Twilight Magic (Rune Witch Book 6)

by Jennifer Willis

  “I rather liked it here,” he said. “I didn’t expect to. But after spending some time to rest and explore away from the familiar . . .” He didn’t mention the rift with Odin that had driven him away from the Norse homeland, or the travels he’d made across other lands before coming to this rainy corner of the world. “I decided I wanted to stay.”

  “And so the Tree followed, when it was time for its own renewal.”

  Loki looked at Sally standing in the snow, so defiant and naïve and still only beginning to taste her own power. He imagined the many trials and adventures that would come her way in the next century or so, and knew that her reality would be so much more interesting and complicated than anything he could conjure in his mind. He smiled despite the sadness.

  “As it will be for you.” Movement in the trees beyond caught Loki’s attention, but he was relieved to see not Utra and her advancing army of amateur sorcerers but the lurking presence of Fenrir. His son had proved himself a loyal ally to the Rune Witch, and Loki hoped it would always be so.

  “So if the Tree goes, you go, too? And vice versa?” Sally asked.

  “Not exactly. This is but one of many anchors, here and elsewhere, but the Tree is the most important one. For me. It’s something you’ll learn in time, as you lay down your own roots—literal and otherwise.”

  The sky was warm with dawn. Behind Sally, Thor and a few of the Valkyries opened the sliding glass door at the back of the Lodge and stepped out onto the elevated porch that overlooked the Tree. Thor’s gaze zeroed in quickly on Loki and Sally. Even at this distance, Loki caught the consternation on Thor’s face, and he didn’t have the breath left in his body to shout his reassurances to the big god.

  Loki pulled his left hand away from the Tree and transferred the utility knife from his right hand to his left. He tugged back his right sleeve to expose his wrist.

  Sally shuffled in the snow outside the circle. “Tell me again how this isn’t suicide?”

  He couldn’t bear to meet her eyes again. “In time, we all make our own sacrifices.”

  He readied the blade and pierced the skin of his right wrist when he was nearly deafened by an explosive burst of air. A delicate hand wrested the knife out of his grasp.

  “Sally . . .” He began, but his words failed him as he turned to find not Sally but Opal standing beside him. But it wasn’t Opal, either. It was Utra, and she was inside Loki’s protective circle and holding Loki’s knife.

  “Loki!” Sally’s shriek pierced through his shock, and he stumbled back toward the Tree. Utra stalked toward him.

  “How . . . ?” The words died on his lips as Utra drove the blade into the flesh beneath his right ear and slashed across his throat.

  The wet warmth of his blood spilled downward and soaked through his jacket and shirt. He was warmed only for a moment before the winter air cooled his blood and the dull, aching throb of his life draining away drove Loki to his knees.

  Everyone was shouting at once. Loki heard Thor bellowing from the deck of the Lodge, and Sally . . . Sally was screaming and crying and uttering some hexing contagion or curse he couldn’t make out. He wanted to tell her not to waste her breath. He wanted to offer a final blessing on his student and heir, but when he opened his mouth only blood spilled over his lips.

  Utra watched with curiosity as Loki wavered on his knees and sank into the snow. She dropped the knife and walked out of the circle as if it didn’t even exist. He didn’t know how she’d broken his barrier, but it didn’t bode well for the Lodge counting on the same formula to protect the property from her followers.

  Loki rolled onto his back. Through the thick branches of the Yggdrasil, he saw the pink sky turn a wondrous dark gray, and lightning crackled overhead. Was he the only one seeing such a sight?

  Heimdall’s voice was in his ear, and Loki felt his weakening body being propped up. He wanted to wave Heimdall away. Shouldn’t an old god be allowed to die in peace without being jostled about? Fenrir’s keening reached his ears, and Loki felt truly sorry for leaving his last child alone.

  “Sally . . .” Her name bubbled from Loki’s lips with his blood.

  “Quiet. Don’t try to move,” Heimdall commanded. There were tears in the Shining One’s eyes. Loki smiled. He was dying in Heimdall’s arms. Isn’t that what the Norns had foretold?

  “This is only one half of the prophecy,” Loki said, surprised that he could speak. It was his body trying to heal and fighting a losing battle, much as the conflict with Utra would prove to be. But there was still time. Not every part of the prophecy of Ragnarok had to be realized.

  “You can prevent the rest, but it will cost you,” he said.

  “Didn’t I tell you to be quiet?” Heimdall laughed, but his face was wet.

  Lightning streaked across the sky, and Loki shivered. The snow around him was stained pink and red, his blood wasted and running free. The ground shook beneath him and wails of beasts long extinct filled the air. Magick was coming unmoored. Ragnarok was nigh.

  “Sally,” Loki whispered. The world around him dimmed as he murmured in a half-forgotten language. “Annu usemi emuq, iksuda qataya. Ina apsu, elenu zikia, anna tiamatu ma urbat. Ki’am kima etlu sepsu ma immaru. Kima zeru abzu.”

  “What?” Heimdall asked. He shifted on the ground but held Loki’s head steady. “Are you cursing me right now?”

  Loki laughed, but it sounded weak even to his failing ears. It was done. Sally was the anchor of magick in whatever world might exist after this morning. She would do well in steering Midgard to a different destiny.

  His eyes drifted closed as a brilliant flash of lightning lit up the sky.

  “Igigi, ati me peta babka,” he whispered.

  Those who see and observe, open your gate for me.

  13

  Sally was knocked off her feet as the ground roiled beneath her. A mighty crash roared overhead and sounded like the sky was being torn in two. Snow soaked through the denim of her jeans to freeze her legs and backside as she sat and watched all hell breaking loose.

  Loki was dead.

  The lightning storm emanated from Loki’s body. Twice Sally tried to crawl toward him, hoping beyond hope that he might still be alive, and each time an energy bolt shot out from his lifeless hands and struck her in the chest, driving her deeper into the snow.

  “What’s happening?!” Heimdall shouted a few yards away. He’d been flung back by a burst of light seconds after Loki closed his eyes for the last time. Heimdall’s skin was burnt red and his blond hair looked a little crispy and dark around the edges.

  “I, I,” Sally coughed on her words and struggled to catch her breath. More lightning flashed furiously out of Loki’s body, a dozen or more sparks streaking at once. His chaos magick was bursting free and looking for grounding. Beneath the static storm, Loki’s body was in active decay. Illuminated by the cracks of lightning, his flesh shriveled inside his clothing, his corpse looking more and more like a desiccated mummy by the minute. She abandoned any hope that this was simply a trickster’s ruse to fool Suleiman’s Spiral. The god of chaos was truly dead.

  Sally choked back a sob. How could he be gone?

  “Sally!” Heimdall was on his feet now and dodging lightning strikes as he stumbled toward her.

  Utra killed Loki. The goddess must have known precisely what would happen if she took down the god of chaos, and now Loki’s magick was pouring out into the world, fierce and untamed. Sally had seen what chaos could do when it dribbled out in tiny leaks—malfunctioning traffic signals and spluttering car engines. A nearly derailed streetcar had probably been the worst of it. But this was chaos wild and wholly unleashed, and there was no telling what damage it might do.

  Ragnarok.

  “I don’t know!” Sally shouted over the roar of thunder that rolled in from every direction at once. “I don’t know what’s happening!”

  But she did know what she had to do. She pushed herself onto her knees and slowly rose to her feet. Her muscles were froze
n and numb, and her movements were sluggish. She gave one last look at Loki’s body—now a tangle of fabric and brittle bones. She threw back her head and spread her arms wide.

  “I AM CHAOS!” She screamed at the sky. Dark clouds churned over her head, masking the dawn with a deadly storm of red, black, and gray. She kept moving forward and tried not to flinch as first one bolt of lightning and then a second and a third found her. “I am the heir to the Keeper of the Realms!”

  The lightning hit her in the chest and in her hands and feet. It drove into her and sparked electrical currents through her body. She had ten million fire ants crawling beneath her skin and biting at her nerve endings. Then she felt like she was getting doused in a frigid ice bath. And then more fire ants, followed by more ice. Again and again with every strike of frenzied and unrestrained chaos grounding itself in her body. Was this what it had been like for Loki?

  Sally gritted her teeth and took more blows than she thought she could bear. Every strike of lightning that lit her up was one less thread of magick that Utra and her sorcerers could try to claim. But too many bolts crackled toward the sky or into the snow instead of finding a home in Sally’s body. Too much of Loki’s chaos was escaping.

  Freya and Saga were on either side of Sally now, reaching for her but unable to touch her. She was encased in a cocoon of static energy. Her skin sparked and shimmered with each new bolt of magick that struck her, but it wasn’t enough.

  Loki! How do I do this?

  “I can’t contain it all!” Sally shouted over another explosion of what she hoped was thunder, but she had a bad feeling it was something worse. “I don’t know how to rein it all in!”

  She continued to absorb one lightning strike after another. She was beyond being able to control her breathing and she sounded like a broken accordion as air stuttered in and out of her. She managed to steady her feet, and she turned to face the Lodge. A legion of robed figures filed around the house into the snowy field and fell into a wide semi-circle before her. Suleiman’s Spiral had arrived. Sally’s body trembled with the turbulent energy that kept pouring into her. She could neither control nor release Loki’s unleashed magick as the sorcerers advanced on her.

  There were so many of them. Before, she would have guessed there were maybe twenty or thirty of these guys working their occult rituals to try to secure real magick for themselves. But the complement of Suleiman’s Spiral on the snowy field looked to be several hundred strong, and more robed figures hurried past the Lodge to join their brethren, hoods pulled forward and making each sorcerer indistinguishable from the next.

  “It’s a trick!” Saga shouted beside her. “Isn’t it? There can’t possibly be that many of them.”

  The good news was that the few lightning bolts that flashed past Sally weren’t absorbed by the sorcerers, individually or collectively. They didn’t have the proper training or the genetic heritage, or maybe their intentions weren’t pure? It didn’t matter. They were powerless against the bolts of chaos that struck them. Screams of pain and the smell of burnt flesh filled the air as the hooded robes were struck down, singly and in pairs. The Spiralists tightened their formation and continued their advance.

  “They can’t contain it, either.” Sally was jolted by another blast of chaos striking her left shoulder blade. She stumbled forward but didn’t fall. She scanned the field but Utra was nowhere to be seen. Sally was pretty sure that wasn’t a good sign.

  Then actual fire rained down from the sky.

  Sally stumbled sideways as a chunk of something steaming and hot landed with a thud in the snow next to her, followed by a deafening screech overhead that sounded like a badly out-of-tune orchestral string section. She wrinkled her nose at the strong smell of burning sulfur.

  “Uh.” She looked up and saw an honest-to-goodness dragon in the sky. It was yellow-orange with scaly skin and massive, bat-like wings each as wide as the Yggdrasil was tall. It belched flame and hocked up smoking black and yellow bolders as it used the figures on the ground for target practice—Norse deity or Suleiman’s Spiral didn’t matter. One robed sorcerer got flattened by a hurtling ball of sulfur while another went up in flames. A chunk of black, steaming rock smashed to the ground not far from where Sally stood.

  “Brimstone!” Saga grabbed Sally by the arm and made a dash toward the Lodge through a gap in the sorcerers’ ranks left by more of the dragon’s casualties. But Sally and Saga stopped in their tracks when they saw what looked like fireworks erupting from inside the homestead. Showers of electrical sparks lit up each window before the entire Lodge went dark. Everything was short-circuiting.

  Another dragon shimmered into existence directly over the Lodge. This one was a dark wine color but was otherwise identical to the first, still torching sorcerers and trying to hit Heimdall with smoking rocks. For a split second, Sally wondered if brimstone was the dragon equivalent of a cat’s hairball. But then the red dragon sprayed the Lodge roof with fire. By some unknown miracle, it didn’t catch.

  Sally and Saga stumbled backward, but there was nowhere to take shelter. The sorcerers had broken their formation and ran wild across the field. The white snow was streaked with black soot and ash. Freaking dragons. Was this the kind of chaos Loki had contained? She thought of all the years he’d kept himself separate and alone to protect his kin and the world at large. Now it was her job to do the same.

  A robed sorcerer screamed and ran directly at Sally, his arms outstretched and bare hands making desperate clawing motions. Saga stepped out in front of her, but the man got hit with a blast of dragon fire and disintegrated into tarry soot.

  Then there were the corpses. A creaky moaning sound echoed from the surrounding trees, and Sally almost laughed when she saw the reassembled and reanimated bones of long-dead humans and animals skulking with stuttering steps out of the forest. Bits of dry, ancient flesh and clumps of snowy dirt clung to their bones as they emerged from the trees. They didn’t look remotely happy.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.” Sally had seen quite enough of the not-quite-living dead on her multiple visits to Helheim with Loki. Here were scores of the terrestrial models, awakened from hundreds and maybe even thousands of years of rest, coming to join the party.

  Loki, I had no idea—what do I do?! Sally turned toward the Tree. The Spiralists scattered under the threat of the fire-breathing dragon and the herky-jerky corpses—and a hailstorm of frogs that had just started. It was not a positive development. The unfortunate skydiving amphibians fell in all sizes and every color of the rainbow, from standard green and brown of domestic varieties to the electric blues and golds of the Southern Hemisphere. Poisonous.

  In the midst of all the chaos, the Yggdrasil stood tall. The dark dust that was left of Loki’s body lay before it in the snow. The lightning storm had ceased. Loki’s magick was loose in the world and no longer held his mortal body together. Her mentor was gone. He’d warned her over and over again that his time was short, but she hadn’t believed him. She thought his would be a drawn-out, lingering death. Not necessarily easy, but slow. She thought there would be time. How had this happened so fast?

  Sally’s breath caught in her throat when she spotted Opal. No, not Opal. Utra. She emerged from the thick branches of the Yggdrasil and stood over Loki’s remains. A dark fury clouded her features. Sally had never seen such an expression on her friend’s face, and she was grateful for the distinction. This Morning Star bitch had stolen her friend and murdered her mentor. Sally’s cold muscles came alive as she shook with rage.

  “Steady.” Saga gripped Sally’s arm, but Sally broke away and marched toward Utra. She pushed her way through the clumsy ranks of the remaining sorcerers and ignored the rain of poisonous frogs, wailing piles of bones, and blasts of fire and stone.

  Utra noted Sally’s advance and reached out for her. “Yes, you must surrender your power to me also, and it will be complete.”

  Bile rose in Sally’s throat at the sight of the hideous grin spreading across Utra’s fac
e. Managarm had tried to harness Sally’s power for his own purposes, and he’d failed. Badbh had tried to use Sally as a pawn, and now she slumbered as a shade in her underground cauldron. Hel, too, had tried to steal her power. Sally would take great pleasure smacking that ridiculous smile right off of Utra’s face. But she couldn’t kill her. How could she get Opal back safely?

  Sally stretched out her fingers and wondered what a cold blast of chaos would do to a body-stealing goddess.

  “Don’t fool yourself!” Utra shouted to her. Worry soured her smile, and that fueled Sally. The Rune Witch felt fierce as she stalked forward, and she hoped she looked as menacing as she felt.

  “This chaos cannot continue!” Utra called. “It must be contained, for the sake of every realm. Give me the power you’ve absorbed, and we’ll save this world together. Hurry! Before it’s too late!”

  “Not bloody likely,” Sally muttered as she balled her hands into fists. She felt the chaos spark along her bones and course through her veins. She held only a portion of the force of chaos that had been released, but she felt the foundations of the Earth and the Yggdrasil and all of the Nine Realms within her. It stung a little, and even tickled, and it filled her with an alertness that made her feel like her blood had been replaced by liquid caffeine. And this was only a portion of Loki’s essence. Sally’s heart hammered in her chest and she tried to keep her breathing even. She couldn’t imagine ever sleeping or sitting still again. How long until it drove her mad? But even if she knew how to rid herself of it, there was no way she was giving Loki’s magick to this impudent interloper.

  “Stop!” Freya raced in from Sally’s left and intercepted her. She held Sally in place just long enough for Saga to catch up and grab Sally by the shoulders.