Valkyrie's Call

by Michelle Manus

  He couldn’t entirely stop the satisfaction that thrummed through him. “Nothing?” he asked her.

  “No.” She stepped next to him and placed her hand on the stone lid. “I can’t feel it at all. It’s...creepy.”

  He held the box out to her. “One creepy, magic-hiding box. As promised.”

  She didn’t take it. “Maybe you could just put it somewhere until we need it?”

  He sighed. “You try to give a woman nice things. Fine.” He walked to the living room bookcases and placed it on an empty shelf. “There. It could be decorative now.”

  She didn’t look convinced. If he’d known a magic-hiding box would freak her out and impress her that much, he’d have made one years ago.

  “So… now, are we done here? With the talking and everything? You feel as if you have been appropriately included in all the details per our agreement?”

  She really knew how to ruin his moment. “Yes, we’re done here. I’ll call Mia and work things out for tonight.”

  “Good. Then I’ll just, ah…” She looked around idly, her left hand tapping against her thigh, clearly unsure of what to do with herself.

  He took pity on her. “The gym is down that hallway on the left.”

  Her expression went carefully neutral. “I’ll probably just go for a run—”

  “This way.” He gave her a playful shove down the hall. He hadn’t built the damn gym with her in mind for her to turn her nose up at it without ever having seen it.

  Valkyrie decided that letting Random herd her to his “gym” was easier than arguing. She would try to find a way to let him down delicately, but she had no interest in being stuck in a windowless room the size of a closet with a Bowflex and a treadmill, or whatever most people thought constituted a home gym. Not that there was anything wrong with a Bowflex or a treadmill per se, they just bored her out of her mind.

  “Look, Random,” she began. She immediately cut off when he opened the gym door. She did not see a Bowflex or a treadmill. The room was large and airy, the size of a small dance studio with high, arched ceilings. Sunlight spilled through the window that ran almost the entire length of the long side of the rectangular room, giving a burnished glow to the dark wood flooring.

  An Olympic weight bench rested in the corner diagonally across from her. A heavy bag hung in the opposite corner, a row of free weights in the stand that lined the wall across from the window. The wall to her left was a rock climbing wall that stretched to the top of the high ceiling. Climbing ropes hung nearby, just far enough to make it an interesting challenge to leap from the top of the wall onto one of the ropes, or vice-versa.

  “This is perfect,” she said, the words out of her mouth before she could stop them. Random looked pleased. No, she decided, he looked smug. Oh, for goddess sake, it wasn’t as if he’d designed the room himself. “Whoever had it built clearly had good taste.”

  This additional sentence did not wipe the satisfied cat-with-the-cream expression off his face.

  “No doubt,” he said cheerily. “I’ll leave you to it, then. Wouldn’t want you to get carried away in here and ruin my pretty face before our date.”

  “It’s not an actual date,” she growled at his retreating back.

  “Methinks the lady doth protest too much,” he called back over his shoulder.

  She closed the door. Forcefully.

  Insufferable. He was absolutely insufferable.

  She dragged out and pieced together the rubber workout mats leaning against the wall next to the free weights. Even after fifteen minutes of stretching and tumbling to warm up her muscles, her clenched jaw hadn’t relaxed. Relaxation didn’t come until she settled into a rhythm on the heavy bag. Punch, punch, punch. Duck. Upward jab. Reset. Punch, punch, kick.

  She’d like to say she imagined punching the satisfied look off Random’s face while she hit the bag, but she just...couldn’t. Aside from the sparring matches she’d been able to talk him into when they were kids, she’d hit him for real precisely once in her life. On his eighteenth birthday, no less.

  She hadn’t wanted to. He’d just strolled into her backyard, seen her and zeroed in, looking like a man going to the gallows. He had walked right up to her with that look of impending doom on his face and said, “If you don’t stop me, I’m going to kiss you.”

  She figured it must have been a dare. Bet you don’t have the balls to kiss Valkyrie Winters, someone might have taunted and Random, well, he hadn’t been good at turning down challenges at that age.

  She hadn’t ever expected those words to come out of his mouth, not pointed at her, so she’d stupidly stood there and let him follow through. She’d even had the idiocy to kiss him back. For a moment. Before reality took hold. Before she’d seen the flicker of movement in her peripheral vision that told her her father watched from his study window.

  So she had done the only possible thing she could to keep Random safe. She’d hauled back and punched him. She hadn’t pulled the blow, and she’d walked away and left him without a word. Because violence followed by obvious indifference was the only possible thing that might convince Elijah it meant nothing to her. That Random meant nothing to her.

  She hadn’t realized he had meant something until he’d kissed her. At least, something other than her brother’s best friend. She’d always felt so much older than him and Jace, but she wasn’t, not really, and when he’d kissed her she’d realized he wasn’t a kid anymore.

  She’d spent the next day, the next week, the next year, afraid the hit hadn’t been enough. That her father would use it against her. She hadn’t relaxed until Jace had gotten himself disowned and left town. Once her brother was gone, Random had left for a while, too, and with the only two people she cared about out of Seclusion, she had dedicated herself to doing whatever Elijah wanted. To not giving him a reason to go after Jace or Random.

  But it had cost her. Jace and Random were the only two people who had ever treated her like a person. The only two people who hadn’t seemed to understand that she was irreperably broken. Once they were gone, it had made her life easier. But it had made it worse, too. And when Random had moved back to Seclusion, when she’d seen him again, it had sparked something inside her. Something that had made her realize she wasn’t as hollow and dead inside as she’d thought. Something that had kept her going when she hadn’t understood what the point in continuing was.

  No matter what else had happened between them, she would always be grateful to him for that. Even if he would never know.

  7

  Random held his phone two feet from his ear in a futile attempt to save his hearing from the damage Mia’s excited shriek was certain to cause.

  “She finally said yes?”

  He frantically lowered the volume while he kept his gaze trained on the hallway that led to the gym. Kyrie only had above-normal senses when she actively used her Aspect, but one could never be too cautious.

  “She, who? I never said who I was bringing.”

  “Valkyrie Winters, obviously.”

  His usually on-point brain could not come up with a single smart thing to say to that. “How did you…?”

  Mia snorted. “Oh, please. You could find a way to bring that woman into a conversation about ice fishing.”

  Kyrie would no doubt be excellent at ice fishing. The cold wouldn’t bother her at all, and her weapons aim was exceptional. Not to mention—oh, hells. Mia was right. That didn’t mean he had to admit it.

  “I’m relatively certain that’s untrue.”

  “Remember Axe to Grind?”

  “I don’t have amnesia, Mia.” He’d gone with her and Stella to the hatchet-throwing venue a few months ago.

  “Good. Then you’ll remember how the first thing you said when it came time to select your hatchet was, ’‘Valkyrie wouldn’t dignify this craftsmanship with the name of weapon?’ In front of the owner?”

  Random winced. “I’m sure I didn’t say that out loud.”

  “You did. Then you expla
ined the place shouldn’t even be called Axe to Grind because they didn’t have any axes, only hatchets.”

  “Did I?”

  “Then, when it came time to throw the hatchets at the targets, which was supposed to be the fun part of the outing, you went on and on about how the hatchet wasn’t properly weighted, and Valkyrie once showed you—”

  “All right, all right. I see your point. Sorry I wasn’t good company.”

  Mia harrumphed. “We weren’t precisely expecting you to be, you’ve been in a funk all year.”

  “Have not.”

  “Have to, and we’d like to see you out of it. So I’ll find you a table tonight. You said seven?”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  “She’d better be worth it.”

  “She is,” he said softly. “But Mia? Try not to get too excited. She’s not—I have no idea how this is going to go.”

  He could feel Mia’s hesitation before she said, “I hope it goes well. I’m sure it will go well. But if it doesn’t? Please let it go. You deserve to be happy and this—it isn’t healthy.”

  He sighed. “I know. I was going to let it go and things...happened.”

  “Things will keep happening forever if you let them. Trust me, Random, I know a thing or two about wanting the unattainable. But when I finally let that go? That’s when I found Stella. I’ll see you at seven.”

  She hung up and Random tossed his phone on the kitchen counter. The rational part of him understood that Mia was right. Yes, he’d determined Kyrie cared about him, but he didn’t honestly know in what capacity. Yes, she thought the gym was perfect, but she also thought someone else had designed it, and at the end of the day all her liking it really proved was that he knew her. Perhaps a little too well.

  And the date wasn’t a real date.

  Unfortunately, getting his head to convince his heart that he shouldn’t be hopeful was a losing battle. More unfortunately, where his heart went, his Aspect followed. Though he’d lived with the strange way his Aspect manifested his entire life, he couldn’t control what it did all the time. It was desire-based, and while he could get it to do what he wanted by intentionally desiring very specific things, stopping it from acting on desires he wasn’t even fully aware he had was a much more difficult task.

  The latter required not wanting anything at all, and he couldn’t shut his emotions down enough to achieve it. He’d tried a handful of times because of the sometimes inconvenient results of his subconscious power use—he’d lost track of the number of neighborhood pets he’d had to return to their owners over the years when he’d felt lonely only to turn around and find a friendly dog or cat pawing at his back door—but every time he’d closed himself off to the level necessary to stop his Aspect from acting on its own, he’d spiraled into such a dark place he’d been afraid he wouldn’t be able to crawl out of it. It hadn’t been worth it.

  Still, when he looked out the window and saw what was in his backyard, he wished his Aspect could be a little less of a pain in his ass. Because he had no reasonable way to explain to Kyrie the situation unfolding outside, and he would prefer to simply hide it so she never had to know.

  Damn it, Krissi usually called him when this happened. He tugged on his boots and headed down to barn.

  The sixth time Random’s phone rang, Valkyrie decided to hell with politeness, and left the gym to yell at him to answer the damn thing or turn it to silent. His phone lay on the kitchen counter, buzzing incessantly. Random was not in the kitchen. He wasn’t in the living room, or the bedroom either.

  She didn’t feel comfortable exploring the rest of his house without him, so she yelled for him at the top of her lungs. It wasn’t so large a house that he wouldn’t hear that. But he didn’t answer. The phone cut off, then immediately rang again. She couldn’t help but see the name on the display: Krissi. She only knew one person who spelled her name like that, and Seclusion was a small town.

  Why the hell was her stablehand calling Random? The obvious answer didn’t fit, because Krissi wasn’t interested in men. She wasn’t interested in anyone of any gender. According to her, she just “didn’t see the point in all of it.” Valkyrie was pretty sure Krissi and Random weren’t friends, either, which led back to the question of why Random had thirteen missed calls from the woman and counting.

  As a rule, Valkyrie did not believe in answering other people’s phones. But with everything going on, she wasn’t willing to risk a possible emergency for the sake of Random’s privacy. She picked up and Krissi started talking before Valkyrie could announce that she wasn’t Random.

  “Why weren’t you answering your phone? Are the horses at your place? You said this would stop happening but they’re gone and the back gate’s open and what am I going to tell Ms. Winters if she comes home?”

  “I imagine,” Valkyrie said, sounding much calmer than she felt, “you would tell me that the horses are missing.” She stepped outside and around the side of the house, the phone still pressed to her ear, and looked down toward the barn. Random stood in the paddock to the right, by all appearances trying to convince Abaddon, her six-year-old mare, to walk into the barn.

  “Ms. Winters?” Krissi squeaked. “Oh shit, am I fired?”

  “That remains to be seen. Explain. Everything.”

  “Well, it started maybe six months ago? That week you were out of town? I came back from the feed store and the horses were gone and the back gate was open and I swear I didn’t leave it open. I was going to call you when Random called and said they were at his place, and well, everyone knows his Aspect’s really weird so I just took the truck and trailer and brought them back.

  “It only ever happened when you were gone for extended periods, and the last time Random swore it wouldn’t happen again, and it hasn’t, not for three months, and I really thought he had the problem ironed out.”

  “Did he say why this happens?”

  “No. But the horses were never hurt and Random said it would just upset you to know about it and I just thought...am I fired?”

  Oh, Random had thought it would upset her, had he? Krissi should have known better. She should have told her. Still, Random could literally charm anyone. He just had that charisma that made a person certain that whatever came out of his mouth, he must be right about it. And Krissi’s personal situation had been a bit of a disaster when she’d come into Valkyrie’s employ, so she couldn’t blame the woman for not wanting to lose her job.

  “Since I am currently amused by how much trouble Abaddon is giving Random, and since I suspect this is all his fault? No, you’re not fired.” An audible sigh of relief carried across the line. “But Krissi? If anything of this nature ever happens again and you don’t tell me, immediately, I will fire you. You will never be in trouble for things that are beyond your ability to control. You will be in trouble for lying to me. Am I clear?”

  “Yes ma’am. Should I bring the truck and trailer over?”

  Valkyrie considered it, but as irritated as she was, having the horses here was probably a prudent solution. Especially since she knew Danvers would be on her property soon, if he wasn’t skulking around it already.

  “No. Load up their gear and feed and drive it over. The horses will be staying at Random’s until further notice.”

  A long pause followed this announcement. “Okay. What about me?”

  “You’re on paid vacation until further notice. At least a week, possibly longer. Don’t return to the property until I tell you to.”

  Valkyrie ended the call and walked down to where Random was still trying—and failing—to entice Abaddon into the barn. The man had a lot of explaining to do.

  “Seriously, Abaddon? Do we have to do this every single time?” Only Valkyrie would give a horse a name that meant destruction. The damnable creature was a Friesian—they were all Friesians, because Kyrie had a type when it came to horses and the type was tall, large, and black—and the mare absolutely hated Random.

  Well, hate was a strong word. It was m
ore, he thought, that she didn’t take him seriously. She understood full well that she could walk all over him, and she did so to her heart’s content. Any time he got within two feet of her, she ran away.

  Honestly, all four of the creatures were nightmares. The only manageable horses she’d owned had been the three out-to-pasture retirees that Jace and Siren had taken with them when they moved into Siren’s place.

  “Just put on the nice halter and go in the nice barn, and the nice lady will come to take you back to your own place.”

  “Perhaps you should tell her it will be a nice trailer ride and there will be nice treats and she will suddenly realize she wants to do what you say,” a derisive voice said.

  Kyrie’s voice. Shit.

  He turned. She didn’t look too pissed off. He tried a charming grin. She scowled at him.

  “Give me that, you’re teaching her bad habits.” She held out her hand for the halter and lead, which he happily relinquished.

  “I’m not teaching her anything.”

  “Everything you do around a horse teaches it something. Right now, you’re teaching her she can run away whenever she doesn’t want to do what you ask.” Valkyrie walked right up to the mare, who stood placid as a lamb and even obligingly bumped her nose into the halter when Kyrie positioned it.

  “Yes, well, I can see it’s had a detrimental effect on your ability to handle her.”

  She shot him a sidelong glance. “I’ve trained her since she was two. One person handling her badly won’t affect me. It’s you she’s going to keep taking advantage of.”

  “Well, she isn’t my bloody equine.”

  “No, she isn’t.” Kyrie’s voice was soft as she reached up to gently rub the mare’s forehead. It was more affection than she’d ever shown him. Abaddon put her head in Kyrie’s chest and looked like she was about to go to sleep, as if she hadn’t had him chasing her all over the damn paddock moments before. “And since she isn’t, why don’t you explain what she’s doing here? What they’re all doing here?”