by Eva Chase
And Loki. My trickster. My stomach knotted all over again remembering the way he’d talked to Hod, the way he’d defended how he’d guided Baldur’s death. How could that be the same man who’d brushed aside the way the gods had tormented him before, who’d reassured me that I didn’t need to be angry on his behalf?
I’d known he might be dangerous. Was that his nature, like the fire he could conjure? Simmering hot below the surface until a sharp gust sent him flaring, burning everyone around him?
I didn’t have all the answers yet. I’d barely had a chance to ask the questions. Muninn had suggested that the gods had expected a lot from me without giving anything in return, but they’d given me a lot. I wouldn’t be alive at all if not for them. I wouldn’t have these powers. They’d been there with me, supporting me, every step of this journey until now.
No. I couldn’t abandon them. Hell, even the thought of what they might be going through right now made my heart ache.
“Thanks for the offer,” I said, standing up, “but I’m going to have to say no thanks. So, go ahead and do whatever you’ve got to do. I’m with them.”
Muninn’s gaze followed me as she stayed put in her chair. Her jaw tightened. “Have you really thought this through?”
What did it matter to her that much anyway? In there, I was just one more person for her to torment, wasn’t I? I couldn’t see how she’d need a helper that much, one she couldn’t just find somewhere else among the dark elves or whoever.
I paused. It wasn’t really about how I could help her out here, was it? It was about how I might hurt her in there.
“You’re right,” I said. “I hadn’t thought it all the way through. You don’t even really want an alliance with me, do you? You’re just worried about me being in your little ‘holding cell’ because I don’t share that many memories with the others. It’s too easy for me to see through your constructs when I’m with them. Too easy for me to shake up their memories with an outside perspective.”
“You don’t know anything,” she said, her tone turning haughty. Her chin rose.
“I know I’m going to shatter this prison,” I shot back. “I know you know it too, or you wouldn’t be scared enough of me to try to wine and dine me. Maybe I should be the one making you offers. Let us out now, and we won’t—”
She made a strangled sound and thrust out her hands. “Have the world you want then. It’ll only get worse.”
I stumbled backward—and out through an open door that hadn’t been there an instant before.
14
Baldur
I tried to hold on. With every shred of strength I had in me, I tried. But the darkness swelled from right inside me, blotting out the courtyard and the wall I’d been braced against and my fellow gods. Blotting out me. I was nothing more than a thought in an infinite void, a dark cold expanse that went on and on and yet closed around me so tightly I struggled to breathe.
Silence echoed in my ears. No taste met my tongue, no scent reached my nose. No sensation touched me at all except frigid nothingness.
My mind shuddered. I had the impulse to close the eyes I could no longer feel, as if I could shut out the darkness with more darkness. Maybe they were already closed. I tried to grope and flail, but I couldn’t tell if I was even moving. A shudder rattled through my thoughts.
Not this again. By all that was sacred, no.
It would be over. I grasped on to that fact the moment it rose up in my mind. This wasn’t forever. It was only a trick of Muninn’s. She was emulating the cold dark of death I’d lingered in for years and years that seemed like an eternity, when I’d thought it might be an eternity after all. I’d had no idea, that first time, that I’d be reborn. For all I’d known, I was destined to drift in that chilling nothingness until my thoughts completely disintegrated and—
No. It wasn’t doing me any good remembering that fear. I had to fight this. Muninn wanted to destroy us, and I couldn’t let her.
If only she hadn’t chosen her weapon so well.
Focus on what came after. Focus on the warmth and the light. Light to burn away the darkness she’d summoned. I tightened my hold on my thoughts and turned them in that direction.
It had been warm and light, that moment when I’d opened my eyes to a field on the edge of Asgard, tall grass hissing around me in a late spring breeze, the sun beaming overhead. With all that sensation around me all at once after so long in the void, I hadn’t known how to process it. I just lay there for what felt like hours, soaking it in, my thoughts settling behind a fog of calm I summoned with the light. I needed that fog to drown out everything before: the cold and the dark and the nothingness.
Maybe it hadn’t been all that long, though. When I’d stood up in the field, other gods and goddesses all around me were just finding their feet too. We turned, taking in each other and the halls of our great city, tall and shining, beyond the grass. A few of the others had started to laugh in pure delight. Tears streamed down one goddess’s face past her brilliant smile. I’d smiled back automatically. I didn’t know what they’d been through, but I could understand their joy.
I’d turned again and found myself face to face with Hod.
The last time I’d faced him—no. I cut off that thought, that memory, and the flare of darkness that clung onto it.
“Brother,” he’d said roughly.
I couldn’t say how he’d recognized me. We’d been by each other’s side so often from the moment we were born, he probably could have read my presence in the rhythm of my breath, in the shift of my weight against the ground. He’d told me once that he could feel the light in me even if he couldn’t see it.
I opened my arms, and he stepped into them. We’d never hugged all that much even as children, but that moment had seemed like the time for it. He’d squeezed me hard and stepped back, tension still strung all through his body.
“Brother, I—”
I cut him off instinctively, my mind sinking deeper into that fog of light. “It’s good to be back, isn’t it?” I teased my fingertips over the blades of grass. “It’s wonderful.”
He swallowed with a bob of his throat. “Yes. Yes, it is. Everything feels as it was. Does it look the same?”
I considered the city again. Was the gleam slightly more muted? I didn’t know if I could trust my memories from before the void. It had crept through every part of me. Tarnished every image I’d ever held.
A cold shiver ran through me. I sank deep into the haze.
“As magnificent as it ever was.” I beckoned him with a brush of my fingers against his sleeve. “Let’s go home.”
We hadn’t made it all the way to the city in that first go. We’d only taken a few steps when a tall imposing figure moved to join us.
Our father, the Allfather, had been reborn with his travel-worn cloak draped across his shoulders and his dented broad-brimmed hat still shading his single bright eye and the scar of the other. He looked as if he hadn’t so much come back from the dead as from a ramble around Midgard.
“My sons,” he’d said in his low voice. He clapped Hod on the shoulder and pulled me into a brief but tight embrace. “It’s been too long.”
His gaze traveled across the field and paused on Frigg, our mother. She was watching us from where she’d hesitated in the middle of the crowd of reborn Aesir. Something in Odin’s face darkened.
I didn’t understand it then, didn’t let myself focus on it long enough to ask, but later I learned their marriage had started to splinter not long after my death. He’d blamed her for the vows, for the game that had followed them and its tragic end. More, it’d seemed, than he blamed Loki, which had never made a lot of sense to me in the fleeting moments I’d let myself consider it. But my father’s deeper thoughts were often mysterious.
He prodded my side then, firmly but not hard enough to hurt. “The vows that were made on your mother’s behalf won’t apply to you in your rebirth,” he said, his tone going a bit gruff. “Don’t tempt fate by preten
ding invulnerability.”
“Of course not,” I said.
I’d seen my own wife then: the lovely Nanna. She darted through the grass to join us and linked her arm around mine, tipping her head against my shoulder with a sigh that was almost a sob. Even as I raised my hand that first time to draw her closer to me, the fog I’d wrapped around myself crept into the space between us.
No matter how much light I summoned to cloud out the past, I knew I wasn’t the god she’d married. I’d left too much behind in the darkness of the void. Not many marriages of Asgard had survived the first century after Ragnarok, but ours had crumbled faster than most.
In the present, in Muninn’s false-void, I shivered. There wasn’t much warmth in the memory of our falling apart. If I stayed there, the raven won. I cast my mind further forward instead.
The only figure of real importance I hadn’t seen in the field that day was Loki himself. It was only some time later he’d come to me as I’d taken a stroll through the orchard. Another bright spring day, but I couldn’t say whether it’d been just a few weeks after our reawakening or the next year. The days had blurred together with the haze around my thoughts.
“Oh, Light One,” he’d said in his jaunty tone, falling into step beside me. But he’d kept a cautious distance between us, his head dipping somewhat deferentially. “I hope there aren’t any hard feelings—bygones left to be bygones and all that? I’ve never borne you any animosity. The circumstances being what they were—making the best of a bad situation…”
“I hold no grudges,” I told him. I didn’t want to feel anything, didn’t want to think anything about the time before the field at all.
He’d given me his brightest grin, brilliant enough to rival a blazing fire, and we’d never spoken of it again. You could say a lot of things about the trickster, but one thing he knew how to be without flaw was circumspect, if he felt he owed you that much.
That memory sent me sliding back into the dark of the present. The sharp words thrown back and forth between my brother and Loki as I’d spiraled into this place. I tried to squeeze those images out of my mind.
The cold squeezed tighter around me at the same time. Darkness choked the throat I couldn’t otherwise feel. A jolt of panic scattered my thoughts.
Light. I needed light. That was the only way I could fight this.
Normally I could will a warm glow out of myself simply by wanting to. Light clung to me and wound through me the way shadows came to Hod. I willed a burst of brightness into the space around me, as if I didn’t already know how that would end.
The light and the warmth vanished into the void, swallowed up the second they left me as if they’d never been there. The chill seeped even deeper.
I propelled more light out and felt it leached away from me before I caught control of myself. There was no point in feeding brightness to the dark. I had to pull back inside myself, hold on to the light I could find there. Just staying sane would be a victory. Muninn could wound me, but only as deeply as I let her.
There’d been so much light in my life, even in the years waiting for Odin’s return on Midgard. Loki, eyes always gleaming with mischief, hair shining like fire, beaming as he made his sly jokes. Thor’s jovial voice as he roared with laughter and passed on a plate of food while we sat by the crackling hearth. The walks I’d taken with Freya through the countryside, both of us quiet in a mutual understanding that we wanted company, not conversation.
And Hod, who dwelled in his own darkness so much that even a glimpse of light from him could fill a room. The times he’d stopped by the music room and leaned back to listen to me play, a rare smile crossing his face… I treasured every memory like that.
I’d seen his smile more in the last couple weeks, when he watched Aria. Our valkyrie lit something in my brother without even realizing it. But then, she had almost as much fire in her as Loki did. My memories of her glinted in my mind: her lilting voice as she’d sung along with my guitar, her grin warm or fierce depending on the situation in front of us.
Maybe not fire. Her strength and brightness were like she was made of steel forged out of sunlight.
Even as I thought that, the memory I’d been hiding myself in dimmed. A wash of cold crept through it, dulling Ari’s shine. I whipped my thoughts from her to Hod, to Loki, to our other companions, but the darkness chased after me.
That had happened before too. The void had crept inside me until it’d filled every crevice in my head, tainted even my fondest memories.
I couldn’t let that happen. I couldn’t fall into that endless pit again. I’d left too much behind the first time. What would be left of me if I lost myself a second time? The others, all of them—they needed me in this battle.
The panic shivered through me. I tried to twist and pin down my thoughts, but they flitted every which way, fleeing the fingers of cold. I hadn’t been ready for this.
I hadn’t let myself be, I’d been so afraid to even consider it might happen.
A different memory rose up, one not bright or warm but tinged with regret. Hod had come to me wanting to talk about that moment in the courtyard, about what I might have gone through afterward, just a few days ago. I’d turned him away. I’d told him there was no need. I’d snapped at him to stop.
I’d been wrong. How had I ever convinced myself that I’d somehow made my peace with the past? I simply hadn’t dwelled in it and had called that peace enough. But now that I was forced to dwell in it again, I didn’t have the slightest idea how to fend it off. I had nothing but the panic and the dread rising up beneath it.
Just breathe. I clung onto that idea as closely as I could. Just breathe with the lungs I couldn’t feel, the air I couldn’t taste. In and out. Think of nothing but that. I had to hold on as long as I could. Eventually this would be over. Eventually Muninn would decide I’d had enough. Maybe I couldn’t fight, but I could endure.
Let me not have lost too much by the time she gave in. And if I ever got another chance to talk, to push aside the haze and tackle the truth with someone who cared—skies above, let me not waste it.
15
Aria
I should have known I’d end up somewhere bad after Muninn’s warning, after the anger on her face. But somehow I wasn’t prepared to find myself skidding to a stop in the living room of my old house, with the sour smell seeping from the stained carpet and the sofa cushions sagging in the dim light that made it past the blinds. Every muscle in my body tensed instinctively, even though I was alone in the room.
Alone for that brief moment. I spun around, and Mom appeared in the doorway to the kitchen, her expression taut as a wrung towel.
She jabbed a finger at me. “Don’t give me that look. As if you deserve half the time and energy I already give to you. Why don’t you stay in your room where I don’t have to see that pinched face of yours? You don’t like dinner? Get a job and buy it yourself.”
It was a patchwork of rants from across my childhood. Lord only knew which dinner I’d complained about—a lot of the time she’d just tossed a few pieces of bread and some margarine on the table and told Francis and me to go at it. By the time I was thirteen, a year after his death, I had started picking up odd jobs to keep me out of the house and put a little more food in my belly. She’d been making that suggestion since I was something like five, if she bothered to answer a complaint at all instead of just rolling her eyes and turning her back on me.
“Why don’t you get a job?” I snapped back now before I had a chance to think better of engaging. My nerves jittered. Who else was going to appear? That hair-cut—lank, shoulder-length, and bleached a yellower blonde—that was circa the Trevor years. An icier shudder ran through me.
“Don’t you talk to me like that, you little bitch!” Mom screeched. I was already diving for the door at the other end of the room. I dashed through the mudroom that was more of a trash bin, out to the backyard where the rusted swing set left by the house’s former owners was creaking.
If I got far enough away, would Muninn just throw me back here? Might as well find out. I’d rather be running than waiting around for the real horror show to start. What I really needed was to find at least one of the other gods. The raven woman had all but confirmed it with her reactions. When we were together, challenging the memories, her prison got so much shakier.
I scrambled over the dented chain-link fence and dashed down the neighbor’s driveway. The growl of a familiar engine, the one that had taught me to burrow myself deep under my covers if I heard it arriving late at night—as if that would protect me any—carried down the street.
My heart stuttered. I threw myself in the opposite direction.
I was stronger than that now. If he came at me, if Muninn forced the issue, I’d slit his fucking throat. The thought was sickening and satisfying at the same time.
I rounded the corner, past the laundromat and off-brand burger place. How far was she going to let me run? Maybe I’d just make for the park. Have a nice little jog to stretch my legs while I figured my way out of this.
I veered toward the next street, and Loki came stumbling out of an alley to my left. He managed to right himself with such assured grace you’d almost have thought he tossed himself around like that on purpose.
His bright gaze snagged on mine. “There you are. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to track you through this memory maze?”
