Valkyrie

by Raythe Reign

  His hand went to the dagger and he unsheathed it. The black blade was like a piece of liquid darkness. He knew that these were likely some of the missing, sick kids from the hospital. He was supposed to not hurt them so that Thor and Liam could free them from the Gash’s influence. He, too, could use the frost to make the Gash go.

  But that would have only worked on one. There are at least five here. He breathed in through his nostrils. The scent of dust and blood hung heavily in the air and made him want to cough and sneeze. I just have to keep them off for a short time. Liam will be here any minute now.

  Yet everything was so silent from the hall. It felt like he was alone in the house. He jerked when he saw movement from the original high backed chair. The figure was standing now like a Halloween ghost. It seemed far larger than a child. Cameron brought the dagger up defensively.

  “Don’t,” was all Cameron said. His mouth was dry as dust. He licked his lips, but his tongue felt rough as sandpaper.

  There was another movement and the three on the couch were standing. Cameron swallowed again as he jerked the blade towards them. As he focused on them though, the one in the other high backed chair had stood as well. The one from the first chair had advanced upon him several feet.

  “Stay back!” Cameron’s voice sounded high and tight. All the magic that he had learned seemed to leave him. His heart was hammering so hard in his chest that it threatened to leap out of it.

  I’m afraid because these are kids. I can’t just let go like I did outside of the bar with Mom. But I wasn’t really going to hit her … I just need to incapacitate them.

  The dagger though would only harm. He didn’t think that if he thrust it through the sheets that it would simply draw blood. It might poison or worse. So though his hands were slick with sweat and his heart was doing a jig in his chest, he sheathed it and let his hands fall to his sides. He took a deep breath to center himself and wiggled his fingers. He felt the electric ping of magic in his hands. He was primed and ready to go.

  In those few moments where his gaze was not all on the sheeted children, they had all advanced. They were only five feet away.

  Burn the sheets and send a wave of frost over the children. Not enough to give them frostbite, but just enough to warn them off.

  Cameron wiggled his fingers once more and lifted his right, fiery hand out towards the nearest sheeted figure. He didn’t touch the sheet. He didn’t have to. He just imagined it blackening and catching fire. In an instant, the fire raced over the sheet, consuming it to ashes that fluttered down on the carpet.

  But underneath the sheet was not a child.

  Underneath was the spindly creature that he remembered thrusting a blade-like hand through his brother’s chest. All the sheets fluttered away at that moment, showing four more of those creatures. They seemed to be made up of bone and darkness with slashes for eyes. They all had the bladed hands and they were thrusting them towards him all at once.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR: RIDE THE LIGHTNING

  “He’s gone,” Liam breathed. Those words felt like lead weights, but somehow he lifted them out of his mouth and into the air.

  He stood stock still in the hallway for a moment. The door to the living room through which his little brother had disappeared through a moment before was shattered into pieces no larger than a toothpick by one of Loki’s spells. The Trickster God had forced his way in ahead of everyone and now he did not move. Loki’s gaze though continued to dart around the room, never stopping on any one spot for long.

  His body finally under his control again, Liam raced inside the room and began pulling the dusty sheets off of the furniture as if Cameron would be hiding underneath them.

  “CAM! CAMERON!” he shouted even as the room, the whole house, the whole world felt empty of his brother.

  He pulled an armoire away from the wall without any sense of the weight of it and tossed it across the room where it shattered. But Cameron was not there. And Liam continued to have no sense of him anywhere. Panic filled him like spiders crawling down his spine and he shook. Sparks suddenly jumped from his fingers. Thor put an arm around him.

  “Calm, Liam. Calm,” the Thunder God murmured into his ear.

  “But Cam …” his voice was high and thin. The smell of ozone grew heavier in the air like it did before a storm.

  Thor tightened his hold on Liam. “Cameron needs you to be in control.”

  “I’ll turn the world to ashes to find him,” Liam said, his blue eyes meeting matching one.

  If he expected a look of horror from Thor, he would have been disappointed. The Thunder God just gave one short, sharp nod. He understood.

  “We’re going to get him back,” Thor said simply then turned to his fellow Aesir. “Where is he, Loki?”

  Liam spun around to face Loki. The Trickster God’s eyelids were now closed and his hands were slightly raised from his sides. The carvings on his armor appeared to be moving even as Loki stood absolutely still. He thought one of the skulls winked at him.

  “Has the Gash … absorbed him?” Elda asked. She was in the doorway while Lihua and Nafari had come into the room and were looking in corners for Cameron. It was absurd, but he knew that they needed something to do.

  “No!” Liam cried even though he had no basis for knowing if the Gash had or not. It was just simply not something he was willing to contemplate. Cameron could not be gone forever. He would not allow it. He realized now that he was experiencing just a taste of what Cameron had gone through when he died.

  I should have come back immediately. Damn the rules. Damn everything. Cam is all that matters!

  Nafari put a hand on Liam’s shoulder. “I do not smell absorption here. When Laqua was taken there was a scent like licorice mixed with rancid meat. It just smells of dust and mold in this room.”

  Though Liam appreciated Nafari’s words, he stared at Loki. The Trickster God would know for sure. He couldn’t bear to look at Thor, because the Thunder God could not lie and if he saw any truth to Elda’s statement there he would … he did not know what he would do.

  Cam cannot be gone. Cam cannot be gone. I can’t be without him. I would make this place a crater. I would light up the Earth so that the Gash had nowhere to hide.

  “He’s not absorbed,” Loki finally answered. Liam let out a huge breath that he didn’t know he was holding. Nafari squeezed his shoulder. But then Loki said, “He’s in a pocket.”

  “A what?” Liam asked.

  Thor was the one to turn around and explain, “The Gash comes from a place we think of as the Between or the Underneath. When we travel between the Realms, we travel through this space in seconds or less. The Gash can create pockets in the Between or Underneath where it can place people.”

  Loki turned around. “They are rather like oubliettes.”

  “What’s a —” Liam got out, but Lihua was answering.

  “It’s a secret dungeon with access usually through a trapdoor in the ceiling,” she explained.

  “In this case the ceiling,” Loki made quotes with his fingers, “is the area where the Gash has thinned the separation between Midgard and the Between.”

  “So Cam is … in another dimension or something?” Liam qualified.

  “Not quite. The Between is not a defined Realm as far as we are aware. It is just … between,” Thor said with a massive shrug and grimace. “We did not even know it existed until my father breached it.”

  “And brought the Gash into the Nine Realms,” Loki added dryly.

  Thor lowered his head. “Yes, while his curiosity has brought about many wonders, in this case —”

  “It has been an unending nightmare. Do not defend him, Thor. Not now with Cameron missing,” Loki interrupted as his strange golden eyes scanned the room.

  Lihua had been slowly turning in a circle in the room. She suddenly pointed to a space by the door. “There. It’s there.”

  Liam immediately looked at where she pointed, but saw nothing other than an empty space. He m
oved a hand through it. He felt nothing either.

  “Yes,” Loki agreed, stepping up beside her. His gaze was fixed on the same point. “There indeed.”

  “What’s there? Nothing’s there!” Liam’s voice rose up into a high-pitched whine of fear and the smell of ozone almost choked even him.

  Nafari squeezed his shoulder again. Liam let out a shuddery breath. Thor looked back at him, concern etched on his handsome face.

  “It is all right, Liam. Loki will find Cameron and bring him back,” Thor said, his tone gentle yet in control.

  Liam knew that he needed to get it together, too. But he was cursing himself for ever letting Cameron come with him. His little brother should have been left back at the bar. Of course, Cameron would never have stayed. He would have pointed out that he had as much right - if not more - to come on this mission. And it wasn’t as if he was powerless.

  But his powers didn’t stop the Gash from imprisoning him.

  “But how?” Liam asked, tugging on his shoulder length hair and pacing the room. “We need to get him back now. He’s in danger.”

  “He is, but you mustn’t underestimate your brother’s power,” Loki said. “Thor, you and the others need to proceed down to the basement.”

  “WHAT?! They can’t leave! We have to find Cam!” Liam cried.

  “Taking Cameron is to distract us and give the Gash time to prepare something nasty down below,” Loki said, amazingly calmly. “You and I can get back Cameron. But the others need to continue.”

  Liam’s fingernails dug into his palms.

  “Trust Loki, Liam. He knows what he is doing,” Thor said with a press of a hand on Liam’s shoulder. The only reluctance Liam saw in his eyes was to leave him. He believed in the Trickster God’s ability.

  The other three Valkyrie hesitated. They looked to him. Liam raked a hand through his hair.

  “Go,” he finally said. “Go. Save those kids. We’ll join you as soon as we get Cam.”

  “Loki, we will need you to open a path to the Between as well,” Thor reminded him gently.

  “I am one of the few that can be in two places at once when necessary.” Loki gave him a thin smile. Even Thor could not question Loki’s abilities without getting some acid in response.

  The others left the room, leaving Liam and Loki surrounded by dusty furniture and dead sheets.

  “Well, what do we do?” Liam couldn’t help the note of urgency from creeping into his voice.

  Loki didn’t seem annoyed by it. Instead, he stepped forward so that he was just in front of the place where he and Lihu had pointed to before. “Come over here by me. I will slit open the pocket here. When I tell you to, I want you to be prepared to grab your brother and pull him out of there. I doubt he’s alone and I doubt it will be easy.”

  Liam raced to Loki’s side. He slid his hammer back into the loop on his belt. He held both hands out, fingers flexing, ready to dart forward and wrap his hands around his little brother’s slender body. He thought he heard Loki begin to chant yet when he glanced over at the Aesir’s mouth it was not moving. The sound was like a murmur that increased to a rumble that increased further into a whine.

  It set Liam’s teeth on edge and he gritted them so hard it felt like they might break. Liam realized that his mouth was open and he was screaming from the sound, but he couldn’t hear himself over the high-pitched whine that rattled his bones. He felt blood starting to ooze from his nose. But he didn’t dare cover his ears. He had to be ready to grab Cameron.

  And then when it seemed like his head might explode, a vertical line appeared in the air. It was like a line a black marker might make on a mirror’s surface. The air around it shimmered and distorted and then there was this squealing sound as the two halves of the line were wrenched apart forming a window into another world.

  A world that looked and did not look like Earth.

  Liam saw the same room they were in before him except there were some major differences. There was the same floor, the same walls, the same furniture, but where the door in this world was a pile full of toothpicks, the door in this other world was whole and shut. Cameron’s back was up against it as he fought off five of the things that had killed Liam long ago.

  They were spindly and a dull gray rather like dirty glass or old newspapers balled into corners. They turned their spiky heads towards Liam and he saw they slashes for eyes and mouths filled with blackness. One of them reared back with its sword-like arm, about to thrust at him. Liam had no weapon handy. He was ready to grab Cameron, but these things were between him and his little brother.

  And, for a moment, Liam was back in the yard, coming towards Cameron, to lift up his little brother, and a knife as cold as death was in his chest. Death it truly was. He froze as the memory overwhelmed him and he forgot all his Valkyrie training, all the fighting he’d been doing for over a decade, and became again just a man who needed his brother. A man about to die once more.

  But Cameron was not frozen. He moved the moment the creature reared back to strike. His hands - one wreathed in flames and the other in ice - were suddenly thrust out before him with the knife clutched in each. Cameron let out a raw yell as magic streamed from both, catching the creature that was about to strike down Liam and shattering it. There was a tinkling sound like breaking glass and Liam watched as the shattered bits of the creature hit the floor and bounced before they simply winked out of existence.

  There was a hoarse roar and Liam’s head snapped up. Another of the creatures was rearing back to impale him. He jumped to the side as their scythe-like arms swept the air where he had been. Then it, too, was struck by a wave of Cameron’s magic and became like glass.

  The combined power of fire and ice ate through the rest of the creatures. The sound of breaking glass was deafening. But once they were all gone, Cameron didn’t stop. He was still screaming, still sending power out, and, to Liam’s horror, the entirety of the pocket began to shatter and become simply black space.

  “Liam, get him!” Loki gritted out. Sweat poured down the Aesir’s face and Liam realized he was using all his strength to keep the pocket open.

  Just as the floor beneath Cameron’s feet disappeared, Liam reached in and caught his little brother’s wrists. He nearly fell forward into the opening as he was suddenly holding up the whole of Cameron’s weight as his little brother dangled above a black abyss. With a burst of strength, Liam lifted his little brother out of the pocket and both of them crashed back onto the floor. Loki nearly toppled over on both of them as the pocket snapped shut. All of them just breathed quietly for a moment.

  Cam’s alive. He’s alive. He’s in my arms and he’s safe.

  Then Liam was turning his little brother around in his arms and running his hands over every part of him that he could reach. “Cam! Are you hurt? Talk to me!”

  “I’m okay. Really, Liam, I’m okay. What about you?” Cameron started touching him the same way, looking to see if the creatures had cut him or worse. Both of them couldn’t keep their hands off of each other. “Your nose is bleeding!”

  “That was from Loki’s spell to open the pocket. I’m good.” He swiped the blood away. “They didn’t get to me thanks to you.”

  “I thought when I saw them … I wouldn’t let them hurt you!” Cameron choked out.

  Liam embraced Cameron so tightly that his little brother let out a soft oomph as all the air was squeezed out of his lungs. He quickly lessened the hold though it was difficult not to clutch. He breathed in Cameron’s scent and felt the soft sift of his hair against Liam’s cheek.

  “The knife that Hel gave me … fire and ice really wouldn’t have killed those creatures. The knife seemed to absorb their power somehow and made them brittle enough that I could shatter them.” Cameron lightly touched the scabbard where the dagger was sheathed again though Liam hadn’t seen Cameron put it back. Perhaps it had a mind of its own and had simply sheathed itself. Disturbing, but possible.

  “I’m fine, too, by the way. In cas
e anyone is worried,” Loki responded dryly.

  He was standing over the two of them. His head was cocked to the side. A faint, amused smile was on his lips. His golden eyes glowed like twin lakes of fire though, belying the seeming calm pose of the rest of him. Cameron jumped to his feet and embraced the Trickster God.

  “Thank you.” Cameron kissed his cheek.

  Liam got up, too, and touched Loki’s shoulder affectionately. Relief that Cameron was back was like a balm. The temptation to order his little brother home was strong, but he knew that Cameron wouldn’t go. And, the truth was, that Cameron had saved him much more than he had saved Cameron. Without Loki’s help though, they would never have gotten Cameron out of there in the first place.

  “Yeah, thank you so much,” Liam added his voice to the chorus of gratefulness.

  At first, Loki did not respond to them, but then he slowly brought his arms up around Cameron and leaned slightly into Liam’s touch. Liam was reminded of a feral cat that was not used to human kindness, but was finding when he allowed himself to be petted that he liked it.

  “I’ve never had much luck with children. Maybe with the two of you it will be different,” Loki said then he was brushing them both off and taking a step back.

  “Are you all right, Loki? Seriously, that looked like it was tough. Is that what you’re going to have to do in order to send the Gash into the Between for good?” Liam asked. Though Loki appeared fully recovered now, he remembered the strain that opening the pocket had caused him.

  “Oh, no, that will be much harder.” He tilted his head to the side and said, “Speaking of which, we must go help the others. Things are not going terribly well down in the basement.”