Falling for Gods: A Reverse Harem Urban Fantasy (Their Dark Valkyire Book 3)

by Eva Chase

  The trickster eased his lips away from mine to consider my tank top. His finger glided along the neckline, sparking pleasure across my collarbone.

  “What should we do with this?” he murmured.

  “Whatever you want,” I said with a tickle of curiosity to see where he’d take that opening.

  A grin curled his mouth. “Hmm. You do have a decent supply of clothing in that hall of yours, don’t you?”

  “Yes?” I said, giving him a questioning look. Freya and I had taken a brief trip down to their house in Midgard not long after we’d first arrived so I could collect some changes of clothes.

  “Excellent. In that case…”

  He traced a line down my breastbone, and literal flames leapt up in the wake of his finger. The magical sear of them soaked into my skin without burning. They spread across my top, consuming the fabric as they went, flooding me with more and more of that blissful heat. When they licked across my now-bare nipples, I gasped with a bolt of pleasure.

  I yanked Loki’s mouth back to mine. As he kissed me, the flames he’d lit continued their scorching path down—over my ribcage and across my belly, tickling my navel, then creeping along the waist of my jeans.

  When they sizzled over my clit, my hips arched of their own accord. The flood of pleasure was so intense my whole body shook. A moan caught in my throat, and my teeth nicked Loki’s lip. “Loki…”

  “Right here, pixie,” he murmured. “Whatever you need from me.” His thumb flicked over the peak of my breast, drawing a whimper out of me.

  I ran my hands down his lean chest. His flames hadn’t even singed his own clothes. I grasped the hem and yanked it up. “Off.”

  He stripped off the tunic and tossed it to the side in the blink of an eye. I’d already reached lower to cup his rigid cock through his slacks. Loki groaned, and the flames he’d sent right down to my feet a few moments ago returned to lick across my core. The gentle but hot caress brought another moan to my lips. As he leaned in to reclaim my mouth, I felt as if I were being devoured in both places at once.

  My hips bucked again, brushing the bulge of his arousal. I fumbled with his fly. There was no hesitation, no fear left in me, only a torrent of desire.

  More flames sparked as Loki kicked off the rest of his clothes. They crackled across my nipples and nibbled my throat, blazed across my belly and lapped at my clit. Not a hint of pain came with the thrill they provoked.

  The sensations coursed deeper when Loki teased the head of his cock along my opening. I made an insistent sound and raised my legs to embrace his hips. He slid into me with a surge of heat and pleasure. A sigh tumbled from my lips.

  Loki eased in and out of me slowly, ecstasy swelling within me with each stroke of his cock, filling me with the most delicious burn. The magical flames tingling over every sensitive spot on my body had me writhing with just a few thrusts. One pinched my clit, and the dam inside me broke. I came, shuddering, on a wave of bliss.

  “Oh, I think we can take you further than that,” Loki said by my ear. He kissed me through the final tremors, and then he started moving again, his thrusts still measured but picking up speed. With each one he filled me deeper. That sizzling heat spread across my whole sex, pulsing against my clit, making my body flare hotter inside and out.

  Another wave of pleasure built and built, until I was trembling for release. Whimpers escaped me with every panted breath. My fingers tangled in the silky hair at the back of Loki’s head. He met my eyes, his amber eyes smoldering with a strange softness as he gazed down at me. We rocked together, every plunge of his cock bringing a bolt of bliss. His expression tensed with his own rising need.

  “Come with me, Ari,” he said, in the most tender voice I’d ever heard from him. The flames licked at me with a sharper prickling of pleasure, but it was that tone and the look in his eyes that sent my spirit flying.

  I cried out, my head tipping back as my eyes rolled up, my back bowing to ride the explosion of my second release. Heat burst in my core and radiated through me. A ragged cry escaped Loki in turn. He thrust harder, gripping my thigh, and I spiraled even higher than before. For an instant, as his hips jerked and he followed me, my vision blurred with a white-hot glaze of ecstasy.

  Loki swayed to a stop over me. He held there for several seconds as he caught his breath, and then he slipped his arm under me, flipping us in one smooth movement so he was on his back holding me against his chest.

  I snuggled against him, still drifting back down from the heights of my orgasm. His fiery heat had seared the sweat from our bodies, but my skin was flushed everywhere it touched his.

  The trickster’s fingers brushed over my hair. I nuzzled his jaw and lifted my head for another kiss. His hand rose to cup my jaw, and the kiss lingered on and on until I was breathless again. My heart thumped so giddily that I couldn’t think of what to say.

  Loki tucked his head against mine. “No proclamations?” he said lightly, but I thought I caught a hint of longing in his tone.

  I swallowed thickly, breathing in the spicy scent of his skin. “Did you have one to make?

  “You know, I think I just might.”

  I wasn’t prepared for the rush of emotion that hit me, even though he hadn’t actually said anything yet: an answering affection—and a jolt of fear at what might happen when this moment ended and we were faced with all the horrible complications of real life again. I wrapped my arm around his chest, hugging him tight. The words slipped out before I could catch them.

  “Don’t leave.”

  “Whoever said I was going to?” Loki replied, but his muscles had tensed against me, just slightly.

  “You’ve been going down to Muspelheim,” I said to his chest. “I can smell it on you. But you didn’t tell the rest of us about it. You’ve been talking to Surt?”

  He really tensed then, his body shifting as if to propel himself upright and push me back from him. “If you think for one second I’d align myself with that wretched excuse for a—”

  “No!” I caught his shoulder, drawing back far enough to hold his gaze. “That’s not what I meant. I know you. I know you wouldn’t turn your back on us because you wanted to. I was just worried that Odin was sending you off on some new scheme. Forcing you to play one of his games. He pushed you so far before…” My grip on Loki’s shoulder tightened, as if I could hold him with me, away from the Allfather and his manipulations, just with that one hand.

  Loki’s expression softened in an instant. He did sit up, but only to collect me against him, hugging me on his lap. “Oh, pixie. You don’t need to worry about that. My blood oath with Odin still connects us, but any compulsion to obey his orders dissolved with our first deaths. I don’t intend to follow his instructions into villainy ever again.”

  “Then what have you been doing down there? You’ve seemed… upset, the last few days. And the way you’ve been going at Tyr—”

  “Tyr is a different story,” Loki muttered. “Do you know how he lost his hand?”

  I hesitated, suddenly not sure I wanted to know. “I don’t.”

  “I told you they chained up my wolfish son. He was a smart one. He could tell they weren’t just playing games like they told him, testing his strength. When they brought the dark elf-made chain, he wouldn’t let them put it on him unless one of the gods was willing to offer his hand in Fenrir’s mouth as a show of good faith.” Loki let out a humorless chuckle. “Tyr was the one ‘brave’ enough to offer. Without any faith. And so he lost his hand, and my son lost his freedom for the rest of his life.”

  “Oh. No wonder you don’t like him.”

  He sighed. “I suppose I should be over those grudges by now. It’s just been the last week, so many memories stirred up…”

  “I know,” I said gently.

  He tucked my head under his, his embrace tightening. “About the rest—my little jaunts down to Muspelheim… Surt came to me offering an alliance. I played along for a little while to see what I could find out about his plans
and resources.”

  “And you went with him into his realm to discuss all that?” I leaned into him to ease the prickling of fear. “What if he’d tried to cage you like he did with Odin?”

  Loki made a dismissive sound. “Do you really think any regular giant could outwit me? I stayed on my guard. Unfortunately, he didn’t trust me particularly, although I suppose in this case that caution was warranted. I was hoping to have more to report before I spoke to the rest of you. I’m not sure anything I gleaned will be all that useful.”

  “Are you going back?”

  “It would appear not. This morning he insisted that we’d done enough talking, that I commit myself to his cause in unshakeable fashion. I don’t think he was very pleased when I told him I wasn’t satisfied with my end of the theoretical bargain.” His next chuckle sounded more like his usual self.

  “You’ve been grouchy since before Tyr showed up,” I said. “Were you just frustrated that you hadn’t been able to find out more from Surt?”

  “Well, yes. That, and…” Loki paused, his chest rising and falling with a slow breath. “Talking with him, it reminded me too much of certain feelings that used to be all too much a part of my life. Feelings that had been creeping back into my mind, in ways I hadn’t totally acknowledged.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I have many real grievances with the gods of Asgard, pixie, but—I didn’t have to agree to Odin’s terms. I didn’t have to keep his secrets. There were parts of me that enjoyed seeing the gods get their comeuppance at my hands. Who’s to say whether I might have fit in more smoothly over time if it wasn’t for that?” He sighed. “Perhaps I’m not the monster they liked to see me as, but I’m not a hero by any stretch of the imagination either.”

  My chest squeezed. I buried my face in the crook of his neck. “You’re you,” I said. “Who’s a hero all of the time anyway?”

  I certainly wasn’t. But I’d be damned if anyone, king of the gods or giant with flaming sword or army of draugr, took the joys and peace I’d found in my new life away from me.

  “I’m honored by your devotion,” Loki said. His tone was dry, but his embrace tightened around me for a moment before he eased back. “I suppose if we want to get on with the heroic side of things, we should find out what the others have gotten up to. Back to that bloody training.”

  I got up, looking around as he pulled his slacks back on. “Um,” I said, crossing my arms over my bare chest. “I do have plenty of clothes back in my hall. I don’t suppose you had a plan for how I’d make it back to my hall to get them, now that you’ve turned what I had on into ash?”

  Loki laughed and tossed his tunic to me. “Wear this. I can protect your modesty as well as the rest of you.”

  The shirt was long even on Loki’s tall frame. On me it fell nearly to my knees. I stuck my tongue out at him as we set off for the city.

  “How do you know it won’t be me protecting you, huh?”

  He grinned, his hand dipping down to close around mine. “I’ll be perfectly happy either way.”

  22

  Aria

  “Are we sure this is the best course of action, after everything we’ve learned?” Hod said as the group of us came down off the rainbow bridge.

  The humid air in the part of Midgard that Loki had directed us to closed in around us. The dark god turned his head, presumably taking in the sounds and feel of the terrain around us just like I was taking in the look of it. Jungle-like vegetation grew tangled along one side of the road. A cluster of small houses on stilts stood in the distance in the other direction.

  “We don’t need to decide how to act yet,” Loki said, brushing his hands together. “At this point, we’re simply investigating. One of the draugr I convinced Surt to show me had a shirt with a very specific logo. It’s almost certain that victim was picked up around here, which means there must be another gateway in this area, whether the dark elves are still delivering bodies through it or not.”

  I stretched out my wings behind me. “Let’s go find out. We can’t help them fix their realm until they’ve stopped hurting all kinds of innocent people.”

  “If we catch them in the act…” Thor muttered, hefting his hammer as we started walking. He didn’t need to finish that threat.

  Baldur came up beside me. “Can you sense their energy nearby?” he asked.

  I’d already pushed my awareness forward across the terrain. “I might need to go up in the air to get a wider impression—oh.” A shimmering clot of that oily energy brushed my valkyrie senses from what felt like not far at all to our right. “There are dark elves that way,” I said, pointing into the jungle. “Four or five of them, I think.”

  “Into the wilds it is, then,” Loki said with a spring in his step. Our encounter by the orchard seemed to have released him from the bad mood that’d been gripping him for so long.

  Thor bashed a path with his hammer for a couple paces until the trickster pointed out that “it might be preferable if they didn’t hear us coming from miles away.” After that, we picked our way across the damp ground, around tree trunks choked with vines, much more slowly. But we’d only been heading that way for a few minutes when a figure appeared amid the brush in front of us: a dark elf, short and stout like most of them were, with the usual black hair and sallow skin. He held up a white cloth just a few shades lighter than his hand like a gesture of surrender.

  We halted, studying him. “You’ve been stealing people from the towns near here,” Thor rumbled. “We need to—”

  “We don’t want to continue those crimes,” the elf broke in. “Not if there are other ways. We’ve had delegations waiting at our remaining gateways, watching for you to come for us again. There’s no way for us to reach out to you in Asgard on our own.”

  “A delegation?” Hod asked, his tone wary but not harsh.

  “Three of my superiors would return with you to Asgard to speak with Odin,” the man said. “Between them they have authority over several sectors of Nidavellir, and they could persuade the other leaders too if they feel it’s in our interests. We would rather this conflict didn’t turn to outright war.”

  The five of us exchanged a glance. A delegation wanting to discuss peace with Odin—that sounded promising. It was kind of hard to take them completely at face value after everything we’d already seen, though.

  “Have these ‘superiors’ come out,” Loki suggested with a beckoning motion. “We’ll want to look them over. If we’re to trust them, we need to see no weapons and none of your war-like contraptions.”

  The dark elf bobbed his head and shuffled away through the dense vegetation. Less than a minute later, he returned with three companions—two men and a woman, all of them similar in stature and coloring but wearing embroidered tunics in a deep blue that I guessed reflected their status among the elves.

  “I can look them over,” Hod volunteered with a wry smile. He lifted his hand, and his shadows stirred around him. They seeped through the bushes around us to coil around the dark elves, testing their pockets and any bagginess in their clothes for hidden items.

  “We don’t want to fight,” the woman said. “We’re only trying to do right by our people.”

  “You lost the benefit of the doubt when you started slaughtering a whole raft of other people to do that,” Loki retorted. “Give us a moment to confer.”

  We took a couple of steps back, and Loki swept his arm with a tingle of magic that must have concealed us the way he’d hidden me when we’d gone to watch over Petey.

  “From what I could sense of their motives, they’re mostly anxious about the future and a little desperate for this attempt to work out,” Baldur said softly. “There was hope in them, and regret for the past. I think they honestly want to bargain with us. I felt no sense of deception.”

  “That’s the same impression I got from them,” I said. “That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep a close watch. But this could be the way we beat Surt for good, if we bring the dark el
ves over to our side, couldn’t it?”

  Thor was frowning. “I’m not sure how far I’d trust the dirt-eaters to follow through on any agreement after everything they’ve already done. We may not need them.”

  “It certainly can’t hurt to have them,” Loki put in. “In my opinion, we may as well hear what they have to say before we go dismissing it.”

  “I agree,” Hod said. “They’ve done horrible things, but they were in a horrible situation. And what could the three of them hope to do to us or Odin that they couldn’t have when they had him captured for all those years?”

  Thor lowered his head. “All right,” he said. “But I’m keeping Mjolnir ready.”

  “As well you should, my friend,” Loki said, clapping him on the arm. He waved away the magic he’d drawn around us and raised his voice so it would carry to the dark elves. “All right, come along. Let’s see this through quickly.”

  The three elves trudged through the jungle with us quietly, their expressions stoic. Were those prickles of shame I felt from them for the harm they’d done or also for having to turn to the gods for help at all? I couldn’t tell. As long as it was mostly the former, I guessed it didn’t matter.

  Loki led the way up the rainbow bridge, Baldur beside him and Thor, Hod, and me bringing up the rear behind our “guests.” Freya and Tyr had stayed behind in Asgard to continue discussing strategy and catching up, but they were waiting by the top of the bridge. Freya took one look at the dark elves in our midst, and her eyebrows shot up. Her hand leapt to her sword.

  “Why are you bringing them here?” she demanded.

  “A delegation to speak with Odin,” Loki said with a sweep of his arm toward our company. “We’ll take them straight to him, if you don’t mind.”

  Tyr’s expression was skeptical, but he didn’t argue. Freya fell into step beside us as we headed down Valhalla’s main road. “Are you sure this is quite—”

  “What is this?” a low voice demanded, rolling through the air. Odin had emerged from his hall and was striding toward us faster than I’d have thought that stately body was capable of.