Betraying Destiny (The Omega Prophecy Book 3)

by Nora Ash

  Hel chuckled. “So feisty, little soul. Yes, you may take your mates and go fight the hordes of Ragnarök. But don’t forget: If you don’t fulfil your end of the bargain, you will die. And then your soul and your mates’ will return to this place—to me.”

  Thirty

  Annabel

  The second I stepped through the doors leading back into the throne room, a pair of strong arms closed around me.

  “Are you hurt? Is the baby hurt?” Modi demanded as a cool hand slid to my abdomen, dark, cautious power gently probing.

  “I’m fine. We’re both fine,” I said.

  “We felt you,” Magni rasped, the hoarseness in his voice betraying their terror for those moments we had been apart.

  Freya? Grim inquired through our bond. I feel her… within you? How?

  “I will explain later,” I murmured before turning back to Hel. She was leaning against the door frame, watching me surrounded by my worried mates with a sardonic slant to her lips.

  “We will be leaving now,” I told her.

  “I suppose you will,” she said, giving me a mocking bow before she reached out a hand. Dark magic plumed from her fingertips and over the combined shields Magni, Modi, Grim, and Saga raised around us. But the Death Goddess’ power wasn’t aimed at us. It hit the floor a few yards past us and fizzed before rising into a large rectangle hovering vertically in the air. Nothing but blackness could be seen through its center.

  “Enjoy your freedom, little soul,” Hel said as she inspected her nails. “And don’t forget—should you not fulfil your end of our agreement…”

  “I will fulfill it,” I said, turning to the rectangle. “Come. It’s time to leave this place.”

  But my mates hesitated. Grim glanced from the rectangle to me. “What did you promise her, Annabel?”

  “I will tell you later,” I said, jerking on his and Bjarni’s hands to get them to move forward with me. “Let’s go. We’ve got an Armageddon to stop.”

  “Nothing is worth losing you over,” Bjarni said simply. “What did you bargain, sweetie?”

  I drew in a deep breath. “You won’t lose me; I promise. But may I remind you that as long as we remain here, I’m dead?”

  That did the trick. They moved as one, taking me with them toward the rectangular portal. The inky darkness inside it swirled as we approached, leaching out of the frame.

  “Is it safe?” Magni muttered, his head tilted toward Grim.

  My cold mate reached out with his magic, letting it slide over the void-like surface. After a moment, he nodded. “It will lead us to Asgard.”

  “Did you think I would deceive you, brother?” Hel taunted. “How very… hurtful.”

  No one answered her as we stepped through the portal and darkness consumed us.

  The sucking, pulling sensation of the portal released me without warning, and I stumbled onto a cushiony surface. Booming crashes rang in my ears, and disorientation rippled through me. There were so many colors. Brightest was the emerald green underneath my knees and palms, and it took me several seconds to realize we’d landed on soft grass.

  Grass. I breathed in and the lush scent of it filled my nostrils, tinged with smoke, and something else I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I inhaled again, filling my lungs.

  Alive. I was alive.

  “Pet? Are you okay?” Magni’s worried face popped into my field of vision. Magni’s face—with his beautiful, bright green eyes and his deep-red mane. I laughed at his sheer beauty, at how vibrant he was, and grasped his beard so I could plant a kiss on his unprepared mouth.

  He tasted so sweet. Sensual. I shivered against him and hummed with delight as he wrapped me in his strong arms and deepened our kiss.

  “As much as properly celebrating our mate’s return to the living seems like a great idea, perhaps this is not the time or place,” Saga drawled. “We need to regroup and figure out our next steps—and fast.”

  Reluctantly I pulled my lips from Magni’s to look up at my blond mate. He nodded at the horizon over his shoulder, and I finally noticed the smokey haze on a background of orange and red. At first I thought it was a sunset, but the light was different, and that deep, thrumming noise jarred my eardrums.

  “Surtr’s horde must have arrived while we were in Hel,” Bjarni said just as lightning flashed. I followed where it struck, and gaped at the sight that met my still-overwhelmed eyes.

  We were on a hill in the rolling, lush countryside of Asgard. Valhalla gleamed golden on the mountainside to the west, and to the east, where a mighty wall stretched, winged figures darkened the sky. On the ground, through a great tear in the barrier, warriors battled. I couldn’t make out the individual people from this distance, but the screams and explosions suddenly made sense.

  “This is… This is the final battle?” I whispered. “The gods’ last stand against Ragnarök?”

  “Yes,” Modi said, and from the tension in his voice and the pang of guilt in our bond, I knew what he was thinking. His father was down there—the destiny he’d thought was his until I came along.

  Saga clapped a hand on his shoulder. “Dying in battle might be a glorious fate, but saving Asgard and the eight other realms is preferable—even for a son of Thor, hmm?”

  Modi gave him a faint, mirthless smile. “Any more precise ideas on how we do that?”

  “We start within Valhalla’s walls,” Mimir said. I hadn’t noticed him under Bjarni’s arm until then. His face was drawn in far more serious lines than I’d become accustomed to, even in the depths of Hel.

  “Valhalla?” Modi frowned at him. “What good can come from us going there? If we are to stop Ragnarök—”

  “We start with Valhalla,” Grim said, voice firm and lips flattened into a tight line. “We need to.”

  “Then we go to Valhalla,” I said, pushing to my feet. The explosion of color all around us and the multitude of scents was still disorienting, but I forced my mind to focus. I had done the impossible—I had united enemies with love, I had escaped Hel, and I had defeated a literal dragon. It was time to end this.

  Grim looked at me for a long moment, turmoil evident in his amber and ice-blue eyes. Fear, I realized; he was scared.

  We can do this. We will do this, I sent through our bond. I was met with dark, impenetrable silence so similar to the shield he had erected between us after we’d first mated that it took me a moment to realize that it was not the same.

  I blinked and prodded it again. It felt alien and… wrong. It wasn’t Grim blocking me. It was… something else. Someone else.

  “The Betrayer,” I whispered, more to myself than to him. “He is there. To stop Ragnarök, we have to stop him first.”

  Another flash of lightning from the wall made me look to Bjarni. I saw the same understanding in his eyes that penetrated my own muddled thoughts. If the Betrayer was in Valhalla, it couldn’t be Thor.

  A thread of relief wormed its way through my chest. Magni and Modi loved their father, despite his flaws and questionable parenting. Having the man who instilled their sense of morals betray them so thoroughly would have been awful.

  “Then we go to Valhalla,” Modi echoed, his hand landing on the pommel of his sword. “And we kill him.”

  Grim swallowed thickly, but nodded once before he fell into step beside me. “To Valhalla,” he said in a whiskey rasp.

  I placed a hand on his arm. “We will defeat him,” I said softly. “I promise.”

  He looked at me then, and the devotion in his eyes took my breath away.

  “If we don’t, Annabel, I want you to know that I will never regret choosing you. Only that it took me so long to do so.”

  I bit my lip to stop my stupid heart from making me burst into tears. “We will. We have a daughter who needs us to.”

  His gaze dipped to my abdomen for a long second. When he looked back up again, some of the fear in his gaze had been replaced by raw determination. He only ghosted a hand down my lower back in before refocusing on the road—and t
he golden palace looming high on the mountain ahead.

  Thirty-One

  Annabel

  The winding path up the mountain was utterly silent as we made our way to Valhalla’s gates. Not a single soul met us, and this high up, even the battle for Asgard could no longer be heard. Not so much as a crack of thunder broke the eerie stillness.

  “I guess everyone’s busy fighting,” Saga said as he looked over the edge of the path and down onto the battlefield in the distance.

  “Without Níðhöggr and Hel’s forces, it shouldn’t be this evenly matched,” Modi said, a deep frown forming on his forehead as he stopped to watch the battle as well. “Why aren’t Hel’s forces here?”

  “It was part of the bargain I made,” I said. “She will not join the battle.”

  They all turned to stare at me. But if I’d hoped for admiration or praise, I’d have been sorely disappointed.

  “What did you promise her, Annabel?” Magni asked, his teeth clenched and a distinctly no-more-stalling note to his deep rumble.

  I sighed. “What I had to. I promised to find a way to free her, and in exchange, she swore to keep her army from joining the battle.”

  Saga drew in a sharp breath. Magni’s jaw clenched.

  “And if you fail?” Modi asked softly. “What price will she exact then?”

  “I won’t,” I said. “We won’t.”

  “Annabel. What is her price?” Grim asked, his voice firm.

  “My life,” I said, already shaking my head when all five of my mates growled, nostrils flaring and eyes widening. “It won’t come to that. I swear to you, I will find a way to free her.”

  “The other gods will never allow it!” Magni snarled, his green eyes sparking with anger and fear. “They sealed her down there eons ago, and they did so for a reason. No one wants the Goddess of Death roaming freely through the lands, and the only way to release her is if they all willingly undo the magic that binds her. There is no other way!”

  I reached out and stroked a hand through his beard. “Then we will convince them. But there is no point worrying about it until we have stopped Ragnarök. Let’s keep going.”

  He pushed his cheek into my touch more on instinct than agreement, judging by the glare he leveled me with. “If I lose you…”

  “You won’t,” I promised again. “I would never do that to you. To any of you.”

  “And what bargain did you make with our sister to be released yourself?” Saga asked, his voice silken, but with a dangerous undertone. They were all pissed at me. “If you already offered your life to keep her forces at bay?”

  “My magic,” I said. “But not yet. In nineteen years, she will claim it.”

  They all frowned, a shared look of puzzlement crossing their handsome faces. “Why then?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. And I don’t much care. She can have it. All I care about is that we get through this together.”

  Saga’s gaze softened—I knew why. Of all my mates, he understood how much discovering my powers and finding my own strength had meant to me.

  “Let’s go,” I repeated. “You can yell at me about my choices later.”

  “We will,” Bjarni rumbled. He clasped a hand to my shoulder and nodded up the path toward Valhalla. “All right, then. Let’s go knock this Betrayer’s skull in.”

  We all resumed our journey up the mountain, save Modi, who lingered for a moment longer, surveying the battlefield. When he caught up with us, he said, “It’s not just Hel and Níðhöggr who are missing. So is the Fenris wolf.”

  “He will make his way here once he has run across Midgard and spread darkness and terror,” Magni said.

  I remembered what Bjarni and Modi had told me about Ragnarök, and what Loki’s giant wolf-monster and sea serpent offspring would do to the human world, and swallowed thickly. Even if we won, even if we stopped the end of the nine worlds, how much would be left of mine?

  “Maybe we should go there,” I suggested. “If we can stop Fenris and that huge serpent—”

  “No.” Mimir’s voice was gentle. “If you travel to Midgard, plum, we will lose.”

  “Will my family survive?” It hurt to force the question out of my too-tight throat.

  “No one but the Norns can tell you that, and even they may not be able to see through the darkness of Ragnarök. All we know for sure is if we do not win, they will die, along with everyone else.”

  He was right. All I could do was believe that by the end of this, I would get to see my parents again.

  The enormous wolves that had guarded Valhalla’s entrance upon my first arrival were still sitting on either side of the gates. When we approached, they stood up, ears flattening along their skulls and teeth bared.

  “Whoa,” Modi called, reaching both hands forward, palms up. “You know me, you daft beast. Let us enter.”

  He barely managed to pull his fingers back in time before sharp teeth snapped the air where they’d been seconds before.

  “Let me,” Bjarni said as he shouldered his way past the frowning redhead. “You don’t have the right touch with animals. Or omegas.”

  Both Modi and I glared at his broad back, but he ignored us as he focused on the snarling wolf.

  “Shh, shh. Be calm, little buddy,” Bjarni cooed. He knelt down just out of the chained canine’s reach. “We may be somewhat Jotunn-y, but we aren’t like those nasty buggers trying to break the wall down. We aren’t gonna hurt you.”

  The wolf’s only response was to lunge for his face. Its growl choking off on a howl when the chain dug into its windpipe and black magic pulled it back in place.

  “You won’t talk sense into this beast. It’s been touched by darkness,” Grim said. He reached out a hand, and the other wolf was dragged back to the opposite side of the gate and held in place too. “Come. We should make haste.”

  Bjarni shot the two animals a displeased look, but got to his feet. “It ain’t right to do that to innocent beasts,” he grumbled.

  My sweet one. When it came down to it, Bjarni was much happier on the farm, tending to their sheep and cooking food for his family than he was mixed up in a mythic Armageddon. I wondered if their farm would still be there, if we survived. If it would be waiting for us, or if it would be buried under ice and devastation.

  I frowned. Would Magni and Modi be happy settling down there? We hadn’t exactly had time to discuss what would come after.

  As we entered Valhalla’s wide doors, I pushed the thoughts away. Planning for a future that might not be there was a luxury I couldn’t afford to get distracted by.

  The great hall was dark. Only faint, gray light from the open gates behind us and the windows high above lit the abandoned long tables and benches. No fires blazed in the many braziers and hearths. No raucous laughter or bawdy songs filled the air.

  Memories of my weeks in gray, sensory-deprived Hel made me clutch Bjarni’s hand. His warmth leached into my skin, and I breathed a sigh of relief as Modi’s bright-red hair came into my field of vision as he took up the lead. No matter what came next, at least I would face it with them.

  My mates closed in around me as we walked, blocking my view of the darkened hall. One after the other, they drew their weapons, as if the silence set their instincts on edge as much as it did mine. There was something… wrong about it, like the great halls were never meant to lay in silence.

  “What the—?” Modi stopped so suddenly I smacked right into his back, nose-first.

  “Trud?” he called, disbelief coloring his voice.

  “What are you doing here?” Magni asked, his brow locked in a deep frown. He took a few steps forward, leaving me with enough of a gap to see what was going on.

  In front of us, maybe a hundred yards away, a slim figure sat on the throne on the dais where Odin had cast judgement on my mates, and later Loki. Long, blonde hair spilled over her shoulders, and on her head perched a golden crown.

  It was Trud, Modi and Magni’s sister.

  She regarded them
with a blank stare, but didn’t speak.

  “Trud,” Modi repeated, “get down from there. It isn’t safe.” He made to take a step forward, but stopped himself, not wanting to leave me exposed. I frowned. He thought his sister a potential threat?

  “Trud?” I called. “Are you all right?”

  Her blue eyes moved over the alphas until they landed on me. “Sister,” she said softly. “They got you out. And now you have come to fulfil your prophecy?”

  “Yes.”

  I didn’t get to say anything else before Mimir murmured, “Magni, step back. Protect the omega.”

  I lifted my eyebrows at the prophet. “Against what? She’s their sister. She’s been helping them.”

  Magni, however, stepped back and to the side without hesitation, shielding me with the bulk of his body.

  Trud laughed, a pealing sound that echoed through the hall and raised goosebumps along my arms. “Brother! You believe the old goat when he suggests I would hurt your pretty mate? She’s right—I’m your baby sister! You used to bring me pretty trinkets and let me ride on your back, remember? I’m just a sweet, soft, harmless little girl.”

  “Shit,” Saga swore behind me. He clasped a hand to my shoulder, and I felt his magic weave through mine, pulling on it until a shimmering shield rose around our little group. “She’s the one.”

  “No. This can’t be,” Modi said softly, and the heartbreak in his voice made me reach forward and place a palm against his back for support. “Trud, this can’t be. You cannot be the Betrayer.”

  “Why? Because I’m a woman? Because my heart is too soft to let me act when Asgard lays forgotten, and we are too busy quibbling amongst ourselves to do anything about it?”

  She rose from the throne and pointed at us—at Mimir. “Ragnarök has been foretold for thousands of years. Who are you to decide it needs to be stopped? You, and those Norn cunts scrambling to prevent the inevitable. But this has to happen, prophet. The nine worlds will fall so that a new dawn can rise from the ashes—a dawn where no one will ever again forget who owns their fealty.”