Both myself and the woman answered yes when the priestess asked us. For the third question, the priestess looked to me first. “Would you die for the uppskera?”
“Absolutely,” I said without hesitation. Now who was too eager? Dammit. I hadn’t meant to jump on the question like that.
The priestess’s eyes widened just a touch, the only reaction I’d seen her give so far. She moved on with the same removed air she had possessed before, making me wonder if I’d imagined the look. She asked the others the same question. They both answered yes, but slower, and with a touch of hesitation in the man’s case. A powerful protective instinct rose in me at his reaction. If they chose him, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to walk away from here without another fight.
The seven turned away from us to gather and compare notebooks, not saying a word. As varúlfur, we possessed the sharp hearing of a canine, so to speak would be to give away results. Tension started to build up a terrible pressure in my chest. The last four years of training and learning came down to this moment. If I wasn’t chosen, all that time away from Ayra would be wasted. True, I had learned about what she was becoming and what I needed to do to help her, but if I wasn’t chosen, what good was it? If that happened, leaving her four years ago would feel like I’d abandoned her when she needed me most. My power became a steam kettle threatening to explode, or at the least make me scream.
Just when I feared I couldn’t take it anymore, the six turned around and took their places before us. Their stoic expressions gave away nothing. The priestess’s gaze settled on me, and my heart felt like it stopped.
“Vidar Balderson, you have earned the right of First Impression. You will have one moon to impress the uppskera. If she does not choose you as her verndari by the new moon, Birna will have the second opportunity to impress her. If Birna fails, Seth will have the third opportunity of Impression,” she announced.
The relief that coursed through me made my knees weak. I bowed low, grateful the motion hid my reaction and gave me the opportunity to draw in a few deep breaths. It wouldn’t be good for the council to see the depth of my emotion.
“Thank you, honored council. I will not let you down,” I said in a voice far steadier than I felt.
The priestess gave a very slight shake of her head. “Our opinion is inconsequential. It’s the uppskera you can’t let down. May you go with the speed and blessing of the Allfather,” she said.
It was all the dismissal I needed. I bowed low to the council, turned, and ran for the edge of the plateau. If I hurried, I might be able to catch an earlier flight out. Every moment counted. Already, I hadn’t been there when her power awoke. For that I would never forgive myself. But I’d had to come to Iceland. I’d had to learn everything I could about her ability and the history of those like her. Now that I was armed with the knowledge, I would help her survive this. I had to. Whether I survived or not remained to be seen, but mattered far less.
I leaped from the plateau and plunged headlong over the edge into an uncertain future.
Chapter Two
I reap the wrongs others have sown, so that our kind may remain unknown.
~Uppskera Journals
Ayra
The sweet, cloying scent of hay forced me to breathe through my mouth, resulting in the taste coating my tongue. But my mouth was dry for more reasons than just that. My hands trembled a little as I ascended the ladder into the hayloft. Not from fear, but from the anger growing inside me like a tornado coming to life, devouring everything in its wake. Calder never allowed me up here, so I knew it was the one place I had to look. In all his cockiness, my arrogant prick of a brother wouldn’t expect me to have the guts to come here. I was not the same woman I was before the awakening, though, and therein lay my advantage over him.
When he had kidnapped me and exposed me to the seeker, Sonya Michaelson, to awaken my power, I’d still been afraid of him. I had been the frail woman he beat up whenever the mood struck him. Which was often. The awakening had burned the fear away, replacing it with a rage so powerful it frightened me almost more than being the reaper did. The scared little girl in me had turned into something else that night.
At the top of the stairs a small cobweb-infested landing awaited me. The scents of dust, moldy straw, and untreated wood teased my nose. Above those, Calder’s musky scent trails lingered, but it was an old scent. Two days or more had aged his most recent trail. Choosing my footing carefully on the loose bits of straw that remained scattered across the worn wood floor, I walked to the door. The knob resisted my efforts, but I snapped the lock with ease. With no more than a little push, the door swung open, revealing a small, dark room beyond. It figured. Calder was so confident that I would stay away out of fear of him that he didn’t bother with a deadbolt. My dear brother had a lot to learn about the woman I was becoming. Just inside, I found a light switch.
The bare bulb buzzed to life, throwing muted yellow light across a desk and backless chair. A collage of images covering all three walls in my immediate view drew my attention to the reason I had come here. Newspaper clippings, both from actual newspapers and from online news sites that had been printed out, papered the walls from floor to about the seven-foot-high level. Only after peering into every shadowy corner and up into the rafters did I finally cross the small room. Cocky or not, I didn’t trust my brother not to have left an unpleasant surprise like a bear trap or something equally as painful. It wouldn’t have been the first time. Anger tried to swirl again at the memory, but I kept it down to a brisk wind. I didn’t have time for it right now.
Aside from a bit of dust and grime on the floor, nothing unpleasant awaited me on my way across the room. Grisly images of crime scenes and startling headlines of murder and maulings dominated the clippings. The dates of the articles on the wall to my left started twenty years ago, ascending as they went from one wall to the next, and the next, up until only a few weeks ago. Not a clean space of wall beneath seven feet of the roof remained. Thousands of clippings, all across the upper United States and the lower territories of Canada. Chills traveled through me, raising bumps along my arms and chest as they went. Every one of them looked like an animal attack, a wolf attack specifically.
Varúlfur didn’t do this, at least not those that had been properly brought into a pack. The only ones that would do this were those bitten in against their will.
I knew there had to be some over the years, those in need of either guidance or putting down. It was the reason the uppskera had awakened within me. Never had I imagined there were so many, and going back so far.
My mouth dried out again, but this time it had nothing to do with the air quality. Dread made my steps slow and heavy, but I managed to force myself over to the desk. The wooden surface was bare of anything save for scratches and dings. Locked drawers offered me more resistance than the door to the room had. Despite my strength, they wouldn’t budge, which meant the wood had to be reinforced and the locks were of something akin to titanium. Regardless, it couldn’t hold up to my efforts. The wood snapped and splintered, all but exploding beneath my clawed hands.
Within the ruined mess of wood sat a metal lock box.
“Damn you, Calder,” I hissed through my fangs.
The creak of stairs snapped my attention back to the door I had left open. Moving on the balls of my feet, I crossed the room light as a ghost and twice as fast. The newfound speed that came with being the reaper still left me a little dizzy, forcing me to place a hand on the wall to steady myself. I cringed at the image of an eviscerated torso beneath my fingers, but didn’t move. If I did I risked the paper crinkling, or worse, me stumbling. Heavy steps moved across the landing, nearly silent by most standards, but clear as a bell to my ears. Someone of Calder’s build easily from the sound of it, but possessing less grace, if that were possible.
I knew who it was before I smelled them.
My lips pulled back as my fangs extended. A shock of white-blond hair exactly the shade of my own preceded the hul
king form of the only other man on this planet that I loathed as much as my brother.
“Father, what are you doing here?” I demanded. Sperm donor was more like it, but habits that had been beaten into one died hard.
A blue-eyed gaze as cold and unfeeling as glaciers stabbed at me, trying to pin me in place. I returned his stare, letting the contempt I felt for the man fill my eyes. He looked away first.
“I didn’t come to argue. I must say, though, this is literally the last place I could think of to look for you. I’m impressed you were brave enough to come here.” His snide tone made me twitch. He couldn’t even give me a compliment properly.
“That would be a first.”
Ignoring my jibe, he went on. “I came to let you know your mother and I support you, and we…love you. As does the Arnoddr pack. They are your family as much as we are, and you can have the highest of ranks among them, above even the alpha. It is your rightful place.”
The way he stuttered over the word “love”, like it was a foreign thing that tasted bad on his tongue, made me bare my fangs again.
“Really? Have you asked Isak how he feels about that? Because I’m not sure your alpha would enjoy giving up his place at the top of the pack.”
My father’s pale brows came together in a bundle of deep wrinkles. “Of course he would. He’d be honored. You’ve received his invitation to join the pack, haven’t you?”
Ah, so he was fishing for information. That explained the rare visit. I had received the invitation from Isak, and from the other two pack alphas in Hemlock Hollow. “If that were your business, you wouldn’t have to ask,” I said.
His size thirteens shook the wooden floorboards as he stormed across the loft. Sliding into a subtle fighting stance, I held my ground, and returned his fierce glare. This time he didn’t look away. But neither did I for once. Less than a foot remained between us when he stopped, forcing me to look up to hold his glare. I had to open my fists as my claws started to grow. Not noticing, he grabbed me by the biceps, fingers digging deep enough into the muscles to hurt. But I was used to the pain.
“You are my daughter. Everything you do is my business. You have a responsibility to your family, to your pack, to honor us. I came to make sure you do exactly that,” he said in a voice that rumbled with the beginnings of a growl.
I smiled, exposing my fangs. His fingers dug even deeper into my arms. No claws sprang from them because he didn’t have that kind of control. I brought my hands together, thrust up between his arms, and to the outside of them, breaking his hold on me with ease. Pulling my claws in just a bit, I grabbed hold of his arms like he had mine. I let him feel the prick of my claws, but just barely.
“I don’t owe you, or the Arnoddr pack. They are not my pack, and you are not my family,” I said in a steady voice.
His face turned bright red. Using his strength, he yanked free of my grasp and struck me across the face hard enough to make me stagger. I hadn’t expected it, or the strike never would have connected. He hadn’t hit me in over two years, but that was mostly because I had left home the day I turned eighteen. The blood warming my fingers told me he hadn’t escaped unharmed. The pain of the slap was minute compared to what I’d been through during my childhood. I had spent it learning to fight, endure pain, hunt, and kill. All because I was of the uppskera bloodline, and they’d hoped the power would awaken in me.
Very slowly, he raised his hands up beside his head, fingers splayed. “I didn’t come here to fight, and I didn’t come here to stop you from going after your brother.”
“Then why are you here?” I snapped.
He lowered his arms and motioned to my hand with a thrust of his head. “To remind you that you have a wedding in two months that you had better be back for. And if you don’t return out of a sense of duty to the Arnoddr pack, do it for Elí.”
I forced my claws back in and closed my hands into fists. Of course he would use that against me, the bastard. If I didn’t go through with the engagement, not only would I dishonor myself and my entire family, but I would dishonor Elí, and none of this was his fault. He was a pawn as much as I was. Unlike me, though, he was an innocent. While we shared no love between us, I respected him and his pack. And I was an honorable person, dammit. Even if I was a monster. My father knew that and wasn’t above using it against me.
Fury boiled so hot in me that I had to look away. If I didn’t, I was going to launch across that room and return every slap he had ever dealt me, and there had been many. I took several slow, measured breaths like my glíma instructor had taught me. The anger started to recede like a slow tide.
My father took a step closer, bringing the wave of anger right back onto shore. “When you find your brother, just remember, everything Calder did was to make you stronger so you not only survive being the uppskera, but so you’ll be the greatest one history has ever seen,” he said.
I poured all my anger into one growl that resembled a word. “Leave.” Power rolled off me and slammed into him, shoving him toward the door. In a barely controlled rush, he stumbled to it. His hands slapped hard against the wood.
He stepped out the door. “All right, all right. I’m going. But don’t forget what I said. You have responsibilities. Elí is a part of them. Turning your back on that would only show how weak and afraid you are. You’ll understand soon. Make the right choice.” With that, he thundered down the steps.
Roaring, I grabbed a metal ballpoint pen from the desk, spun around, and threw it at the door. It sank into the wood up to the gel finger rest. Good ol’ Dad was lucky he moved fast. I turned back to the desk and gripped the edge of it. My claws dug in, splintering the wood with a satisfying crack. Steps sounded on the stairs again. The fool couldn’t actually be coming back for more, could he?
“Ayra?” came a deep, familiar, masculine voice that vibrated along my bones. The last time I had heard it, it hadn’t sounded quite this…mature.
That voice had occupied my dreams for the last four years, bringing me comfort when nothing else could. But they had been only dreams. When he left, I had been a girl with a crush, and now, my entire world was different. He stepped into the doorway, and my heart began to pound hard enough to remind me that not everything had changed.
“Vidar?” I asked, afraid to believe it. That kind of hope was dangerous.
The yellow light of the bare bulb made his ebony skin look golden. Swirls of black knotwork tattoos peeked out from beneath the straining arms of his vintage comic book Thor T-shirt. Both the irony of that and the fact that he clearly still loved comic book heroes almost made me smile. The tattoos had to be the markings of the monks. I wanted so badly to lift his sleeve and look, to caress those arms. At the same time, I wanted to scream at him, or slap him. He had been the one friend I had. And he’d all but disappeared four years ago. Vague letters had come once a month at first, but in the last two years, they had dropped off to special occasions.
Green eyes mixed with yellow that shot out from his pupil like solar flares regarded me with a tenderness I did not want or deserve. Not considering what I had become. Something else lay in those eyes, too. Was it regret? Longing? His black hair was cropped short. I missed the tight curls. And, gods, he had filled out. A lot. To perfection. The pictures he sometimes sent me of him at the temple in his uniform had not done him justice. He had always been tall, but now, he towered at least a foot over me, and at five-five I wasn’t exactly short.
Those magnetic eyes wouldn’t look away from me, almost as if they couldn’t. His power pulsed and crackled like a growing fire, one that wanted desperately to reach out and combine with my own power. Impossible. He’d never felt that way about me. This had to be a dream.
“Vidar, is that really you?”
The big smile that flashed ultra-white teeth at me was unmistakable. A mixture of childlike joy, repressed desire, and repressed anger spun me into a whirlwind that made my heart pound like a Viking drum. Was that moisture in his eyes?
“Yes,
White Wolf, it’s me. By the gods, you look amazing!”
Giggles of pure happiness bubbled from me quicker than I could stop them. I couldn’t help it. I’d waited so very long for this moment. “As do you!”
In two great strides, he closed the distance between us and swept me up into his arms, enveloping me completely. He felt so warm, familiar, and safe that I couldn’t help but relax into him. The tight vise of his arms took my breath away. But that was all right. I didn’t want to breathe. I wanted Vidar. He was all I had wanted for the last four years. For a moment, I was the teenage girl he’d left behind again; happy, full of hope and dreams, not yet a monster, not yet engaged to someone else.
But I was a monster now. The anger over him leaving me behind returned in a rush that left me a bit dizzy.
Drawing on my anger, I went against every instinct and desire in me and drew away from him. The anger gave me strength. In it, I found an old comfort.
“What are you doing here, Vidar?” I demanded.
For him to see me now, as the uppskera, and not the woman, it was too much. All I’d ever wanted was for him to see me as a woman. Now he never would because I could never be just a woman again. In the back of my mind stuck the idea that if he hadn’t left, I might not have been forced to become the uppskera. And I certainly wouldn’t have been forced into an arranged engagement with Elí.
Pain and regret flashed in his eyes as his hands slid slowly from my arms. “I’ve come back for you. I meant to come before your awakening, but a ceremony delayed me. I’m so sorry.”
“That’s right, the ceremony you mentioned at the Verndari Temple.” He never did tell me what the ceremony was about. But then, his infrequent letters had never talked much about the temple. What he had told me, I wasn’t exactly thrilled about. Like how he’d taken a vow of celibacy. At first it had been a comfort to know he wasn’t bedding some Icelandic woman. But it also meant he wouldn’t ever be bedding me either. Not that it was an option now. It was far too late for that. In fact, with each moment the shock of seeing him again turned more and more into anger.
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