Valkyrie's Call

by Michelle Manus

  He moved to the doorway, but when he tried to follow her outside she whipped around, the flat of her palm slamming into his chest with enough force to bump him back over the threshold.

  “Stay inside.”

  “It’s not a bomb, Kyrie, it’s a letter.”

  “Yes. But it’s addressed to me.”

  He looked down and saw she was right.

  “It isn’t ideal, but it isn’t surprising Danvers knows who I am, and I was in your company last night. If he tried your place and found it empty, it’s logical he would jump to mine. And since my wards don’t suffer from the intentional loopholes yours do, he can’t get in here without alerting us.”

  The envelope had been delivered via the Seclusion Courier, a private delivery service. A Null private delivery service. Aspect wards typically weren’t set to keep out Nulls—both because they weren’t much of a threat to anyone with Aspect, and because Aspecters, like most everyone else, preferred their packages actually arrive at their place of living—and Random’s were no exception.

  “There’s no one here,” he insisted. A blur descended from the sky and Nelsen hurtled down to land on the porch railing. Kyrie, who had readied and then relaxed her dagger in the space of a second after identifying Nelsen, gave the falcon a pointed glare, as if wondering how he could be so dumb as to appear out of nowhere at a tense time.

  “Let’s just ask Nelsen, shall we? Nelsen, is anyone on the property?” His Aspect caught the words and translated them for the bird, who replied with a series of noises that Random’s Aspect translated into a mental image of a barren field.

  “Nelsen says it’s all clear.”

  “Forgive me if I don’t take the bird’s word for it. I need to clear the area. Which means I need you to stay inside.”

  “You do realize I’m the one who broke your mystical chains of bondage last night, right? I’m not helpless, Kyrie.”

  She gave him that look, the one that told him there was no point in arguing with her.

  “Fine, I’ll stay inside.” But only because his Aspect hummed quietly inside him with the pleasant happiness it felt whenever Valkyrie was near, and none of the disquiet it felt when she was near and in danger. “But your coffee’s going to get cold.”

  He bent down to retrieve the envelope.

  “Leave it,” she snapped.

  “Yes, General.” He gave her a sharp salute that she ignored. To Nelsen, he said, “I’m sure that somewhere, deep down, she apologizes for her rude behavior.” Then he shut the door and went to put the bacon in the oven to keep it warm. For good measure, he dumped her coffee back into the carafe as well. She’d probably be half an hour before she was convinced the damn premises were safe.

  Valkyrie swept the perimeter of the house, despite her relative certainty that nothing was wrong. She’d looked out the peephole in time to see the courier service driving away and her senses, Aspect-heightened by the possibility of danger, hadn’t keyed in on anything more dangerous than a suicidal squirrel leaping through the tall pine trees that surrounded Random’s house.

  But Elijah Winters had trained her to be thorough no matter how benign a situation appeared, and she’d be damned if anything happened to Random because she’d been too lazy to take sensible precautions. He wasn’t helpless, but he also wouldn’t be in any danger at all right now if it weren’t for her.

  She should have asked him how large the property was, but while that would have made things easier it wasn’t, strictly speaking, necessary. She cast her Aspect out and searched for the wards that protected the home of every Aspecter powerful enough to create them. They were easy to find. Like the stickers on Null house windows that proclaimed the home was protected by such-and-such alarm system, wards wanted to be noticed. Their primary purpose was to declare that the property they protected was more trouble than it was worth to breach.

  Her power brushed against Random’s wards, her Aspect whispering against his like the soft touch of velvet against skin. Long tendrils of her power left her, disappeared into the wards and weaved themselves into the structure, adding her strength to Random’s cleverness.

  It was an instinctual thing, more her Aspect’s choice than hers, and it happened before she could think to stop it. Now that it had, she couldn’t believe Random had allowed it. Wards weren’t open to manipulation unless their maker wanted them to be. He would have felt her touch the moment she found the wards, could have kept her out with a lazy blink.

  A joint work like this, mixing Aspect—it was personal. It suggested an almost intimate level of trust between two people, which was why the only people who typically worked together in this fashion, actually blending Aspect together, tended to be close family members or lovers.

  Family. Random was her brother’s best friend. They had all grown up together. Of course he trusted her. Beneath the sarcastic playboy lay a core of practicality most people would never expect from Random, and he would have recognized the value her enhancements could bring to the wards. That was all. It had nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with her.

  She finished her sweep of the area around the house, her new connection to the wards obviating the need to physically search the entire property. Fortunate since, though she couldn’t put an exact acreage to it, she had the sense the property was large. Nothing near the fifty acres her father’s estate comprised, but maybe ten or so.

  She’d never envisioned Random as the type to want any amount of land. When they were younger, he’d frequently complained that she and Jace lived too far away from anything fun. Her confusion only mounted when she found the barn. She swept the building to verify it was empty, which it was. Completely empty. No horses, no tack, nothing. Why the hell would Random buy a property with equestrian facilities? Much less one with a ten-stall barn, three turnouts, two round pens, and an arena?

  Properties with these kinds of facilities did not come cheap, and while she suspected he did well for himself, she couldn’t imagine why he would spend his money on this. It was more her style than his, and he obviously hadn’t decided to buy an actual horse.

  She stalked back to the front door and swept up the envelope. She didn’t doubt Danvers knew her phone number and could have just as easily sent a text instead. He’d sent a letter for the same reason he’d put one in her house. He wanted her to know that he knew where she was. That he knew how to get to her.

  She pulled out the slip of paper and her blood went cold.

  Random Tremayne? Really, Ms. Winters, I’d have thought you’d have more sense than to get attached to anyone. Attachments can be so...fragile. So easily broken. I would hate for something to happen to him. And your father would be so disappointed.

  Valkyrie’s fingers clenched, wrinkling the edges of the paper. She didn’t like Danvers’ continual references to Elijah. Because, like Random, she couldn’t see her adoptive father bending to anyone’s will, much less that of the man he’d been hunting ever since her mother’s death.

  Elijah Winters didn’t have it in him to bend. Yes, torture could make a person say almost anything, but this was more than that. It was one thing for Danvers to know about her once-broken fingers, but this was different. It was in the tone of the words, the easy, casual knowledge that her father would be disappointed, and the implication of how Elijah’s disappointment with her typically expressed itself.

  It didn’t flow like the information gained when one man tortured another. It flowed like the information gained from two people who spoke to each other often, conversationally. Two people who were close. But what kind of trickery, what kind of power, could make Elijah close with the person who had ultimately caused her mother’s death? Her mother, the only person Elijah Winters had ever truly cared about.

  She couldn’t fathom it, had never heard of any branch of Aspect, even Dark use, that could twist a person’s base nature in such a way. But experimentation was Danvers’ dominion.

  To her knowledge, her mother, Evelyn, had been his first attempt to twist a per
son’s Aspect. Valkyrie still had no idea what he’d done to Evelyn. Her mother had never spoken about it when she was alive, and after she died, Valkyrie never asked her father because the one surefire way to break his hair-thin temper was to mention her mother. So Valkyrie had stopped thinking about it at all, until Siren had come into Jace’s life.

  Siren, who had been yet another of Danvers’ experiments at changing Aspect, who had almost, almost managed to kill him. He’d told Siren that she and Evelyn had been the first, and not the most interesting, attempts of his career. Who knew what uses he had twisted Aspect to in the intervening years? Who was she to say he couldn’t turn Elijah to his will? And if that had happened…

  If that had happened, then Random was in far more danger than she could have imagined.

  She smoothed out the paper and forced herself to read the rest.

  I propose a new deal. I will be at your home Thursday evening. Bring me the Council’s adnexus by midnight, or we’ll see how much you like Mr. Tremayne when he’s missing all of his extremities. You’d be surprised what you can cut off a man and still keep him alive.

  I’ll be watching.

  Random was debating how rude it would be to eat without Valkyrie when she stormed back into the house.

  “Where’s your luggage?” she barked.

  “My luggage?”

  “Luggage bags. Where do you keep them?”

  “The closet. Why?”

  She moved for his bedroom and he followed after her. What the hell did she need a bag for? Of course, it was Kyrie, so—

  “If you have a dead body to dispose of I’d really prefer if you didn’t use my suitcases for the job.”

  She didn’t answer. She didn’t even acknowledge that he was present, just flung open his closet door and pulled his suitcases down from the overhead rack.

  “Seriously, Kyrie, I have trash bags. Heavy duty ones. Tarps, too. All of it much more appropriate for blood-soaked appendages than my luggage set.”

  That at least got her to glare at him but it was a short, sidelong glare. She didn’t look angry, didn’t look murderous, she looked—scared.

  In the seventeen years he’d known her, he’d never once seen her look scared.

  “Kyrie, what’s going on?”

  She still didn’t answer him. She opened his dresser and started throwing his clothes into the bags. She didn’t even pay attention to what she grabbed, if her throwing all of his work ties into a case was any indication.

  “Kyrie.”

  She grabbed an armful of T-shirts and tossed them on top of his ties, then went back for more. He was going to have redo all his laundry. She’d just wrinkled half his wardrobe in under a minute.

  “Kyrie.” He took his life in his hands and grabbed her shoulders before she could abuse any more of his clothing. “What the hell is going on?”

  She didn’t shove his hands away. That was worrisome enough that he dropped them.

  “You need to leave.”

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “Leave.” She turned back to the suitcase that contained all of his socks, all of his ties, and the majority of his T-shirts, and zipped it closed. “Get out of town. Out of the country would be better.”

  “Uh-uh.” He placed his hand on the suitcase so she couldn’t pick it up and haul it out of the room. “I’m not going anywhere, you and I had a deal.”

  “And I’m breaking it. You’re not safe here, you need to go.”

  “I’m not any less safe than I was yesterday.”

  “Yes, you are. He thinks—” She cut off, her lips twisting into a grimace. “He thinks I care about you. He thinks he can use you against me.”

  The words cut. He thinks I care. Not, I do care. But even as he reminded himself, again, that she didn’t, he looked at her. She could run miles without getting winded but she breathed heavily now, her chest rising and falling in marked movements. Valkyrie, who had taken her Academy finals at sixteen and trounced every record in Battle Aspect history without ever losing the mask of cool detachment on her face, looked wild now. Almost frantic.

  Looked, he thought, like he’d felt when he’d seen Danvers punch her in the parking lot last night, seen the chains around her wrists.

  “Would it work?” he asked softly. “Do you care, Kyrie?”

  He’d never asked her. He’d spent the last year trying to prove to her that he was worth something, worth taking a chance on. Worth more than a one-night stand. He’d wanted her to give him a chance to make her care about him. He’d never considered that maybe she already did. Because it wasn’t possible. Because if she did, then she was a better actor than he’d ever given her credit for. If she did, then she’d put them both through hell and he had no idea why.

  “No. I don’t care, Random. I never have.”

  Every instinct in his body shouted one perfect, glorious word: liar. The truth was there, in that shift in her voice, in the way she looked right through him when she said it, rather than at him. Liar, liar, liar.

  It took everything he had not to grin like an idiot. He didn’t call her out on it. Whatever her reasons for lying to him were, they weren’t ones he was going to overcome by trying to make her admit the truth. And though he didn’t have any proof, he would bet his own money that somehow it all tied back to Elijah Winters.

  “Then there’s nothing to worry about,” he said smoothly. “You don’t care, so I can’t be used against you. Our deal still stands.”

  “I may not care, but that doesn’t mean I want to see you hacked into small pieces.”

  “Is that what he threatened to do to me? It lacks originality, don’t you think?”

  “This isn’t a joke, Random.”

  “I never suggested it was, love. I happen to take threats against my life very seriously. Which is why I’m not going anywhere. It’s personal now.”

  Her hands clenched into fists. “What will it take?”

  He raised an eyebrow in question.

  “To get you to leave. What will it take?”

  “Ah. That. If you want me to leave town, I will.”

  Her shoulders relaxed.

  “If you come with me.”

  And she was tense again. “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “You know why. Danvers has my father. I have to get him back.”

  “Why does it have to be you? You’ve worked enough bodyguard details to know that when someone is fixated on a person, the best course of action is to remove that person and let another party handle the issue. Danvers is obviously fixated on you. Come away with me and let the Council handle him.”

  “No.”

  The stubborn set of her jaw told him she wasn’t going to yield. He could ram his head against the iron wall of her will until his skull caved in, or he could retreat and skulk in the shadows until he found an alternative way around her barriers.

  “Fine. Keep your secrets. But you’re not getting rid of me.”

  “I can knock you out and put you on a plane to Switzerland.”

  “One, it is very difficult to put an unconscious individual on a commercial flight, and you don’t own a private jet. Two, I’m the only Aspecter to ever successfully manage teleportation. It doesn’t matter where you put me, I’ll just come right back here.”

  “No one believes you actually teleported.”

  Fortunately, that was true, since the only witness to the fact would never admit to it. He’d been too young and traumatized at the time it had happened to realize convincing the Council of his ability to teleport would have been one of the worst things he could do. But he’d been all of eight when he’d done it, and his entire world had just been upended, so he had talked. The random nature of his Aspect meant he hadn’t been able to replicate the feat, and he had quickly become a laughingstock. The Boy Who Cried Teleportation.

  His first days at Academy in Seclusion had been terrible, and he didn’t want to contemplate how miserable his childhood might have been if Jace hadn’t befrie
nded him. But even Jace, for all he had the Winters family name behind him, couldn’t have entirely quashed the level of teasing aimed at Random if Valkyrie hadn’t decided to step into the waters because her little brother was involved.

  Anyone dumb enough to fuck with Valkyrie Winters didn’t do it a second time. Even when she’d been twelve. That had been the beginning of his childhood idolization of her that had turned into a schoolboy crush when he was older, hopeless infatuation when he was even older, and now this. Head-over-heels, insert-your-preferred-cliché-here, love.

  “Believe it or don’t.” He shrugged. “But we both know there isn’t a cage you can put me in that I can’t get out of. So you can waste time trying to get me out of the way, or you can accept that I’m going to be here.”

  “You are infuriating.”

  He flashed her a grin. “One of my untold number of charms.”

  “Leave.”

  “No. I’m sure I can trust you not to let anything happen to me.”

  It was, perhaps, manipulative. A few of the bodyguard assignments she’d contracted with for the Council had been for witnesses in cases he’d been involved with. He’d seen her work. She had protective instincts a mile wide. Questioning her ability to protect him should make her dig her heels.

  Her face went carefully blank as it became the mask she showed the world. Seeing her disappear beneath that ice would have hurt him before, because he hadn’t believed she could look at him with that level of detachment if he’d meant anything to her. He thought differently, now.

  “Fine,” she ground out. “You can stay.”

  “Generous of you.”

  “But Random?”

  “Yes, love?”

  “You don’t go anywhere without me.”

  His Aspect practically purred. “I’ll manage, somehow.”

  “That includes work.”

  “I’m already on vacation.” It was rapidly shifting from the worst to the best vacation of his life. Or it would be, as soon as they dealt with Danvers and he tricked Valkyrie into admitting she had feelings for him. “Come have breakfast, Kyrie, and tell me what was in that damn letter.”