by Kira Brady
Every inch of her body hurt. That was an understatement. A trail of blood followed her, leading any pursuers right to the Underground lair. Fuck. One more reason for Norgard to rip her a new one. She choked at that. Maybe dying would be easier. More bearable. But she couldn’t die out on the street where her empty shell would be free for any old vengeful spirit to seize. She had to make it to someone who would dispose of her properly. No way in hell she was coming back as one of those monsters to terrorize the living.
She owed that much to her parents. To Moll and Oscar and Hart. To Bear, wherever he’d run off to.
Damned Bear. If he’d been there she wouldn’t have been tricked.
But maybe he had been there, and she just couldn’t remember, falling up and over and through the rabbit hole in the topsy-turvy web of the dream.
More tears dripped down her cheeks, filling her mouth with the salt and tang of blood. The tunnel walls spun around her in a kaleidoscope of brick, beam, and broken crockery. The refuse of a century ago collected in the gutter along the side of the wooden boardwalk. One arm in front of the other, she dragged herself forward, pushed with her unbroken leg. Every movement burned with agony. Every breath felt like a stab with a butcher knife.
She wanted to stop, just to rest here a moment. Maybe this was far enough. Surely the runners would have seen her by now and could get to her body before the wraiths did.
Hands rolled her over and lifted her. Blackness—sweet, sweet, blackness—curled over her. She wanted to let it sweep her away, to sink down into oblivion and end this terrible pain.
“For fuck sake, stay with me, Reaper!” Panic in a voice that was usually calm. Oscar’s blurred face. His long, cunning fingers gripped her jaw. “What’d’ya do this time, bitch? Do I have to babysit your ass all the time?” His hazel eyes swam above her. Three of them, no, five.
She tried to speak, to tell him not to worry. It was a relief, really, to leave this weary realm.
A shadow passed over her, and Oscar’s face was replaced by something far less pleasant. No, she wanted to scream. Please, no. Surely this time she was too far gone.
“Ah, my sweet.” The sound of Norgard’s voice cut deep inside her, twisting, corkscrewing into her vulnerable soul. There were worse things than bodily injury. “Take her to my chambers.”
Suddenly she wished she had let the wraiths take her. Better to die and become a flesh-eater than to live with this.
Please, she wanted to beg. Please don’t let him take me.
But in the way of dreams her tongue wouldn’t heed her command. Useless. Lolling.
Oscar didn’t look away, but he didn’t do anything to stop it.
Coward.
No, Grace was the coward.
The giant, carved wood bed slipped into view, and she fought harder against the cottoning fever dream. Above her, the painted ceiling swirled with color and flames—Dante’s hell illustrated and expanded by some manic artist with a paintbrush and an opium pipe.
Wings unfurled across her vision—giant, scaly things, purple-grey skin stretched across the long fingering bones. The mattress sagged beneath the weight of the monster that bent over her, kneeling between her spread legs. The sound of ripping fabric. Jeans and shirt sliced from her body. The fabric stuck to her wounds, and she stifled another moan as it was roughly pulled away. Norgard’s erection burned high against her naked thigh, seeking entrance.
Everything had a price.
She watched, detached, as he scraped one long claw across his throat and blue-black blood welled from the cut. A shimmering droplet fell, scalding her tongue when it landed. It rolled, thick and unbearably sweet, down her throat.
Without his blood she would die. It would only cost her soul.
Grace fixed her eyes on the painted image of the gates above her head, and surrendered all hope.
Chapter 4
Grace gasped awake and found herself in an unfamiliar alcove. Mechanic odors thickened the air: biodiesel and oil, smoke, but also honey, for some strange reason, and beneath it all lurked iron and a hint of cinnamon. Drekar.
She reached for her knife, but it wasn’t at her hip. For a moment she was disoriented. She fell off the cot and landed hard on her side, knocking over a small table and shattering the glass of water that had been sitting on it. She swore and staggered to her feet.
Norgard was dead. He couldn’t hurt her anymore.
But his brother could. She steeled herself. Her jacket was unzipped, her corset askew, her boots off. Not the way she’d left them. Oh, Freya. Seen one soul-sucker, seen them all. She shouldn’t expect anything different.
Leif Asgard heard her banging and appeared from around the corner. His face would make angels weep: glowing skin, square jaw, tousled hair in varying shades of blond, and those green eyes that shone like jewels. He was too gorgeous to be real, and he didn’t even know it. A smear of oil crossed one chiseled cheekbone. His hair stuck up at odd angles. Even messy, he was beautiful. Large brass goggles were pushed on top of his head as if he had just stepped away from an experiment. “You’re up.”
She tore her eyes away. It was a trick. The devil walked in fancy skin. The room, now that she examined it, was a little alcove off the larger room. It was crammed like a rat’s nest with brass boilers and metal pipes, beakers and tincture jars, and shiny copper wiring. She was in the bowels of the Drekar Lair, in the mad scientist’s laboratory. She’d never been here before.
“Welcome.” He wiped oil off his hands with a rag and stuck one out to shake. “Let’s start off on the right foot this time, shall we? Leif.”
She busied herself rechecking her clothing. She zipped the hoodie up to her chin.
He cleared his throat and withdrew his hand. “I wasn’t sure how long you would be out, so I brought you home. The lab took a bit of a beating in the Unraveling, but at least it didn’t slide into the sea like some of the Sound-side rooms.” He brushed a bit of earth off a nearby pipe. “Almost good as new.”
She made him nervous. This was Asgard’s sanctuary, and he’d brought her here. What did that say about him? That he trusted a blood-sworn mercenary? That he thought she wouldn’t slit his throat and run at the soonest opportunity? He was an idiot. He might own her soul, but she would never make it easy for him.
Asgard shifted his weight. “Are you recovered?”
“Where’s my knife?”
“A remarkable instrument,” he said. “Where did you get it?”
“And what happened to my bike?”
“It was a bike? It looked like a junkyard reject—”
“It was mine!”
“Calm down.” He held up his hands. “The death trap is parked outside. Your cat is safe too.”
“My—don’t touch my cat!” She focused on his forehead so she wouldn’t have to meet his eyes. I’ve seen you naked, his eyes would say. You weren’t half bad.
Asgard stilled. The air in the room seemed to shrink.
“You’ve got what you want. Now give me back my stuff.”
“I got what I want,” he repeated slowly. The scent of iron rose with his anger. “And what exactly did I want?”
Damned if she would spell it out for him. His brother had liked playing mind games.
“Look at me when you accuse me of being dishonorable,” he demanded. “Or are you such a coward that you can’t come out and say it? You don’t even know me.”
“I know enough.”
“Is that so?” His voice dropped. His rolled shirtsleeves displayed muscular forearms and a faint dusting of coal. His hands were stained reddish brown with the distilled essence of biodiesel. Why didn’t he get a slave to do his dirty work? The Drekar Regent shouldn’t be filling his own smoky lamps. Shouldn’t he be out trying to take over the world? Or repopulating his family of monsters? That’s what his brother would have done. Norgard would have crowned himself king of all Seattle by now and set to work trying to knock up every surviving woman.
“What have I done to deserve t
his evil reputation?” Asgard asked.
“Regent—”
“I’m not my brother.”
She met his gaze then. His eyes pierced her fragile armor. Same as his brother, he could strip her with a glance. Norgard would have stopped there, letting his eyes rove over her flesh as if she were naked and available anytime he bloody well chose.
Asgard wasn’t content to fondle her curves. His eyes stripped off the shielding black and barreled on through, probing beneath skin and muscle to the heart of her.
It freaked her the fuck out.
She crossed her arms over her chest. “Prove it. Let me go.”
“I’m not keeping you here—”
“No.” She raised her chin and pointed to the spot beneath her jacket where the gold slave band burned her skin. “Let me go.”
Asgard ran a hand through his hair. “I was afraid you’d say that. I can’t—”
“Fine.” He refused to free her. He was exactly like his brother. She would pay off the debt herself. “Give me back my knife and let me get back to work.”
“How do you feel?”
She grimaced. What kind of question was that? She felt like a million bucks. Rested, repaired, like her ribs had never met a brick or piece of rebar in her life. Drekar blood hummed through her system like an amphetamine. She could run a marathon, fight a dozen aptrgangr. There was nothing like Drekar blood to cure what ailed you, except of course for the price of the damned stuff.
Asgard reached out to touch her, and she jerked back. He let his hand fall open. He had large hands. Working hands. Oil and grease and coal dust under his nails. He should have chapped, calloused skin, but his damned magic blood wouldn’t let a single cell get busted. Immortal, Drekar had blood that regenerated every wound except one.
She’d seen a Drekar die once. A sly red-haired bastard named Vikinstrom who liked his girls young and his sex bloody. Grace didn’t know what crime had been the last straw for Norgard, but she had been in the Great Hall the day Vikinstrom died. Norgard had pulled the great bone sword from the pommel of his throne and sliced the Dreki’s head clean off before he could open his mouth to scream. Blood had sprayed. Oh, so much precious wasted blood. She’d waited for the head to regrow or the spinal column to reach out and reknit itself. But it had lain there in a pool of red. The eyes in the severed head had stared up at the great jeweled ceiling.
She’d never looked at Norgard the same way again. He’d given her hope; that was the moment she knew he could be killed.
But the Unraveling had stolen even that revenge from her.
Asgard cleared his throat. The green in those eyes was like the bottom of the sea. Gorgeous and otherworldly. She forced herself to imagine what they’d look like in death, staring empty and shocked, just like Vikinstrom. Yes, he could be killed, but who then would inherit the ring? Thorsson? That would be worse.
“How do you feel inside?” he asked. “Rundown? Heart heavy? Or is that your normal state of existence?”
She took a good look at her emotional state and was shocked to find herself perfectly normal. A little angry. A little scared. But none of that bone-weary fatigue or dirty sensation that usually defined her postcoital state.
It didn’t mean anything. Maybe he was telling the truth. How could her body be healed if he hadn’t fucked her? It would change her understanding of the way things worked. It would change her history, her justification for the last four years. She didn’t want to examine it too closely.
“Fine,” she snapped. “I need to get back to work.”
“You had old bruises. I guess I don’t have to ask why you haven’t been healing them. But I have to wonder how you got them. Why have you been fighting? What could possibly possess a tiny thing like you to go hunting aptrgangr when you don’t have to?”
“What should I be doing—painting my nails? Serving Ishtar?”
“Gods no—”
“Then what? You haven’t sent me on any missions—”
“Exactly. You should have stayed out of trouble.”
“Aptrgangr are rising faster than the Kivati can put them down. Humans are being killed. They need me.”
A muscle twitched in his jaw. “So it’s altruistic.”
“By Freya, no. I need the money. You think this blood debt is going to pay itself?”
He studied her, his eyes raking her body. She knew what he saw: muscled from fighting, lean and a little underweight. She had never been curvy and feminine, but now her cheekbones were a little too sharp. The glint in her eye, a little too hungry. Who knew why Norgard had been drawn to her? She was sinew and bone, and he could have had anyone.
“Why did he train you as a fighter?” Asgard asked.
She crossed her arms. “I’m good.”
Asgard’s eyes dipped to her lips. “There’s something . . . odd about you,” he said, half to himself. Absently, he pulled a small brass spyglass from his pocket and put it to his eye. Humming to himself, he adjusted the gears and studied her through the glass. Nothing he’d done so far had been this impersonal.
I’m not a science experiment, she wanted to growl. “That’s Hart’s.”
“The Deadglass?” He dropped it from his eye and turned it over in his hands. “My brother had it commissioned when he first arrived in Seattle. Do you know the story?”
She shook her head. That had been over a century ago. The Drekar and Kivati were equally out of touch with real people time.
“There was no war then.” He flipped the Deadglass and his hand clenched over the brass. “The artist was a Dreki who fell in love with a Kivati girl. It might have all turned out, but . . .”
“But the Kivati hate the Drekar.”
He gave a sad smile. “Even Paris couldn’t call a truce between these two houses. My brother was power hungry. He used the distraction to make his move. Burned the city to the ground. This Deadglass is one of only two in existence. The only one, I guess, now that Sven took his monocle to the bottom of the sea. Do you know what it does?”
Hart, a fellow mercenary, now free, had showed it to her a couple times. “Shows ghosts.”
“More than that. It sees that which cannot be seen with the naked eye.”
Grace raised her chin. “And what do I look like in the glass?”
“A beautiful woman who sparkles with a thousand stars.”
She balled her hands. The moment was suddenly too warm. “Where is my knife?”
He shook himself. “Fighting. Such a waste.” Turning from her, he led the way into the adjoining room. Machinery filled every inch of space. The air clotted with steam and loud noises. In the center of the room, a dozen biodiesel lamps lit a long worktable. Wires snaked across a pile of castoff metal, tubes and a man-sized sheet curved like a chest plate.
On top of the chest plate, curled in a ball, lay the cat. Bear looked perfectly at home. Asgard reached for him.
“Don’t! Bear doesn’t like to be touched.”
Asgard raised an eyebrow. “No?”
“ No.”
As if to test her, Asgard put his fingers on the cat’s fur and stroked. Grace waited for Bear to snarl and bite him, but instead the traitor purred. Asgard didn’t smirk. He turned his face to the cat. “I don’t know anything about the blood bond. I’ve never studied the old magics. They always smacked of superstition to me.”
“It’s real, all right.”
“I can see that. My work has always been of a scientific nature, but that won’t help break a magic bond. To study the bond, I’ll need to do some tests—”
“On me? Yeah, right.” Bear might have drunk Asgard’s Kool-Aid, but she wasn’t submitting to any of the mad scientist’s designs. Not willingly.
Asgard stepped away from Bear, and she breathed a sigh of relief. “Not curious, are you? Not even in the name of science?”
“I need to go.” She wasn’t going to let him test anything. She remembered the blood binding ceremony too well. Nothing could break it but paying off the debt. She w
as human, and he was Drekar, and there was nothing he had that she wanted except her freedom. And her cat. “I won’t say it’s been fun, but, you know, things to do and all.”
Asgard picked up a copper tube the size of a lipstick container. “The runes on your chest, what do they mean?”
She played with the zipper of her hoodie. He’d no reason to take off her clothes without her permission.
“Stop looking so affronted. Nothing happened. I would never force myself on an unwilling woman.” His voice snapped her head around. A trickle of smoke curled from his nostrils and floated to the ceiling.
Norgard hadn’t forced her. That was the rub of it. He had coerced, so she could never really claim she had told him no. It wasn’t rape then, was it? She had willingly succumbed to having her soul shredded, piece by piece. First, because she thought she loved him. Then, because she needed his blood. She was too jaded to believe in love anymore, but she knew sex cost good coin. Elsie had it right. Why give it away, when you could get rich from it?
Asgard growled low in his throat and fiddled with the copper tube. Suddenly a burst of blue fire erupted from the top.
She jerked back. “Warn a girl, would ya?”
Bear jumped off the table and hid. Leif tossed the lighter to her and she caught it. The tube weighed next to nothing, but it packed a punch. She flicked the hidden button on the bottom, and fire shot out.
“Careful,” Asgard said.
Freya, yeah. She could use this baby. There had to be a catch. “How does it work?”
“Curious now, are we?” He leaned against the table. His linen trousers draped artfully over long, muscled legs. The top few buttons of his white shirt were undone, revealing a sleek, rock-solid chest. Beneath the biodiesel lamps, his skin shone with the luster of a thousand tiny scales. By all rights he should be cold as a snake, but she knew if she touched him he would be hot. He was bigger, rawer than human men. His scent transmitted pure sex. He smiled lazily, and her knees wobbled.
“Turn off your fucking pheromones,” she snapped. “They don’t work on me.”
“If they don’t work, why should I turn them off?”
