Valkyrie

by Raythe Reign

  A darkness flowed over their mother’s expression for a moment. Liam wondered if she had seen something more than they had at the hospital. “I know when I’m more in the way than not. This is too important for ego to get involved.” She pulled her keys out of her pocket and regarded the two of them embracing. Her expression was rather blank and then she said softly, “It’s strange how … how natural you look this way.”

  Before either of them could speak, she turned away and got into her car. Liam and Cameron watched her pull out into the highway and drive off into the desert night.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE: THE MAN ONE'S MEANT TO BE

  You won’t know who you are until your moment comes. And after that moment comes, you’ll be the person you were always meant to be.

  Their father’s words ran through Cameron’s head as the sun rose over the desert. His arms were crossed over his chest. The thin long sleeved shirt he wore would be too hot later in the day, but he was chilled now and wished he had a jacket. The desert night had been brutally cold. He’d spent most of it curled, safe and warm, in Liam’s arms, but just before dawn the other Valkyrie had returned with news.

  “We think we know where the Gash is … or, at least, where most of it is and where the rest is headed,” Elda had said when everyone had gathered in the bar.

  Cameron rubbed sleepy eyes as he leaned against Liam’s broad chest. Only Nafari gave them a second look, but there was no malice in it. He’d just half smiled and nodded towards Liam. They were best friends after all. Cameron was glad that it looked like whatever Nafari’s personal feelings were about them being together, he had decided to let them slide and be supportive. Cameron felt some of the tension in his shoulders bleed out. After their mother’s reaction, Cameron didn’t need another reason to toss fireballs around.

  “I think we’re all intrigued by your words, Elda,” Loki said from his perch on Thor’s lap. “Do explain further.”

  Cameron wondered if the two Aesir had spent the entire night like that. From the smiles on Thor’s face and Loki’s lightness, sitting together, wrapped around one another, appeared to be exactly how they wanted to spend the rest of the eternity. Elda didn’t show anything, but a momentary surprise at the fact that Thor and Loki were together. Cameron imagined that it was rather shocking to see the gods one had grown to worship entwined.

  It was Nafari who continued, “From what you all said, the Gash split itself into multiple parts to infect the children. Lihua sensed the disparate parts going to one destination. She was able to figure out exactly where that was.”

  Lihua had been leaning against the wall, silent, since they had come in Liam had explained that she was always wiped out after her sensing the Gash. She often felt contaminated from its essence and this time it was no different. Or rather, it was worse than usual.

  Liam’s face when he’d seen her gray skin tone had become filled with worry. He’d gone over to her and touched her cheeks. He’d whispered something to her that must have been comforting because she smiled and then they hugged. She’d closed her eyes when Liam had hugged her and her face had become suffused with happiness as they rocked back and forth for a moment. But now, without Liam hugging her, as Elda and Nafari explained what she had seen, she looked drained beyond exhaustion. Cameron was about to tell Liam to go over to her when the Thunder God spoke.

  “Where is this central location?” Thor asked. His right hand drifted down to the shaft of Mjolnir. His blue eyes held a spark of lightning in them.

  “I’m surprised you can’t sense it yourself. I would have thought that the Aesir’s powers would be far more than the Valkyrie,” Elda said with a faint frown.

  “The Gash has taken great pains to hide itself from the Aesir,” Loki explained. “I can sometimes have an inkling about what’s going to happen with it as I sense the wrongness it creates around it.”

  “Like the hospital,” Cameron said.

  Loki nodded. “I knew that there would be very bad things happening there so … Gash.”

  “Well, there’s nothing around it now.” Elda looked down and scuffed one booted sole across the ground. She wouldn’t meet Cameron or Liam’s eyes. “It’s in a completely isolated area.”

  “What is it, Elda? What are you worried about telling us?” Liam asked and Cameron could hear how close his voice was to Thor’s. If he closed his eyes, it would have been hard to tell them apart. He sounded quite stern and Cameron wouldn’t want that tone directed at him.

  “The main bulk of it is at the ranch, Liam,” it was Lihua that answered him. Her voice was raspy as if she had been screaming for hours, instead of meditating silently in the desert. “It’s where you died.”

  That last line fell like a stone. The room went absolutely silent. No one was looking at them again. Not even Thor. He was staring down at the ground, frowning very hard. Cameron imagined that it had been as agonizing to Thor to watch Liam die as it would have been for their father. Thor adored Liam that much. Loki’s lips were pursed and he was stroking one of Thor’s massive shoulders. Nafari was biting his lower lip so hard that Cameron thought he might draw blood. Lihua had become paler and more of a shadow of herself. Elda’s hands twisted in her hair.

  “Of course it is!” Cameron laughed. It was a bright, bitter laugh. “Of course, it would be there! Where else? Where fucking else?”

  “Cam.” Liam’s hands tightened on his shoulders. He knew his brother wanted to calm him, to make him see that this was just the Gash playing with them, that it didn’t mean that fate was stepping in to take Liam away from him.

  Again.

  “It’s all right. This is exactly what I expected,” Cameron said and he heard the brittleness enter his voice. “It’s what I’ve always expected.”

  He knew that others heard that brittleness, too. Loki, especially, noticed it. The Trickster God went still. The others merely looked worried though most of them didn’t know of the fireball incident. Elda actually looked up at him and he saw a leader’s desire to comfort troops. But she couldn’t reach him. Liam’s hands tried to turn him around so that they were face to face. But he broke away.

  “Cam, c’mon don’t —”

  “It’s okay, Liam.” He did turn to look at his brother then even as he walked backwards to the door and the night beyond. He heard the feyness enter his voice but he couldn’t stop it. “This is how it always had to be. We’d have to fight it again at that same spot.”

  Liam looked so beautiful. His blond hair shining like spun gold. His blue eyes as clear as the sky. His tall and muscular frame was exactly what a man should be in Cameron’s opinion. He was so lucky. Liam had come back. Nothing else mattered in the end. Even this.

  So why do I feel like I might shatter? Because this could end.

  “We’re going to destroy it, Cam,” Liam told him. He took a step towards him, but Cameron held up a hand and gave him one of those brittle smiles.

  “I know. I just need a minute.”

  And he had fled from the bar out into the parking lot. He’d then walked out into the desert until he could just barely see the red from Fenrir’s sign. Only then had he stopped. His breath frosted the air. His skin ached with the cold. He wrapped his arms around his chest and just stood there, staring up at the sky that was alight with stars. He remembered the voices that had plucked at him earlier, but they were not there, or he couldn’t hear them now. There was only silence and the memory of their father’s words.

  Kurt Blake had said those words to Liam one night out on the porch as the sun was dying, not coming up. He didn’t know that Cameron was listening, too. Cameron’s room had a window that opened up onto the porch’s roof and he had been out there, drawing in his sketchbook, when their father had started talking.

  “Dad, what’s going on?” Liam had asked. “Something’s wrong. Did something happen at work?”

  “Just you sit on down, Liam. What happened today was … well, it was written long ago,” their father said and Cameron heard him take a drin
k of something before he went on. “It was written on my first week on the job. I was only twenty-three. Much too young and stupid to have a gun, but there you go. Yet I used it to kill a man. The man’s name was Derek Smalls. He was a wife beater.”

  “Dad,” Liam breathed, shocked, horrified and honored at the same time to be told this.

  “His wife, Lisa, had called the cops countless times. Her face black and blue. Every bone in her body broken at one point or another. But every time she wouldn’t go through with the charges.” Another swig of something, likely beer since his father did like beer. “I don’t blame her. It’s easy to call someone weak when you’re looking at it from the outside. She believed he would kill her if she went through with it. He was likely going to kill her anyways, but she wanted whatever bit of life he would grant her.”

  “So what did you do?” Liam’s voice was low, full of emotions that Cameron’s ten-year-old brain could only glimpse but not yet understand. “Did you … did you stop him from hurting his wife?”

  “Yes, I did.” There was silence for a long time. “In the only way a man like that could be stopped. I was there alone. She’d called me directly, because I’d helped her in the past. She would later tell me it was because … because she trusted me. With what? Her life? His death? Was she right to trust me?”

  “She was, Dad, she was completely right,” Liam answered the rhetorical question. Cameron had wondered even then if his father believed his older brother. His good and honorable older brother.

  “It was sunset … just like this. It made it hard to see in the house though. The shadows were long especially in the kitchen. Lisa was almost invisible where she was hiding against the sink’s cabinets. I just heard her whimpering,” their father painted a vivid picture. “Derek had beaten her so badly that she couldn’t stand. I remember flashing my light in her face by accident and seeing more black and blue and red than white. She held up this shaking hand to shield her eyes …”

  Silence fell again as the sun dipped down below the horizon, setting the sky on fire.

  “I knew Derek was still in the house. He was bellowing and smashing things like a wounded bull,” their father said with a huff of almost laughter. “He was such an animal. A sick animal that needed to go.”

  “Dad, did you … I mean did he do something … of course, he did something … to make you ...” Liam stammered and went silent without making himself clear with words.

  But their father understood. “To make me kill him? Do you mean did he attack me or threaten his wife at that moment? That’s what you’re asking, isn’t it?”

  “I’m sure you did have good reason,” Liam said, his voice tight. “I know you did.”

  But while Liam was upset, not liking that their father had shot an animal that was beating his wife, going to murder his wife, Cameron understood that there had really been no other choice. His father had understood that fact. He hadn’t shied away from it. He’d done what he’d done, because he had to do it. To get rid of a great evil.

  “I had the only reason a man needs to take another life,” their father paused. “But that’s not your way, Liam. I know that.”

  “Dad, no, I understand — I’m not judging you. It was right that you stopped him,” Liam insisted, but there was still that pain in his voice. “I just wish … I just wish it didn’t have to be you to do it. I can tell it hurts you. I can see it in your face.”

  “You won’t know who you are until your moment comes. And after that moment comes, you’ll be the person you were always meant to be,” their father said softly.

  He heard Liam shift and he knew that his brother reached for their father to comfort him. “Dad, you’re not a killer. You’re a lawman.”

  “Yes, Liam, I am a lawman. The law is greater than us. It demands more than maybe we have sometimes,” their father whispered. “But I knew that day, after I put Derek Smalls down who I was and what I was meant to be.”

  The sun had completely set. There was only the thinnest rim of red-gold on the horizon. The desert looked to be on fire.

  “What happened to Lisa?” Liam asked and Cameron was so grateful for that. He wanted to know, too.

  Their father gave a soft laugh, but it wasn’t pained or bitter or anything like that, but glad. “She’s remarried. Has two kids. Doing really well. She still sends me cards at Christmas.”

  “You saved her,” Liam let out something that sounded like a laugh mixed with a pained sound.

  “I think I saved three people at least. Lisa and her children. And then others, too. Derek would have hurt other women after Lisa. He wouldn’t have stopped,” their father said. “He had to be stopped.”

  Cameron wiped his face then. They were tears. No tears of sadness though. He was proud of their father. Kurt Blake had done what he’d had to do to save countless lives. He’d had the strength to do it where others wouldn’t have had the strength. Cameron wanted to be just like that. Just like their father.

  “What about today, Dad?” Liam asked. “What happened today?”

  Cameron tensed, because whatever it was had led to this moment.

  “Today,” their father paused, “I was the person I was always meant to be.”

  The faint crunch of sand told him that someone was behind him and the memory ended as quickly as it had begun. The fact that it was a single crunch told him that it was Loki and not Liam. He saw the Trickster God out of the corner of his eye as the Aesir stepped up beside him and stared at the rising sun, too.

  “We’re going to go after the Gash today,” Loki said, not looking at him, but regarding the horizon as if it was just a pretty picture.

  “Yeah, I figured.” He was happy and his voice sounded normal. Not fey. Not brittle. Normal.

  “We believe that it hasn’t been able to leave town because it is not complete. Otherwise, I think it would flee, regroup and then go against us,” Loki said with a half shrug.

  “I would have thought it was pretty damned pissed at us and keen on taking us out as soon as possible. Seems odd for it to want to run away,” Cameron pointed out.

  “I don’t doubt it’s angrier than a kicked hornet’s nest, but you scared it,” Loki said with a faint smile. “Really scared it. Which is quite satisfying to me that it was you that had it sitting up and taking notice.”

  Cameron turned to face the Trickster God. Loki’s golden eyes were like the sun. He was beautiful and otherworldly looking at that moment.

  “You could have hurt it a long time ago, Loki. If not by yourself - you have the same powers as me, stronger obviously - or by bringing the Aesir back so why is it satisfying that I scared it?” Cameron lifted an eyebrow at him.

  Loki glanced over at him out of the corner of eye and shifted his stance. “I couldn’t go up against the Gash myself and win. I would have been harried all over the globe by it if I’d done so. That would have affected my plans adversely.”

  Cameron narrowed his eyes at Loki. “Yeah, that might be so, but there’s more going on here —”

  “What were you thinking about when you came out here in that rather dramatic fashion, I might add?” Loki’s eyes twinkled.

  “You look like you approve of my dramatic exit.” Cameron felt that brittleness wanting to steal over him again as he thought of where the Gash was waiting for them and the tragedy of the Blakes.

  “I do! You have to keep people guessing. If you’re all steady and normal then that takes away the fun.” Loki grinned.

  “Fun? Yeah, I can see how you would call it that. But you’re changing the subject —”

  “Yes, I am, so tell me. What were you thinking, Cameron? I’m sure it was fascinating and I do so want to know. Your mind is one of the few that I cannot read.” Loki lightly touched Cameron’s temples. It was a brief, affectionate touch, not sexual, but more … paternal if he didn’t know better.

  That had Cameron remembering his father’s words. “I was just thinking if we’re all … meant to become someone in order to do something
.”

  Loki’s eyebrows rose. “Well, that’s … vague.”

  “It’s something my father said, or more, what he believed,” Cameron murmured. He ran a hand through his hair. “The fact that the Gash is at that ranch where I lost Liam and we’re going to face it there again …”

  “You and Liam could stay behind —”

  “No!” Shocked that Loki had even suggested it, Cameron continued on, “No, it’s our fight, you see. We’re the men we are because we’re supposed to destroy the Gash.”

  “With Thor and my help, of course?” Loki’s lips twitched suspiciously.

  “Yeah, with your help. And the other Valkyrie, of course. Which reminds me, why aren’t all Valkyrie in the world congregating here to fight the Gash? Why just Elda’s group?” Cameron asked.

  “Only so many Valkyrie can leave Valhalla at a time,” Loki answered simply.

  “Oh, so if Liam stays here that means that at least one less Valkyrie can come over at any time?” Cameron clarified.

  “Yes, something like that. Now, Cameron.” Loki put an arm lightly around his shoulders. “You and Liam are more than just fighters against the Gash, you know?”

  Cameron nodded, but said, “I keep thinking of a life beyond the Gash and I — I think I see it, but …”

  “But you’re afraid it will all end in tragedy?” Loki guessed. His golden eyes glowed like those lights that led men into the desert to die.

  He grasped Loki’s near hand in his. He squeezed it. It was cool and soft in his. “Loki, you say there’s more for Liam and I than the Gash, but … do you see it? Or do you only hope it?”

  The Trickster God let out a soft huff of laughter. “Cameron, you and Liam are a part of something quite a bit greater. That I know. But will you be able to fulfill that something more? That I hope.” Loki’s voice was almost a whisper as he added, “That I sincerely hope.”

  Cameron’s heart leaped and then fell. There was no guarantee about him and Liam coming out of this all right. He thought of his father that last night he’d left to go to the corner market. He knew that when his father had seen the shooter that would take his life that he hadn’t been afraid. He had been accepting of it. Kurt Blake had to be the man he was always meant to be. To protect. To serve. To die doing it.