by Nora Ash
My own magic rose to meet her, more eager to wrap around her light than when I’d sworn my oath of truth. She allowed it to, prodding at it and sending shivers through my entire being.
No, no, no. With a force of will, I clamped my shields down, leaving her with nothing but an impenetrable ice barrier. I kept it in place as her magic slid across it, testing once before she returned her focus to my broken body. Her amusement echoed in my mind before her magic dove into my flesh and through my bones.
I kept my teeth gritted through the arduous healing process, my sole focus on my inner barriers. Just that briefest of touches of her essence, that single moment of feeling her within, and I knew what her plan was—why she’d proposed this trade.
She was looking for a weakness. Looking for a way in, to twist me into compliance like she had her four mates.
“That’s one down,” Annabel said, pulling her hands from my shoulder. When she looked up at me, the strain of what she’d done was evident on her face. Exhaustion painted lines on her delicate features, and even in the darkness, the dullness of her eyes was clearly visible.
“If you continue, you will drain what’s left of your magic,” I said, my voice calm; emotionless. “Are you certain you wish to render yourself defenseless for whatever answers you seek?”
She jutted out her chin, a look of defiance I knew all too well from the years I’d seen her grow from a child into a woman replacing some of her exhaustion. “I won’t be defenseless, Grim Lokisson. That I promise you.”
She pressed her hands to my left side, forcing her magic into my body with a grunt of effort. Instantly the agony eased some, and I watched her as she slowly mended my shattered ribs.
She truly believed she would find a way to make me see the errors of my ways. She was banking every last drop of her strength on it. Once she’d healed me, she’d be as weak as a kitten, entirely reliant upon me for protection. As if finding whatever weaknesses she was searching for would somehow give her a path to my heart, like it had with my brothers and our enemies.
Perhaps if she’d known that my kind had nothing but ice where she was hoping for warmth, she would have thought twice before she spared my life. I may have looked like a man to her, another god to be brought to his knees by Fate’s siren call, but I was not.
Monsters birth monsters, and I was born from ice and mist and terror. To Annabel, I would be nothing but her destruction.
Five
Annabel
I slept for a long time after healing Grim’s injuries.
It was hard to judge the passage of time in Hel, but when I woke up, the gray light seemed dimmer, as if dusk was nearing.
“What’s the time?” I mumbled groggily as I sat up. My head was still wrapped in the cobwebs of dreamless sleep, but I had the distinct sensation I’d been out for a while.
“Time is not a relevant concept in this place, plum,” Mimir said. When I looked in his direction, I saw his head sitting on a turned over tree trunk, the same place I’d put him down when we made camp last night.
“You have slept for nearly a full day.” Grim’s voice was gruff and unfriendly, as usual. I turned to him and arched an eyebrow at his near-naked figure. He was sitting cross-legged with his back to a large rock, some form of breeches covering his private parts and one of his knives in one hand and some sort of whetstone in the other. It made a slick, slicing sound every time he ran it along the blade.
“Get too hot?” I asked, giving Grim a small smirk when he shot me a dark look from underneath the shock of charcoal hair covering one of his eyes. The blue one, if I remembered correctly.
“Troll blood is vile, even without its usual stench,” he said, nodding to the large rock next to the one he was leaned against. His wet clothes hung over it, boots and belt at its foot.
“I suppose that is one plus about Hel—no bad smells,” I sighed, then grimaced when I remembered how he could still smell one particular thing. It was as good a reminder as ever to go hunt down some fresh moss.
Grim looked up when I got to my feet and staggered a little as my knees threatened to buckle. Shit. I shouldn’t have been so weak after sleeping for so long. I’d known healing him would drain most of my magic, but it seemed I’d pushed it too far.
“Don’t leave my side,” he said, his voice brusque as he paused the whetstone’s rhythmic slide.
“I need more moss. Feel free to tag along if you have a period fetish, I guess,” I said, walking off before he could voice another command.
I didn’t hear any movement behind me, but before I’d taken more than a few steps into the woods, Grim fell into step by my side. He was wearing his boots and leather trousers, and he had a knife in each hand, but his torso was still bare.
“I didn’t take you for the kinky type,” I said, keeping my tone light as I continued walking.
“A mild-mannered gnome could kill you without breaking a sweat,” he snarled, gaze searing the side of my skull. “Don’t stray unless you wish to die—and, as a byproduct, cause your beloved mates unthinkable agony before their shredded spirits join us.”
I pushed the pang in my soul away at the mention of my mates. I had to stay focused, and the hollowness in my chest whenever I thought about them threatened to take my ability to so much as think.
Mimir was guiding me to a way out of Hel, but even if I succeeded in escaping this cursed place, there was still Ragnarök to worry about. The prophecy was clear—Verdandi had been clear. I needed five mates. Not four.
Grim was my fifth. Grim, who’d murdered me. Grim, who hated me.
Grim, who for the briefest moment had shown me a shred of vulnerability—an inkling, a faint whisper that somewhere, behind the betrayal, behind his icy exterior, there was an actual person. Someone I could make see how awful, how incomprehensibly wrong his choice had been. A last ghostly thread of hope for humanity, for the nine worlds… and for myself.
And so I had to focus on the here and now, and lock away the agony of my tattered bonds to the four men who’d given everything for me. I had one goal now, and I could not afford distractions. I had to crack his icy heart, make him understand—and, however impossible it felt, find a way to forgive his betrayal.
I glanced at the brooding god out the corner of my eye. He was painfully beautiful. They all were, my fated mates, but Grim was… different.
I’d never seen him topless before, and the dimness of the gray forest around us did nothing to hide the width of his chest and every hard muscle flexing with every step he took. Like his brothers, he was so obviously an alpha, but that was where the similarities stopped. His bared skin was so pale it seemed to be made from pure frost, an ethereal glow to it that underlined his otherworldly heritage, and there was nothing warm or primitive about him.
Out of all three brothers, he was the one who looked most like Loki, with his black hair and high cheekbones. His features were so lean they were almost gaunt, but there was nothing sickly about him. Just haunting, icy beauty and a darkness that seemed to spill out from within.
“Why did he put you up to this, Grim?” I asked softly.
“Who put me up to what?” His voice was as gruff and unfriendly as ever, his focus on our surroundings rather than me.
“Killing me. Betraying us. I claim one of my truths—I want to know why Loki decided to welcome Ragnarök. And why you would rather trust him than your brothers.”
He snapped his head around to look at me then, the expression in his mismatched eyes inscrutable. His jaw clenched, his Adam’s apple bobbing once, almost as if he’d tried to speak but something had stopped him.
A small growl slipped past his lips. “I am unable to answer that.”
I frowned. “What? But you swore an oath.”
Grim leveled me with a hard stare. “I cannot tell you anything concerning he who is responsible for Ragnarök’s coming.”
I blinked. “Is it… is it because he put some sort of silencing spell on you?”
The alpha didn’t r
espond. I took that as a yes.
“Christ.” I shook my head, then spotted what looked like a suitable patch of moss and crouched to pull some free.
“You do that a lot,” he said, his voice somewhat softer.
“Hm? Do what?” I looked up from the moss and caught his haunting eyes. They were so intense I found it hard to hold his gaze.
“Invoke the Christian god, or his son. Even now, after everything you’ve seen. You don’t call out for Thor, or Odin, or any of the other gods you have encountered—not even your own mates. It’s always this Christian deity. Why?”
I shrugged. “It’s how I was raised, I guess. It’s mostly an expression. Why do you ask?” Then something dawned on me. “Is it…. offensive to you guys?”
He chuffed a breath through his nose. I could almost have believed it was a laugh, if not for the darkly serious expression on his face. “Offensive? To a god who cares about mortal worship, perhaps. I was perfectly happy living in exiled oblivion. You can call to your desert god as much as you please. It’s too late for regrets for your kind.”
Something in his words, in his tone, made a memory niggle at the back of my mind—a passing comment from Loki on our way back to Valhalla, something about… forsaking our old gods? I shook my head, dismissing the hazy thought. It wasn’t important, not now.
“Well, if you can’t tell me anything about Loki’s plans, then I have another truth I want from you,” I said, pulling the last chunk of moss free before I stood back up. “Tell me what it was like for you growing up. Tell me about your mother, about why you were taken to Bjarni and Saga’s childhood home to be raised. About your relationship with your brothers, your father, your stepmother. I want to know exactly what it felt like, every painful detail you would never tell anyone else, every moment of joy, every loss. All of it.”
Grim bared his teeth at me, such a ferocious alpha threat it should have looked foreign on his cold features. It didn’t—it just looked exceptionally scary. Enough for me to take a step back.
“You want my life story, Annabel?” Despite his obvious anger, his voice was still soft like black silk. “You think you’ll find a way to manipulate me through my past? You will be sorely disappointed. Nothing I say will help you escape.”
“Just tell me,” I said, forcing more bravery into my voice than I felt.
He sucked in a deep breath through his nose, staring me down, and for a moment I thought he would refuse. Undoubtedly he would have, had he not been bound by the magic of his oath.
“I was birthed by one of the Jotunns of Niflheim,” he began, and from the hesitance in his voice it seemed the words were being forced out of him. “They are… different than other Jotunns. And they have little maternal instinct. At six months, once their offspring no longer require their mother for nourishment, they will usually be left to fend for themselves.
“I am told my mother attempted the same with me, but I was a halfling. Had my father not come by to finally meet his youngest son, I would have perished in the mist. He bribed my mother with magical gifts to care for me past her natural inclinations. And she did, to the extent she was capable.
“I have few memories of my time in Niflheim. Of her. I do remember her attempts at making me stronger. I was… an embarrassment, I imagine. A squalling, weak little thing clinging to her teat. Had it not been for my father, I am sure she would have drowned me in the bogs.”
“How did she try to make you stronger?” I prodded.
Darkness flashed in Grim’s eyes. “She would beat me to get me to fight back. It never worked, of course. I would just cower and wail and plead for mercy.
“My father’s next visit happened to come during one such lesson—on my fourth birthday, I believe. That’s when he took me to Jotunheim to be raised alongside Saga and Bjarni. I suspect he recognized that there was too much of his blood in me to survive a childhood in Niflheim.”
“Four? She did that to you when you were four?” Despite my anger with him, my heart gave a spasm at the thought of a helpless toddler in the hands of… of a monster. “And Loki let you stay with her for four years?”
“Ah. Does your soft heart betray you again, omega?” He gave me a small smile that held no warmth. “Perhaps I only killed you because my mother beat me as a child—is that what you’re thinking? Does it make it easier to accept what I did to you now?”
I glared at him. “Continue.”
“As you wish.” He chuffed through his nose and leaned back against a tree trunk, seemingly unbothered by the rough bark against his skin. “My brothers’ mother was about as thrilled to have Loki’s mistborn bastard in her home as could be expected, but she fed and clothed me. And through my brothers, I learned the concept of loyalty. It took us a while to get along—I was a stranger in their house, younger than them, and… odd. Not entirely of their world.
“But I will always remember the autumn day I’d gone out to search for poisonous mushrooms in the woods surrounding our cabin. Bjarni had tied me up in the outhouse overnight, and I was planning revenge. But the mushrooms grew farther away than I’d anticipated—almost to the foothills of the mountain range.
“I didn’t notice the troll until it was on me. My father had started my magical education at that point, but I was still too young and too inexperienced to fight back. I knew I was going to die. But…” His lips curved in a half-smile. “My brothers had followed me into the wilderness. When they heard me scream, they came bursting out of the underbrush, armed with nothing but sticks and stones. Saga was barely eight at the time, Bjarni only six. They attacked that troll with a fervor Tyr himself would be hard-pressed to match.
“To this day, I don’t know how they managed to chase it off, but they did. They saved my life. After, Bjarni hugged me while I bawled my eyes out. It was my first experience with a kind touch. If he hadn’t held my arms so tightly, I would have punched him.
“After that day, I swore I would always protect them, no matter the cost. We weren’t friends, not for several more years, but we looked out for each other. They made life under their mother’s roof tolerable for me.”
“And your father?” I asked. “Where was he?”
Grim shrugged. “Who knows? Wherever his schemes and plots took him. He would stop by from time to time to check on our progress and prepare us for our supposed Fate to save his bloodline.”
“No kind words? No hugs?” I asked, even though I pretty much knew the answer already. The God of Mischief hadn’t exactly come across as a warm and jovial father on our first meeting.
Grim’s smile turned acrid. “From Loki? I’m sure the answer surprises you, but no. I never minded. My brothers did, for a while. He is our sire, and without his teachings, I would not have become as powerful as I am. But my loyalty is with my brothers. Not him.”
I frowned. “Yet you betray them to help him? I don’t understand.”
He only gave me that dark stare of his, and I sighed.
“Right. You can’t tell me. Fine. Continue. When did you, Bjarni, and Saga become friends, then?”
Grim’s sensuous lips turned to a flat line. He hesitated for several breaths, before he finally said, “When I Presented as alpha. I… was not expecting it. My mother’s kind is not subjected to base biology, not in the same way as the inhabitants of the other realms. I had no such… interests. I’d passed the age when both Bjarni and Saga Presented with no change, and so I assumed I took after her in that way.
“When my first rut struck, I thought I was dying.” He stared straight ahead at some point above my shoulder. His voice was flat, emotionless as always, but something about him was… off. Different.
“Bjarni and Saga were out. I would have gone to them otherwise. But they weren’t there. I was so out of my mind, I went to her instead—their mother. I came crashing through the door, wild and panicked and hungering. I didn’t understand what was wrong with me, but I knew I needed help, no matter who it came from.
“She was in the kitchen when I saw
her. And… something in my brain clicked into place. I hated that woman, but right then… she was female, and that was all that mattered. I fucked her against the kitchen counter first. Then on the dining table. And finally in her bed. It was sickening. In the few moments’ respite between ruttings, I wanted to vomit. The sensation of being tied so intimately with her… But it didn’t matter. She would make this… crooning sound, and my body ached for more.”
“You… you raped Bjarni and Saga’s mother?” I whispered, so stunned by his admission I didn’t know what else to say.
“You would think so,” he said softly. “You haven’t met her. I would be hard-pressed to overcome her now. I was smaller then. When I came for her, she smiled and spread her legs for me and told me to, ah—stick it in, I believe were her words.”
I blinked. Repeatedly. “What… the hell? You were her stepson!”
“Bjarni and Saga returned home when I was still tied with her after the final round,” he continued, ignoring me. “I thought they were going to kill me. Part of me wanted them to. They took me out to the stables, but instead they sat me down and talked about what it’d been like for them when they Presented. How scared they’d been when they felt like they lost all control. They explained about the biology of it, about the urges, and how to sate them without going into a frenzy.
“After that, our bond became… different. Stronger. I have been by their sides ever since. Until you.”
“And… their mom?” I asked, not quite capable of getting that disturbing image out of my head. “How old were you when this happened? Did you all leave her home to come to Iceland then?”
“I was… thirteen, I believe. We stayed for four more years before we left to explore Jotunheim and beyond. We didn’t come to Iceland until centuries later.”