by Eva Chase
The god of darkness, always in the dark. Or did it look dark, if you simply couldn’t see at all? Somehow I didn’t get the feeling he wanted me prying into the intricacies of his blindness either.
I turned back to the bedroom. A murmur escaped Petey’s mouth. He tucked his arm a little closer to his face. An ache spread through my chest, up to my throat.
I did have to go. But I’d be back. I swore it to any gods that actually existed, if there were more than the five I’d met so far.
My wings fluttered to hold me in place as I eased the window back to its previous position. Just in case Mom happened to be paying extra attention this morning. I pressed my fingers to my lips and then to the window as if Petey would feel that kiss on his forehead where I’d have wanted to press it.
A car engine growled down the street. A patchy red Chevy parked in front of the house, and a bulky figure swayed out of the passenger seat with a wave to whoever was driving. My shoulders stiffened.
Hod had turned toward the sound. “Who’s that?” he asked.
“My mother’s current boyfriend,” I said. “Stoned to the eyeballs, it looks like.”
Even as I was saying that, I realized I was wrong. His movements were clumsy, but in a jerky way. Twitchy. He looked high, not stoned. And high on something that wasn’t treating him well.
It’d been a couple months since I’d last seen Ivan in person. How much had his habits changed since then?
He rattled the doorknob for a moment before he managed to get the key to work. Then he stomped inside. I held there for a minute, my wings flapping steadily in time with the too-loud thump of my heart. There wasn’t anything I could do about that asshole.
I pushed my wings a little higher—and Ivan’s voice bellowed through the house, raw and furious. “Pete!”
I flinched. Petey’s bedroom door slammed open. My little brother woke with a jerk, pushing upright on the bed, his head listing as he dragged himself out of sleep.
“Where the hell did you put my controller, you little shit,” Ivan roared. He barged through the room, flinging the blanket back on Petey’s bed, swiping the toys off his play table in the corner. A Lego structure smashed on the floor.
“What?” Petey said, his voice wobbling. “I didn’t take anything.”
“You’re always fiddling around with it,” Ivan said. “It must have been you. Cough it up.”
Petey cringed back on his bed, hugging his knees. “I really don’t know. I didn’t touch it today. I promise.”
“Don’t you fucking lie to me, you pathetic waste of space.”
Ivan loomed over Petey, one bulging arm raised. A cry caught in my throat. I threw myself back at the window.
My fingers had just closed around the pane to yank it up when Ivan stepped back. His hand dropped to his side, his chest heaving with ragged breaths.
“Don’t you dare mess with my stuff again,” he growled, and thundered back out of the room.
A tear was streaking down Petey’s cheek. He stifled a sob and heaved his blanket tight around him.
“Petey,” I said, but he couldn’t hear me either. Fuck, how did this visibility thing even work? I was supposed to be able to let him see me if I wanted to—
I braced my arms to shove at the window pane, and a hand closed around my forearm.
“No,” Hod said.
I glared back at him, even though I knew those fathomless dark green eyes couldn’t see my expression. “You heard what just happened even if you couldn’t see it. He’s terrified.”
“I can hear that it’s over,” Hod said. “And I don’t think appearing before your brother as a winged magical being is going to put his mind at ease.”
“Would you let me do it even if it would?” I asked.
He didn’t answer that. “You have to let him go. You’re not part of his world anymore. There’s nothing you can really do for him.” He hesitated. His voice thawed, just a little. “You showed him you care. That has to be enough.”
As if on cue, Petey shifted his pillow and uncovered the chocolate bar. He snatched it up, a brilliant smile crossing his face. His gaze darted to the window, as if he were looking right at me. But he couldn’t see me.
And yet he was beaming at me.
My heart squeezed, and Hod’s grip tightened. I couldn’t fight him. I already knew that.
At least, not like this.
I let him pull me back from the window. With a wrenching in my chest, I swept up into the sky.
The gods needed me right now. They wanted me to fulfill their mission. Fine. I’d track down Odin for them, and then they wouldn’t need their valkyrie anymore. Maybe they’d be distracted enough that I could get away completely. Maybe they wouldn’t even care at that point.
Either way, I was coming back here as soon as I could. And next time I’d do more than leave a chocolate bar.
11
Hod
I might not ever have seen a dawn, but I knew when it came. I could feel the moment the first rays of the sun seeped over the horizon like a faint but rising energy jittering over my skin, breaking through the stillness that had been the night.
No matter how many times I experienced that sensation, it always set my nerves a little on edge for the first few minutes. A vibration carried through the walls from the ceiling, a stirring in the bedroom above the study—Baldur’s. My twin brother had been sleeping restlessly again, tossing and turning.
Nightmares, maybe. I didn’t like to think about what those nightmares might contain. Whether I might feature in them, and how.
The chaos of the human world always agitated his mind, even if he didn’t complain about it. We’d been here too long. He needed the calm of Asgard.
A knock sounded on the study’s half open door.
“Hod?” our new valkyrie said.
I turned in my chair to face her automatically, directing my eyes as well as I could to where I could sense her face was. It wasn’t too hard to estimate from the direction and volume of her voice, from the soft sounds any body makes as it moves: the rustle of clothing, the rising and falling of breath. I’d formed a mental construct of her already from our earlier interactions—short and wiry and deft but forceful in action.
She’d contracted her wings. The soft murmur of those feathers would have been impossible to miss.
“Shouldn’t you be in bed?” I said. We’d only returned a few hours ago from the reckless jaunt across the country I’d let her talk me into. I could get by on a nap or two throughout the day, but mortals—or those recently mortal—generally seemed to require more.
She shrugged, another rustle. It was a different shirt from yesterday, not the silvery hiss of silk but a somewhat coarser rasp I’d guess was cotton. “I got a little sleep. My mind decided I’m done.” She paused. “You still need to teach me whatever it is you brought to making me a valkyrie.”
“So you came for your lesson?”
“It seems like it’s about time. Everyone else managed to fit theirs in yesterday.”
She was shifting from her wary tone to the brasher one I was becoming equally used to. I’d have thought our valkyrie had only two modes if I hadn’t heard her voice soft with affection at her little brother’s window last night.
I was already regretting the decision to let her go see him. She hadn’t been up to anything nefarious, that much was true—this time. But her ties to her old life clearly remained tight, and venturing back into it had only strengthened them. I didn’t believe she was eager to learn so she could fulfill our mission. Loki had chosen her because she was like him—a sly one, a schemer. No doubt from the moment I’d sent her back toward this house last night she’d been forming new plans of her own.
That damned choked sound she’d made when she’d mentioned her brother had swayed my resolve for one imprudent moment.
She took a step closer, swiveling to take in the room. “What are you doing in here anyway? You can’t read all these books, right?”
I prop
ped one elbow against the desk and the other on the back of my chair. “I can in a way.” With the right supernatural compulsion, I could make the ink murmur its words to me. “We all find ways of adapting.”
She hummed to herself. “I’m going to guess that’s not what you’re going to teach me, though.”
“No.” I was going to have to teach her, regardless of her motives for asking, but that didn’t mean now was an ideal time for it. “I think it would be better if you were fully rested first. What I have to show you is… more discomforting than what you’ll have learned from the others.” Which was why I hadn’t rushed in to provide my part earlier.
“Well, now you’ve really peaked my curiosity. I’m definitely not getting back to sleep with that idea in my head. Might as well get it over with!”
She wasn’t going to give up. Why was I wasting my time arguing? If she wanted to learn so badly, let her find out for herself.
I pushed myself to my feet. “If you insist.”
Just the thinnest warmth was starting to creep through the window. A row of small potted ferns sat along the sill. I let my fingers come to rest on the delicate fronds of the nearest one and motioned for the valkyrie to join me.
“You’ve talked with the others about the traditional duties of the valkyries,” I said.
She nodded, a whisper of her hair, as she came up beside me. She was close enough now that I could smell her as well as hear her: clean and hot and ever so slightly sharp, the way fire smelled beneath the smoke. Had that come with her transformation into a valkyrie, or had it always been her natural scent?
“The basics,” she said. “Watch the battles, choose the winners, send the deserving up to Valhalla. That about covers it, right?”
“It does. But only on the surface level. You don’t just choose the winners—you choose the losers as well. And what happens to the losers in a war? What happens to those deserving before they ascend?”
“They die,” she said. “Obviously.”
“And when a valkyrie chooses, sometimes she’s the one who takes that life.” I stroked my hand over the fern. It tickled my fingertips. “Your new senses will allow you to feel the hum of life inside a body. You gather it in your grasp and then you ease it all the way out. There’s a darkness in you that can swallow it whole.”
The living energy in the fern quivered at my touch. I curled my fingers as if I were physically gathering it against my palm. The fronds trembled and turned dry against my hand. The warmth of that energy cooled as it congealed. I closed my hand into a fist—and it was gone. The fern was nothing more than a limp husk. Nausea unfurled in my gut.
Loki’s plan still seemed like another of his harebrained risks as likely to blow up in our faces as get us where we needed to go. But, by the Allfather, wherever he was, I hoped this valkyrie would be the last one we needed. If only so I never had to carry out this tutorial again.
“I could do that?” Ari said. She sounded unnerved. Good.
“You wouldn’t be a valkyrie if you couldn’t. This is the lesson. Now it’s your turn.”
She shifted, reaching toward one of the other ferns. After a moment of silence, she said, “I don’t think I feel what you were talking about.”
“I can help,” I said briskly. This was what I was here for. I’d just have to get it over with.
I set my hand over her smaller one, the smooth skin of her knuckles brushing my palm. The darkness in me reached out to the sliver of the void running through her being. Teased it closer to the surface of her awareness. Set the plant’s energy thrumming in contrast.
Ari sucked in a breath. “Oh.”
I eased back, letting her instincts guide the process from there. Somewhere inside her, she already knew what to do.
A shiver ran through her body. Her hand clenched. I let mine slide to the fern beneath. It had crumpled like the one I’d killed.
“And that works on anything living?” she said. “Just like that?”
“Any life can be snuffed out. Or cast from its body toward Valhalla, although those doors aren’t open to mortal souls any longer.”
“Got it.” She let out a jagged chuckle. “Now that’s an ability I wish I’d had on call last night!”
I tensed. My fingers leapt to close around her wrist, yanking her so she faced me. “Never treat the taking of a life lightly. In a battle where someone has to die, you make that choice. That’s the only time you do. You can’t go stealing away lives out of nowhere.”
“Okay, okay,” she said. “It was a joke. A bad one, obviously.” The strands of her hair murmured as she cocked her head. “And a sore spot for you.”
“Not one that’s any of your business.”
“That doesn’t mean I can’t be curious.”
“It means I’ve got nothing to say about it,” I said. My lungs had already started to constrict. “Drop it, valkyrie. And don’t joke like that again.”
“Fine. I’m sorry.”
She was silent then, for a moment that stretched into another and then another. I realized I was still holding onto her wrist and released it. Ari inhaled slowly, but still she didn’t speak. Her silence niggled at me.
“What’s the matter, valkyrie?” I asked. Let her spit out whatever her complaint was. She thought I was being too harsh? She didn’t like having her questions cut off? Let her try me. I could remind her what her place was here. That she hadn’t been owed a place here at all.
The shape of her voice suggested a grimace. “What makes you think there’s something wrong?”
“You got quiet,” I retorted. “Normally you’re as bad as Loki, the way you go on.”
She exhaled. “I was just wondering why you don’t really look at me. Not look at me look at me—I know you can’t see. But I’ve watched you with the other gods. You can at least make it seem as if you’re meeting their eyes. But you don’t with me. Like I’m so much beneath you, you can’t be bothered.”
The anger I’d been stoking faltered. That wasn’t at all what I’d expected. She hadn’t said how that impression affected her, but her discomfort was threaded through her voice.
“It’s not you,” I said. “Well, it is, but it’s only that I’m not as familiar with you. I’ve had hundreds of years to build a model of each of them in my head, to fine tune it. I have less experience to draw on with you. I have to approximate more.”
Her posture unclenched. I hadn’t realized how much I’d unsettled her. “Well,” she said, “it seems like there’s an easy way we could fix that.”
Her hand closed around mine and drew it to her face. She rested my palm lightly against her cheek. My fingertips brushed the scattered waves of her hair. Her eyelashes grazed the pad of my thumb when she blinked. And just like that, the construction of her in my head reconfigured itself in infinitely more detail. Detail that included the soft warmth of her skin against mine. The way her breath tingled over the inside of my wrist. All the life in her sang beneath that surface.
A pang shot through me in response.
“Wonderful,” I said in a voice I could already tell was too curt, aiming my blank gaze at where I now knew her eyes to be. “Familiarity increased. Lesson concluded. Just hope you never need to use that one.”
“That’s it?” she said.
I nodded to the door, that motion just as curt. “You can go.”
It was an order, not an offer. She made a brief disgruntled sound, but she went. I waited until I was sure she’d left the hall, and then I went out after her. An uneasy energy stirred through my body and gnawed at the dull ache that pang had left behind.
I knew the house well enough after all this time that I could move through it without hesitation. My model of it was near-perfect. The creak of the floor and the vibrations that ran through the boards told me when a piece of furniture might have changed position, though they rarely did. Nothing hindered me on my way to Loki’s bedroom door.
The sounds of motion on the other side told me he was up. I strode inside,
greeted by his huff.
“Just because you can’t see doesn’t mean a person can’t still want a little privacy,” he said, his voice momentarily muffled by the shirt he was pulling on.
I snorted. “You’re the last one to ever think of anyone else’s privacy, aren’t you? I just wanted to tell you that your valkyrie has all her training. So let’s get on with things.”
Loki chuckled. “What a hurry you’re in all of a sudden.”
“We all want to get back to Asgard,” I said. That was the only thing I wanted right now. Baldur was becoming more detached with each week longer we were trapped here. Back in those even more familiar halls, we could all stop this constant fretting. And we could get away from mortals and valkyries and the lot of them.
Away from the strange sense of longing this valkyrie in particular had somehow managed to provoke in me.
“Hmm,” Loki said, in that way he had as if he knew far more than he ought to. “While she’s coming along well, I don’t think it’d be fair to throw her into the fray quite yet. But I might have just the thing for a final test.”
12
Aria
It was already late in the day when we reached our destination: a small, faded-looking industrial city somewhere in the north end of Michigan. Shadows clung to the vacant factories with boarded up windows we passed. We walked through the streets, invisible to mortal eyes, but the truth was in this part of town there wasn’t much of anyone around to see us.
I peered through the gap where one warehouse’s front door sagged on its hinges. The dwindling sunlight didn’t penetrate the interior at all. A smell like grease and chalk mixed together hung in the air, and traffic rumbled along the highway a few blocks over. When I extended my senses, the mass of human lives—all that living energy I could steal into the shadow inside me if I got close enough—hummed around me at a distance.
A cheerful scene, this was not.
“What are we looking for?” I asked. All Loki had said about this trip so far was that we needed to wait until it started to get dark before we could take much action. I’d dozed as much as I could to prepare for this apparent test, and then trained a little more: sparring with Thor, testing the limits of my wings on my own. Not knowing what the test was, it was hard to know how to prepare.
