by Eva Chase
“Definitely. I start to think I should have brought the real you with me down to retrieve Thor’s hammer rather than Thor in that dress. Although of course then we’d all have been denied the impressive spectacle of the dress, so…”
Freya laughed. “No, I think you made the right choice there. I wouldn’t have missed that sight for anything.”
Whatever tension had formed between them before dissolved into the air. I sucked in a breath, and the trees around me wavered.
I froze, studying them. Perking my ears, tasting the breeze, like Hod had suggested. A streak of gray shimmered between two of the trees and disappeared. That ashy taste tickled over my tongue again.
“It’s happening again,” I said. “The false Asgard is wavering. More than before. Maybe—”
I didn’t get the chance to make any suggestions. The ground tipped up, folding the trees down on me, and the smack of a trunk sent me tumbling out of the orchard toward wherever Muninn wanted me next.
10
Aria
Darkness whipped around me. I flung out my arms and released my wings, trying to catch hold of something. A faint sensation tugged at my heart—one of the gods, one of my sort-of creators, someplace nearby. I threw myself toward that impression with all the strength in my body.
I collided with a solid form all lean muscles and smoky scent. Hod, I had time to recognize, and then Muninn’s constructed world tipped me over again. Both of us fell, sprawling, onto a carpeted floor.
I scrambled off the god, mindful of my knees and elbows. He sat up with a dazed expression, rubbing the back of his head where it’d smacked the floor. “Ari?” he said. His fingers grazed my skin as he found my wrist and clasped it. “Are you okay?”
“Slightly more bashed up than the last time we talked, but still breathing,” I said. The fall had woken up the ache in my ribs. And other smaller aches from earlier today that I didn’t really want to count. As glad as I was to see Hod safe and relatively unharmed, I wouldn’t mind bumping into Baldur for a little of that healing touch sometime soon. “Where did she send you?”
“Better we don’t talk about that,” he said grimly.
I’d seen how much the memories Muninn stirred up had affected even unflappable Loki. For now, I wasn’t going to push.
I pulled myself into a crouch so I’d be ready to move fast if the situation called for it, but nothing in the room around us looked like a threat. The pale blue carpet was soft under my feet. A twin bed, neatly made with a spaceship-print comforter, stood at our right, a maple dresser and kid-sized chair-and-table set at our left. The window over the table was open, curtain drifting beside it. The breeze carried in the smell of a freshly mown lawn.
“Have you seen any of the others?” Hod asked.
I nodded. “I was on my own at first, and then I ended up with Loki and Freya.”
“But no sign of Baldur?”
Oh. Of course he was more worried about his twin brother than anyone else. “No,” I said. I wanted to say that I was sure Baldur could withstand whatever Muninn threw at him, but honestly, it was hard to tell what was really going on beneath the light god’s bright surface. Sometimes I got the impression he was amping up the shine to deflect anyone from looking underneath.
“She hasn’t hit anyone with anything we can’t handle yet,” I settled on, and frowned at the room around us. “I don’t know what she’s up to now. I’m pretty sure we’re not in Asgard anymore.”
“Not from how it feels to me,” Hod said. “I’d imagine this is someplace on Midgard. Do you recognize it?”
I shook my head. “I’ve never been here before.” The only kid’s bedrooms I’d ever been in were the ones in my mom’s house, and neither mine nor Francis’s nor Petey’s had ever looked this tidy. The carpet in mine had been so patchy you could practically play checkers on it. There’d been water stains on all of the ceilings from the leaks during bad storms, and a hint of mildew smell that had never quite left because of them. “This is definitely not from my memories.”
Hod’s brow furrowed. His head turned as if he were taking in the room, but I knew he couldn’t see it.
“How much can you even tell about where we are?” I asked with honest curiosity.
“From the way the air moves, I can get a sense of the size of the space, where the large objects are. And touch can fill in a lot.” He patted the side of the bed. “From the furnishings, I’m assuming bedroom? Not very large. Clean.” He paused, his chest expanding with a slow inhale. “Something about it smells familiar. Maybe I’ve been here.”
“Do you make a habit of dropping in on random kids?” I said, and tensed as the door eased open. A small figure stopped on the threshold at the sight of us. My heart flipped over.
Oh. Not a random kid at all.
Petey’s thin eyebrows drew together as he contemplated us with his wide gray-blue eyes. Every part of him was exactly as I’d have remembered him, from the mussed golden-blond curls to those skinny legs—legs that poked from beneath shorts starting to fray along the hems. No need to ask whose head Muninn had pulled this part of the illusion from.
Because it had to be an illusion. Petey wasn’t really here. But that didn’t stop every particle of my body from aching to go to him.
I could go to him, couldn’t I? It couldn’t hurt the real Petey to give this one a hug, to tell him once more how much I loved him, that I was coming back for him.
Before I’d even finished thinking that thought, I was already moving. Onto my feet, stepping toward my little brother, my arms outstretched. Hod sucked in a breath behind me.
“Ari—”
Oh, God, he wasn’t going to be a wet blanket about even this pretend reunion, was he? I ignored him and reached to brush a stray curl from Petey’s eyes.
Petey flinched, jerking away from me. He stared up at me with stiffened shoulders. “Who are you?” he said in a quavering voice. “What are you doing in my room?”
The words hit me like a slap across my face. I froze. “It’s me, Petey. It’s Ari.”
He drew back a step. “I don’t know you. You’re not supposed to be in my room. Mom says no one’s allowed to go in there unless they ask me first.”
My chest clenched up so tight I could barely breathe. “I just wanted to see you,” I said. “You do know me. Ari. Your sister. I’ve been there since you were born.”
“You’re a stranger. I’m not supposed to talk to strangers.”
“Ari.” Hod had gotten up behind me. He set his hand on my shoulder, his grip firm but not hard. “This is his bedroom in his foster parents’ home. Loki and I came to see it before we dropped him off, that last morning. We should go. She’s just trying to hurt you. Don’t let her.”
“But…” My eyes had gone hot. Petey was still staring at me, his little body rigid. His chin wobbled. As if he was terrified of me. “Can’t you make him remember? You shadowed the memories over—you must be able to bring them back. It won’t count. It’s not really him.”
“It’s not really him,” Hod agreed. “And I can’t work any magic on him. He’s acting the way Muninn wants him to. You let him go once. You can do it again.”
I hadn’t had to stand there faced with Petey’s bewildered gaze before. “Petey, please.” I took another step toward him, searching his expression for any hint of recognition. He cringed backward, stumbling right out into the hall.
“Mom!” he cried out in a thin voice. “Mom, help me! There’s a stranger—”
A shudder ran through my body. I closed my eyes, set my jaw, and shoved the bedroom door closed.
Footsteps pattered away on the other side. The fake Petey running to his false mother? I threw my shoulders back against the door, my head bowed, my breaths harsh in my throat.
Hod moved toward me, but I held up my hand to stop him. My fingers curled into my palm. I pushed myself off the door, spinning around, glaring into the corners of the room as if I might spot the raven there.
“That was sick, Muninn,” I said
. “Just sick. I don’t know why you turned against Odin, but if you think you’re somehow the good guy here, you’re delusional. You don’t just use a little kid— Do you have any idea— So Odin seemed a little heartless sometimes? You just proved you’re a fucking monster!”
She didn’t answer. I hadn’t really thought she would. With a strangled sound, I hurled my fist at the wall. It dented the plaster with a satisfying thud and an equally satisfying jab of pain through my knuckles.
“Ari,” Hod said, sounding more urgent now.
I leapt away from him, battering the opposite wall with my foot, slamming my heel down on the seat of the chair so the wood cracked. “This is all fake. This is all fake, and garbage, and— I didn’t spend years clawing my way out of my mom’s house just so you could shut me up in this stupid prison. Let us out!”
I took another swing at the wall and then swooped up on my wings and kicked the damned ceiling. Plaster dust sprinkled down. I whirled around, chest heaving, choking on a sob.
Hod stood by the bed, his mouth set in a pained line. Just waiting for me to finish my tantrum. Because what else could anyone call this? What the fuck was I actually accomplishing with all this flailing?
My shoulders sagged. The anger inside me dimmed, but that just left more room for the anguish.
“Are you done, valkyrie?” the god of darkness asked, but his tone was soft, not disapproving.
“I just wanted… I just wanted to hold him one more time.”
My voice petered out. I eased forward and leaned my head against Hod’s chest. He swallowed audibly. His arms came around me, hugging me to him.
“I know,” he said.
“Even if he wasn’t real…”
“I know.”
I relaxed into his warmth, thinner than Loki’s but steadier. He hadn’t said much, but just that acknowledgment eased the worst of the pain. Enough that I managed to say, “Well, we’re alone now, but I’m not sure there’s any way you could kiss this better.”
A chuckle broke from Hod’s throat. His hands came up to cup my face and gently tilted it back. A hungrier darkness filled his unseeing green eyes. “I could try,” he said in a low voice that sent an eager shiver through me.
A different sort of shadow flickered at the edge of my vision. My head snapped around, trying to track it. There. A flutter of wings in the ripple of the curtain.
This time I didn’t hesitate. I launched myself away from Hod toward that glimpse of the raven. My snatching hands brushed through a sensation like ruffled feathers—and the room and the god spun away from me.
The world blurred around me. The ground tipped. I tripped over my feet and fell to my knees, which at this point had to be the most bruised part of me.
No carpet this time. Plain wooden boards. A wide-open living room, shelves lined with books along one wall on either side of a stone fireplace. A ceiling fan stirred the humid air overhead. I was surrounded by two empty armchairs and an oversized sofa where two figures sat nestled against each other. A haziness clung to the edges of the space, as if this was more a dream than a physical place. Not that the places I’d been in before here had been real either.
“You could go,” the man said. His voice was as thin as his tall frame, his shoulders hunched. His hair fell sleek and white around his slightly pointed ears. A jagged scar cut across the left side of his face. The other side was lined with age. “I know it wasn’t easy before. It can’t be easy doing it again. I can manage on my own. I doubt Death will let me lose my way.”
“No,” the woman curled against him said hoarsely. She raised her head from where she’d had her face pressed against his chest, her glossy black hair spilling over her narrow shoulder blades, and I realized it was Muninn. The same loose black dress, the same darkly intent eyes as when I’d first met her.
When was this? Who was this? I had the feeling I’d stumbled into one of the raven woman’s memories somehow. Had she meant me to? This felt more personal than anything I could imagine she’d have wanted me to see.
“I’m not losing one moment with you,” she said, her fingers tangled in the man’s shirt. “If I could, I’d conjure more.”
He nuzzled her face. “We had plenty. More than I ever had the slightest hope I’d get. You’ve gotten no shortage of memories out of this, Miss Raven. Don’t hold on too hard.”
“No such thing,” she muttered. Her head bent close to his again. She pressed a kiss to his lips, and his eyelids slid closed as he kissed her back. My face flushed.
No, I wasn’t meant to be watching this at all. But it meant something that I’d managed to tumble from the memories she’d constructed for us into hers, didn’t it? There had to be something here I could use.
I’d only started to turn when the scene around me collapsed in on me with a wash of darkness like vast wings battering me. I had just enough time to gulp a breath before Muninn hurled me empty-handed out of her memory.
11
Thor
I couldn’t really explain how it happened. The moment anything that felt like a threat came at me, something in my mind and body shifted. The battle fury shunted logic and every other practical consideration to the back of my head. A wave of power rushed through my limbs. With my pulse pounding like a drumbeat in my ears, my feet battered the ground and my hand swung Mjolnir with no thought except how to most quickly connect each killing blow.
Topple them all. Topple them fast. Let the blood flow until not one of them could lay a finger on me and mine.
That was simply my nature. I worked the way I worked, and it had served us well through enough battles across the ages, when we’d had plenty of battles to fight.
The sad thing was, I couldn’t say for sure which battle it was I was re-fighting at this moment. One of Muninn’s twists of the landscape had tossed me into a field with a vast array of giants already charging toward me, their teeth bared with war cries and weapons raised. I’d hurled myself forward, hammer at the ready, the second my feet had steadied on the ground.
We’d fought a lot of battles against giants. I couldn’t remember any particular one where I’d been on my own, but then, Muninn didn’t seem to be aiming for accuracy. Mostly she seemed to be aiming to destroy us.
She could forget about that. I’d bash every one of these giant skulls five times over and still be ready to fight my way back to Ari and the others. One little raven wasn’t getting the best of me.
My muscles heaved as I whirled this way and that, slamming the dark-elf-made hammer into a forehead here, a jaw there. Whipping it through a whole line of my enemies, tumbling them like dominos, before it flew back to my hand. If there’d been more of a gap in the fighting, I might have paused to call a clap of thunder and lightning down, but this fray never let up.
The giants might not be taking it easy on me, but this was a cleaner battle than any I’d fought in reality. With each battering, the bodies burst into more dust, until it coated the grass all around. Better than the blood that usually splattered me and my surroundings in the middle of a clash like this. I couldn’t say I missed the metallic stink of gore in the air, the flavor of it creeping into my mouth.
But somehow, without the spurts of blood and the strewn bodies, the roar of the battle fury dulled. I kept fighting, kept bashing the giants that ran at me two or three at a time, because if I hadn’t I’d have ended up with a spear in the gut or a club to the head.
I swung left and veered right, trying to summon more of the fervor with the momentum. It didn’t work. A weight settled in my gut as I sent the next body flying with a streak of dust.
All these people I’d once killed. All the lives I’d extinguished. They weren’t anything more than dust now out there in the real world too. I’d snuffed them out in one thump of my heart, with hardly a thought to any one of them.
The weight in my gut turned queasy. But what could I do but keep fighting until I smashed them all to pieces?
I lashed out to topple a giant who’d rushed up behind
me, and realized I was no longer alone.
Ari had dropped down at the edge of the field. She staggered and caught her balance. My gut clenched tighter as she lifted her head to take in the view.
The view of me burying Mjolnir in this giant’s head. Slamming it straight into that one’s face. More dust rained down, with a faintly sour smell.
I swung faster, harder, my pulse kicking up a notch. The giants might go for her next. They weren’t real. If they’d ever been alive, that was a long time ago. I couldn’t stop until I’d destroyed them all. Until I’d conquered this damned memory Muninn had thrust me into.
The fiery rage shot back through my veins. A roar rang from my lungs. I hit and kicked and threw in an endless storm of motion as the swarm barreled toward me, sweat trickling down my back. The bodies and shouts blended into a blur. My hammer pummeled flesh and bone until it collided only with empty air.
I swayed to a halt. Were the giants really all gone? Nothing lay around me on the plain except the strewn dust.
My hammer hand dropped to my side. A tremor ran through my muscles. The queasy sensation coiled around my stomach.
Ari was staring. She eased to the edge of the field, clutching her switchblade, her wings unfurled high. The breath she drew in was shaky. Was that horror on her face?
“I would have helped,” she said. “But I didn’t— I couldn’t figure out if I might just end up getting in the way. I guess you had it under control.”
Her tone turned a bit wry on the last sentence. It prickled at me. Before I could decide how to answer her, another swarm of giants appeared on the horizon. My heart plummeted. Not again. Did the raven really think she could topple me this way?
Ari jerked straighter, her muscles tensing. By Hel, no, I didn’t want her in the fray with me, seeing that fury even closer up. Risking the smack of my hammer if my aim didn’t fly true, the sear of my lightning.
“Back,” I said roughly, waving at her. “Keep away. This is my battle.”
