From the Earth to the Shadows

by Amanda Hocking

  “Yes, of course.” She smiled thinly. “I need to use the restroom anyway.”

  Even though Valeska had slipped into the small washroom off the main room, Quinn ushered Oona and me into the adjacent bedroom and closed the door behind us. The bed was unmade, and based on the ripped jeans and swords strewn across it, I guessed that it was Quinn’s.

  “Why are you so opposed to her?” Quinn asked me bluntly. Her arms were folded over her chest as she stared at me.

  I shook my head. “I’m not. I don’t want us all getting killed.”

  “If Odin can handle this by himself here on out, great. Then we’re done.” Oona wiped her hands together, symbolizing that we could wash our hands of this whole mess. “But if not, we have to take her up on her offer. Don’t we? I mean, she’s the only chance we have to get into Kurnugia.”

  “Why do we have to go to Kurnugia?” I argued.

  “To stop the underworld goddess from escaping and to rescue Asher?” Quinn asked, speaking to me as if I were a moron.

  Reflexively, my hand went to my heart, hovering just above where his words were still branded on me. Don’t worry about me.

  Using all my willpower, I managed to keep my voice even as I said, “I don’t even know if he’s still alive.”

  Oona’s jaw dropped and her eyes widened, and Quinn’s breath caught in her throat and she took a step back from me, as if she suddenly realized I was infected with a contagious disease.

  “You’re saying you don’t even want to try?” Oona asked once she’d recovered from her shock.

  “You’re even more heartless than I thought,” Quinn said, and her voice had taken on a forlorn, defeated quality that cut deep through me. “You really don’t care about anyone but yourself.”

  “Quinn!” Oona snapped, rushing to my defense.

  “No, it’s not like that,” I insisted, and though I tried to hide it, the pain and confusion found its way into my words, making them shrill. “You don’t think it doesn’t kill me that I can’t run down and save him right now? Of course it does. But…” I paused, and when I spoke again, my voice cracked. “I don’t think he wants me to save him.”

  “How do you know?” Oona asked.

  I rubbed my neck and let out a shaky breath. “It’s hard to explain. It’s just something … I know.”

  “Okay.” Oona glanced over at Quinn, then asked me, “What do you want to do, then? What’s our game plan?”

  “Let’s meet with Odin and see what he says, and maybe this will be over soon,” I said, sounding more discouraged than hopeful.

  “Well, then I think Valeska should go with us to meet Odin,” Quinn said firmly. “She knows more about Kurnugia than the rest of us, and if that’s where Odin sends us next, then it would be best if she was there to find out exactly what he needs from us.”

  “I was planning to meet him alone, but yeah, sure,” I relented, since there was no point in fighting. “Whatever you guys think is best.”

  EIGHT

  When Quinn and I reached the top of the Caana temple, winded and tired from the long trek up the stairs, Valeska was already there. She had flown up using her large, elegant wings, and now leaned back against a mossy stone wall as she waited.

  “Maybe next time you meet with Odin you could pick a place a little lower to the ground,” Quinn suggested as she slumped against the wall beside Valeska, sitting on the soft grass that covered the mezzanine. There were more levels above us, but they were only small platforms, so this seemed close enough to the top.

  “I didn’t choose the place,” I reminded her. “When a Vanir god tells you to meet him somewhere, you go where he tells you.”

  The Caana temple was an ancient pyramidesque stone building made by the Maya thousands of years ago, which they eventually abandoned. Over the centuries it fell into ruin, before being rediscovered and becoming a tourist attraction.

  This particular one was known as the Sky Palace, because it was the tallest one in Belize, and it towered above everything around it. Even the nearby trees, with their broad leaves reaching toward the sky, were dwarfed by the temple. The only thing above was the full moon, illuminating the darkness.

  Technically, we weren’t even supposed to be here. The ruins were part of a national park, and they were closed, but it hadn’t been all that hard to sneak in through the forest. Immediately surrounding the ruins was a dense jungle, filled with chattering and flitting animal life that we could hear but could not see.

  Caana City had sprawled out enough that it had begun swallowing up the rain forest, and from the top of the temple it was easy to see the buildings and high-rises of the city, twinkling in the near distance.

  “You know, I could’ve carried you up here,” Valeska told Quinn.

  “No, it’s okay,” Quinn insisted, smiling crookedly at her. “I could manage, and I didn’t want to hassle you.”

  Valeska laughed lightly. “I’m stronger than I look.” She then flexed her sinewy arm, forming only the smallest of bumps on her bicep, and Quinn joined in laughing with her.

  While those two bantered and joked, I walked along the edge of the mossy half-wall that ran along the front. The grassy mezzanine was surrounded on the other three sides by stairs that led up to higher, more narrow landings, but the steps appeared more like seats in an outdoor amphitheater.

  Despite the ache in my legs, I couldn’t sit and rest the way Quinn and Valeska were doing. An electric unease ran through me, similar to how I felt before hunting down an immortal to return. Only this time I wouldn’t have a release.

  In my black bag holstered to my thigh, the Valhallan cloak was stored, filling the bag to the maximum capacity. I’d bound the cloak up as small as I could to make it fit, because I wanted to keep it close to me. The strap strained on my aching thigh, but the pain was a welcomed distraction.

  As I paced, I glanced up at the night sky, and I couldn’t help but notice how eerily the vibrant Valhallan cloak matched the sky above us. The stars here were brighter than they were back home, even with Caana City as large as it was becoming. From my apartment window back on the canal, I could barely even make out the brightest stars over the blinding lights of the billboards and traffic and lampposts.

  “When is Odin supposed to get here anyway?” Quinn asked.

  “He said to meet him at the top of the Caana temple when the moon is the highest in the sky,” I explained and glanced down at the clock on my phone.

  I hadn’t known what that meant exactly, but Oona’s thaumaturgy studies had left her with an expertise on the phases and cycles of the moon. She’d informed me that the moon would be at its absolute peak over the meridian at 11:46 P.M. And the time had just ticked to 11:55.

  Quinn looked up at the moon, fat and almost sunnily bright. “It looks pretty high to me.”

  “I know,” I said with a sigh. “I think he’s late.”

  “Aren’t we the impatient ones?” a voice asked jovially. It was deep, almost thunderous, with a thick British accent adding a playful lilt to it.

  I turned around to see Odin striding down the stairs from the higher altar, with his long gray duster billowing out around him. Despite the humid heat of the tropical night, he wore a jacket over his tailored suit. Behind him, his enormous raven, Muninn, had landed on one of the stone walls and began preening its inky black feathers.

  Odin looked much the same as he had the last time I’d seen him. He was tall and broad, not quite a giant, but with the imposing presence that was far more fitting of a god than a man. With a strong jaw, full lips, and rich dark skin, he was ruggedly handsome, although not overly so in the ethereal way that angels and Eralim could be. Which was better, really, because they could be practically painful to look at.

  The only thing that muddled his otherwise impeccable appearance was that his left eyelid was withered shut, but his right eye was bright and wide as he approached us.

  “No, of course not,” I answered, hoping to match his spirited tone but instead only m
anaging a strained formality. “I was only afraid that we’d missed you.”

  “And who exactly is this we?” Odin asked, and he narrowed his good eye as he appraised Quinn and Valeska.

  They had been lingering back, but I glanced over my shoulder when Odin addressed them, just in time to see them walking closer to us.

  Quinn’s mouth hung slightly open, and her eyes had taken on a wide, awed quality that I wasn’t used to seeing on her. Valeska, for her part, appeared as stoic as she had when she arrived at our motel room door, but I wouldn’t expect any less from a girl who tricked angels.

  “They’re here to help,” I explained. Valeska politely greeted him, but Quinn did a curtsy before announcing a little too loudly that she was pleased to meet him.

  “I suppose you’ll need all the help you can get,” Odin mused reasonably. “I presume you were able to retrieve the Valhallan cloak?”

  “Yes, I have it here for you—” I began as I reached for the bag holstered on my leg.

  “Oh, no, the cloak isn’t for me,” Odin corrected me. “It’s for you.”

  I’d been unzipping my bag, but I stopped to gape up at him. “What? What are you talking about?”

  “Valhalla is often incorrectly referred to as a place, but in reality it’s more of a state of protection. A spell or an aura cast around the gods to protect us,” Odin elaborated. “And that cloak you have is imbued with that same protection spell. If you have it wrapped around you, you cannot be harmed by or stopped by any other spells.”

  “And why do I need that?” I asked, but already my heart was hammering in my chest.

  “Because I have another errand for you,” he said with a sly grin. “I need you to retrieve my spear, Gungnir.”

  “I thought that was destroyed,” I said, referencing the slim knowledge I had learned about the legendary weaponry in school.

  “That’s not exactly true,” Odin replied carefully.

  “What’s Gungnir?” Valeska asked. “What’s so special about this spear?”

  “Back when the world was still young, the Vanir gods became nervous about an uprising among the lesser gods that walked the earth, and they feared that Kurnugia wouldn’t be enough to hold them,” he explained, with a prescient understanding.

  “I offered to forge a weapon, something that would destroy immortals completely. No underworld, no next life, no trips to Vanaheimr,” Odin said. “They would just be gone.

  “The other Vanir gods were very excited about this, so they helped me craft the perfect spear,” he elaborated. “Auchimalgen killed the rare camahueto to bring me his unbreakable horn for the shaft, and Poseidon ventured down to Atlantis to give me the powerful orichalcum for the tip.

  “Finally, Brahma gave me Halāhala, the most vicious poison ever created, and I dipped the tip into it,” Odin said. “Thus, a weapon capable of obliterating even the mightiest immortal was created.

  “Gungnir was so powerful, it was locked away, only to be used as an absolute fail-safe,” he went on. “But my son Baldur, always the most thoughtful and compassionate of my children, did not think any such weapon should exist. He tried to destroy it, but he could only snap it in half, leaving the deadly tip intact.

  “With no way to break it further, he thought the best course of action was to hide it from the Vanir gods so we could never be tempted to use it,” Odin said. “He voluntarily went into Kurnugia, taking the spear with him.”

  “Why did he go to Kurnugia?” Valeska asked, but I feared I already knew the answer.

  “He knew it was the one place I could not travel,” Odin replied, and for a moment I couldn’t breathe.

  “That’s what kicked off Frigg’s long slumber,” Quinn said, slightly misremembering what we had been taught in school about the absence of Odin’s wife. “She tried to get into Kurnugia to visit Baldur.”

  His mood darkened for a moment, but his voice was even when he said, “It was all a bit more complicated than that.”

  My heart hammered in my chest, making Asher’s words throb and burn. Going to the underworld meant I had to either deny those words and save him, or heed his wishes and let him die. And I didn’t know how I could do either.

  “I need you to go to Kurnugia and retrieve the spear from my son Baldur,” Odin said. “Last I heard, he was in Zianna. That cloak will shield you so you will be able to get into Kurnugia and leave with the spear.”

  I ran a hand through my hair as a wave of nausea rolled over me, and I felt the familiar restless electricity I experienced before a kill. But it was only intensifying, and I had no way of quieting the urges.

  “But … why me?” I asked, hating how plaintive my voice sounded. “Why can’t someone else? Another god, maybe?”

  “It’s precisely because you aren’t a god,” he explained, his voice warming to reassure me. “You are a Valkyrie—created with strength and power beyond your humanity, but without the curse and limitations that immortality brings. You can go where I cannot.

  “And you must go,” he said. “That spear is our only chance of stopping Ereshkigal. If she finds a way to open the door from Kurnugia, all the evil and power that has been locked up for centuries will be unleashed on the earth.”

  NINE

  I sat on the stainless-steel countertop of our kitchenette, the metal feeling cold through the thin fabric of my jeans, and I watched as my friends tried to wrap themselves in the night sky. Or at least that’s what it looked like they were doing.

  The Valhallan cloak looked massive when spread out across the floor. It was a full circle that took up almost the entirety of the living room/kitchenette. Unfortunately, it was an entirely different thing when squeezing a six-foot-tall Valkyrie, a demi-Alkonost with a fifteen-foot wingspan, and a petite sorceress-in-training under it.

  Originally, Atlas had tried jamming himself under it, too, but it very quickly became apparent that his bulky frame would not fit comfortably under there with them. Now he leaned against the counter beside me, sipping Oona’s soursop wine while watching Quinn, Valeska, and Oona scramble around.

  So far they had tried a dozen different positions, their arms and legs and wings poking out of the satiny fabric as they moved.

  Since Quinn was the tallest, she had the long hood draped over her head, and she peered down at the cloak with silver locks of hair sticking to her forehead. Valeska’s wings bulged out the fabric where she stood pressed against her side, and Oona was a bump near her knees as she crouched down on the other side.

  “Okay, I think we got it,” she announced.

  “We’re all covered?” Oona asked, her voice slightly muffled through the fabric.

  “Yeah, we are,” Quinn said, then she looked over at me. “Okay, Malin, come on. You try to fit under.”

  I didn’t move. “It’s not going to work.”

  “What?” Oona poked her head out of the front seam of the cloak. One of Valeska’s black feathers had gotten stuck in Oona’s short hair, and she exhaled hard to blow it free. “There’s still extra fabric.”

  She was technically right, in that there were a few inches pooling at their feet. But last time I checked, I was bigger than four inches around, so there was no way that I was going to wedge myself in there enough to be covered from head to toe.

  “Four of us aren’t going to be able to fit under there,” I insisted. “One of us has to stay behind.”

  Quinn lowered her gaze, and I could see her jaw tensing under her flushed skin. Her lopsided mouth twitched as she struggled to come up with something, an impassioned protest that would ensure that she would travel with us.

  But there wasn’t any.

  Oona insisted she was well enough to go—and as far as I could tell, she was—and she was the only one who knew protection charms and health potions, which would definitely come in handy in a realm of unstoppable monsters. Valeska was going because she was the only one who had any experience inside Kurnugia. And I was going because Odin had tasked me with the mission.

 
Slowly, Quinn untied the cloak from around her neck and let it slip off her shoulders. The stars and galaxies rippled as they fell and landed in a puddle around the three of them. Valeska and Oona straightened up, both of them appearing red and sweaty from hiding out under the cloak.

  “Maybe we don’t have to be fully covered,” Oona suggested, but Quinn strode over to the counter.

  “I do not think that is a risk we should take,” Valeska said, brushing her damp hair off her forehead, and she didn’t need to remind us of the burns that covered her back.

  “No,” Quinn replied firmly and poured herself a plastic cup of wine, emptying the bottle. “I’ll stay behind.”

  “Hey, at least you’ll be safer here,” I said, trying to assuage her disappointment, but I realized belatedly that I was probably making it worse. There were many things that Quinn valued in this life, but safety wasn’t one of them.

  We were going somewhere that we’d only been told about, where no other Valkyrie had gone. Even as dangerous as it most certainly would be, I was sure that, for Quinn, the risk would be worth it, to see things that no mortals were allowed to see.

  She looked over at me, her eyes hard, and then knocked back the glass, swallowing the wine in one big gulp.

  “I’m assuming we should pack light, so I need to be judicious about what I bring,” Oona said, breaking the tension with the practicality of our trip.

  The last time we had gone to the Gates of Kurnugia, Atlas had carried her massive thaumaturgy kit, but since he wouldn’t be going this time, Oona would have to pare it down to something more manageable. She went over and knelt beside her case to start sifting through it.

  “Is there anything we definitely should or shouldn’t bring?” I asked.

  “Electronics will break down there, so leave all that behind,” Valeska said. “And leave your Valkyrie sword. It won’t work down there and would only draw unwanted attention.” She cleared her throat. “I brought my grandmother’s sword when I went down before, and it did not go well.”