by Eva Chase
“Oh.” I guessed that explained a little more why there was that friction between him and the others that I’d noticed from time to time. You’d think they’d have gotten over it after all this time together.
“Are you deeply offended?” Loki asked. “You thought you’d landed a god but it turns out not quite?”
I rolled my eyes. “I don’t give a shit what you call yourself. I just didn’t realize.”
“Good then,” he said in that same a-little-too-casual tone. Then a more natural lilt came into his voice. “All different beings have their own sorts of energy. I’d imagine Freya comes across a little differently from the boys’ club too—she’s Vanir, not Aesir, although search me what separates the two. Humans are another thing altogether. As are valkyries.”
He dipped his head, his lips brushing my temple. The fleeting kiss sent a fresh tingling through me, but my mind was already spinning off in another direction. “And dark elves would be something else too,” I said.
“Well, yes. I supposed that factor would be helpful if we didn’t have to be close to pick up on that energy in the first place.”
I pushed myself upright. “I don’t have to be close. I’m supposed to be able to hone in on the energy of a battle from just about anywhere.”
An eager gleam lit in Loki’s eyes. “Where are you going with this?”
My heartbeat raced faster. “I don’t think I could take in the whole country, let alone the whole world, from here—but I could fly around—I could feel out where there are a bunch of dark elves all in the same place, emerging and disappearing. Like they were coming and going from this realm.”
“Through the gate!” Loki scrambled off the bed and threw on his clothes in an impressive display of chaotic grace. “You can rest your wings. I can run through the sky faster than they’ll take you anyway. With the amount of activity the cave-dwellers have got going on this side of the ocean, I don’t think we’ll need to cover the entire world. We can scour the country in an hour.”
I grabbed my own clothes. My excitement mingled with trepidation. What if it didn’t work, and I sent him running all over the place for nothing?
But this was what I’d come back for. I’d come back to try. And also possibly for super-hot not-quite-a-god sex.
“You going to carry me around?” I said, pulling on my borrowed linen pants. I really needed to find myself some new jeans.
“This isn’t the time to worry about your dignity,” the trickster said. “We can make it a piggyback ride. Come on. If we’re quick, we can be back with good news before the rest of these slugs even go down for breakfast.”
I hurried after him to the dormer window. My legs balked as he pushed it open. “If the dark elves see me…”
He beckoned me after him. “The illusion I put on you will stick until I take it off. No one will notice you’re with me unless I let them.”
“Okay, okay.” I clambered out after him. He scooped me up and settled me against his back exactly like he’d said, piggyback style. I draped my arms across his shoulders and braced my knees against his waist, and he sprang out into the air.
This was how he’d caught up with me at that club so quickly, I realized as he darted higher toward the sky. He hadn’t been right behind me; he’d just been able to cross that distance so much faster than I had.
In the space of a couple of breaths, he’d already strode high enough up that the entire state sprawled beneath us. On our earlier travels, he must have held back so the rest of us could keep up.
“Anything around here?” he asked.
“First I have to figure out what I’m even looking for,” I said. I’d been too busy avoiding getting killed by the dark elves—or worrying about getting Petey killed—to have paid much attention to the unique qualities of their energy. But as I breathed in, dragging up those memories, I found I could almost taste it anyway. Slower in its pulsing and a little thicker than human energy, slightly oily. I grimaced and cast out my senses.
Life thrummed all across the landscape below: scraps of it in the smaller towns, a boisterous burst from New York City up ahead, and everything in between. I caught a hint of that oilier energy here and there, but when I trained my focus on it, it either faded into the mass of human life or gave me the impression of nothing more than one or two figures. No larger fluctuations.
“I don’t think the gate’s here,” I said.
“Then onward!”
Loki raced forward through the sky, miles falling away behind us with each stride. We fell into a pattern: He paused, I reached out my senses, we moved on. Sometimes I didn’t sense any dark elves at all; others there were only a few, like before. My hopes started to sink. Maybe they’d found some way to disguise their presence from my valkyrie awareness.
Loki stopped yet again, and I opened myself up to the energy humming below us. A town here, a city there, more cities dotted across the hilly landscape—and a patch of oily energy.
I tensed against Loki’s back. He touched my calf where it rested against his thigh. “Here?”
“Wait.” Just a bunch of dark elves wasn’t enough. What mattered was what they were doing.
As I concentrated hard on that patch of lives, three of them winked out, one after the other, as if they’d died. A minute later, five new ones appeared seemingly out of nothingness. A smile stretched across my face.
Not out of nothingness. Out of their passage between their realm and ours.
“There,” I said, pointing as I honed my focus even more closely. We were so high up that the cluster of buildings I was pointing at on the side of one of the lonelier hills looked like a tiny blotch.
Loki cackled to himself. “We’ve got them now.”
I laughed too as he spun toward home, relief coursing through me. He’d strode past a few states when his head twitched to the side. “Look who’s here.”
He glided to a stop. A black feathered shape swooped over to join us. With a shiver of the air, Muninn transformed into her human body, other than two much larger black wings she flapped to keep herself level with us.
“Where are you coming from, Loki?” she asked, looking only at him. “You look awfully pleased. Did you learn something?”
“Only the exact location of the dark elves’ gate,” Loki said with a grin. “We’ll have Odin back by dinnertime.”
Her eyes widened. “Where is it?”
“Back hills of Kentucky. I’m about to round up the gang for a closer investigation. I assume you’ll join us?”
“Of course,” she said.
I adjusted my position against Loki’s back, and her gaze never left his face. Understanding hit me. She couldn’t even see me. Loki’s illusion hid me from her, too.
“I may have a few weapons I can bring to the battle,” the raven woman went on with a dark glint in her eyes. “Let me retrieve them and I’ll meet up with you as soon as I can.”
Loki bobbed his head to her, and she contracted back into her raven form. With a few swift flaps of her wings, she’d soared away from us.
As Loki set off again, an uneasy sensation settled in my gut. “So, we’re going straight to that gate—to go through it, to fight the dark elves and get Odin back?” I said.
“That seems the obvious course of action,” Loki agreed. “What’s the matter, pixie?”
“Your illusion can stop them from seeing me. But if I’m fighting with you, if I’m killing them like a valkyrie—they’ll know I’m there.”
And then they’d come after Petey like they’d threatened.
“You don’t have to make this your fight too,” Loki said.
He meant that, just like the others had meant it when they’d said I could hang back before. But it didn’t feel like the right answer any more than it had then.
“Even if you get Odin, it’s not like you’ll have stopped the dark elves from being in Midgard, right?”
“That’s true. We can’t exactly justify—or carry out—a total extermination. We might b
e able to banish them from this realm if we can find evidence of their exact crimes, and once we have Odin’s powers with us again…”
“But that will take time,” I filled in. “Even if they don’t know for sure I helped you again, for all I know they’d kill Petey just out of spite.”
Loki was silent for a moment. “I won’t deny that’s possible, Ari,” he said.
I let out a pained breath. “Then what am I supposed to do? As long as they know where to find him, they could hurt him whenever they wanted. They might have already hurt him for all I know.”
“No,” Loki said firmly, cutting off my spiral of panic. “Hod is guarding him. He can take on plenty of dark elves himself—and if they’d made an attempt, he’d have sounded the alarm.”
Right. I sucked in a breath. I owed the blind god a whole lot of thanks the next time I saw him. But still…
“I can’t expect you all to keep protecting Petey forever,” I said. “Or even for very much longer. You’ll all have to be there to fight the dark elves off at the gate, won’t you? And then you’ll be going back to Asgard.”
“And so will you,” Loki said gently, as if I needed the reminder. But even if I could have evaded the gods somehow, convinced them to let me stay here in the human realm, I couldn’t protect Petey from the dark elves’ vengeance all on my own either. That knowledge sank like a boulder in my gut.
“I can’t leave him there,” I said. “He’ll never really be safe.” He never had been, even when it had just been my mom and her revolving door of asshole boyfriends. And I couldn’t very well take Petey with me anywhere, could I?
I swallowed hard. Loki touched my leg again as we glided down over the house. “I think you already have your answer. We’ll move your brother somewhere the dark elves won’t be able to find him. And then you can show those dirt-eaters what a valkyrie’s real rage can look like.”
24
Hod
Ari’s hair rustled as she bowed her head. Across the street, three sets of footsteps went up the front walk of a house. The sun was warm, baking the shingles of the roof we were perched on, and the breeze brought the bright scent of daffodils from the garden below, but none of that shifted the cool shadow that hung over the valkyrie.
A childish voice carried up to us. “What are we doing here?”
“We’re meeting your new family,” Baldur said with his calm warmth.
Ari let out a shuddering breath. “Is this really the only way we could have done this?” she said quietly.
I knew she already knew the answer to that. “If I’d left his memories, he would have slipped up. Said something that tipped people off that the story we gave them wasn’t right. He could have ended up back with your mother. Even an adult who knows the full gravity of a situation has trouble living a conscious lie.”
“Yeah.” She drew her legs up in front of her. The feathers of her wings, still spread at her back, fluttered faintly in the breeze. “I always thought someday I’d have a proper job, a house, everything set up so I could challenge Mom for custody and win…”
“You couldn’t have given him that, not the way you are now.”
“Not as a valkyrie. I know.” She exhaled raggedly. “I just keep reminding myself that this is better than if I’d just died and not been here at all to do at least this much for him.”
The emotion in those words brought a little ache into my chest. I’d known Ari loved her brother from the first moment she’d talked about him, but love could so often be possessive, even selfish. Instead of clinging to him, she’d given up her place in his life for his own good.
“You’re doing the right thing,” I said. “You’re looking after him the best way you could have. He’s lucky he had a sister like you.”
Her next breath sounded choked. Her hand whispered across her cheeks. Swiping away tears, I realized. The ache inside me bit deeper. The urge to take her in my arms had been growing in me since the first moment we’d laid out this plan to her, to pull her to me like I hadn’t dared to the other night—but I’d been able to tell then that she wouldn’t have wanted that. How could I say now was any different? The last thing I wanted was to remind her of the man who’d hurt her.
So I stayed where I was.
The three figures across the street had reached the house’s front door. One of them—probably Loki—knocked. A moment later, the door opened.
“Oh,” the woman who’d answered it said a little breathlessly. “You’re here. Hello. It’s so good to meet you.”
“May we come in?” Loki said in a voice as smooth as usual but higher pitched. The trickster had transformed himself into a refined lady for this role—supposedly a social worker from the local child services agency. We’d picked out a family waiting for a foster child that had seemed like the best possible fit for Ari’s brother, and Loki had doctored all the necessary records. Baldur was coming along as his assistant, to conduct good vibes and ease the transition.
My job, as always, had been spreading the darkness. I’d wiped every identifying memory from the little boy’s head. I’d wiped all memory of him from all the minds in the city that held it: the mother who’d left him to be assaulted, the boyfriend who’d done the assaulting, the dark elves who’d been lurking in threat, the teachers and friends who might have asked after him. None of them would think to look for him now.
I couldn’t have reached every single dark elf who might have been in on that threat, but we’d whisked him away to a city in Canada where Loki’s computer hadn’t found any signs of their activity. The chances of them stumbling on him by accident and recognizing him were slim.
He was safe. And he had no idea he’d ever had a sister, let alone one who’d been willing to sacrifice so much for him.
“I’m fine,” Ari said abruptly. Her voice didn’t sound teary anymore.
“I know you are,” I said, because I had the feeling that was what she needed to hear. And I didn’t really doubt that she would be fine. She was awfully resilient in all sorts of ways, this valkyrie of ours.
The door to the house opened and closed again. Only two sets of footsteps descended the walk. And then they must have made themselves unperceivable to mortal eyes again, because a moment later Loki had glided up to meet us.
“Everything’s in order,” he said. “He seemed to warm up to the foster parents right away.” There was a murmur of cloth I realized was his hand squeezing Ari’s shoulder. “You won this battle, pixie.”
She shifted, leaning into his touch. Just for a second, but it was enough to turn the ache in my chest into a sliver of jealousy. When had the two of them gotten so familiar?
“I want to stay a little longer,” Ari said. “Then we can go kick those dark elf asses.”
Loki chuckled. “We’ll go finish preparing for that battle.”
“Are you coming, brother?” Baldur asked.
I shook my head. “I’ll return with the valkyrie.”
When they’d left, Ari eased her legs down again and leaned back on her hands with a soft creak of the roof. “You don’t have to stay,” she said. “I didn’t go through all this just to screw it up acting stupid now. I just… want to be near him a little more.”
“I’m not worried about you doing anything rash,” I said. “Do you want to be alone?”
She paused. “No,” she admitted. “Not really.”
We sat for a stretch in silence. Every slight movement she made sent a reverberation through me. I had to say something more.
“I’m sorry.”
Her head jerked around with a hiss of her hair. “For what?”
“For suggesting you were selfish. And for— I’ve been hard on you since the start. I can admit I misjudged you. Loki made a good choice this once, picking you.”
She was quiet so long I thought I might have inadvertently offended her more. Then she said, in a tone that suggested a smile, “Okay. Apology accepted. And it’s a good thing you feel that way, because it seems like you all are stuck wi
th me now.”
“Is that a bad thing?” I asked.
“No, maybe not. I mean, considering the alternatives… Thank you, for being there for Petey and for making this work.”
“I know how much it mattered to you. You haven’t really left him alone.”
“Yeah.” She rubbed her hand across her mouth. “Now that you know all my tragic secrets, do you figure someday you’ll tell me your sob story? It seems only fair.”
The corner of my mouth twitched up even as my gut twisted. “I don’t know. Not right now. Maybe someday.”
“Well, whenever you’re ready, I’m prepared to rage on your behalf.”
I snorted, but the words brought back the earlier ache. I had a feeling she would rage, if I let her. But I hadn’t even let myself, not ever.
There was something relieving about knowing I’d have someone who’d shout alongside me if I ever felt the need to, though.
Without letting myself second-guess the moment, I slid my hand across the shingles until my fingers brushed Ari’s. I gripped them gently. She didn’t pull away.
“Someday,” she repeated, and hesitated. “I slept with Loki.”
A prickling sensation shot through me from head to toe. My back tensed, but I managed to keep my hold on her hand loose and my voice even. “Why are you telling me?”
“Well, I’m sure you’d have figured it out before very long anyway. And I kind of wondered if it’d matter to you.”
“It isn’t really my business,” I said, wondering how much of my reaction she’d already been able to read. “If you want to be with him that way, I’m not going to judge.” Not her, anyway. Him, I could fantasize about strangling a little more often than usual.
She hummed to herself. “The other thing is, it’s not just about him. I feel connected to the four of you. I thought maybe it would go away once I scratched that itch… but if anything I feel it more now. With all of you.”