“It wasn’t like you’d have been able to stop me becoming the uppskera. Destiny and all that,” I said in a harsh tone that sounded completely unconvincing.
He looked down at his shoes. “Doesn’t matter. I should have been here.”
Hell yeah, he should have. I had to clamp my jaw shut to keep those words in. I wanted to say it, and more. I wanted to hurt him like he’d hurt me. But that only made me feel more like a monster. Another part of me wanted to reach out to him, but I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. He had left me in my own private Nifleheimr—hell.
“You weren’t my keeper,” I said instead.
Wrinkles formed in the dark skin between his brows. “No, but I am your friend.” He swallowed hard after the soft words. “I ran into your father in the barn. Looks like you put him in his place.” He smiled a bit at the last part. The pride in his eyes made me tingle down to my toes. But sadness quickly replaced it. “Did I hear him right, that you’re engaged?” Why would he be sad? He’d never thought of me that way. He’d left me.
I lifted my head. “Yes, Elí Gabrielson.”
“Isn’t that a nephew of Isak’s?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“It surprises you that I’m engaged to a nephew of the alpha of the Arnoddr pack?”
A flustered look came over him, and his mouth worked a bit before words came out. “Yes. I mean no. But, yeah. You said you never wanted to get married. Was this your choice?”
I moved some papers around the desk, needing to look at anything but him as I answered. “Elí and I were friends throughout our senior year. My parents convinced Isak we would be a good match, and they made the arrangements.”
Vidar swallowed so hard I heard it. The sound was both satisfying and heartbreaking. “When is the wedding?”
“In August, when he gets back from visiting his parents in Quebec. He’s been studying molecular biology at UCLA.” I tried to sound proud, because I was, really. But it came out sounding a bit petulant.
He tried to move around the desk to catch my eye. “Do you love him?” he asked in a soft voice that cut deep into me.
I lifted my chin and looked him right in the eyes. “Vidar, you don’t get to come back here after four years of near-silence and ask me that.” I wasn’t going to tell him how agreeing to the marriage had gotten my parents to finally allow me to move out. Or how it had stopped my brother from beating me up on a daily basis. And I certainly wasn’t going to tell him that those had been the main reasons I’d agreed to it. He didn’t deserve to know that.
Vidar flinched as if I’d slapped him. “Fair enough,” he whispered. “You’re still going through with it, even though you’re the uppskera now?”
“Of course I am.” I had to. It was the honorable thing to do, and being honorable meant more to me than just about anything. Honor was all I had that separated me from my horrible family. Besides, I wouldn’t want to disrespect Elí or Isak by backing out.
“How will that work? Being married and being the uppskera?”
I waved a hand in a dismissive gesture. “Don’t know. I’ll figure it out as I go.”
Upper lip curled in distaste, Vidar looked around. “I thought you hated this old barn.” The abrupt and obvious change of subject would have made me smile if it weren’t so sad.
To hide the chill that danced over me, I turned my back to him and returned to the lock box. Just looking at him was almost harder than I could handle. Time and distance had made me want him more and here he was in the flesh—really hot, hard flesh at that. My mind was pissed at him for leaving me for so long, but my heart was glad he was back. It should have felt like a betrayal to Elí, but it didn’t. While he wrote to me every week and sent me gifts all the time, only one of us was in love, and it wasn’t me.
“I do hate this place, but I have to find out more about what Calder was up to. Hopefully something in here will lead me to him. You heard what happened, I take it.” It had to be why he was here. He had only just received his bachelor’s degree in science and I knew he wanted to go for his master’s. He’d left not only the temple, but the university, and all because of this damn uppskera thing. If I hadn’t become the uppskera, would he have even come back? Doubtful.
Footsteps almost too light for such a big man crunched across the dirty floor. Clearly the temple had been good for his ninja skills. That thought made my lips turn up. The boy I had known had loved not only comic book superheroes, but also the ninjas in Japanese manga.
“You think he had more to do with this than just ensuring your power awoke?” His voice—deeper than I remembered—vibrated along my skin.
I had to give myself a mental shake to stop picturing him sprawled on his bed reading comics. He had been cute then. Now he was downright sexy. I did not want to see him that way. Not after he had abandoned me.
“I’m fairly certain he did.” Did I sound breathy? Shit, I think I did.
I picked the lock box up and set it on the desktop. It had to weigh at least fifty pounds, though it was no more than the size of a shoebox. While that posed no issue for my werewolf strength in lifting it, it may for opening it. Claws extending, I picked at the seams. The metal didn’t even dimple. Leave it to my brother to find something hard enough to resist werewolf claws. I halted my efforts as I felt Vidar hovering over my shoulder.
“I’m so sorry, Ayra. I saw Dustin at Crescent Coffee. He told me how bad Calder became after I left. If I’d known, I would have come back and put that dog in his place. I wish you would have mentioned it in your letters. I should have been here.” His voice rumbled so close behind me that I could feel it against my back.
Oh, how I wanted to lean into all that hard muscle and lose myself. I shoved the stupid thought aside and started picking at the box again. One, Vidar had only ever seen me as the young girl I had been, his best friend, but one he had left behind. Two, the day he left my brother started “training me to fight”, which translated as daily beatings in the guise of sparring matches. I couldn’t even begin to tell Vidar how bad Calder had gotten after he’d left.
“Stop apologizing. You were accepted into the Verndari temple in Iceland, the highest form of lögreglu training for our kind, and Reykjavik University. You couldn’t pass those opportunities up. Now you can be a lögreglu with a science degree like you always wanted. Fighting crime one tornado at a time.” The words both sounded and tasted bitter. I wanted to yell and scream instead, but my good girl programming was hard to override.
A lögreglu—the Icelandic werewolf version of a cop—with a master’s in science and renewable energy were a combination I had always teased him good-naturedly about. Partly because I figured he only wanted the master’s in science because he wanted to help me with my lightning channeling problem. Always wanting to help, that was Vidar. But it was more than that. He wanted to be like the superheroes he read about. It had to be why he was back; to achieve glory through me.
I ground my teeth against what I really wanted to say until I had my anger under control. “Besides, I had to learn to stand up for myself,” I finished, as if my last encounter with my brother hadn’t left me cowering.
But that was before. I was stronger now. Now, I would stand up to him. I had to. By biting in the unwilling, he risked exposing our kind. He also risked drawing the attention of other shifters and races that wouldn’t want a light shone on the things that went bump in the night. If that happened, it would be the Salem Witch Trials all over again, only with werewolves burning at the stake. The violence and fear in this world was already reaching a crescendo. All it needed was a focus. Our kind would be that focus if we were outed.
I wanted to cling to my anger, but it was hard to do so with Vidar so close. I had waited so long to see him again. But not now, not like this. There could be no future for us now that I was the reaper and engaged. Not that there could have been before. Some part of me had always known my dreams of chasing storms with him were just that—schoolgirl dreams that would never be.
/> “Here, this should help,” his deep voice broke into my ruminating.
A key dangling from Vidar’s hand appeared over my shoulder. I snatched it up and slid it into the lock. It fit and turned.
“Where did you find this?” I asked.
“I know where Calder used to hide his important stuff. Apparently that hasn’t changed.”
The box held only one thing: a small black book. I sat it on top of the box and opened it. Names with dates and locations next to them filled the page. The dates began thirty years ago. My eyes strayed to the clippings on the walls. With shaking hands, I picked the book up and carried it to the earliest of the clippings. The names in the book didn’t match the names of the victims, and the dates were days, sometimes weeks off the clippings. I flipped through the pages. More of the same filled them.
“This doesn’t make any sense,” I muttered to myself.
Behind me Vidar walked the room, cursing softly in Icelandic as he perused the gruesome wallpaper. It took every ounce of control I had to focus on the book instead of watching him. Oh Odin, I had missed him. The asshole. Finally, about halfway through the book I came to a page filled with writing instead of just a list of names and dates. This was more of a diary entry dated about twenty-one years ago.
Despite my efforts, the power still hasn’t awakened in me. It doesn’t make sense. I’ve made plenty of rogue varúlfur in need of being put down. I am of the uppskera bloodline, the power should have awakened in me by now.
The next entry sent chills shooting through me.
My sister was born today. It turns out the mark doesn’t appear after the awakening, one is born with it. She will be the next uppskera. Not me. Her. After all I did to make sure the power awakened. How could I have been so stupid?
“Oh, Odin. How could he have…?”
The book fell from my hands, sending up a puff of dust as it hit the ground. Such cruelty was extreme even for my brother, or so I had thought. To bite in so many against their will and leave them to deal with the becoming on their own, knowing full well they would go mad or kill, it was tyrannical. Vidar was suddenly at my side, bending to pick it up, and I hadn’t even heard him move. I was starting to think ninjas had nothing on verndari trained at the Icelandic temple. He was silent for a moment as he read.
“That son of Loki. I never would have thought he was capable of this,” Vidar whispered.
I swallowed hard. “Me neither. I suspected he had bitten in at least one person against their will, but this, this is…” The lump in my throat wouldn’t allow me to finish.
The tenderness toward a man who detested me and bullied me my entire life, the weakness, I hated it. Anger rose in me and devoured that tenderness as if it were kindling.
“I have to find him. He has to answer for what he’s done,” I said through gritted fangs.
“Yes, he must.”
“But where do I start? Where would he have gone?”
I flipped through the journal a bit more. A page toward the end caught my attention. Calder’s handwriting on these last pages was a messy, passionate scrawl.
If we are condemned to exile on this world, we might as well rule it. And who better to sit on that throne than me? My sister may be the uppskera, but I will be the one who leads our kind into the light. Mine will be the greater destiny in the end.
The first step to that is coming out as a species. The second is war. I must continue to bite in the worst of the worst, build an army of them, and then activate our sleeper agents in the governments.
First attack: July.
“He’s insane. Our kind will be slaughtered in droves,” I murmured.
Vidar cursed in Icelandic and nodded. “He is, and that’s the problem. He’ll leave a trail of bodies for us to find him by.”
Keeping my face as emotionless as possible, I turned to him. “Us? No. The uppskera works alone.”
Slowly, as if trying not to startle me, he took one of my hands in his. As much as his touch thrilled me, I did not like being handled like a porcelain doll. I was the reaper, for the Gods’ sakes. I could hardly blame him, though. When he had left, I had been an insecure teenager nearly at the bottom of the pack. It would take him time to get used to the fact that I was now more powerful than most alphas. Helheimr, it would take me time to get used to that. But the bottom line was that he had no right to handle me at all. He’d lost that right the moment he left me behind.
“The leitar has her kennari, and the uppskera has their verndari,” he said.
I laughed, the sound coming out bitter. “Vidar, the uppskera doesn’t need a protector.”
He shook his head and gripped my hand when I tried to pull away. “You misunderstand. The uppskera’s verndari isn’t to protect them from others, but from themselves. Reaping takes a toll, Ayra. You’ll need someone with you.”
It wasn’t just the line of an old, concerned friend who felt guilty for leaving me. Part of me wished it were. The old uppskera journals that I had been reading since childhood mentioned such issues. Some uppskera lost themselves in the reaping, others went insane. Not all, but enough to scare me sleepless as a child. None mentioned the reaper having a protector, though. I twisted my hand free of his grasp and took a step away. The pain etching lines into his face almost made me regret my actions. Almost.
“Please, just let me travel with you, help you find Calder, for the sake of our kind if nothing else. Then we can go from there. There’s still a lot we have to talk about,” he urged.
I tried not to read into what he meant by “go from there”. That was a dangerous road to travel. But I couldn’t deny that I wanted and needed help fighting Calder. The thought of facing off with him still sent a shot of fear through me.
Nodding, I met his gaze and held it. “Fine.”
One corner of his full lips lifted to expose his two right upper fangs. “Good, I have a score to settle with that dog.”
“Not before I do. When can you be ready to leave?”
No matter the cost, I would protect our kind from exposure. And, I would kill those who had forced this on me, my brother included. Hel hath no fury like mine. Maybe that’s because I’m a creature of it now. Or maybe I always was. I would make the people that forced it on me pay.
Starting now.
The fact that one of them was my own brother made a deeper, darker fury fester in me. He had to die. And if I had to take Vidar with me to accomplish that, so be it.
Chapter Three
Neither alpha, pack, nor Council stands above the uppskera.Only the Aesir themselves may govern the chosen of Odin.
~Uppskera Journals
Ayra
The town of Hemlock Hollow had always been a refuge for me. It had been my escape from my cruel family. From its thirty-acre round park in the center of town, to its library with an extensive section on storms and weather, it was the perfect getaway. A unique main street—or Aðal Street to us locals—that wrapped around the huge, circular park like the world’s biggest roundabout, ensured visitors drove in, around, and right back out. The great restaurants and ski shops sprinkled throughout the green spaces made it feel more like something that should be nestled in the hills of California or Colorado instead of Montana. But it wasn’t the shops, parks, or even the library that kept me coming back, it was the people.
I closed my brother’s journal and tucked it under my arm. So far I hadn’t found anything more about the war or his plans for an attack in July. I had no idea where to turn or which way to go yet. It frustrated the hell out of me to have a ticking time bomb over my head and no direction.
The towering pines and bushy aspens crowding the road gave way to Mike’s Malt Shop. Beneath its extensive covered patio a score of high school students sat enjoying summer break, eating burgers and milkshakes. Seeing them stung. My time in high school hadn’t been a thing like that. The blond waitress with enviable curves who skated her way through the patrons called out a hello and waved at me with the hand not balancing a tray.<
br />
“Hey, Ofelia,” I called back as I strode down the sidewalk.
On another day I would have stopped in for a shake and an update on the town talk. Not only did I have places to go, but I was the gossip. The heavy gazes of a score of high schoolers lifted as I passed several tall spruce trees growing up out of the wide green space between the sidewalk and street. After a jeweler and an art store, I took a left on Hemlock Street, which ended in a roundabout after only a few yards. A massive wrought iron gate stood at the entrance to a seven-foot-high rock wall that stretched behind all the businesses on Aðal Street.
Down by one of the ski shops I spotted a news van. A reporter primped in the mirror before turning to her cameraman. She fluffed her hair, pasted on a concerned look, and gave him the nod. Though they were forty feet away, my varúlfur hearing picked up her words clearly as if she stood beside me.
“We’re here in Hemlock Hollow, the town nestled between forest and a massive wolf preserve. There have been no reports of wolf attacks anywhere near Hemlock Hollow, which is odd considering the rash of attacks all across the rest of Montana and into parts of Idaho.”
She went on, but I turned away. I’d heard more than enough and didn’t want her getting wind of me and deciding I looked like a good person to interview. The chief would redirect her out of town soon enough. My teeth ground together. Poor wolves, getting a bad rap because of half-mad werewolves bitten in and abandoned to go through the change alone. For now the new werewolves were only killing livestock, but they would move on to more challenging prey if they weren’t brought under control. Sonya had her work cut out for her, but so did I. If I didn’t stop Calder from biting in new wolves, she’d never be able to keep up with saving them.
At the wrought iron gate, a press of a finger on the DNA detecting keypad told it I was local. Well-oiled hinges hummed as the gate slid open. The moment I was through, it closed behind me. Here, the businesses turned a bit more practical. Just past the hardware store I saw the sign for my destination. Tension began to lift from my shoulders when I pushed open the door to Nitro Moto.
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