by Eva Chase
Muninn, send her somewhere else. There had to be somewhere better than here. Not that the raven was interested in bettering our situation. If I could fight my way through this scene straight to her, shatter her and her prison… Not that I seemed to have gotten much closer to her so far.
“I can fight,” Ari said.
“I don’t want you to,” I snapped. The giants were almost on me. With gritted teeth, I heaved myself away from her to meet their charge.
It was a smaller group this time. With two stomps of my feet, I sent lightning streaking from the sky into their tightest cluster. I crushed the others even faster than the ones before, my lungs starting to burn with the strain, but the battle fury racing through my brain never quite drowned out my awareness of Ari somewhere behind me. Ari still watching Thor the destroyer.
Often I took pride in that role. But she hadn’t seen much else from me in the last two weeks, had she? Teaching her how to pummel her enemies. Burning off frustration by battering the grounds around our Midgard house with my hammer. Destroying all those dark elves who’d swarmed against us.
Or maybe it was simply that having those outside eyes on me was stirring up a twinge of guilt that had always been there but I usually managed to keep buried.
I hesitated a second before I bashed my hammer into the skull of my last attacker. Twisted with rage, that giant’s face that didn’t look so different than my own probably did. Brutes, Loki liked to call them. What would anyone call me?
The body fell with a thump and deflated into a heap of dust. I scanned the field. Nothing else stirred for now.
“Thor?” Ari said. Tentative now. My fingers tightened around Mjolnir’s handle.
“How did you end up here?” I asked without turning.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I seem to be able to kind of reach out toward you all if I come close to you while Muninn is tossing us around. But I haven’t figured out how to use that to any real advantage yet. I guess we’re always better off together rather than apart. More chances to pick apart her illusions.”
Her footsteps rustled across the grass into the drifts of dust. The dust from the bodies I’d toppled, which had felt far too solid as illusions went. My stomach churned. I swiveled around then, pointing in a different direction. “Let’s see if we can find a way to toss ourselves out of this place, then.”
Ari held still until I reached her and fell into step beside me. I shifted a little to the right to give her more space, but I couldn’t help watching her from the corner of my eye.
She flicked her switchblade closed and shoved it in her pocket, her head low. Her wings retracted. In the space of a few seconds, she looked like an ordinary young woman, albeit a determined and sharply pretty one. Even my nausea couldn’t stop the current of desire that crept up from low in my belly.
“Are we okay?” she said after a minute, her voice still tentative.
My head snapped around. “What?”
“I just mean… you seem upset. Maybe with me. I don’t know. The stuff Muninn’s been throwing at us, the tricks she’s pulling—I don’t know what she could have shown you. I’d like to know we’re still all right.”
She glanced up at me, worry and confusion shimmering in her eyes. If my stomach had been tight before, it twisted into one massive knot now. She thought I might have some kind of problem with her. Shit.
I stopped dead in my tracks, turning to face her. “We’re all right,” I said. “We’re absolutely all right. I’m sorry, Ari. You didn’t do anything wrong. This is the first I’ve seen of you since we got thrown apart in the courtyard. I—I’m glad to see you, just to know you’re okay.”
She folded her arms over her chest and raised her chin, more of her usual energy coming back. “Then what are you upset about? Because something’s obviously jerking your chain. Was it something about that battle? Bad memories?”
“Not exactly. I…” I let out a breath in a rush. “I don’t want that, the way you saw me out there—the way you’ve already seen me more times than I’d like—to be the way you think about me. I fight because I need to, and maybe I can find enjoyment in it while I’m in the middle of it, but I don’t revel in the killing. I don’t seek it out.”
Maybe that wasn’t entirely true. There had been times, long before Ragnarok, when I’d gone journeying with Loki or one or another of my brothers knowing we’d probably come to blows with someone. But always someone who deserved it. And I hadn’t felt that urge to seek out a fight in a long time.
Not since I’d watched my home and all the people in it consumed in a searing blaze no hammer could defend against.
“Hey.” Ari touched my arm. Warmth blossomed under her fingers. “I’m not anyone to judge. How many lives did I whisk away when we took on the dark elves?”
“It isn’t the same,” I protested. “You don’t get lost in it.” You don’t wonder whether you really do have control or whether the fury is driving you.
Her mouth twisted. “I know what it’s like to get caught up in emotion. To want to hurt someone so badly you forget everything else in that moment. I don’t like it either.”
I frowned. My hand moved of its own accord, stroking over her hair. “I’m sure if you’ve ever felt that way about anyone, they deserved it,” I said fiercely.
She closed her eyes, her expression relaxing at my touch. As if she welcomed it every bit as much as I’d wanted to offer it. Skies above, could I be that lucky?
“And the horde you were just tackling didn’t deserve it?” she asked.
I wet my lips. “I was defending myself. So, I suppose they did. I don’t even remember what we would have been fighting over in whatever memory Muninn pulled them from.”
“What’s there to feel guilty about then?”
I paused. The answer stuck in my throat. “Sometimes, I regret… We always talked about the giants as our enemy, you know. I didn’t even trust Loki for the longest time. But the truth is, my mother was a giantess.”
Ari’s eyebrows rose as she met my eyes again. “Odin and all his many travels,” she said, sounding only amused.
“Basically,” I said, a little of my shame at the admission fading. “But he took me back to Asgard as his own, and I always acted as if I were only his. For all I know, I’ve killed cousins or uncles or who knows what relatives on the battlefield. I never stopped to ask.”
“They didn’t ask you either,” Ari pointed out.
“You don’t think there’s something twisted about that?”
She shrugged. “I don’t think blood means very much. My dad took off before I was old enough to remember him. My mom spent more time cutting me down than taking care of me. I’d sooner help a stranger than her. Being born isn’t a promise to anyone.”
“But you also wouldn’t beat any of them into a bloody pulp.”
“I might have been tempted recently,” she muttered. She grasped my hand where it was still resting against her hair, curling her fingers around mine. “You want to know how I think about you, Thor? I see strength and devotion and a huge heart that can’t stand the thought of anyone under your protection, which is basically all of humankind, getting hurt.” She grinned. “Oh, and let’s not forget an enormous appetite and the most enthusiastic laugh I’ve ever heard.”
I could almost see my reflection glinting back at me in her gray eyes. I didn’t need any of Baldur’s special senses to know she was telling the truth. The tension that had been wound through my gut subsided.
Ari’s head twitched to the side. Her eyes narrowed. “What?” I said. Even as the words left my lips, I caught a hint of something. A dark shimmer, a brief movement, there beyond the stretch of grass and then gone.
“The real world broke through again,” Ari said, turning with her hand still clasped around mine. “I saw a little more this time. It was dark, but there was a reddish light, and for a second I felt so hot…” She looked back at me, but her gaze was distant. “It happened when Loki and Freya were talking too.”<
br />
“I caught a glimpse of something too,” I said. “Just now. But only a glimmer.”
A smile leapt to Ari’s face. “You did? Then the effect is getting stronger. We’re getting closer to breaking through. It seems almost like… When it happened before, Loki was apologizing to Freya for not recognizing how great a warrior she is. And just now, I made you think about yourself, about all those battles, a little differently, maybe?” She studied my face.
“You did,” I said. “You think that’s what caused the break?”
“I don’t know. But maybe, when we change our minds about something, or realize we were looking at them the wrong way in the past… That could shake up Muninn’s construct, right? Anything that shakes up our memories and the way we think about them should, since she’s using those memories as her foundation for this whole place. A little more of that and we’ll crack the entire thing apart.”
My spirits rose. “We can hope.”
“Yeah, we can. Don’t let her wear you down, okay?”
She slipped her arms around me, and I bent into her embrace. A smell like clover tickled off her soft hair over a scent like a just-lit flame. Every nerve in my body thrummed with the closeness of her.
When she drew back, her cheek grazed mine. My breath caught. She hesitated there, her lips just inches from mine. Heat rose in the space between us.
“Thor,” she said quietly.
“Ari.” My voice came out raw. “You and Loki…” The memory of him kissing her in the courtyard jabbed at me.
“…understand very well that I’m not looking to get tied down at the moment,” she filled in. Her breath tickled over my jaw. “Which is a good thing, because I don’t know if I could be happy just picking one of you. Unless you don’t want—”
“To Hel with that,” I said, and drew her lips to mine.
She kissed just as sweet as she smelled, the joy of our minor victory rippling between us. I ran my fingers deeper into her hair, and a pleased murmur escaped her. Her body melted into me as if she needed the strength she’d talked about—my strength—to get her through this, if only just in this moment.
The feel of her warm and eager against me almost made me lose my head in a very different way. But it also reminded me that we weren’t anywhere near through this prison yet. Reluctantly, I eased back from her. She beamed up at me. The sight of the flush in her cheeks, the rosiness of her lips after that kiss, sent a bolt of lust right to my groin. It took all my self-control not to pull her right back to me.
“Still a lot farther to go,” I said.
“Yeah.” She turned, her hand on my arm, and her eyes widened. Her jaw went slack and then snapped shut. “I see—”
I leaned forward to try to make out what she’d deciphered, and an invisible force thrust up between us, ripping Ari away from me. With a shout, I snatched after her. My fingers closed only around empty air.
12
Aria
The world spiraled around me. I tried to shove myself back toward Thor. The wind whipped my body forward, and between the flashes of grass and stone, my gaze caught on a hunched figure behind the thick bars of a cage, a ring of fire licking all around it. The figure raised his head just slightly, showing a silver-flecked beard and one scarred-over eye—Odin. A twang ran through my chest: the connection I’d felt when I was searching for him before. That was the real god. But where was he? I had to catch every clue I could…
The smell of ash and something pungently bitter clogged my nose and mouth, and then I was wrenched away from there too. My groping hand closed around solid flesh. I clung on, but the wrist slipped from my grasp.
My ears popped. I fell on my ass on marble tiles that were so familiar their hard surface was almost a relief. I was back in the Asgard we’d first entered. The massive stone halls loomed around me, hot summer sun streaking between them. In front of me, a huge group of gods—constructs, I had to assume—had gathered in a circle in a smaller courtyard with buildings tight around it. They whooped and hollered at whatever they were watching.
I pushed myself to my feet, catching my balance against the side of the hall I’d landed next to. I hadn’t completely lost Thor. He was just straightening up where he must have landed outside the neighboring buildings. His gaze fell on the crowd before it found me. He stiffened, his usually ruddy complexion paling.
What? My head jerked back around to search the crowd, but I was too short to see over the tops of most of the gods’ heads. All I knew was that whatever they were doing, it was making them laugh and chatter amongst themselves. It sounded pretty good-humored. But obviously Thor saw something I didn’t.
Or remembered something I couldn’t have.
I scrambled onto a ledge on the side of the building for a better look. Clinging to the cool stones, I turned toward the crowd again, and froze.
Baldur was standing in a cleared space in the middle of the ring of gods. Distress, a sharper emotion than I’d ever seen from him before, was etched all across his face. One of the gods at the edge of the ring chucked a knife at him, another a stone, another what looked like a carrot. He batted them away with bursts of light from his skin, his mouth twisting tighter.
What the fuck were they doing? Why were they pelting Baldur, of all people, like that? Hell, they looked happy about it, smiles stretching across all those faces, the laughter I’d heard before carrying through the gathering. Like it was a friendly game, all in good sport. Couldn’t they see he hated it?
No, they couldn’t see anything. They were just constructs. I had to remember that. Constructs Muninn had built and guided like puppets.
But something about this must have come from a memory. It didn’t make sense.
I braced myself against the wall to release my wings, but before I could leap off to fly to Baldur, a dark-haired form shoved through the crowd.
“Baldur!” Hod called out.
His twin brother turned. A flash of—was that panic?—crossed Baldur’s face before his expression settled into one of relief.
Hod hooked his arm around Baldur’s and cleared a path with lashes of shadow as he led the light god out of the ring. I watched them go until a flicker in the open space drew my gaze back. My mouth fell open.
Baldur had reappeared in the middle of the ring. But—
My gaze darted back and forth. There were two Baldurs now. The one standing with Hod at the fringes of the crowd, shaking his head with a smile that still looked a bit pained at whatever his brother was saying, and the one who’d appeared out of nowhere in the midst of the other gods.
The new one stood there with arms spread as if welcoming the projectiles, totally serene. I didn’t see any magical glow around him, but when more of the gods took up the “game,” tossing a plate, a potato, a spear, every object simply bounced off his body and dropped to the ground.
Huh. This just got weirder and weirder.
Maybe sometime long ago Baldur really had stood there and been pelted, for whatever crazy reason. Someone clearly remembered that.
Thor must have spotted his brothers—half brothers, given what he’d told me about his mother? He was striding around the outer edge of the ring to join them. I hopped down from my ledge and hurried after him. There was only one place I was getting any answers. It was a good sign, wasn’t it, that almost all of us had found each other again? We had a better chance of breaking down Muninn’s prison the more of our minds we could put together. At least, I hoped so.
“—not going to come to that,” Hod was saying in a rough voice when I reached them. “Let’s just go. We don’t have to put up with her torture.”
“I don’t think leaving will be enough,” Baldur said, his usual melodic lilt eerily subdued. “I can feel it. The things they’re throwing at that memory of me. I can feel all of it.”
If I’d thought Thor had gone pale before, it was nothing compared to the sallow shade Hod’s face turned at that information. His hands clenched.
“Then we’ll find the oth
er constructs she’s conjured up and stop them before it gets to that point.”
“Gets to what point?” I asked, studying their expressions in turn. “What the hell is going on over there?”
Hod’s dark eyes veered toward my voice automatically, and somehow even more color managed to drain from his face. “If we get on with this, you won’t ever have to find out, valkyrie,” he said, and strode forward, a stick of shadow darting across the ground in front of him. “Has anyone seen Loki yet? One or another of him must be around here somewhere.”
“I’ll turn him up if he’s here,” Thor rumbled, and set off in the opposite direction to cover more of the courtyard. Baldur trailed behind his twin. His apprehension quavered so close to the surface that I could sense it where I normally only felt that dreamy calm from him.
I hurried after them, slowing when I caught up with Baldur. “What’s the matter? Why were they doing that to you? It really happened, didn’t it?”
“It did,” he said, his gaze still following his brother. “Hod’s right. It’d be better if we simply stop it and don’t have to relive the whole event.”
“Why?” The other version of him, the remembered one, hadn’t looked disturbed at all. He’d seemed to be welcoming the onslaught. “I don’t get it. Did everyone just go bonkers one day, or was—”
“Aria.” His voice stayed soft, but there was a note of steel in it. “I don’t want to go there. Leave it. Please.”
I’d started to bristle, but the anguish in that last word wrenched at my heart. My mouth snapped shut. “I’m sorry,” I said after a moment. “I’ll try to help. What exactly are we looking for?”
Baldur glanced down at me then. Some emotion I couldn’t read shimmered in his bright blue eyes. He set his hand on my arm and squeezed gently. The touch flooded me with a sudden warmth. For fuck’s sake, every one of these gods was way too appealing. I’d just been kissing Thor, and tempting Hod into another kiss before that, and Loki, well… And now one possibly-only-friendly gesture from Baldur had set me alight.