“How lost do you want to get?” Starkad’s question rolled over her.
The euphoria that came with the combination of pain and pleasure was a world Kirby could vanish into.
“As far and deep as possible?” Gwydion teased.
And there was the dick joke. As comforting and right as everything else surrounding her. She didn’t want sex right now, though. “I want to stay here. I’m about to lose myself for who knows how long. Tonight, hold me. Keep me grounded.”
Starkad pressed his lips softly to the back of her neck and wrapped his arms around her waist. “Of course.”
She sank back into him, still holding onto Gwydion. They kept the shadows and doubt at bay but didn’t completely erase her fear for what she was about to do.
Chapter Twelve
The effects of a night of cuddling evaporated when Kirby came face to face with Min and Brit in the morning. Not because of who they were, but because of what came next.
The five of them were back in the kitchen, but Kirby was too wound up to eat anything.
Judging by the untouched coffee, fruit, and pancakes that sat on everyone else’s plates, she wasn’t the only one.
“Do you really need me here for this?” Brit asked. She’d nibbled on a strawberry, and that was it.
“You don’t want to hear the rest of the plan?” Kirby didn’t believe it.
“I’ll stick around for that part, but I don’t want... You’ll see, I’m sure, once I’m in your head. Or is it the other way around?”
Even Starkad wasn’t hiding his concern. “Kirby will change first. Brit hasn’t had any interaction with the grunt—”
“Erek,” Brit corrected him.
“—since before the fight with Hel, so talking to him here may give her information she shouldn’t have. But he needs to be the first back to campus, and we want anything he can tell us. So once Kirby is Brit”—Starkad shook his head—“she’ll tell Aeval where she wants to hang out for the next week or so, until it’s time for her to hop a plane back east.”
“We only get one attempt with these lives,” Min said. “We’re taking on their bodies, their minds, everything about them, but if they die, we become ourselves again.” He frowned, his fuck barely audible.
Gwydion dropped his spoon, and the clatter made them jump. “No. Wrong. We’re not doing this if there’s a fuck element.”
“Brit’s ka has an unknown variable.” The frown that settled on Min’s face was concerning. “In that she can’t die, but she did at one point, or this wouldn’t be possible. There’s a slight possibility that if Kirby were to be injured the way Brit was the other day—rendered comatose even—she’d be stuck.”
That was a pretty big well fuck, but Kirby couldn’t back down now. This was the only shot they’d had in months, and they probably wouldn’t get another before it was too late. “If we’re not killed, how do we turn back when it’s all over? Can’t you give me a safe word or something? Both of us, that we can use on the other if needed?”
“Yes.” The creases in Min’s forehead lessened but didn’t vanish. “Ástvinur.”
Beloved. The word in her original language was so beautiful rolling off his tongue.
“Anything else I need to know?” Kirby asked.
“You can release the ka yourself, by focusing, but I’ll be here to help when you’re done, regardless. Don’t fight this. If there are things about Brit that are contrary to you, your instinct is going to be to override them. Don’t. The two of you will be living separate lives. She won’t have access to what you do as her, unless you tell her after.”
Brit pushed back from the table. “Right. I’m going back to my room.” She rested a hand on Kirby’s shoulder. “Good luck. And I’m sorry.”
Kirby squeezed her hand, but a response didn’t come.
As Brit walked out of the kitchen, Min prompted Kirby to stand, and they stepped back a few feet from the table.
“Your entire body is about to adjust itself,” Min explained. “It will be more comfortable if you’re upright. When I say don’t fight her, I mean everywhere. You’ve got a different center of gravity. You’re taller. You move differently. Brit knows how to work Brit’s body. Let her.”
His phrasing drove home how odd this situation was.
Kirby nodded. “I get it, in theory.” And if she struggled with it in application, she had a week to adapt. Was this the kind of scenario where being a fast learner mattered? “I’m ready.” She wasn’t really, but she never would be. Now or never.
When Min brushed his thumb along her cheek, a light jolt raced through her, like the faintest hum of electricity.
She expected an onslaught of memories to knock her back, the way it had when she remembered her past lives. Maybe he hadn’t started yet.
Her joints felt wrong. As if she was being compressed from all sides at once, wrapped in a tight cocoon. Her muscles twitched, and her legs wobbled under her. She steadied herself and focused on the floor, to ignore the spinning in her head. The tile should be farther away. Not much, but the five or six centimeters were enough to disorient her.
Her shirt was too tight in the chest. Her yoga pants stretched tightly across her hips, but were looser in the waist, and the hems met the floor.
Because I’m wearing Kirby’s clothes.
She was Kirby.
“You’re done.” Min’s voice sent flutters of comfort and security dancing over her skin. That was new. She was used to desire and confusion, mixed with a smattering of fear for how she reacted to him.
“How do I look?” Her voice wasn’t right. It wasn’t Brit’s. but it was. It was the way Brit heard her own voice.
“Exactly the way you should,” Min said.
That was... good? She turned to face Starkad and Min, trying to let instinct drive her movements. She stumbled. Turning around. What the fuck?
Min settled a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t think about walking or any movement, any more than you normally do.”
Easier said than done. An image splashed in her mind. A memory from when she was younger. Fourteen? Fifteen?
“I’m never going to get this.” Frustration filled Brit, as she flopped on the practice mat. Kirby made it look so easy.
Kirby offered her a hand. When Brit accepted, the tingle of desire raced both ways. Kirby wanted to see Brit get this. To celebrate with her. To protect her until she figured things out. To find a quiet corner of campus and see what her lips tasted like.
Brit wanted the kiss. Desperately. She also wanted to be better at anything than Kirby was. To finally land that kick. Make that impressive pin to the mat. Get a higher score in shooting. To prove to Kirby they were equals.
“You’re thinking about it too much,” Kirby said. “You already know the moves. Stop listing them in your head, and just let your body react.”
Brit both appreciated and hated the smug advice. She did know all of this. “Easier said than done. You might as well tell me not to think about an elephant.”
Kirby shook the past aside, but the emotions from both perspectives lingered. “That’s disorienting,” she muttered.
She focused on Starkad, who watched her with an unreadable expression. Except she knew this one, because the same feelings bounced though Brit. Envy. Intensely passionate jealousy, for the way Kirby felt about him. Disdain, that he’d done so much wrong and still got to be by her side.
But Kirby didn’t feel that way. Starkad had been with her since the beginning of time—her time, anyway. He was her berserker. Her savior.
Her captor. Her tormentor. Her rival.
No. Her lover. Her grace.
She pressed a palm to her forehead, wobbling on her feet.
“Stop fighting it.” Min was kind. “You’re not Kirby right now; you’re Brit.”
And apparently Brit had a lot of very specific feelings about the men in Kirby’s life. “I can still hear myself. I don’t want to lose me in her.”
“It doesn’t work that way. K
irby is still always there underneath, and you don’t have to stop being you. But you do have to stop fighting Brit,” Min said.
Except Kirby wanted another goodbye kiss from Starkad and Gwydion, and Brit wanted to get back to her room, put on clothes that fit, and get to her hideaway on the Cayman Islands. She had property there. A different identity. Money—not a lot, but enough to cover expenses for six or so months while she looked for alternatives.
Min nudged her. “This is going to be easier if you go someplace where Brit has memories and Kirby doesn’t. At least until you adapt. Aeval is waiting with your things.”
Kirby’s feet wanted to carry her back to the breakfast table. She had to lean into this new half of her instead. She gave Starkad and Gwydion one last glance. “I’m sorry.”
She let the part of her that was Brit lead her out of the kitchen and down the hall, to the room where her new things were being kept. She changed quickly. Each glance in the full-length mirror on the back of the door filled her with ambivalence.
Kirby saw the woman she had loved, who’d betrayed her over and over, but whom she kept giving another chance. Brit saw herself, and she hated having to look herself in the eye. All of her lies and inadequacies reflected back at her. The flaws she hid from everyone else, but that someone else would discover sooner or later.
That explained why Brit didn’t want to stick around to see a copy of herself. This was going to be an interesting few weeks.
MIN WISHED THERE HAD been a better way to give Kirby an idea of what she was heading into. The last few months with Brit had shown him hints of several insecurities. Kirby could handle the situation, but it had to be a lot to face.
Starkad looked annoyed with the way she’d left the room. “If I thought you were vengeful, I’d wonder if this was payback for my insisting Kirby be kept on the TOM campus in the first place.”
Gwydion sighed. “Un-fucking-believable. Of course that’s the first thing you say.”
It was nice to see some things hadn’t changed. The antagonism between these two, for instance. “This is harder on her than it is on you,” Min said.
Starkad’s scowl eased. “I know.”
“But vengeance...” Gwydion drew out the thought. “Don’t think you’re off the hook there. I’ve got ideas.”
“She’ll be all right.” Starkad almost sounded like he believed it.
Gwydion shook his head. “Keep telling yourself that.”
Hadn’t changed at all. When Min had seen the two of them laughing and joking, he assumed they’d put aside their animosity. He shouldn’t have been fooled. “Have you two been like this for six months?”
“Like what?” Gwydion adopted an angelic expression that wouldn’t fool anyone who knew him.
Starkad looked like a petulant child. “No.”
The temporary truce had been because Kirby was here. Safe. In their grasp.
Min remembered that false sense of security. He’d fallen into the same delusion in her last life. He could watch Starkad and Gwydion bicker all day, or he could get on with his own transformation. “You’ll want information from me once I’ve changed?”
“I assume, from what you told Kirby, that you’ll have enough control to provide it.” Starkad was issuing a challenge. This was as much a question of Min’s honesty with Kirby, as it was about what he’d be able to tell them.
“I will.” Min didn’t lie to her. The idea was abhorrent. “I’m practiced at accessing two souls, so I won’t have the struggle you saw in her. In a few days, she won’t have issues with it either.”
Starkad pushed back from the table, and rested a hand on the pistol holstered on his hip. “Let’s do this.”
Min closed his eyes and turned his thoughts inward. He evicted the outside world to drift along the thread of magic that tied him to so many other lives and souls. A vibrant cord guided him toward the last person he’d seen die, and he followed the line.
He tugged the ka into himself, letting it flow into his heart and mind. His arms. Fingers. Legs and toes. His body shifted with the change.
Erek. The soldier’s name—his new name—was Erek.
Min didn’t pull too hard at the memories. They’d flow as they were needed. As questions were asked or familiar environments and people were encountered.
He opened his eyes again, to see Starkad had a gun leveled at his head.
“Reassure me you’re still in there.” Starkad’s tone was hard.
Erek laughed mentally. This was a light version of the treatment waiting for him when he returned to campus. Starkad had most likely helped implement those procedures.
“Would you prefer poetry, or a retelling of the first time I met Kirby?” Min asked in an unfamiliar voice. Erek latched onto the vividly erotic memories, and his body reacted.
Starkad lowered the firearm but kept his finger on the trigger. Min wouldn’t have noticed. It made Erek wish he had a weapon of his own, though. He’d never trained with the school’s old combat instructor, but based on the stories he’d heard, he was pretty sure Starkad would kick his ass.
That was one of the few things Min and Erek would probably agree on. This was a hostile mind to be sharing, full of paranoia, lust, and a desire to control or harm at any cost.
And it was Min’s home for the foreseeable future.
Chapter Thirteen
Min-as-Private-First-Class-Erek stepped through a portal Aeval created, directly in front of the gates at The Order of Mistletoe Academy and Boarding School. He’d never seen the manicured green landscape with trees just turning for autumn, but thanks to becoming Erek, he knew where everything was.
Kirby and Brit had briefed him on what to expect next, and Erek’s memories agreed, though without quite as many details.
“On the ground now, or you will be fired upon.” The command roared over an unseen loudspeaker. Min let Erek’s memory take over, as he lay on his stomach, hands behind his head. Visitors weren’t greeted this way, but he was the sole survivor in a failed raid, he’d been gone for two days, and he’d just stepped through another immortal’s gate.
Tension coiled through him, as he watched two pairs of boots approach.
A boot rested against the small of his back. She unsnapped his holster and removed his firearm. An Urd cleanup team had cleared all the bodies from the warehouse after the rescue of Aeval’s people. Min had to call in a lot of favors, to get assistance with an unauthorized mission, but it meant he had access to Erek’s clothing and weapons, which he wore now.
“Name and rank,” a woman barked.
He recognized that voice—Erek did. “Private First Class Erek.” TOM soldiers didn’t have last names. Hel believed the act separated them from their pasts.
“Date of birth.” She was Amy, and she’d been Erek’s first crush.
Erek’s birthdate rolled off Min’s tongue as if it were his own.
“First place you fucked me?”
Fraternizing between cadets was against the rules, though Kirby and Brit were only one example that it happened anyway. As desperately as Erek wanted it at the time, he hadn’t broken that rule with Amy. “My fucking imagination. First time. Last time. Every time.”
The owner of the other boots snickered.
“What happened when you tried?”
“You—” Erek didn’t want to answer, though the words were right on the tip of Min’s tongue. No one knew this, and now everyone was about to.
“Private.” Her voice took on a dangerous edge.
If he didn’t answer, they’d shoot him here, Erek’s ka would fade, and Min would be exposed. “Library. Second floor. Study room.” She’d been sitting on the table, and Erek forced his way between her legs. She’d kicked him back into a chair with her no. “You rested that sexy-ass boot against my nuts and told me, if I ever did that again, you’d practice your garrote skills on me while I slept.”
That seemed to be a common occurrence here. A bunch of hyper-aggressive alpha girls and boys, shoved into dorms
and training together, and told they could only screw on the school’s clock? Not surprising. Still disgusting, but not surprising.
“And?” she asked.
Erek briefly wondered if being shot was better than admitting this. “I cried and begged you not to tell the staff, and swore to Vidar I’d never do it again.”
Boots Two laughed out loud. “Is that true?” His voice told Min he was Jakob.
“Hand to Hel,” Amy said.
Jakob stuck a hand in Min’s face, and Amy removed her foot from the small of his back.
“Welcome back, man.” Jakob helped Min to his feet. “Where you been?”
“Long story.” Min kept his hands behind his back and let them bind him with a plastic zip tie. Next came the blindfold, and the headphones meant to block sound. Then Min was bundled into a Jeep. He didn’t have to see or hear it; his memory told him.
The ride most likely lasted fifteen or twenty minutes longer than it needed to. When they stopped, he was marched to a new location, and the bindings on his wrists were cut. As he pulled the headphones off, he heard a door latch shut behind him.
“Private Erek.” A new voice came over a new speaker. “Remove everything and place it in the bin in the wall.”
Min yanked off the cloth bag keeping him blind. He was in a small room, only two meters wide in each direction, with stainless-steel walls and a textured tile floor with a drain in the middle. The cameras and speaker were hidden.
The only break in the wall was a meter square about chest level. He shoved the mask and headphones in there, then stripped. Erek had far less of an issue with his nudity than he did with admitting he cried after he tried to force himself on someone and she more forcibly stopped him.
When Min adopted Erek’s ka, he’d hoped to glean the information they needed immediately. After all, Erek had been the one to proclaim For Death. But the private didn’t know any more about Hel’s resurrection than Brit did. It would happen if the steps were followed, and that meant a lot of killing.
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