Wings of the Valkyrie

by Charley Case

  Azoth took the distraction as an opportunity to strike and hit Mila on the shoulder with an exploding orb.

  Sending healing magic to the wound before she hit the ground, Mila watched as another stasis bubble failed, then another. She sent magic through the ground and the fields popped back up. Looking for Rebecca, she saw her struggling to fight off a Rougarou and charge a flickering stasis bubble.

  The entire battle was turning into a clusterfuck.

  She needed to do more. This trading blows wasn’t going to cut it. There was no way they could win a battle of attrition.

  Mila caught movement in the sky, but was forced to block another attack from Azoth. Mila raised a shield, but saw him turn toward Yaminah a split second later. She bunched up her legs, sprang forward and slammed her shield into the Drude, sending him skittering across the sand. Mila took the chance to charge in while his guard was down, but she saw Rebecca being overrun and diverted the attack meant for Azoth to a group of five thralls, giving Rebecca some breathing room.

  By the time she turned back, Azoth was charging her.

  “Come the fuck on!” Mila shouted, frustration almost overwhelming her. “Can we get a break? Just once?”

  It was right about then when the four remaining Valkyries landed in flashes of light and brandished weapons.

  “Need a hand?” a muscular woman of Indian descent asked before chopping a Rougarou’s head off with a giant two-handed sword.

  “Like you wouldn’t believe,” Mila answered, relief flooding into her.

  “Take that asshat down, Mila!” Victoria shouted, her sword locked with Missy’s as they struggled for dominance. “We can take care of the rest. And for God’s sake, don’t hold back!”

  Mila focused on Azoth, who seemed amused that they’d received some backup.

  “All right, bitch. Let’s dance.” Mila gripped the device tightly and prepared to do something insane.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Mila didn’t hold back.

  She gripped the device and pulled the power out, filling herself far beyond her normal capacity.

  Her wings exploded out of her back, far bigger than they used to be, and bright enough that they hurt to look at. She continued pulling in power while she focused on Azoth, who had slowed his charge and now had a cautious posture.

  “Do I finally see a challenge from you, child?” he sneered, throwing an orb at her.

  Mila formed a small shield over her hand and batted it away like it was a toy. She did the same with the next three. The entire time, she was pulling in power at an ever-increasing rate.

  Power bubbled and spilled out of her as she reached her absolute limit. Light poured out of her eyes, rising and swirling like smoke.

  She aimed with one hand and pulled Gram out with the other. The sword unfolded, then burst into white flames.

  Azoth saw the writing on the wall, but he still had some tricks of his own.

  He lunged forward, wrapped his hands around her forearms, and began to devour her. He pulled out everything she was, or at least tried to, but she used the opportunity to learn instead of blasting him away from her.

  She felt what he was doing, learned how it flowed from her into him and finally how he changed that power to something he could use. She let him take far more than a full charge since she wanted to be sure she could do the same to him when the time came.

  Azoth was the one to break the contact and stumble back, drunk on the power he’d stolen. He clapped his hands together and sent four incorporeal tentacles lashing out of the ground to wrap around her ankles and wrists.

  The tentacles were far stronger than Mila thought they would be, but she was overflowing with power. She pushed raw celestial magic into them, attempting to burn them out at their source, but Azoth hadn’t finished.

  He made a series of complicated hand movements and shouted a word she didn’t understand. She screamed as a pillar of swirling black flames engulfed her from below.

  Her clothes instantly incinerated. Even the enchanted leather didn’t stand a chance in the unnatural heat. The scream ripping from her throat cracked as the pain pushed her beyond her limits. The oils in her skin were superheated and fried her from the inside out. Every hair on her body flashed into smoke.

  The only reason she hadn’t instantly turned to nothing but a little pile of carbon was that she’d already been healing her body. The stresses of holding so much power were literally tearing her body apart, so a portion of that power had been continually healing the damage.

  She dumped more healing into every corner of her body, and to her surprise, she healed faster than the fire could damage her. In seconds, she was fully healed despite the flames continuing to lick at her. Mila decided she’d had enough of this ride and sent a surge of power down the tentacles holding her aloft.

  A ripping metal scream came from Azoth, and the fire cut off as he stumbled back while clutching the sides of his head. His many tentacles became uncoordinated in his distress, and he fell back onto the sand.

  Mila stalked forward while gripping the device harder and sucking every last drop of power from it. The flow was increasing—she’d already replaced the power it had taken to heal the fire damage. Her body glowed as she ran out of places to store the power so it spilled out onto her skin.

  She stepped close to his squirming tentacles and finally sucked the last of the power out of the brass ball. As soon as she did, the device came apart and fell to the sand in twenty separate pieces.

  Staring at the creature that had caused so much pain and death in such a brief time and seeing fear radiate off it made her feel nothing but disgust.

  “You should be braver,” Mila told him. “You live a life where you torture and enslave and use and murder, and now, when you face a small taste of what you do to others, you cower. At least have the backbone to accept that over your life, you’ve earned this true death.”

  Mila pointed her finger at his void. “Is that it? Nothing to say?”

  “Defend me,” he shouted.

  The sound of a rifle firing made Mila flinch, but she had already healed the gunshot wound. She turned to see Carl and his team, their guns pointed at her. She threw up a shield as they all opened fire.

  Anger burned through Mila. She sent out a blast of celestial magic that washed over the team and several other bewitched people in their proximity. Every one of them blinked, then looked around in confusion as the spell shattered.

  “Mila?” Carl asked. “What happened to you?”

  “Hello, Carl. Sorry, I have to take out the garbage. If you could find Finn and see what he needs, that would be great.”

  He hesitated while looking from her to Azoth and back. “About time. That piece of shit is like the turd that won’t flush.”

  Mila snorted. “I like that. It’s super accurate, too.”

  “You know you’re naked, right? Also bald… Everywhere.” Nick gave her a confused once-over.

  Tina slapped him. “What the fuck is wrong with you? She’s obviously riding the edges of godhood, man. You want her to erase you for being a dumb fuck?”

  “Sorry, ma’am.” He cracked a salute.

  Mila chuckled and shook her head. “It’s fine—”

  “How dare you belittle me in fr—” Azoth started, but Mila stomped on his lower abdomen with quite a bit of magical enhancement behind it.

  “Shut the fuck up. The grownups are talking,” she growled down into his face hole.

  “Fuck.” Nick backed away. “I think we’ll leave you to it, then.”

  “We’ll talk later,” Mila told Carl.

  He nodded and ran off to find Finn, gunning down a Rougarou on the way.

  Mila turned back to Azoth. “You’re a pathetic stain on the boot of the universe. You’re cruel, and sadistic, and deserve a million times more than what I‘ll do to you. But I want you to know something before you know nothing, ever again. I don’t want to make you suffer. I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t want to ge
t my revenge. All I want is for you to not exist. You’re a sickness, and the only thing you do to a sickness is eradicate it.”

  “I’ll be back. It might take ten thousand years but we will face one another again, and I’ll have fun peeling the skin from your—”

  Mila reached down and grabbed him by the arms, lifted him to a standing position, and shook him. “Shut the fuck up.”

  Then she began.

  She reached into the Drude and copied what she’d learned as he tried to devour her. She took his power away, changed it into something useful and kept it for herself. Her power grew even further.

  It was easy.

  There was no limit to the flow between them. She could take as much as she liked and she could take it as fast as she wanted, so she did.

  Azoth didn’t make a sound. He twitched and tried to hide away bits of his power, but she had come into his house and was opening all the drawers. She rooted out everything he had. When he ran dry, he started pulling it out of his minions.

  The Rougarou fell first. All at once, the beasts went from flesh and blood to black dust that was instantly lost in the fine black sands.

  Next were the thralls. They fell to dust as well.

  Mila grabbed that reclaimed magic as soon as it flowed into him.

  The mass control spell came next, leaving several hundred thousand people confused and scared, but still alive.

  Missy and Yaminah were the last ones freed of their servitude. Both women immediately passed out, finally able to sleep without nightmares.

  Then it was all gone. She took one last look, but Azoth was nothing but a body, devoid of magic.

  Conversely, Mila was about to kill herself with too much magic. She needed to do something with it, and she needed to do it quickly. Looking down at Azoth’s pathetic form slumped in her hands, she realized killing him wasn’t enough. She needed to erase him.

  Mila created a shield around Azoth and let the weak body slide to the bottom of the sphere before sealing it. Then she filled the shield with fire so hot that it burned the ash to nothing. For a brief second, there was a mini sun in the center of Iceland.

  When she released the shield, not even dust fell out. He was gone. Truly gone.

  She was dying. Mila knew it, but she didn’t really know what to do about it. She had more power in her at that moment than ten thousand magicals combined, if she had to guess. She couldn’t simply let it go—it would kill everyone on the island.

  She cocked her head. “The Drude can do it… Whatever it takes, right?”

  Mila closed her eyes and looked for a place she hadn’t been since the first day she’d found out she was a Valkyrie. To her surprise, she found it easily.

  Where do you keep ten thousand magicals’ worth of magic? Elsewhere, of course.

  Chapter Thirty

  Mila woke up feeling refreshed. Which was good, since she didn’t remember how she’d gotten into bed. The last thing she remembered was stuffing a bunch of raw magic into another dimension to save for later.

  “You’re awake.” Victoria closed the novel she was reading. She was reclining on the bed beside Mila. “So you don’t freak out, you’re still hairless. We need to get a hair potion, but they can be hard to find.”

  Mila reached up and felt her unusually smooth scalp. “Thanks. I definitely would have freaked out.”

  Victoria sighed. “Okay, I have to ask. What the hell did you do?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, you were getting your ass kicked, then turned into an unstoppable demigod. How?”

  “Oh. I took all the power we put into the device back into myself so I could use it all at once.”

  Victoria raised an eyebrow. “That’s not possible.”

  Mila chuckled. “I know.”

  Victoria sighed and climbed off the bed. “I’ll go get Finn. He’s still at the site, trying to sort out what to do with nearly three hundred thousand forcefully awakened Peabrains.”

  “They all remember?” Mila sat up in the bed.

  “Yeah, it will be a real mess. Go take a shower or something. It’ll be a little while.”

  Mila decided that was a good idea. Despite not having any hair at the moment, she felt oily, which kind of creeped her out.

  She took her time in the shower, letting the hot steam and water wash the last few weeks away. She didn’t want to have to go through anything like that ever again. That thought made her laugh. She would have to go through something like that again, for sure. It was her life now.

  When she stepped out of the shower, she discovered that someone had gone back to the condo and grabbed more of her clothes, and left them in a bag on the counter. Digging through, she found a pair of black leggings and a gray V-neck t-shirt, and literally kissed them both before putting them on.

  “Oh, how I’ve missed you two,” she said to her clothes.

  She also saw that someone left her a stylish black knit cap that made her look kinda cute, considering she didn’t have any eyebrows.

  When she walked out into the guest room, Finn was already there and sitting on the bed, a big, goofy smile on his face. “Hey, baldy.”

  “Hey, jerk,” she retorted seductively.

  “So, we have a surprise for you.” Finn couldn’t contain his smile.

  “This sounds scary.”

  “Oh, it’s terrifying. But you’ll love it.”

  He went to the door and let Danica in. She had a white baby blanket over her shoulder and folded into her arm. Penny rode on her other shoulder, her smile nearly tearing her face in half.

  “Oh, my God. Are you shitting me?” Mila practically skipped over and peeked into the blanket.

  Inside were three baby faerie dragons, each with their eyes still closed, and laying piled on top of one another. Mila noticed the one on top of the pile was quite a bit smaller than the other two, but otherwise looked fine.

  “This big girl is Tarra, and this is her brother Rhys, and this darling little girl is Mia. Pretty sure she’s named after you.

  “Oh my God, Penny, they’re beautiful.” Mila gently rubbed Mia’s tiny head.

  “Also, I found out you were having all those pregnancy swings because of Penny. She can explain later, but I have to say it’s insane.” She looked up at Penny. “Insane. How does your race even exist?”

  “Chi shee.” Penny poked Danica in the nose.

  “What did she say?” Danica asked suspiciously.

  “She said, ‘Because of people like you,’” Mila translated and kissed Danica on the arm, then reached in and held Mia’s tiny hand. “So, I’m not pregnant? It was all some crazy side effect from these little ones?”

  “How would I know if you’re pregnant or not?”

  “Because you’re my doctor, dummy.”

  “How am I supposed to check if you don’t come to the hospital?”

  “Because you’re my magical doctor.”

  Danica laughed. “You got me there.”

  “Well? Am I?” Mila threw her hands up.

  Danica started laughing in earnest. “No, babe. You’re not pregnant.”

  Mila chuckled along with her. “You’re such a jerk.”

  “I think we need a bigger place.” Finn nodded toward the babies. “What would you think about buying an island?”

  “How are we going to buy an island?” Mila laughed.

  “Well, I know of a few tons of gold and gems that no one’s using.”

  THE END

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  Author Notes - Charley Case

  May 24, 2020

  Thank you for reading the final installment of the Lone Valkyrie series. In the beginning I wasn't planning on doing a series for Mila, but after book one of The Adventures of Finnegan Dragonbender,
I knew that we needed to show Mila’s growth as a Valkyrie if the next series was going to be as awesome as I wanted it to be. She became a real powerhouse over the last three books, and to be honest she needed to be to fill the shoes I have waiting for her.

  I always find it funny how characters I write demand things from me, then throw a fit if I don't oblige. Reminds me of my cats…

  So, we’ve been stuck in our houses for a while now, and like I said in my last notes, I’m kind of made for this. However, most of my friends are not.

  I have a friend that lives on the other side of the country that I have known for longer than I have not. (aka more than half my life) He and I, along with our wives, go on vacation twice a year. Usually we go skiing in the winter and head off to Chincoteague Island in the summer. This year was no different.

  At least it was planned to be no different.

  In the winter they had a family emergency that kept them home so we missed out on seeing them. And it’s not looking good for this summer due to the pandemic.

  Now, you have to understand that I’m okay with this. Family emergencies happen, and apparently so do pandemics, but I’m an introvert. My friend is not… he is very much an extrovert and having to stay home is driving him insane. Literally insane.

  To get his socializing in we started playing D&D over video chat. When we saw how successful that was, he wanted to add another day of D&D every week. Okay, that’s fine. Then he wanted to do a happy hour on Fridays. I mean that’s three days a week, maybe… What about playing some pub quiz games? We could do it on Saturdays! Uh… so four days a week?

  You can see where this is going.

  The other night me and my wife were laying in bed after a long night of hanging out on a video chat and she turned to me with a furrowed brow.