Valkyrie's Call

by Michelle Manus

  Valkyrie wasn’t sure why he offered the last bit of information—it hadn’t been a question, so she didn’t think Meredith had compelled the answer—until she felt Meredith’s Aspect flicker and falter. She might not have used her power to force the answer, but testing its veracity had drained the last of her Aspect.

  Valkyrie didn’t have time to shout a warning, doubted Meredith could have run even if she had. Elijah surged to his feet. His power crested like a tidal wave and he backhanded her with enough Battle Aspect to send her flying six feet across the room. She slammed into an armchair and dropped, instantly unconscious.

  At least, Valkyrie prayed she was only unconscious, but she couldn’t risk going to check. Elijah moved toward the fallen woman, his eyes hot pools of rage, and if he got to her, Meredith would never wake up again. Valkyrie pivoted and stepped, the short sword in her right hand lunging for his exposed middle.

  She hadn’t expected the strike to land, and it didn’t. He pulled the long knife from its shoulder sheath in a movement so practiced and graceful it was almost invisible. He parried and leapt back before the strike from her other sword landed.

  It was the movement of a man who knew precisely where he was positioned in a room. He dove over the back of the couch, rolled, and came up with a short sword in the hand that had been empty.

  Valkyrie did not immediately press after him. The parlor was an atrocious space for a fight. She couldn’t go three feet in any direction without hitting a piece of furniture. She’d known she would likely fight him somewhere inside the house, had chosen short swords because the length of a long sword made swinging one in an object-cluttered room practically impossible. All she would do was hit furniture, herself, or otherwise aim strikes that had none of the necessary momentum to cause real damage.

  The shorter length of her chosen weapons meant fewer things to avoid when she struck, but it also meant the necessity of getting closer to Elijah to land a strike. Additionally, a one-handed weapon couldn’t hit with the same force she could deliver with a two-handed blade. Any advantage Battle Aspect gave her in an ordinary fight was more or less nullified by the fact Elijah’s Battle Aspect was the equal of her own.

  Or...was it?

  He had always been larger than life, to her. An immovable force. A mountain the rocks of which were too steep and jagged to climb. A monster too vicious to slay. She had always known she couldn’t kill him, because to kill him was to kill herself. And somehow, that knowledge had translated itself into the belief that he was better than her.

  A better fighter. Better at his Aspect use. Smarter. More strategic.

  That’s bullshit, she could almost hear Random say, and you fucking know it.

  Elijah wasn’t better than her. That belief was predicated on her fears, on the fact that at one point she had been a child, and vulnerable, and he had chained her before she could grow into her power. So that by the time she had grown into it, she hadn’t realized how much of it she possessed.

  He had trained her, and she had never been good enough. Even when she’d bested him in sparring matches, she had always been not good enough. Sloppy technique, he would tell her with a sneer. A lucky hit. I left that side wide open and how long did it take you to land a strike?

  Six months before her Academy trials, he had stopped sparring with her altogether. He had told her she was as good as he could make her, in a voice that implied she was an utter waste of his time. She’d been so relieved at the fact that his giving up on instructing her meant she had to spend less time with him that she hadn’t given much consideration to the fact that, in the month prior, she had won every single one of their sparring matches.

  She gave it thought now. Realized that, though he stood six feet from her, condescension and arrogance written in every line of his face, it was not the belief in his superiority that made him stand and wait for her to make the next move. It was uncertainty.

  He didn’t know who would win this fight. He didn’t know if she would be willing to destroy herself if it meant taking him down with her.

  Elijah Winters was afraid. Of her.

  A wide, vicious grin spread across Valkyrie’s face, and she launched herself at him.

  18

  Valkyrie scored another cut along Elijah’s side, felt the answering drain in her body as he pulled from her to close it over. She couldn’t continue this much longer. Already her body dragged with lassitude as the injuries she inflicted on Elijah took their toll on her own body.

  It had taken what seemed like eons to wear him down even to this point. He might delight in the opportunity to use his wounds to weaken her, but his vanity had refused to allow him to take hits needlessly.

  She had not sparred with him in over a decade and his style, though the same at its core, bore small differences. He’d rid himself of many of the weak points she’d once exploited, had gained a few new tricks that necessitated quick response.

  But he had not fought as often as she had in that time period. And though his connection to the Council’s adnexus, to her, allowed him to heal his injuries, it did not grant him eternal youth, or endless stamina. He was just past fifty years old and she had pressed him hard in the beginning, landing strikes that would have been fatal—to both of them—had he not blunted or turned them aside through Battle Aspect.

  He could kill her at any moment by allowing one of those fatal blows to land, but she knew him. His arrogance wouldn’t allow him to let himself be bested. He didn’t want her dead—he wanted her back under his control. Wanted her to submit, to beg him for mercy, to finally yield to him.

  She would never yield. So she’d struck and spun until he’d spent his Aspect enough that her blade started tasting flesh instead of shield. He wouldn’t have spent his power entirely—he wasn’t reckless enough to leave himself with no defenses. No, he would have held a quiet reserve, waiting for her to spend her own power to the dregs, and then he would make his move.

  It was the playbook he had taught her. He simply seemed to think she hadn’t learned the lesson well enough. But she had. Her own Aspect shields dimmed as he landed hits—some genuine hits, others she intentionally allowed—until she quit shielding altogether, and his cuts drew blood.

  She felt the quiet triumph in him, felt his certainty that he had won and only needed another opening to ensure his victory. She let him press her back, to maneuver her into a corner. Without her Aspect, and with as much as he’d pulled from her body to heal himself, it was almost a guaranteed victory for him.

  She let herself falter and gave him an opening. He took it, his short sword aimed in a thrust at her wide-open left side. Valkyrie’s Aspect snapped into place around her, coated her from head-to-toe in full Battle armor. She didn’t have enough power left to maintain it for long, but she only needed it for a few seconds. She dropped the dagger in her left hand and used that arm to block, sweeping under the blade as Elijah thrust, diverting the strike upward.

  At the same time, she pivoted, using her weight and momentum to slam him into the wall. She thrust the short sword in her right hand forward. It impaled him through the stomach, sliced through flesh and muscle to pin him to the wall.

  His fingers went nerveless, dropping the blades in his hands, and he clutched for the sword in his stomach. Valkyrie drew his right arm away, held it to the wall, and pulled one of her daggers. She plunged it through his palm into the plaster, drew a second dagger and secured his left arm the same way.

  He moved as if to shove himself off all three blades. She scrambled for the hilt of the short sword and held it into him, held him pinned. Her vision wavered as he spun her body’s energy from her, took it into himself to staunch the flow of blood from his stomach, to stave off the death due him.

  “Do you truly think you can hold me here?” Elijah spat through a mouthful of blood. “Every second I stay on this sword is a second you come closer to death. You cannot win this, daughter.”

  “I am not your daughter.”

  A grotesque
smile spread across his face. “Oh, but you are.” Aspect twisted around his body. His face flickered and morphed, became Danvers’ for a moment before it resumed the likeness of Elijah’s.

  Her legs almost gave out, a combination of her life dripping slowly from her body and the truth she fought hard not to accept. The man before her was Elijah. The Battle Aspect he’d used, the way he’d fought, and the strength that even now flowed from her to him proved that beyond all doubt.

  But the illusion Aspect that had changed his face seconds before—that had come from him as well. She remembered, back to what seemed like lifetimes ago, meeting Danvers at Savado’s and thinking his movements looked familiar. She had explained Danvers’ intimate knowledge of her life by accepting that Elijah had worked with him. But even then, some part of her had known that it didn’t add up, that he knew too much even for that explanation.

  She remembered Ella’s words as she stood in Random’s kitchen. “Danvers? You really don’t know, do you?” And Ella—Ella would have. Ella, who could read a person’s lineage with a touch, who had read Valkyrie’s in Random’s living room, would have known beyond all doubt that Elijah Winters was not Valkyrie’s adoptive father, but her biological one.

  She should have put it together before now—the pieces had all been there—but she hadn’t, hadn’t even considered it. Because it meant—it meant…

  “You raped my mother,” she whispered. But that wasn’t the worst part. No, the worst part was that he’d done that, and then he’d taken on a different face and he’d pretended to “rescue” Evelyn, to love her. He’d tortured and used her and then he’d shared a home with her for the rest of her life in some mockery of a family, and for what? Because Valkyrie was the result of that experiment?

  Elijah’s face twisted into a snarl. “Danvers did that.”

  “You’re the same person.” Her voice was raw, savage.

  He shook his head. He was agitated in a way she’d never seen him. “I created Danvers to do what needed to be done, to do the things that don’t fit in society. I loved Evelyn.”

  He honestly believed it. She saw it in his face, in the fervent light in his eyes. Elijah Winters was legitimately, full-on psychotic. He’d put on a different face, built an identity around it, and thought it somehow absolved him of the sins he committed in that body. That Danvers wasn’t truly him.

  Another, worse thought occurred to her. “Tell me she didn’t know. Tell me she never found out.” If her mother had ever known what she lived with…

  “No. I made certain she never found out about Jace, either.”

  The room seemed to stiffen and contract around her. She could barely stand. Moisture fled her body as Elijah drained her to stay alive, the skin around her knuckles cracking and splitting open. She needed to retrieve the adnexus, to end this, but she couldn’t make herself move. She needed to know, had to know. “What about Jace?”

  “Your mother didn’t like to be left alone. But there were things I needed to take care of, things I couldn’t entrust to others. Things I needed months to accomplish.” He choked, coughed up a mouthful of blood and spat it out. “So I left my brother in my place. He shared my talent for illusion, so she never knew the difference. But he tired of it. He knew she wanted another child. Knew that it would kill her, eventually, to have one. So he gave it to her so he could be done with the charade.

  “And by the time I found out, it was too late to make her abort it.”

  Valkyrie tried to process the information, what it meant, and found she couldn’t. Her thoughts were slow and muddled, and she had the strangest sensation that her body was shutting down piece by piece, like a long hallway in which the lights were being turned off one by one.

  Chills wracked her. She shivered, unable to control them, her body shaking so hard she clenched her teeth to keep them from rattling.

  “I thought,” Elijah smiled, “that would get your attention for long enough.” He strained forward, using his body to work the swords and daggers from the wall.

  Valkyrie stumbled back, the room spinning and spinning as she fought to stay upright—and failed. Her legs buckled and she went down.

  Random woke with the certainty that something was wrong. He reached for Valkyrie, only to find the other side of the bed empty. Cold.

  His pulse pounded in his ears, his Aspect a soft echo alongside it. A worried echo. It was, he thought, what had woken him up. He was used to his Aspect waking him up for her—when she wasn’t eating enough, wasn’t sleeping enough. It would push and push at him until he gave up and drove to her house to fix whatever was wrong.

  This was...different. His Aspect was still worn down to almost nothing from the teleport, but it was insistent within him, urging him up. He rolled out of bed and got dressed. He turned the lights on and swept through the house, hoping to find her in each room he checked and knowing he wouldn’t.

  He’d seen the look in her eyes when he’d asked her not to shut him out again and he’d known that whatever she had planned next, she intended to keep him from it. He’d known and he’d let her distract him anyway. Because he’d wanted that softer side of herself she’d offered him in that moment. Because he’d thought he had time. That he would wake up next to her and convince her to tell him whatever it was she still hid.

  Only when he’d cleared the house, when he knew she wasn’t there, did he think to check the bookshelf. Gone. The box was gone.

  Shit. Idiot. He was a complete, flaming idiot.

  He grabbed his phone and dialed her number even as he ran for his car. His Aspect burned with painful intensity behind his chest, regenerating at an uncomfortably fast rate it had only seen fit to do a handful of times in his life. There was a reason Aspect regenerated at a steady rate, over several days: like building muscles, or growing new blood cells, it required fuel and energy to accomplish the process. To replenish it faster meant it took from his body what it needed, burning any available energy and fat stores to convert one kind of energy into another. If it ran out of those, it tore into his muscles.

  He didn’t have much available fat at the moment. Fine time to wish he’d eaten more of his own cooking.

  He slid into the car and twisted the keys. The engine barely had time to catch before he slammed it in drive and raced for the road that led to the Winters’ estate, where his Aspect assured him he would find her.

  He tried not to think about how the last time he’d driven this car, she’d been here next to him. Tried not to wonder if she ever would be again.

  His phone clicked, sending him to Valkyrie’s voicemail for the sixth time in a row. On a hunch, he called Meredith. When she didn’t answer the cold dread that had been steadily building inside him evolved into something stronger, something darker. Meredith was never without her phone, and she was pathologically incapable of not answering it.

  He pulled up to the massive gate that guarded the Winters’ grounds, only to find that the code he’d used the entire time he’d known Jace and Valkyrie no longer worked. He reversed ten feet, put the car back in drive, and floored it. Metal screeched against metal and the car busted the wrought iron gates wide open. The estate’s wards reached for him but his Aspect slipped him sideways through them, as if he passed through a viscous liquid that closed back around him once he was through.

  His heart pounded in his chest, only grew worse when he reached the circular drive and saw Meredith’s and Valkyrie’s vehicles already there. He parked behind the Jeep and ran to the front door. He paused at it for the briefest moment to listen, but his Aspect gave no indication that a trap waited. It simply urged him on with that steady, burning certainty that he needed to hurry.

  Inside, his Aspect tugged him right, toward the front parlor room he’d never seen any of the Winters actually use. Meredith lay prone on the far side of the room. He saw her chest rise and fall, knew she lived, and gave his attention wholly over to the wall where Valkyrie had Elijah impaled on a sword, his hands pinned to the wall with two daggers like s
ome modern crucifixion scene.

  Random didn’t need his Aspect hammering behind his chest to tell him something was wrong. He saw it in Valkyrie’s posture, in the pallidness of her skin. In the shock on her face. Elijah strained against the blades, as if he’d rip them all the way through his body to free himself.

  Valkyrie fell back.

  Random moved, jumping over broken furniture, and caught her. Elijah let out a snarl of rage and Random freed one hand to slam it against Elijah’s chest, pushing him back against the wall to hold him immobile. The more Elijah moved, the more he damaged himself—and Valkyrie.

  “Kyrie, love?” Random tried to keep the panic from his voice and failed. She was cold as fresh snow against him, her skin dry and brittle, and her heart beat like a hummingbird’s, too fast and too shallow.

  “Random?” She sounded dazed.

  “Kyrie, what do I do?” He needed her to tell him, because there had to be an answer. One that didn’t end with her dying in his arms.

  At the sound of her name she stirred. Her legs took on a little more of her weight. She shook herself, like a dog that had smelled something bad and was trying to rid its nose of the scent. “Just—” She gasped in a breath, the sound rattling through her lungs like wind through dry leaves. “Hold him.”

  She pushed off him, fell twice as she stumbled to the coffee table and the box that lay atop it. She dropped beside them, her eyes half-lidding closed, and took the box in both hands. “Let him go and get out of the way.”

  He did as she asked, moved out of the line of sight between her and Elijah. He told himself it would be fine. She had an answer, she had to have an answer. She grasped the lid of the box, tore it open, and smiled at him. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  No.

  It took less than a second for his Aspect to move him to her side. It wasn’t fast enough. He appeared next to her just as her fingers ripped a ring from the scepter that lay inside the box. An invisible line of force drew taught between Valkyrie and the box, as if a rubber band connected them and was being stretched to its limit.