She shook her head. “I have always known what you are. You take things that don’t belong to you for a living, as if the very fact that you can means you should. You aren’t an arms dealer, you’re a thief.” I opened my mouth to respond, fists balled so tight in anger that I thought I might tear through the gloves with my nails, but Othello continued before I could. “It is a ruthless, selfish trait. But I overlooked it because you are, at your core, good. Da, you steal. You take. But so often you take the lives of those who would hurt others. You take the burdens of others onto yourself. But to lie to me about something you stole, something I asked you to steal for me? To be unable to give anything back to those who care about you, even something as simple the truth? That I don’t understand.”
I heard a sob, and realized Othello was crying, or about to. I unclenched my fists and slipped my hands into my pockets, saying nothing. A thief. She’d called me a thief. Was that what I was, I wondered? Someone who took, and took, and never gave back? Sure, I traded for goods, but that was a transaction, not charity. Thinking about it rationally, I knew she was right. But she’d also gotten it wrong. It wasn’t that I couldn’t give. Not really.
Deep down, the truth was: I hated to receive.
Granted, I’d only found out recently that Dez’s love had been conditional, contingent upon my accent, on a spell that bound her to me. But perhaps I’d known it all along. Perhaps I’d known that love—no matter how freely offered—was its own sort of fairy tale.
Perhaps I’d known all along that gifts were never really free.
“You’re right,” I said, at last. “I am a thief.”
Othello turned in surprise, but whatever she saw in my face made her shy away.
“But I did not steal the Tree of Knowledge,” I said. “Eve was given to me under the condition that I keep her safe. From everyone who would use her to their own ends.” Othello opened her mouth, but I held up a hand. “No, I let ye say your peace, now let me say mine.” I took a deep breath of the frigid air, felt it fill my lungs with that bitter cold, and knew what I was about to say next might create a rift between the two of us that might never close. But I went there anyway. “That fact that ye cannot understand why I’d keep somethin’ like this from ye—ye, Othello, a woman so obsessed with her secrets she refuses to share ‘em with her so-called friends—is complete and utter shit. I’ve stolen from ye, more than once, but I never kept anythin’ from ye if I thought it might hurt ye. When ye wanted to save Natasha, I took a risk. Not for her sake, but for yours. I am sorry I lied, but I don’t owe ye any excuses, if I ever did.”
Silence rode the air, thicker and heavier than the snow that lay at our feet or the ice that rose up behind us. I could hear Natasha coming down the slope and knew we had only a few minutes before she joined the party. But I doubted it would matter, now. Othello and I had both said things we couldn’t—wouldn’t—take back.
Only time would tell if we’d be able to forgive each other for that.
Chapter 31
The Manor—as Rasputin had dubbed it—was built into the side of the mountain, accessible only from the very bottom. I hadn’t been sure what to expect based on the description alone, but since Natasha had referred to it as “the ruined castle,” I definitely hadn’t expected to find a stronghold in the middle of this Godforsaken place. Natasha, on the other hand, had known exactly what to expect.
“I came here on the third day,” she said as we approached the massive wooden doors. They were ajar, the crossbeam that would have locked them in place shattered in two as though the door had been breached, long ago. “I came searching for warmth, or food, or shelter. But there was none. That is when I turned back to find my brother. But I got lost and ended up in our world.”
“Ye know what it is we’re lookin’ for, don’t ye?” I asked. “Ye knew when ye heard Othello say we were lookin’ for a flower, back at Dimitri’s club.”
Natasha hunched a bit as if cold, but we all knew she wasn’t. “There is a garden. A hidden garden full of plants and herbs and flowers.” She shuddered. “But to enter the garden you must first speak with its caretaker. I agreed to do this, hoping to eat something, anything, but I could not pay the price.”
“You were dying,” Othello said, “what could have cost more than your life?”
Natasha’s eyes flicked to Othello, then to me. “She asked me to free her. But I could not. I did not dare.” Had Othello and I been speaking to each other right then, we might have exchanged glances, but as it was we were left to study Natasha separately, wondering what she meant. But she didn’t elaborate. Instead, she jerked her chin towards the entrance. “Go. See for yourselves, and you will both understand why you should never have come.”
“Aren’t ye comin’?” I asked.
Natasha hesitated, then shook her head. “I will wait for you here. I promise I will not run. I wish to return home.”
Othello and I did look at each other, then. “I’ll go first,” I offered.
“Be careful,” Othello replied. I nodded, feeling the slightest tension ease from between my shoulder blades. If Othello cared about whether or not I ended up dead, then maybe we’d be able to mend things, at some point. Fingers crossed.
I slid the AK-9 from my shoulder, angling it so the butt rested against the crook of my shoulder, muzzle pointed down. I crept forward, moving along on the balls of my feet like I’d been trained, body turned slightly so I could sight down the barrel if anything spooked me. In a way, I preferred to take point for this very reason; I was used to operating alone and didn’t like having my line of fire compromised.
The castle’s interior was sparse. Stone walls, stone floors, with impossibly wide steps winding up massive towers on either side on the foyer. Several ragged banners hung along the walls, so faded I could make nothing of their color or their heraldry. I spun right, then left, eyeing either side to be sure there would be no surprises. Natasha had managed to flee the castle without impediment, but she also said the garden we were searching for had a guardian, which meant there might be other creatures here. And, frankly, any creatures who could inhabit this lifeless, frozen realm were fuckers I had no interest in meeting.
“Where d’ye t’ink the garden is?” I asked, once I was sure we were safe.
“Up,” Othello replied. “Where there’s more light.”
I nodded, then went for the stairs. “I can’t believe anythin’ could grow here,” I said. Part of me hoped Othello would take the bait and join in some small talk, but she didn’t. Instead, she grunted her affirmation, and trailed after me. Or I assumed she did; she moved so furtively I’d have had to look back to know she was there. More spy training, I’d have bet.
The stairs took us up, and up, and up. At last, we found a door leading into the center of the tower. More stone here, except in the center of the room, a wooden ladder ran up to another floor. I tested it with my weight. The wood groaned but seemed stable enough. I climbed slowly, but the wood held, despite how long it had been left unattended in this place. Once at the top, I held out a hand and helped Othello up to join me. Together, we scouted the room, only to find yet another doorway. This one stood open and must have led to the battlements we’d seen from below, given the distance we’d traveled and our position within the castle. I stepped out onto the battlements, sighting down the line of my rifle, and promptly froze. Othello bumped into me.
“What is it?” she asked, alert.
I frowned, cocking my head to see past the barrel. “D’ye see that?” I asked. I pointed towards the slope of the mountain, visible opposite us. There was something odd about its shape. An outline in the snow which seemed both eerily familiar and utterly impossible.
Othello looked where I indicated, squinting to see in the dim sunlight which remained. “What am I looking for, Quinn?” she asked, exasperated.
Before I could respond, the shape shifted and snow fell in a tiny avalanche that spilled over the battlements. It shifted again. More snow tumbled down.
Then, at last, I knew with absolute certainty what I was looking at, what I’d always been looking at: a face. An impossibly huge face, the proportions so large I had trouble deciding just how impossibly huge it was. I focused on the features for perspective; one pale cheek and one clear blue eye were visible, poking out from beneath the snow. The eye, pupil alone as tall as I was, stared at us. The face moved again, spilling more powder down until at last the woman’s entire face was clear. And it was a woman’s face; the lips were sensual, the features stunning, the hair so blonde it was almost the same shade as the snow that surrounded it. When she spoke, the rumble caused another avalanche that revealed bare, surprisingly muscular shoulders. “Why have you come?”
It wasn’t until the stones beneath my feet stopped vibrating that I could speak. “Othello, it’s talkin’ to us.” My voice sounded breathy, even to me.
“You can hear it, too?” she whispered.
I nodded.
Othello cursed in Russian. “I was hoping I’d simply gone crazy.” She shook herself. “Do you think this is the guardian Natasha was talking about?”
I grunted. “I doubt she’d have forgotten to mention the giantess watchin’ over the castle. She’d have to have one twisted sense of humor.”
“She is Russian,” Othello remarked.
“Why have you come?” the giantess asked a second time, louder this time. Another wave of snow plummeted off her body. It seemed the muscles continued all the way down her arms, which were bound on either side of her face by a pair of manacles, the chains of which disappeared beneath the battlements. Snow obscured the rest of her body from view. From her size and the angle of her hands, I realized she had to be lying prone, holding her own head up with her hands as if watching television flat on her stomach, her body tucked away beneath the mountain.
No, I realized, her body was the mountain.
“We have come for a flower,” Othello answered, yelling as loud as she could. “For the raskovnik.” It was an honest answer, and yet it made me cringe, as if answering the creature at all made her somehow more real. More terrifying.
“Who are ye?” I called, before she could respond to Othello’s question. Maybe if I had a name, I’d be a little less concerned; once you name a thing, it becomes a lot less scary, in my experience. Of course, that wasn’t always true. Just because you know what a black widow is doesn’t mean its bite will be any more pleasant.
I really needed to stop thinking.
“Free me,” the giantess replied, ignoring us both.
“What was that?” I asked.
“Free me. That is my price.”
“No offense,” I said, “but how d’ye plan to stop us?”
Those massive lips spread into a smile, revealing gorgeous teeth larger than the doors that had once secured this castle, but I noticed the smile never met her eyes. “Free me, or you will never make it out of this realm alive. I will call down the snow of this mountain, and all beneath its shadow will die.” She shook herself a little as if a shiver had run down her spine, and I saw the mountain itself quiver, faintly.
“Quinn, I think you should let me do the negotiating,” Othello hissed.
I rolled my eyes. “It was just a question. Besides, did ye notice she never told us who she is?”
Othello nodded. “Before we decide,” Othello called, “tell us who you are. Who would we be freeing?”
The smile brightened. “I am known to my people as Skadi.” The way she said the name sounded different than how I’d have spelled it in my head, but that wasn’t surprising; there were languages out there with sounds I couldn’t even make, let alone work into an actual sentence. Don’t believe me? Try learning the Polish alphabet.
Go on, I’ll wait.
I almost asked Othello about the spelling, but when I turned to her she looked so stricken, suddenly, that the flippant question died on my tongue. She grabbed my arm, holding it tight enough that I was forced to ask her what the matter was. “Skadi is the name of one of the jotunnar,” Othello whispered. “She’s a Norse goddess.”
I frowned. “And how d’ye know that?”
“I needed to track down as many of the gods and goddesses as I could at one point. For Nate. He asked me to find out which are still roaming the world, and which were sleeping. It became a hobby.”
“A hobby?” I asked, incredulous.
“She’s the Norse goddess of winter. And mountains,” Othello added, ignoring my question.
“So, if we freed her, we’d be freeing a goddess?”
“Da,” Othello replied.
“And is that a problem?” I asked.
Othello simply stared at me.
“What?” I asked.
“You can’t be serious.”
I shrugged. “I met a god once. Maybe more than one, come to think of it. None of ‘em seemed particularly bad.” To be honest, the Monkey King had been a self-involved glutton for punishment with a remarkably odd vernacular, but still he hadn’t struck me as a danger to the outside world. As for the elder man who’d helped bring Jimmy back to life and the Muses Othello and I had met in New York? Well, I couldn’t be sure where they fell on the deity scale, but none had given me cause to fear them.
“They can be vindictive. And they interfere in the affairs of mortals, if they can,” Othello explained. “It’s a risk. Maybe not to us, but to the world.”
I squared my shoulders to face Othello. “If it means savin’ the others, I don’t care. I’m not out to save the world, Othello. I only want to protect what’s mine. But if ye t’ink this is me takin’ when I should be givin’, tell me, and I’ll leave it alone.”
We stared at each other for a few long, tense seconds.
Othello sighed. “And just how do you go about freeing a goddess?”
“Break the chains,” Skadi replied, as if she’d heard our whole exchange.
“Great idea,” I said. “Now, precisely how do we do that?”
Chapter 32
The chains were secured below the battlements on the ground floor, but the garden where the raskovnik could be found lay atop the tallest tower, nearly eye level with the goddess—which meant she had a front row seat, not to mention the perfect vantage point from which to make sure we did exactly what we’d sworn to do. Despite our willingness to free the goddess, we’d had to negotiate several items before we did so, including her promise not to go running the instant we freed her, leaving us to die in the resulting earthquake. Othello had been the one to suggest we retrieve the flower first, though Skadi had been quite clear about our odds of survival if we tried to double-cross her.
It was almost like she didn’t trust us.
Once we’d crossed the battlements and surmounted the far tower—Skadi’s looming eyes so large above us now that when they swiveled the best I could do was note it with my peripheral vision—we found, to our complete and utter surprise, an impossibly lush garden. Despite the climate, the garden itself appeared unbelievably vibrant and alive. The wide array of colors, after staring at various shades of blue for days, were almost painful to look at. Plants, potted in ceramic urns, lay in neat rows between apple trees whose roots had bowed the stone in places, as if we might find dirt and other nutrients beneath the tower floor. Without so much as a word, Othello and I split up, wandering the garden as if entranced. And perhaps we were; I’d never seen anything in nature so beautiful, so full of life.
It almost made me want to take up gardening.
For like, ten delirious seconds.
“How is this place even possible?” I asked, mostly to myself.
“I feed them,” Skadi replied, her thunderous voice making me want to duck and beg forgiveness. Small wonder mortals used to offer sacrifices to these creatures, I thought; I imagined you’d do just about anything to get them to stop talking down at you, eventually.
“Feed them?” Othello echoed.
Skadi turned her head a bit, propping her chin up higher than before, and blew through pursed lips. Her bre
ath—remarkably fresh considering—spilled over us in a wave of heat, causing the trees and various plants to sway as if brushed by a spring breeze. But it wasn’t merely heat. There was a thickness to it, a humidity that almost stole my breath away. It felt the way I’d always imagined an Amazonian jungle would feel. Hot. Sticky. I glanced over to find Othello rubbing her fingers together in the air above her head, as if she could practically see the condensation hovering in the air.
“Amazing,” she said. “She’s turned it into a greenhouse.”
Skadi smiled softly as if pleased. “It reminded me of my husband’s home by the sea. I never cared for the place, myself, but he was a boat builder and took great pride in his trees.”
“You have done a magnificent job,” Othello said.
Skadi’s smile widened, but she said nothing else, leaving us to our task. I figured she appreciated the compliment but was far more eager to see herself freed—Lord knows that would have been my first priority.
Freedom now, flattery later.
Othello began looking in earnest, studying the vegetation in search of the purple flower Skadi had described. I did the same, meandering through the rows, running my fingers across errant fronds and along low-hanging fruit in the process. I was perhaps halfway through the garden when something caught my eye. A tree, but nothing like its fellows. The tree itself glistened silver, as if forged of precious metal. But even on closer inspection, I knew there was nothing artificial about it, nothing impossibly smooth or man-made.
Before I knew it, I was standing only a few feet away, hand hovering mere inches from its trunk. Something whispered to me, I thought. It reminded me of my wild side, as if to listen all I had to do was open myself up. From so close, I could feel the power thrumming through the thing, the air around it slightly turbulent, like the steam that dribbled out from beneath a manhole cover. I wasn’t sure what kind of power I was sensing, but I could feel it calling to me, begging me to press my fingers against that grayish, beveled surface. I licked my lips and began inching forward, listening to the whispers.
Moscow Mule: Phantom Queen Book 5 - A Temple Verse Series (The Phantom Queen Diaries) Page 14