by Jane Kindred
“Of course I am.”
“Take off your shirt.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I want to see if you have Leo’s tattoos on your spirit skin.”
“What difference does that make?”
“Don’t be a pussy. Just take off your shirt.” It wasn’t her favorite insult—as someone who happened to own a pussy, she thought they were pretty great, actually—but it seemed to be effective on thousand-year-old Viking pride.
Eyes flashing with anger instead of the preternatural glow, Gunnar took off his coat and hung it on one of the fence posts before unbuttoning the shirt and tossing it at Rhea.
Jesus. Those abs. She almost forgot why she’d wanted him to take off the shirt.
The ink was replicated as thoroughly as every other delicious part of Leo’s skin. Rhea traced her fingers over the lines of the snake, and Gunnar shivered. Not very spirit-like. She pressed her palm to the ink and held the question in her mind: Is this spirit or is this flesh?
The snake began to uncoil. It was all she could do not to yank her hand away. Rhea had never experienced a vision like this. As it writhed beneath her hand, the ink became bumpy—scaly—a tactile, 3-D tattoo. Suddenly, she understood. The mark Faye had placed on Leo’s skin was meant to keep not just the munr but the hugr bound to the skin. It was how she’d fooled the Norns. But it was also the home of the curse itself, the Jörmungandr energy Leo had so feared. Just as it would have on Leo’s flesh, the mark was becoming manifest in the hamr through her—her connection to Leo through ink and blood. She was calling it forth, summoning the snake more surely than she had summoned the first vision of the Hunt.
Gunnar stepped back, breaking the connection. “What are you doing?” His eyes had gone from blue to a vivid aquamarine, the irises variegated with dark lines like fissures in marble, pupils elongated into vertical slits. Was it wrong that she was finding a bare-chested, cowboy-hat-wearing version of Leo with snake eyes super hot?
“Shifting your shape, apparently. Because you’re hamr, not hugr. You’re a projection of Leo’s flesh. You are not spirit.”
The hamingja gave her a mental fist bump.
Gunnar paced away from her, blinking his eyes, blinking away the shift. “If I am not spirit...where in the Allfather’s name is the hugr?”
“Dressler stabbed Leo with the Holy Lance and took it. Leo’s body is dying. Without it, Faye says he’ll become draugr.”
Gunnar’s brow furrowed. “Faye?”
“It’s the name Kára goes by now. She’s at Leo’s bedside.”
“Kára. So that is where she went. Yesterday, we spent the day together. I thought we might today, but she never returned.”
Rhea tried to shake off the little sting of unexpected jealousy. This wasn’t Leo. It was only the physical projection of his form. He could spend his time with whomever he pleased.
“Leo’s vördr said you’d know where to find Dressler—the real one.”
He looked at her sharply. “You say he has acquired the blood of Leo Ström. If this man has also stolen the hugr of the rightful Chieftain, he will have rejoined his hamr in Náströnd, the Shore of Corpses, where the souls of those taken by the Hunt are relegated. He means to trap the hugr there to seal his immortality.” Gunnar’s eyes darkened. “It will also make him the leader of the Hunt.”
“Shore of Corpses?” Rhea shuddered. “He can go there?”
“As an immortal, he can.”
“And can you follow him?”
“Until the hugr is bound and I become nothing but the echo of a dying mortal man, yes.” Gunnar took off the cowboy hat, looking defeated, and dropped it in the snow. Rhea watched, puzzled, as he braced one hand against the fence and removed his boots and socks. When he unzipped his pants, she cleared her throat.
“Uh...what exactly are you doing?”
“Preparing to follow the whoreson.” Without the slightest bit of self-consciousness, he stepped out of his pants and his briefs and laid them over the rest of his clothes on the fence. “I will need your assistance.”
Rhea tried to keep her eyes on his face. “With...what?”
“Releasing the snake.”
“Excuse me?”
“To go below, I must take on the form of one who moves among the dead. Your touch upon the mark of the snake seemed to spark the change. If you would...?” He turned his tattooed shoulder toward her.
“Oh. Right.” Rhea laid her hand over the ink once more, and the 3-D sensation of movement began immediately.
His eyes were changing, and as he stepped back, a transformation had definitely come over him, but for the moment, he still had the appearance of a man. And his expression was sad.
“I’m sorry.”
He tilted his head. “For what?” It was becoming difficult to look at him as the perception shifted, like a lenticular print being tilted in the light.
“That you had to find out you weren’t hugr.”
Gunnar shrugged, resigned. “One cannot fight destiny.” In the next instant, he coiled to the ground, no longer a man, but a massive serpentine reptile as thick as the man’s waist, with a spiked head and short, lizard-like limbs—the Jörmungandr tattoo come to life, a sea serpent on land with a dragon’s legs.
The aquamarine eyes blinked one last time as if to say goodbye before it slithered away into a crevice in the rocks.
Rhea turned to head back to her car with a feeling of vague unease. If Gunnar couldn’t get the hugr back, what then? How would she even know what had happened in the underworld? An insistent thought reminded her that the hamingja was still with her: Perhaps you know of someone else who moves among the dead. Of course she did.
Ione answered her call with a cheerful, “Merry Christmas!” Apparently, Phoebe hadn’t told her about Theia yet. Or any of this.
“Okay, don’t freak out, but—”
“Rhea Iris Carlisle.” She’d done an instant switch into mom-voice. “How many times have I told you not to lead with that if you don’t want me to freak out?”
“Sorry. But you’re going to freak out. And...just don’t.”
“Rhea—”
She delivered the words in a single, rapid breath before Ione could interrupt her. “Theia was kidnapped and put in a trance by a Nazi dickweed, but she’s fine now, and I need to borrow Kur to get my boyfriend’s soul back.”
“Theia was...? What... Nazi? Rhea!”
“I told you, she’s fine now. He just wanted to lure me to his altar so he could swipe some of my blood to help make himself immortal.”
“This is Christmas, not April Fool’s.” Ione’s voice said she was about to hang up.
“I’m not joking. Any more than Phoebe was joking that night when she tried to tell you that you were dating a necromancer.”
That got her attention. “Where is Theia now?”
“She’s at my place with Leo. The Nazi who burned down my shop stabbed him and took his soul, and now Leo’s shape-shifting astral projection is seeking him in the Viking underworld, and I need someone who can move among the dead.”
A button clicked on Ione’s phone. “I’m putting you on speaker. Dev’s here. Tell him what you need.”
“Hello, Rhea. Happy Christmas.”
“You know you’re not Christian, right?” She couldn’t resist teasing him even in the middle of this. Or maybe teasing made her feel less like freaking out herself.
“Ione likes Christmas, so it’s Christmas. What do you need me to do?”
“I need Kur. When he’s inside his cage, he’s in the underworld, right? And he can go anywhere in it?”
“In essence, yes.”
“Can you communicate with him?”
“To some degree, but mostly it’s a shared sense of emotion.”
“Oh.” Maybe this wasn’t going to work after all.
“But Rafe can command him. We’ve discovered Ione can call his shade from the cage without releasing him physically into our world. And once he’s shade-walking, he’s in Rafe’s domain.”
Awesome. Might as well make it a family affair.
* * *
When they’d gathered at Ione’s place, Rafe stripped down to his briefs to conjure the quetzal power, spreading his gorgeous wings that stretched the width of the living room, the tattoo of Quetzalcoatl on his back expanding with them, becoming a second skin. Ione had to coax Kur’s shade from Dev before Rafe could see it, and Rhea was afraid he wouldn’t come, until Rafe began to talk to the invisible dragon.
“Sorry to disturb you, my friend, but I have a favor to ask of you. I need you to find someone in Mictlan—in the Realm of the Dead.”
“Gunnar called it the Shore of Corpses,” Rhea put in.
Rafe nodded patiently. “Shore of Corpses or Mictlan from my own tradition, the demon will perceive it as equivalent to his own underworld.” He turned his focus back to the dragon’s shade. “I need you to seek another dragon. A serpent. One projected by a living man who is of this realm.” Silence followed as Rafe listened intently, frowning, before he spoke again, addressing Rhea. “He says he already knows of this man and that there are two dragons.”
“Two?”
“‘The dragon who gnaws is loose,’ he says. I don’t know what that means, but it sounds like the two are fighting.”
Nidhöggr. The name came to her with certainty. Malice Striker. The dragon that gnaws at the roots of Yggdrasil and feeds on the bones of the dead. Náströnd is his domain.
“I need to go to him.” This was what she had to do. The hamingja was insistent. “I need to go to the Shore of Corpses.”
Ione rose from the couch. “We are not putting you into a magical coma so you can leave your body to go to the underworld.” It was how Dev had gone below to release Phoebe’s soul when Carter had sent it there, a risky move that had almost cost them both Phoebe and Dev.
“But I can help him.”
Rafe rolled his shoulders, and the wings disappeared. “I’m sorry, Rhea. I can’t be a party to that.”
Dev inhaled sharply, as if breathing in the shade, and shook his head. “Neither can we.”
Beside Dev, Ione took his hand, her expression sympathetic but firm. They were a united front against her.
“I can help you.”
The others turned swiftly, startled by the sudden appearance of the redhead inside Ione’s foyer, but Rhea was becoming used to her pop-up entrances.
Dev took a step toward her, his golden-brown eyes going a little dragony. “Who the devil are you?”
“She’s the Valkyrie.” Rhea regarded her with skepticism. “How can you help? Leo’s vördr says you’re the one who kept the hamr from understanding his nature.”
“Of course I did. How else would I have kept his hugr from Wyrd?” Faye smoothed a plait of hair over her shoulder. “Be that as it may, I can escort you into Náströnd. But there is a price.” Naturally. There was always a price.
“And what would that be?”
“It must be negotiated there.”
Ione folded her arms. “You tell her the price now or she’s not going.”
Rhea gave her a warning look. “Back off, Di.”
Ione’s eyes widened with surprise. She was used to being the final authority in the Carlisle family.
“As long as it doesn’t mean giving up my soul or staying forever on the Shore of Corpses,” said Rhea, “I’m in.”
Faye gave her a slight smile, the first since she’d seen her at Leo’s bedside. “It will be within your power to give. No souls or lives will be asked of you.”
Rhea nodded. “All right. Let’s go.”
Ione stepped toward her. “Rhea—”
But whatever she was going to say, Rhea never heard. Faye touched her hand and the room winked out.
Chapter 26
They stood on the shore of a dark subterranean lake.
“Watch your step.”
Rhea glanced down and leaped backward from the writhing snakes covering the ground, nearly sliding into another coil of them on the rocks behind her.
She steadied herself against Faye, swallowing the urge to scream. “This was not in the brochure.”
Faye pulled up her fur hood, glancing up. “And watch your head.”
Globs of something black and snotty-looking dangled from the stone ceiling, slowly dripping to the ground like thick molasses. Where it struck the snakes, they hissed and writhed as if the stuff burned.
“Nidhöggr’s poison.”
Rhea hunched her shoulders. “How am I supposed to avoid that? I don’t have a hood.”
Faye sighed and removed the coat, giving it to Rhea. In its place, a more Valkyrie-like horned helmet appeared on Faye’s head, leather body armor and gauntlets replacing her flowing dress. Girl was looking badass.
Rhea shrugged the coat on quickly, narrowly missing a drop of poison that slid off the fur as though deflected by it. “So how do we find Gunnar?”
“Ask the corpses.”
“What cor—?” Rhea swallowed. The waves on the churning lake had grown more defined. That wasn’t water. It was, as the name should have warned her, a lake of decomposing bodies.
Those still in one piece rose up from the churn, and some climbed onto the shore, slouching closer. “Whom do you seek?” They spoke as one, and the sound from the decaying mouths reminded her of the draugr’s roar. These, at least, were well beyond the bloating stage of decomposition and smelled more of dank, rotting plant matter than rotting flesh.
Rhea glanced at Faye. “Gunnar?”
“Nidhöggr,” said the Valkyrie. “We seek the Malice Striker.”
The corpses creaked and shuffled as they raised their arms together and pointed into the darkness toward a passage thick with snakes.
Faye pressed a weapon into Rhea’s hand—a battle-axe that had appeared at her side, the sharp curve of the blade carved with intricate runes. “You must go alone from here.”
“What? Wait—”
“I have brought you as far as I can. This is not my realm.”
“Well, what am I supposed to do?”
“That you must figure out for yourself.”
“What about the price? You said we had to negotiate.”
The Valkyrie answered without any of her usual sly smiles and affectations. “Leo is the price.”
Angry heat rushed to Rhea’s face. “You said no souls and no lives.”
“Not his life. Him. The Norns have taken him from me piece by piece—his will, his mind, his soul that I cannot touch though he lives because of me—and now you have taken his heart.”
“Look, you’re the one who encouraged him to seek me out as his protector. I didn’t ask for him to fall in love with me. I was perfectly content on my own.” She hadn’t been, though. She’d thought she had, but now the idea of being without Leo was crushing.
“If you succeed here, if you bring his selves back together, if he lives...he lives with me.”
Before Rhea could object, the Valkyrie was gone.
She gripped the handle of the axe and took a deep breath. There was nothing else to do but go into the tunnel. She wasn’t about to stay here and hang out with the corpses, who were looking unsettlingly interested in her life force. She stepped carefully, dodging snakes, hoping none of them were poisonous, which they probably were. There was almost no light in the tunnel, just the glow of something at the other end, and there was no getting through that carpet of snakes by simply walking. Rhea’s fingers closed tight around the axe. She hated the idea of killing a defenseless creature just trying
to survive, but she had the feeling these weren’t exactly living. And it was them or her.
She took a step and swung at anything that came toward her or wouldn’t move out of her way, wielding the axe like a machete clearing brush in a jungle or a scythe cutting down wheat. There was more of the drippy goo inside the tunnel, which actually helped, since it got rid of more snakes she wouldn’t have to step on or kill. The whole environment seemed fairly impractical, but it was the underworld after all. Swing. Step. Now dodge. Swing right. The hamingja was guiding her. She’d forgotten it was there. Its presence was comforting, a bit of Leo with her in the darkness.
The gloomy light at the other end grew larger, and the snakes grew fewer until at last she emerged into a sort of smoggy mist.
“Fancy meeting you here.”
Rhea jumped, the axe held in both hands in front of her. “Who’s there?”
A figure distinguished from the mist, short-cropped hair at the sides visible before the features of his face became clear. “I suppose the Valkyrie let you in,” said Dressler. “You’re too late, though. I’ve delivered your Leo’s soul to the ruler of this realm and released Nidhöggr from the fetters that keep him here. I’ve just been waiting around to see the dragon emerge into the living world. Shake things up a bit.” So that was his deal. Typical “embrace disruption” chaos-loving-bro bullshit.
“Don’t get too excited.” Rhea clutched the axe. “You’re the one who’s going to get shaken up.” She said it with more confidence than she felt.
Dressler laughed. “What are you going to do? Swing that at me? I’m immortal, thanks to you.”
Rhea swung as he spoke and the blade of the axe sliced across his thigh, cutting his laughter short. “Probably still hurts, though, huh?”
Dressler swore and stepped back, looking ready to swing his fist, but the ground beneath them rumbled with a heavy impact, and a dark, leathery beast the size of a tank barreled into view within the mist—which turned out to be smoke after all, coming from the thing’s nostrils.
“Ah, here he comes now,” said Dressler. “Behold—Malice Striker.” There was no sign of Gunnar yet.
Rhea had to keep Dressler talking until she figured out where Gunnar was or thought of something to do. “How did you set him free?”