took my hand and held it in both of his. “Ms. Elsa Overholt,” he said. “I’m Loki, your grandmother’s dear, dear friend—even though she hasn’t talked to me in fifty years. But what’s fifty years to creatures like us?” His laughed softly at the joke I didn’t quite get. “I’m delighted to finally meet you. That is, delighted to have you finally know I’m me. I’ve checked on you from time to time—pardon the curiosity. I couldn’t imagine my Hilda playing grandma.” His gaze lolled around as he spoke, never quite landing on anything at all. “Where is she?”

  “I—I don’t know,” I stammered, meeting his eyes as they snapped to me. They were the dark, woodsy green of a pine forest. And I could have lost myself in them forever. I finally had to force myself to look away. “She’s gone.”

  “Gone?” he repeated. His smile took on a hungry edge. “Fascinating. She left you here all alone?”

  “Not all alone.” Tuck cleared his throat. “Maybe Loki can help us?” He nudged my shoulder.

  “Probably not,” Loki said, walking down the hallway toward Grandmother’s bedroom. “Not particularly interested in other people’s problems.” He looked at Tuck like he was less than roadkill. “Particularly human problems.”

  “Human problems? What, as opposed to squirrel problems?” Tuck shot back. The flash of anger showed how fragile his veneer of calm actually was.

  I put my hand on his elbow, just in case. Something told me Loki wasn’t someone he should bait. Once Tuck got started, he was impossible to stop. But he ignored me and aimed those inscrutable gray eyes right at Loki. “So what exactly are you?”

  “Not really sure,” Loki said, indifferently flipping through the family photo album he pulled down from the bookshelf in the hallway. “I’ve always been me. Like you’ve always been you. You’d maybe call me a god. Humans have done that in the past. If you ask me, I’m ordinary—and you, well, humans are sub-ordinary. No offense.” Loki’s gaze transferred to me and stayed there for an uncomfortably long time.

  “None taken.” Tuck sent me a look that said he wanted to believe Loki was loco. But there was a trace of doubt, like he was begging me to double-check his sanity.

  Loki no longer paid us any heed. He wandered through the hallway, blandly perusing the framed family photos decorating the walls and examining the paperweights and knickknacks displayed on a narrow table. Finally he came to a stop in front of the puddle of blood.

  I felt a surge of panic. My grandmother was gone, and there was a pool of blood in her vandalized bedroom. Maybe Loki had something to do with it, or maybe he’d suspect that Tuck and I were delinquents who’d taken Grandmother hostage. I didn’t know who or what Loki was, but my instincts told me not to trust him.

  But Loki’s grin brightened the room like a camera flash. “Hilda’s been fighting again, hasn’t she? It’s long overdue. Valkyrie power is a fickle thing—use it or lose it. And she was skating dangerously close to the latter.” He strolled around the room, assessing the rest of the damage. “I wonder what brought her back. It would take something big to summon Hilda out of retirement. Or shall we be frank and call it what it was—hiding?”

  “Hiding?” I repeated. “But she’s been living here for the last fifty years. That’s hardly hiding.”

  Loki didn’t answer. He was too busy examining the thick gash in the door frame. “Hilda still can swing a sword, you’ve gotta give her that. But who knows how far that will get her these days? Most of the modern girls prefer semiautomatics.” He paused. “More discreet,” he mouthed, as if it should have been obvious.

  Tuck’s eyes were tracking every millimeter of Loki’s progress around the room, until he stepped forward, visibly impatient with Loki’s circular chatter. “What girls? And who was Hilda hiding from?” he demanded. “What are you talking about?”

  Loki walked slowly through my grandmother’s room, muttering about our appalling lack of education while searching for something. “Ah, here it is.” He lifted an antique-looking book from underneath some papers on Grandmother’s desk and flipped to a page, seemingly at random, then handed it to me.

  It was open to a black-and-white sketch of a woman pointing a sword at the back of an armored soldier, marching him up a hill. Another woman waited farther up, with a wolf at her side and a raven perched on one arm. There was a sword in her other hand.

  Loki cocked an eyebrow and looked down at the book in my hands. “Things have changed during Odin’s absence. Modernized. But those are Valkyries, in their more traditional role. Until recently, when she went AWOL, your grandmother was their leader. The best and most brilliant of them all. Something Astrid can’t forget even though, by defa
ult, she’s their leader now. Hilda managed to keep herself hidden from the others for half a century.”

  “Excuse me?” Tuck said.

  Loki shifted impatiently, as if he was explaining the obvious and resented every second he was wasting doing so. “Valkyries are far and away the most ferocious fighters you’ll ever meet,” he said, aiming his words at me as if Tuck wasn’t even there. “For centuries, your grandmother hovered over battlefields, rewarding the soldiers who fought ferociously and faced death without flinching. She escorted them to Valhalla. To the afterlife.”

  “Afterlife?” I repeated. “As in dead?”

  “Most certainly,” Loki said. “How else would Odin build an army powerful enough to one day destroy the world? That’s his burning desire, you know. Been at it for ages, and frankly, it gets a bit old. Unfortunately, undead soldiers don’t. That’s how he keeps his ranks up. Otherwise he’d barely get them trained, and poof, they’d be gone. He gouged out his eye in exchange for the wisdom of the ages, and that strategy is the only evidence I’ve seen that he actually got anything out of the bargain.”

  “That’s not my grandmother,” I said, casting a nervous glance at Tuck, who was still staring at the open book in Loki’s hand. “Even if she was a Valkyrie, she wouldn’t help Odin build an undead army. Especially if he wanted to use it against the rest of the world. She hates war. Besides, that book’s a hundred years old.”

  Loki cracked a mocking half grin. Calling me an idiot without uttering a word.

  The room felt hot and close, a nursery designed to hatch my wildest fears. Fears that surrendered all too willingly to exhilaration. And something else—pride. I shook my head again and again as I backed away from him, not sure if I was more terrified by what he was telling me or by my own desire to revel in the truth of it.

  “You know what your grandmother is.” Loki’s mouth twisted into a dry smile. “Just as surely as you now know what you are. I see your guarded posture, the way you’re watching my hands for any hint of pending attack. You’re enjoying your heightened senses every bit as much as you should. There’s nothing wrong with being fast and strong. With being invincible. Savor it. You’re the first new Valkyrie I’ve seen in a thousand years. It’s nearly impossible to make new ones, you see. Not many gods wandering around these days, tampering with mortals. Creating half bloods. And even when they do, only a select few have what it takes. But you do.”