by Nora Ash
Annabel fidgeted by my side, clearly feeling it too. I placed my palm on the small of her back. It was a light touch, a small gesture, but the way her spine straightened meant so much more.
It meant she was mine—something we both already knew, but it never hurt to be reminded of.
In front of us, the world rippled and shimmered, a gelatinous membrane shuddering into being. Annabel inhaled sharply through her nose. She’d only been through a portal once before, and that had been something of a harrowing experience.
I cast a glare at Magni. He still needed to pay his dues for that.
But then again, maybe he already had. He was doing better now that he was closer to Annabel, but he was still pale, his lips still bloodless. Hopefully he’d survive, but not before having to withstand the knowledge that right now, he was pretty much useless.
“Is that it?” Annabel asked, drawing my attention back to where it belonged. “Is that Asgard?”
I peered past the thin tissue between realities to bask in the glow of a golden city. I hadn’t seen it in centuries—perhaps longer than that—but the sheer majesty of Asgard couldn’t be mistaken for anything else. Gilt spires jutted past iridescent clouds beyond a sea of rolling fields. There was no grass so green in any of the other realms, each blade like a shard of emerald purloined from a dwarven mine.
And all around the image blazed a honeyed, runic script. It didn’t say “TO ASGARD,” exactly, but I knew enough to know that’s what it meant.
Or I thought I did, because the moment I began to step through, Grim stopped me.
“Wait.”
I turned to him, brows raised. “What for?”
“There’s something… off about this,” he said, squinting at the runes. Abandoning Magni to Bjarni’s grasp, he cocked his head, coming to my side.
Great—something else that was just wrong enough to be unsettling. “Off how?”
Grim’s lips moved, but no sound emerged from them for quite some time. Annabel looked up at me, searching my face for an answer, but I was unfortunately just as bewildered as she was.
Finally, he shook his head. “Entry isn’t free.”
Bjarni snorted. “The hell is that supposed to mean?”
Grim glared over his shoulder at him. “It means there’s a cost. If either of you bothered to give magic the respect it deserves, you’d know there often is. Crossing borders like this, especially into a place as well-warded as Asgard, will require a phenomenal amount of magical intervention. We’ll have to give up something of ourselves in exchange. We’ll have to pay a sort of… toll.”
“And the price?” I said, instinctively blocking Annabel from view. Grim was right—I didn’t know a whole lot about the finer points of magic, but I did know that when it came to a cost, it was usually steep.
Grim’s mouth formed into a slash. “I don’t know. It doesn’t say. The most I can tell you is that it will be exacted three times. Three trials, so to speak.” He looked back up at the sigils. “But I’m not sure what they entail.”
“Perfect,” Bjarni muttered. “We’ll just step through the magical doorway with no idea what’s on the other side, then? Is that it?”
“I’m afraid that’s it,” Grim answered, turning to me once again. “I’m the scholar. I’ll go.”
Bjarni bellowed a laugh. “And if the trials don’t involve brooding with your nose in a book? Then what will you do?”
Grim quirked a brow. “Are you volunteering?”
Bjarni shrugged, hefting Magni up off his feet without even the slightest hint of an effort. “I’m pretty useful in a fight.”
“Put me down,” Magni hissed.
“And if it isn’t a fight?” Grim countered, gesturing to the portal. “Everything that’s here leads me to believe it’s something more esoteric than that. Something metaphysical.”
They would bicker like this for hours if I let them, and that was time none of us had. I was the eldest. I was the most experienced. And that made me responsible.
“I’ll go,” I said, already stepping forward. “I’ll let you know when it’s over with.”
“Saga!” Annabel said, grabbing at my arm. “Wait. You have no idea what’s on the other side!”
“No,” I told her, “I don’t. But neither does anyone else, and that’s not the point. The point is that we have to get you to safety, and we have to get him—” I nodded at Magni. “—to a healer. Because if you lose him, sweetling….” I trailed off, knowing exactly what words I wanted to say, which ones were true—and yet when it came down to it, I was utterly unable to say them.
If you lose him, then I lose you too.
“I’ll be back,” I said instead, gruffly shaking her off to deter her from pursuit.
But in true Annabel fashion, as soon as I was on the other side, she cried out after me, “I’m coming with you!”
And so the darkness swallowed us both.
I cursed, pulling in a lungful of mist. It was the only thing I could sense in this void besides Annabel herself, shimmering like a beacon behind me. Every echo of her footsteps incensed me. Gods damn her, I told her I would do this myself!
“Go back,” I snapped once she was near enough, whirling on her and taking her by the shoulders. “This is no place for you.”
She shook her head. “You need me. You can’t do this alone.”
I stared at her in utter disbelief. Was she implying I was weak? That I needed the company of some omega to get through this?
Wasn’t that what she was always implying, though? Every time I gave an order, she rebelled. Every time I made a suggestion, she had one of her own. Every time I wanted to take action, she just had to argue. And now here she was, following me into dangers untold because she thought she knew better than an alpha—than the son of a god.
The darkness yawned around us, fog thickening in my chest as I tightened my grip on her, walking her backward whence we came.
“I didn’t ask your opinion on what I can and cannot do, Annabel,” I growled, a palpable heat prickling my throat. “Just as I did not ask you to accompany me here. Go back with the others. Now.”
But she dug in her heels, reaching up to take my wrists in her delicate hands. “No. Saga, just listen to me. Please. I have this feeling….”
“I am not interested in your feelings!” I snapped, tightening my grasp until she winced. “You cannot listen, can you? What the hell kind of omega doesn’t know how to follow an order from her mate?”
Annabel’s eyes darkened, growing nearly as pitch as the rest of the room. “What the hell kind of alpha is challenged by his omega trying to support him?” She made a valiant attempt to brush my hands off her. “You know I can do this. You know I have some kind of ability, something that could help. Why won’t you just let me?”
What was happening to me? The anger was rising so hard and so fast. The muscle in my cheek was twitching, my nostrils flared wide to billow as much mist as I took in. Another flash of heat, this one white-hot, seared behind my eyeballs until all I could see was red. I knew I was bruising Annabel now, but I couldn’t stop. I didn’t want to stop. Not until she obeyed me.
“Because I don’t need your help,” I told her through my teeth as she struggled to free herself. “What I need is for you to obey me. I need you to submit. I am not interested in any magic you might have, Annabel, nor am I interested in how you seem to want to play the warrior all of a sudden. You aren’t one. I am. I’ve tolerated you playing dress-up because it means you keep your mouth shut, but even my patience for that is waning.”
With surprising strength, she shoved away from me at last, stumbling a few feet toward where the threshold to the portal must have been. But instead of crossing it, she stopped short, staring at me with wide eyes and an unsettlingly blank expression.
“Is that what you think of me?” she asked, voice low and trembling, not just with hurt, but with cold, seething rage. “You think I’m just your… your weak little omega? Your subordinate? Your sla
ve?”
The words tumbled from my mouth faster than I could stop them. “That is all I want you to be.”
Annabel blinked in reply, just once. It was the kind of look I would have expected from someone who’d been slapped in the face. And the worst part was that I liked it. It felt good to see her put in her place.
“This is why,” she whispered after a long moment. “This, right here—the way you see me, how you treat me, what I am to you at heart….” Tears were shrouding her gaze, but they did nothing to obscure the anguish in her eyes. “This is why I can’t ever love you, Saga.”
But she didn’t have to love me—as far as our arrangement went, love was not required. I meant to tell her that too, to sneer it at her cruelly, but faster than I could stop her she stepped around me, heading into the black.
“Annabel!” I called after her, and as I did, the mist fled my lungs in a smoky plume, leaving me empty and cold. I put a hand to my chest, trying to recall where that anger had come from—all that hate and fear. It had bubbled up so rapidly, so readily, and….
What had I done? Why? What was this… this rage, clawing at my brain stem?
“Shit,” I breathed, turning to follow her scent. “Annabel, I….”
But I couldn’t say it. Once again, the words wouldn’t come. They were so simple—I’m sorry—but no matter what I did, I couldn’t say it. The words formed on my tongue and died on my lips.
Desperation mounting, I roared into the shadows. “Come back here!”
Annabel’s only reply was a scream.
It wasn’t fear. I’d heard terror before. I’d even heard it come from her own mouth. And this… this wasn’t that.
This was pain. This was sheer, brilliant agony. The kind that stabs into you just as surely as any knife.
All too soon, it lapsed into wet, sticky gurgle.
“No,” I whispered, every molecule in my body screaming at me to run. To save her. “No! Annabel!”
And yet all the while, I knew it was too late.
I was the son of a god. And not just any son—the eldest of them all. I was blessed long before the others with the powers of my father. I was the fastest. The strongest. If anyone could save her, it would have been me.
But no matter what I did—no matter how far or fast I ran into that darkness, following the waning echoes of a body choking on its own blood—I never seemed to get any closer. I was always just far enough away for it not to matter.
Until she was already gone.
I stared up at the spindle that had grown out of the rocks beneath my feet. It stretched three, maybe four times as high as I was tall, towering over me, so high up that Annabel’s blood hadn’t even dripped to my eye-level yet. Her body cast an eerie shadow; speared on the stalagmite, she rattled and spasmed. Her eyes rolled.
Then they set upon me. Confused. Accusing. Glazing over to cold, dead gray.
“S-Saga…”
My stomach lurched up toward my throat, then plummeted at the same moment gravity began to tug her down, down, down....
“No!”
I surged forward, grabbing the stalagmite with every intention of snapping it in two—but the damage was already done. As Annabel slid down the tapered end, the spire widened, ripping an even greater hole in her until….
Her legs fell one way. Her torso fell another. Ruined flesh scattered at my feet like confetti.
My mate’s flesh.
With it, I was rent apart too, and not just my body—but my soul.
23
Annabel
“Please… gods, no. Please…!”
“Saga?” I said, blinking against the shadows draped from every corner of this dark, dank place. There was a smell to it, not blood or urine, but just as acrid.
Fear. It was the smell of fear.
The hairs on my nape came to attention. My chest clenched as a moment later, a scream, raw and jagged, shattered the cadence of heavy sobs I’d been following for what felt like an eternity.
It was that pain that had led me here—Saga’s pain. I didn’t understand it. I hadn’t the first clue what had happened. All I knew in the very mantel of my bones was that one of my mates was is agony, and it was the kind that would have killed a lesser man by now.
That was what he was begging for, in fact—death. An end to his suffering. To a torment neither of us had the words to name.
“I can’t,” he wheezed, making the air around me tremble. “I can’t…!”
“Saga!” I called again, louder this time, but it came out more like a rasp. Our bond had wrapped around my throat like a noose, tethering me to him, tugging me along. “Where are you?”
Another scream served as my answer. It was too much to bear.
Knowing damn well I could end up face-first in a wall at any minute, I quickened my pace, first to a brisk walk and then a jog. Finally, I found the courage to sprint, spurred on by Saga’s keening cries and the excruciating twang it inspired in our bond every time.
I called his name again and again, but there was no soothing him. Could he not hear me? Why didn’t he answer?
At last, and so abruptly I nearly went tumbling over him, I found my mate on his knees hunched over a figure sprawled across the ground. Well, half a figure. The legs were gone, the pelvis in tatters.
He was holding it like it was the most precious thing in all the worlds to him, cradling it to his chest as he peppered desperate kisses along its face. “Please come back to me,” he was saying, shaking like a leaf. “Please, you can’t… you can’t go….”
Slowly, giving him as wide a berth as I was able, I approached. My fingers landed soft upon his shoulder. “Saga…?”
He spun, dropping the bundle in his arms. Porcelain shattered on the rocks, a doll cast aside and still spewing red threads into the dark.
The way he looked at me then… the shock, the horror, the relief… it stole any other words I might have said, and all I could do was change trajectory, cupping his damp cheek.
He leaned into my touch so hard it nearly brought me to the ground beside him.
“I don’t understand,” I blurted, coughing as he threw his arms around my waist. Pressing his face into my clothes, my mate—a god, an alpha—sobbed so hard his whole body shook with his grief. “I… I’m here. What happened?”
“Don’t go,” he answered, digging his fingers into my shoulder blades hard enough to leave bruises. “Please. I’m sorry. I’ll give you the world. I’ll give you anything. Everything.” Nuzzling in hard, he breathed me in, holding me so tight I was practically doubled over him. “Forgive me. Forgive me.”
“I don’t…” Bracing myself on Saga’s huge shoulders, I pushed away just enough to look down at him, jaw slack in disbelief at his red-rimmed eyes and the brokenness in them. “I don’t need to forgive you.”
It was the first time I’d admitted so out loud. It might have even been the first time I’d admitted it to myself. But seeing him, with what he’d thought was my broken body in his arms, I knew then everything I ever needed to know about this man.
Saga just looked at me, brow furrowed, searching my face for the lie, but there was none. Closing my eyes, I continued, “I know I should. After everything you’ve done to me… taken from me… I should hate you, just like I should hate my parents. But I don’t. All I know is….”
Slowly, I opened my eyes again. Once more, I moved my hands from his shoulders to his face, brushing his tears with my fingertips.
“All I know is that you’re my mate. And that… that everything you’ve done, you’ve done to protect the ones you love. Your brothers. I… would have done the same.”
Saga lowered his head again, something dark and terrible flickering across his face. A moment later, however, it was replaced by a warm glow.
We both shifted our gazes. Just beyond where we embraced, a woodland had come into view. Vast and lush, it surrounded an idyllic little cottage. Firelight spilled from its windows.
“What the hell is this plac
e?” I murmured. With a deep breath, Saga stood, taking my hand.
“I think… it’s the second trial,” he answered, threading our fingers together.
He started toward the cottage with me in tow, kicking the life-sized doll out of the way and squeezing my hand as he did so.
“Do you know this place?” I asked as he led me up the well-trod path toward the cottage’s front door. The scent of vital foliage was thicker here, yet somehow too sweet, as though it were only the facsimile of a memory rather than the actual thing. I hated that dissonance immediately—how it was like we were walking through a scene someone had been told about, but never actually borne witness to. It made this place seem all the more foreboding and disturbingly alien.
“I know it,” Saga confirmed, pausing only briefly upon the stoop. With a sigh, he wiped his eyes with his free hand and looked down at me with a mirthless smile. “This is home.”
I began to say, “I don’t understand,” but perhaps he knew I wouldn’t, because without giving me any further time to process he pulled open the door, leading me over the threshold and into a thick mist smelling of fresh-baked bread.
On the floor near a stone fireplace, two boys played with sticks. One was tawny and fair-haired, broad of build even at this age, while the other—slighter, darker, more subdued—studied their game with a Corvid-like shrewdness I’d come to recognize over the past few days.
Bjarni and Grim. They were children here, innocent, vulnerable. The house was warm enough, and secluded enough to be safe, but… where was their mother?
I never got the chance to ask. Abruptly Saga pulled me behind him, turning to face the doorway as a shadow slipped through, blackening the golden afternoon.
“Where were you?”
In front of me, Saga straightened, using his frame to partially block my view. Still, I could see the furious creature just beyond him—the man who somehow seemed to dwarf my indomitable mate, if not in height, then in sheer presence. Despite the darkness he cast, he had a glow about him that reminded me of the runes that had flanked the portal, and a strange sort of vagueness to his features that made it difficult for me to focus on any one aspect of him long enough to get a sense of what he looked like.