by Charley Case
Wings of the Valkyrie
The Lone Valkyrie™ Book 3
Charley Case
Martha Carr
Michael Anderle
This book is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Sometimes both.
Copyright © 2020 LMBPN Publishing
Cover by Fantasy Book Design
A Michael Anderle Production
LMBPN Publishing supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.
The distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
LMBPN Publishing
PMB 196, 2540 South Maryland Pkwy
Las Vegas, NV 89109
First US edition, May 2020
eBook ISBN: 978-1-64202-943-7
Print ISBN: 978-1-64202-944-4
The Terranavis Universe (and what happens within / characters / situations / worlds) are Copyright (c) 2019-2020 by Martha Carr and LMBPN Publishing.
The Wings of the Valkyrie Team
Thanks to the JIT Readers
Kerry Mortimer
Deb Mader
Dorothy Lloyd
Larry Omans
If we’ve missed anyone, please let us know!
Editor
The Skyhunter Editing Team
Dedications
From Charley
This book is dedicated to my wife and best friend, Kelly. Without her belief in my abilities, and patience to see the process through, this book wouldn't exist.
From Martha
To all those who love to read, and like a good puzzle inside a good story
To Michael Anderle for his generosity
to all his fellow authors
To Louie and Jackie
And in memory of my big sister,
Dr. Diana Deane Carr
who first taught me about magic, Star Trek,
DC Comics and flaming cherries jubilee
From Michael
To Family, Friends and
Those Who Love
To Read.
May We All Enjoy Grace
To Live The Life We Are
Called.
Chapter One
Mila sat cross-legged on the couch, the baseball-sized device Penny had created with Rebecca and Lance cupped in her hands. She tucked her bare feet under herself, mashing them into the down-filled seat to keep them warm on the chilly spring morning.
The cold normally wouldn’t be a problem, but Penny had the double French doors to the balcony open as she worked to reinforce the wards on the building, and the breeze was slowly sucking the heat from the room.
Now that Missy was firmly on Azoth’s side nowhere was particularly safe, but Penny would ensure that it would take some real effort to attack the condo. The only thing they had going for the building was the fact that Missy hadn’t known about Mila while she spent five years hatching the plan to resurrect the Drude and use him to take her home with his abilities. She might not have the specifics like with Victoria’s secret place in San Francisco, but the elder Valkyrie knew that Mila was somewhere in Denver, so Penny decided it wasn’t worth the risk and had been beefing up security on the building for the last week.
Stretching her neck until there was a satisfying pop from her spine, Mila settled into the cushions and wiped a little nervous sweat from her hand on the knee of her leggings. She felt a chill as a fresh gust of wind made its way to her. While reaching over and grabbing a red hoodie she had draped over the arm of the couch, Mila saw Victoria sigh heavily as she turned the page of the novel she was reading.
After pulling on the hoodie, she put the device in the large pocket before zipping up the front and turning slightly to face her elder.
“Are you doing okay? You’ve been a little…” Mila looked the normally well-kept woman over, noting the mustard stain on the thigh of her gray sweatpants, and the very wrinkled state of the Ramones t-shirt she had been wearing for the last two days, “not yourself, lately.”
Victoria dogeared the page she was on and ran her hand through her hair, but it became tangled in the long blonde locks before she had it halfway through, forcing her to back out and come at the tangle from another direction. She quickly raked out the small bird’s nest, her cheeks turning slightly red.
“I’m fine, all things considered.” She tossed the book to the cushion beside her and tucked her feet under herself. “I mean, it turns out that the one Valkyrie who outranks me in seniority is also the one who awoke our greatest enemy, and led the monster to multiple of our sisters so it could feed on their souls. Other than that, I’m good.”
Mila pulled the device out of her pocket and ran a thumbnail along one of the many seams. “Yeah, I get all that. I feel it too, although not to the same degree. I was thinking more along the lines of the fact that you haven’t been working. As long as I’ve known you, you were all about your company. I don’t think I’ve seen you make a phone call since you told the Valkyries to scatter. Aren’t you worried that your business is going to, I don’t know, fail or something?”
Victoria laughed bitterly. “Oh, that’s all over. As far as my company is concerned, I’m dead. Missy knows too much about all that. Even my secret apartment wasn’t exactly a secret to her. No, my business days are over for now. It was about time I moved on anyway.” She dramatically tossed her hair over her shoulder and gave a look that was so sultry it could only come from hundreds of years of practice. “I was getting a little too old to pull off this body for much longer. If anyone took the time to do the math, they would have seen that I’ve been running the company for forty-three years. I may not look as young as Missy with her blue pigtails and micro skirts, but I sure as hell don’t look like I’m in my sixties.”
Mila snorted a laugh. At most, Victoria looked about thirty-five, the same as Mila and the rest of the Valkyries she’d met. “How did you get away with it for so long? Shouldn’t people have been asking questions, like, twenty years ago?”
“You’d be surprised what people don’t notice when they’re making obscene amounts of money. I kept their bank accounts full, and they pretended my plastic surgeon was a miracle worker.” She gave a half-smile as she stared off into the past. “This one was a good life. No spouse this time around, which is a blessing and a curse. Plenty of lovers, though, which is fun for a while but to be honest, I was getting bored by the end. There’s only so much money you can make and so many strangers you can fuck before you don’t care anymore.”
“Have you been married before?” Mila had never considered that Victoria might have a spouse. It seemed like such a foreign concept for the woman in power suits to have someone waiting for her at home.
“Dozens of times.” A sad smile touched her lips. “For us, it always ends badly, though. Well, usually. We outlive them all.
“I was married in this body, way back when I was first reborn. Grady. Grady Mays—he was an oil tycoon who lost it all in the Great Depression. Poor guy died penniless.” She suddenly laughed. “He was way more fun after he lost everything. We would jump boxcars and travel across the country when his latest scheme inevitably fell through. It took a while, but I eventually convinced him we didn’t need the money, and he miraculously just…let it all go. We eventually bought some land in California, back when it was still nearly empty, and built a house out of trees we cut from the property. Li
ved out the rest of his days in peace. He took up carpentry. I always thought that was such a weird choice. He was crap with his hands when it came to using anything more than a pen, but he loved it.”
“Was he a magical?” Mila asked, completely taken by the charm of the story.
“Nope. Peabrain.”
Mila cocked her head to the side. “How old was he when he died?”
“You’re wondering why he never figured out I wasn’t aging?”
Mila nodded.
“He was eighty-three when he died.” Victoria smiled. “He never noticed me not aging because he was already twenty-five years older than me when we married. When you spend enough time with someone, you see them how you see them, regardless of how they look. It’s why attractiveness is so unimportant in the long run. I think he knew something was going on, but he wasn’t going to complain.” She smiled. “Besides, we had fun.”
The talk made Mila think about Finn and the fact that this would happen to her at some point, but it was so far in the future, she didn’t know how to frame the idea. Her thoughts must have shown on her face because Victoria awkwardly cleared her throat.
“Sorry, I forget that you’re still new to all this. You luckily picked a long-lived race as a mate. Dwarves can live for hundreds of years. You two will have plenty of time to be together.”
Mila smiled while tossing the device from one hand to the other. “I know. It’ll work out somehow.”
They sat in silence for a minute, both thinking about the past and the future.
Mila raised an eyebrow as a thought hit her. “If you’re done with the company, does that mean you’re broke again?”
Victoria smiled mischievously. “That’s one of the great things about being rich at this time in history. There are so many ways to hide money that enormous amounts can go missing and no one will notice. Like I said, I was preparing to leave for a while. I have stacks of money hidden away in offshore companies and banks all over the world. Hell, for a while in the eighties and nineties, I was making so much money that I had to make the company look way less profitable than it was so I wouldn’t get noticed. It’s not good practice to be a magical and run a company that pulls in ten times what the next most profitable company does. The community looks down on that, thinks you’re using your powers to unfair advantage. There’s a reason I’ve never shown up on the billionaire lists. I hide it all.”
“Bill…how fucking rich are you?” Mila’s eyes bugged out a little.
“Very.” She pointed at the device. “Are you going to charge that, or fondle it all morning?”
Mila looked down at the dark brass-colored ball in her hands, half-forgetting she had it. A spike of unease filled her like it always did when she dumped her raw magic into it. It was unnatural how stable the thing looked considering how much power it contained.
“Yeah, sorry. I know I’ve been putting it off. Something about it gives me the creeps.” She held the device up at eye level as if trying to peer inside its thick shell.
“I know what you mean. Between you and me putting everything we have into it every hour for the last week and the couple of dozen charges the other sisters gave it while we were cleaning up on the rooftop deck, I figure it has to have about three hundred times the power either one of us can hold on our own.”
Mila nodded. “Not only that, but it doesn’t let you know how much more it can hold. I keep worrying that I’ll channel power into it and it’ll suddenly be full. Next thing I know, I’ll be spraying raw magic all over the room.”
Victoria went a little white. “I hadn’t considered that.”
“Shir?” Penny flew in through the open doors.
“How can we tell when this thing is full?” Mila let Penny know what they were discussing.
The little blue dragon flared her wings and landed on the couch beside Mila. She pursed her lips and put her hands on her suspiciously thick hips before shrugging. “Chi chi.”
“Well, that’s helpful.” Mila rolled her eyes as Penny flopped down onto her back, yawning.
“What did she say?”
“She said, ‘when it doesn’t take any more magic,’ like an asshole.” Mila stuck her tongue out at Penny as the little dragon put her hands behind her neck, making her belly stick out even more than it had been. Mila pointed at the distended abdomen. “What’s going on here? Did you eat a whole chicken or something?”
Penny swiped a hand at her finger, batting the digit away and giving Mila a dirty look. “Shir shee chi?”
“No, you don’t comment on my flabby butt, but only because it’s so tight you could bounce quarters off it, and you know it.” Mila chuckled. “You would be the first person to comment if I let myself go, you little hypocrite.”
Penny smugly shrugged and shot a smoke ring from her nostril.
“Are the wards up to your standards?”
Penny nodded, explaining that she had upgraded the wards to make the building invisible to anyone that meant its inhabitants harm, along with a few offensive measures on the off chance that someone attacked the building.
“While I appreciate the hard work,” Mila set her jaw as her eyes hardened, “I don’t think we want this building to be the last stand if Azoth finds us here.” She looked up at the rather plain-looking hand scythe sitting on the shelf above the TV. “We need to have somewhere to take that thing if they get too close.”
“Shir shee? Chi shee shir.”
Mila’s brows rose slightly. “That’s not a bad idea.”
“What’s not a bad idea?” Victoria looked between Mila and Penny.
“We can take it to Penny’s friend Rebecca’s house. Finn and I owe her a visit anyway, and she knows the stakes. You think she would be amenable?”
Penny nodded enthusiastically. “Shir!”
Mila laughed. “Road trip, indeed.”
Chapter Two
By ten o’clock, Penny and Mila had spoken with Rebecca on the phone. She was more than willing to keep the Reaper if the condo was compromised, but Penny insisted that she come and put up additional protective wards at the house. Rebecca said they should all come and have dinner so that everyone knew how to get there, and it was about time they all met in better circumstances than a rooftop battle.
An hour later, Rebecca teleported into the condo after Penny made her a recognized guest to the new wards. Mila and Penny sat with the tall, attractive witch with short blue hair at the kitchen island while Finn ran to the store to get food and beer for the day’s activities.
Danica stumbled out of her room, her arms reaching far over her head in a giant yawning stretch. She wore a pair of gray jersey cotton shorts and a cropped t-shirt that was riding so high that it exposed the bottoms of her breasts. The long-legged elf spotted their guest and immediately dropped her arms, turning bright red.
“Oh my God, I didn’t know we had a guest,” Danica sputtered while trying to pull the cropped tee down to her waist, but it wasn’t going to happen.
Rebecca laughed and stood to shake Danica’s hand. “Don’t worry about it. I have a set, too—I know what they look like. I’m Rebecca, Penny’s friend. You must be Danica. Penny talks about you a lot.”
Danica took her hand and shook, but looked past Rebecca to catch Penny blushing from the fruit bowl she was using as a recliner. “I hope it’s all good?”
“I don’t think she’s ever said a bad thing about you.”
“Well, it’s good to know she reserves all her snark for face-to-face interactions.” Danica stuck her tongue out and winked at the chagrined dragon. “Is there any more of that coffee left? I worked a twenty-four-hour shift last night and didn’t get to bed until six a.m.”
“There’s a couple of cups left. I just brewed it.” Mila sipped her brew as Danica went around the island and pulled her favorite mug from the cupboard. “Are you busy today?”
“Not at all.” Danica filled the cat-covered mug and inhaled a deep sniff of the vapors. “Last night was the end of this month�
�s Emergency rotation. I have the next four days off.”
“Are you going to be hanging out with Phil?”
Danica shook her head. “He’s at a conference in D.C. this week. It always happens this way. I have time, and he’s gone. He has time, and I’m working. I’m half-tempted to quit my job so I have time to hang out with my boyfriend.” Danica chuckled and sipped loudly. “Oh, yeah…that’s what mama needed,” she moaned into her mug.
“Well, you should come with us to my house,” Rebecca suggested, sitting back down on her stool. “We have the pool, and it’s a beautiful day for drinking on the deck.”
“Plus, we’re going to grill out for dinner.” Mila waggled her eyebrows. “It’s your favorite…”
“Scallops?”
Mila’s brows dropped. “Oh, I thought your favorite was shrimp.”
Danica laughed. “I love shrimp, especially with steak.”
Mila brightened. “Well then, you’re in luck. Finn is at the store right now getting everything. Knowing him, there will be filets for everyone along with more shrimp than you can shake a stick at.”
Danica smiled. “I don’t know. I can shake a stick at a lot of shrimp.” She looked Mila up and down, then checked out what Rebecca had on and turned back to Mila. “Are you going to wear that? It doesn’t scream day in the sun like Rebecca’s sundress.”
Mila looked down at her leggings and red hoodie then over at Rebecca, who was pulling off a yellow sundress that perfectly complemented her short, dark blue hair.
