The Tower

by L. A. McGinnis

  “Tell me how that place changed him.” Her insides turned slightly queasy. “And you.” And can we fix him, she didn’t add.

  “That place was created by the Orobus to be the nexus of his power. A depository of sorts. My theory—well, Mir’s theory—is the surge of magic enhanced all our gifts. Tyr and Hunter were unaffected, since they were outside. But those of us inside the tomb—Mir regained his memories. My sight has been restored, fully and completely. Ava succumbed to the darkness.”

  “Balder, what about Balder?”

  “He developed a darker nature.” Even though she knew this, it was still a kick in the gut to hear it out loud from someone else. “Perhaps become the mirror image of what he was.”

  “Why?”

  “We don’t know,” he admitted. “Mir’s working on it.”

  “And what about you and Mir?”

  “I’m as I was before.” He turned those blue eyes on her, laser-sharp and searching. “What of you, Gabriella? Have you changed at all, since your return?”

  She paused, feeling, remembering, comparing. “No,” she admitted slowly. “I don’t think so. Pretty much the same—pissed, of course—at Balder and the shit he pulled with the Fates. Weirded out by the thing with my father. None of this was supposed to happen, we were supposed to go there and save Ava. Kill the Orobus. Then we were supposed to go home.”

  “Really? That’s what you thought?”

  “No, I didn’t think the mission would be simple,” she admitted. “But I didn’t think it would turn into this. Balder turning into a monster. Us losing Ava. Almost losing you and Tyr. All in the same trip.”

  “Too much losing for you, Gabriella?”

  “Yes.” She sighed while she studied him. “Because we don’t have anything else to lose.”

  “There’s always more to lose. Don’t tempt fate.”

  “If you’d seen what Balder just did, you wouldn’t even let those words cross your lips.” She shook her head ruefully. “We’re barely holding on.”

  “You were successful with the Fates?”

  “Define successful.” She gave him a brief, succinct version of what Balder had done. “This won’t work, since we needed them to be willing participants and engaged allies. Not forced into this war, hostages to our cause. They’ll be looking for any reason to cross us.”

  “They will,” he agreed. “Let’s hope Fen had more luck with the Morrigan.”

  “He did, he filled me in while I was patching him up. It sounds like quite the alliance, these Fae siblings.” She gave Odin a brief rundown of Fen’s meeting with the Morrigan, adding doubtfully, “But somehow, it feels like every step forward is a loss.”

  “Everything has a cost,” Odin pointed out.

  “True. But how long can we keep paying?” They were close to running out of currency.

  50

  Celine figured there was nothing better in life than having your feet up, a warm baby in your arms, and a fire in the fireplace.

  Well, not running for your life and having your mate at your side might be better. Since she had Fen waiting on the com unit, and Lilly was making her hot chocolate, she’d chalk tonight up as a win.

  “Thanks, Lill, you’re the best.” Gratefully, Celine watched Lilly set the steaming cup beside her.

  “I’ll be better if you let me hold him.” Lilly reached out grabby hands for Remus, and Celine carefully placed the baby into Lilly’s arms, settling him gently so he didn’t wake. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to see his huge baby blues, it was only she wanted a few, uninterrupted minutes with Fen.

  “Okay,” Celine whispered into the com unit. “Fess up. How badly were you hurt?”

  “Not bad at all.” She heard deception in Fen’s voice, even over the airwaves. He was seriously the worst liar on the planet. “Barely a scratch and Gabriella fixed me right up. Besides, I hardly did anything. Odin wiped the whole horde out with fire magic.”

  “Mmm-hmm,” Celine murmured, busy trying to figure out how bad a scratch was when it came to Fen. “Where are we at with the Morrigan and the Fates?”

  “Success on both counts.”

  “Ask them if my brother made an appearance,” Lilly prodded, rocking back and forth. “And if they got Ava back.”

  “What about Ava?” Celine asked Fen, praying the answer was good. “And Domenic—anyone seen him lately?”

  “Negative on both counts.”

  Since Fen’s voice sounded ragged, almost as if he’d been choked, Celine took pity on him and did all the talking. “Remus was adorable today, Fen. He took a nap, and then he ate, and then he took another nap. And his eyes were open for a full ten minutes.” She knew her voice turned dreamy because she was a sap, and she didn’t even care. “They are the exact shade of your eyes, that dark-almost-navy blue. And I know he’ll grow up strong. And smart.”

  When Fen answered her, and it took a minute, his voice was sad. “I know he will, Celine. Let’s hope we get to see it.”

  51

  Whoever said it was good to be king was fucking right.

  Forget the kingdom of man though, forget the world. For that matter, forget the Nine Realms.

  All this time, David Domenic had been thinking too small. All his hatred narrowed down his vision to a pinpoint of what it should have been. The universe. Or rather, all the universes added together, and whatever was outside of those was there for the taking. His and Ava’s.

  Or whatever she was now.

  She wasn’t Ava Burke anymore. There was no name for what floated along the hallways of this glass and steel castle, wrapped in skin and flesh.

  The shivering, black energy that drove her, pulsed and hummed within that shell, called to him, sang to him in a velvety, ancient voice, as nothing before ever had. The fact that the flesh encasing it was beautiful of form didn’t hurt. But it wouldn’t have mattered. Out of her dark, mirror-like eyes shone something that, at times, made him feel weak. Took his breath away, while it made his heart beat stronger.

  Feelings.

  He wondered if these were feelings.

  What if when the magic inside of her called to the magic inside of him and mixed together, they made feelings?

  When the sensation coursed through him, his world was splashed in color. Bright swatches of it—stunning—against the white and blue-black he’d become accustomed to. Brilliant, they seared through him in reds and blues and greens and left him wanting for more.

  More, more, more.

  And the more he got the more he wanted, and the longer he was around her, the sharper he felt her absences. She still slept, at times. Still went…somewhere else, at times. To a place he could not find.

  This disturbed him in ways he could not put his finger on, but it produced a restless anger, and sometimes, people died because of it.

  But she always came back.

  And then, he hungered for her attention.

  “David?”

  They were still David and Ava. For now.

  There would be a time when they left this world. And perhaps all other worlds, when they would be beyond names, but for now… “David, are you there?”

  He liked that name, his name, on her lips. How her voice wrapped around it, her tongue wrapped around it, how the sound of it made him…feel.

  “Yes, Ava?”

  She stumbled toward him, clumsy as a foal.

  “What are you doing out of bed? Should you be up?”

  Her head cocked in an unnatural, furtive way—a bird—searching the sky for predators. There was an emptiness to her he hoped would be gone by now.

  “I’m…hungry?” She looked pale. Wrung out.

  “Haven’t you been eating?” His insides tightened at her frailness. He’d made arrangements. He had left orders. “You should have been eating these past few days.”

  “I’m not sure. I think so?”

  “You have to take care of this body,” he chided gently, taking her under the arm and guiding her to the kitchen. “Remember? We
talked about this. The flesh needs nourishment. Water. Sleep. Rest.” His hand slid down to the small of her back, trailing down over the bump of every vertebrae. Frowning, he added, “They are weak, these shells of ours. We must take better care of them. You must take care so they last.”

  “Yes, David.” There was a blankness to her now that hadn’t been there when the real Ava Burke had been in control. But the churning, ancient power he felt behind that façade?

  Made even him tremble.

  Propelling her into the kitchen, seeing him at her side, the staff scrambled into action. “I told you to keep her eating,” he hissed. “I explained, very carefully, how important these first few weeks would be.”

  Soon enough, he supposed, someone set a steaming cup of soup, a slice of bread, tea in front of her.

  He nudged her. “Eat, Ava. Some soup first, perhaps?” Searching her face after her first bite, he comforted himself in the fact that she ate everything. He took her back upstairs. Redressed her, like a doll. Tucked her into bed. And waited until her breathing was steady and deep.

  Every breath echoed inside him. Every breath calmed him, tethered him. Searching back through his minutia of memory and history, he came up with a word for all these things that he felt.

  Soulmates.

  “Together, Ava,” he promised her, kissing her forehead, “this universe will be ours.”

  From the moment she stepped out in front of him, facing him, all the Grim, all his armies, he’d sensed the bond. This unbreakable connection between them.

  He brushed another kiss on her forehead. And she smiled in her sleep, her hand curling.

  Then he went down and painted the kitchen in blood.

  52

  Gabriella spent the next week avoiding Balder.

  It was incredibly inconvenient and narrowed her available territory down to her bedroom, the front room, the kitchen—but only if she timed it right—and the library, where she was currently cooling her heels, waiting to sneak past him and go to sleep.

  With his swaggering, arrogant attitude, the bastard had taken over the entire house. Everywhere she looked, at any time of day, it seemed like he ended up right in front of her. Still disarmingly attractive, he was also every inch a conceited, morally vacant stranger. Drumming her fingers on the library window seat, Ovid’s Metamorphosis lying forgotten in her lap, once again, Gabriella reconstructed what happened in the cairn.

  Everyone exposed to Domenic’s death changed. But only Balder had come out flipped, with some Jekyll and Hyde transformation. Why him, and not the others?

  He’d been exposed to the same phenomena the rest of them had, unless there were some variables she’d missed—some other outside cause.

  Replaying the events, she hit pause on Ava, standing there with a blue ball of fire in her hand. Gabriella visualized the orb of magic streaking through the air, straight toward Odin’s chest, then Balder tackling him out of the way. The fire cutting a groove straight across Balder’s back. There was her anomaly. It wasn’t the Orobus’s magic at all. It was Ava’s.

  Cause and effect.

  Or the vengeance of the gods. From chaos comes darkness.

  At least that was Ovid’s hypothesis. Snapping the book shut, Gabriella tucked herself tighter into the corner of the window, watching the last of the winter light play over the snow. How was she supposed to fix Balder, if this was magic? She was only mortal, for fuck’s sake, and once again, she was in over her head. When the door slowly opened, she shrank down a bit more. “Look, can you come back later? I’d really like to be alone just now.”

  “Sorry, can’t help you with that,” Balder said, leaning back against the closed door. “You’ve avoided me long enough, Gabriella. Time’s up. We need to talk.”

  She looked trapped, Balder thought, nothing but a dark silhouette outlined against the waning winter sun. Curled so tightly into that corner, as if she wanted to disappear.

  But he was here, and he’d come to speak his piece, and he wasn’t leaving without saying it. “I’ve given you a week, Gabbie, hoping you’d come to me. It didn’t happen, and I’ve run out of patience.”

  “I don’t have anything to say to you.”

  He seriously doubted that. “Oh, I think you have plenty to say to me, you probably just don’t know where to begin. Let me get you started.” He smiled, and he knew it wasn’t pretty. “How did you like that stunt I pulled on Asgard?”

  Her face changed then, almost as if she’d forgotten all about it. “It worked, I guess,” she admitted. “Not the way I would have handled it, and definitely not what we had planned, but yeah. It worked.”

  Stymied, he stood there for a second, then regrouped. “Come on, Gabbie,” he goaded, “you hated what I did on Asgard. Admit it. I screwed up your perfect plan.”

  What he didn’t imagine was the flash of sorrow in her eyes. “Like I said, it worked.” Her shoulders slumped in defeat. “I’m tired, Balder. I don’t want to fight with you, especially not about the past.” A long silence drew out between them. “Not about anything, anymore.”

  “Gabbie?” He’d come in here with every intention of riling her up and battling this thing out between them. He had to get them back onto some kind of equal footing, even if he had to bring out her temper to do it. This not-talking-avoiding-each-other bullshit was killing him. “Talk to me. Please?” he pleaded.

  She cocked her head. “Now that almost sounds like the old Balder. The one I lo…” She clamped her mouth together. “You want to talk? Tell me what happened in Gavrinis. Tell me what changed.”

  She lifted her eyes to his, and the doubt in them made his heart stutter. “Can you ever go back to the man you were before?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted softly, ducking his head. “But if it would make you happy, I’d try.” The words glittered between them like a promise. “I’d do anything to have you back. I miss you. I miss everything about you.”

  In the same room. Yet eons apart.

  He tried again. “Please, Gabbie, I know we can work this out.”

  “I can’t.” Her eyes dimmed as she took him in, something inside her yielding, as if she’d already given up. She was scared, something had frightened her badly. “I can’t help you, because I don’t know how to fix you.”

  “I can change,” he pleaded.

  “Really? Are you sure about that?”

  Balder paused as a wave of dread overtook him. No, he wasn’t.

  In truth, he felt trapped inside a body that wasn’t his.

  Feelings—true, heart-stopping feelings—were out of his reach. He yearned for Gabriella, yearned to touch her, to feel her, to connect with her. But this transformation had taken that ability away. Emotions were stifled, his honor was in tatters, and even though he was losing the only person he cared about, he was helpless to stop it.

  Cursing this change, he fought to feel just a spark of love, a flicker of passion. Yet try as he might, that’s all he felt—a flicker. The barest memory of what they’d shared. He only had these vague reminders of their bond, yet it was the only thing keeping him from feeling completely dead inside. Looking at Gabriella, this beautiful woman standing in front of him, he yearned to love her again.

  But he was stuck in a prison with invisible walls. And he didn’t know how to escape.

  “You see?” she pressed gently. “Whatever happened, altered you. Something was stolen from you, Balder, and it was the very best part of yourself. I’ve fixed people before, but I don’t know… I don’t think I’m capable of fixing you.

  “I don’t know what else to say, Balder. I’m sure words can’t solve this. As a matter of fact, I know they can’t.” All of a sudden, she stood straighter.

  Something had changed. But he’d missed what it was, exactly. Only that it had.

  “I can’t give you what you need, Balder. Not yet.” She brushed his arm when she passed. “But if I can find an answer, maybe soon.”

  After she was gone, he puzzled over her carefully chose
n words. They meant something important. And there was something different about her. Purpose. She had been filled with purpose when she’d left this room.

  But instead of following her to the ends of the earth, he’d only watched her walk away.

  53

  “Look, I need your help, and you can’t tell a soul. No, this does not negate our deal. And yes, you will still owe me for saving your life.”

  When Gabriella saw interest spark in Hel’s depthless eyes, she knew she was in. For this to work, all she’d had to do was round up Hel and talk her into a little field trip down Michigan Avenue. The girl had some serious shopping issues.

  Arms crossed, Hel tapped her pointy shoe on the floor. “Let me get this straight. I get you back to that island, and I don’t even have to go with?”

  “Nope. Better I go alone.” Gabriella slipped one of Hunter’s borrowed—hence, stolen—knives into her belt. Smoothed her hair back into tight ponytail. “I don’t expect to find anything. But if I do, it’s best if you aren’t around.”

  Interest prickled in the air between them. “What if I want to come?” Hel did, indeed, look intrigued. “If the island is empty, then it’s probably safe, right?”

  “No. Think of what happened to Balder. Same thing could happen to you.” A ghost of a smile played on Gabriella’s face. “You could grow a conscious. What a disaster that would be.”

  “Seriously. That’d be like growing a third eye. I doubt it’s even possible. So not going to happen.” The tapping of her foot slowed. “Fine. I’ll get you to the doorway. But if I even sense trouble…”

  “You’re going to keep your fine, well-groomed ass on the other side of that portal. Do you hear me?” Gabriella cautioned. “You stay out of sight, no matter what. Let me do what I have to do, and then I’ll be back.”