From the Earth to the Shadows

by Amanda Hocking

  “I’m glad you’re okay,” he said, taking my hand in his. “I don’t know what I’d have done if I lost you.”

  “Well, you’d have to go back to the underworld and get me,” I teased.

  “I suppose it is only fair that we take turns rescuing each other. So next time, I got you.”

  “It’s a deal.”

  “You know, we still have the journey back to Caana City,” Valeska reminded us. “And I wanna get out of this stinking, festering cesspool and get a shower and eat real food. Not to mention, you’ve got a meeting with Odin that you can’t be late for.”

  The last time I’d spoken with Odin, he’d left me the same instructions as before: meet him at the top of the Caana Temple on the night of my return, when the moon is highest in the sky. How exactly he knew when I’d return was beyond me, but he’d met me last time on that same directive.

  And he was a Vanir god. I was sure he had his ways of finding things out.

  I stood up. “Let’s go, then.”

  Last time I’d left here, it had killed me to leave without Asher. But now he was here, by my side, and I couldn’t wait to get away from all this.

  We swam across the pond and slowly climbed up the slippery steps. Well, Asher, Oona, and I did. Valeska flew up to the top and waited for us to join her. When we finally reached her, we were treated to a stunning view of the Gates of Kurnugia—the winding maze and the tall pyramids—with the sun setting on the horizon.

  We slid down the sheer side of the cavern to the ground. Combining Valeska’s ability to fly with our own memory of the path we’d taken before, we made quick work of getting out of the Gates of Kurnugia. In fact, we made such good time that we made it to the middle of El Noveno Anillo in time to catch the 5:45 hyperbus back to Caana City.

  I sat next to Asher on the bus, giving him the window seat. He looked out the window the entire time at the world racing by. I closed my eyes and rested my head on his shoulder, loving the feel of him next to me.

  “It’s all so strange,” Asher said softly. “Escaping was such a victory, and I want to relish it. But I know there’s still so much left to do. The war hasn’t even started yet.”

  “Maybe there won’t be one,” I suggested. “Maybe when I meet Odin later he’ll tell me that’s it, and this will all be over.”

  “No.” He said it with such certainty that I looked up at him. “Gugalanna won’t stop without a fight. They took down Zianna, and it’s only a matter of time before they break through up here. They want a war, and they’re going to have one.”

  I reached up to him, touching his face gently to get him to look at me. “We only have ten minutes left on this bus, then we’ll go back to the motel where the real work will start.

  “But for now, there’s nothing else that we can do, nowhere else we need to be,” I went on. “Let’s pretend that we’re two normal people, just happy to be together.”

  He smiled then, faintly, so the corners of his mouth barely moved, but there was light playing in his eyes. The weary creases on his forehead smoothed as he relaxed, letting his happiness soften the harder edges of his face.

  “Okay.” Asher leaned back in his worn bus seat. “I’ll play. What would two ordinary people without a care in the world be doing on a hyperbus in Belize?”

  “We’re on vacation,” I replied amiably.

  He arched an eyebrow, and his smile deepened. “Our honeymoon?”

  “Now you’re getting ahead of yourself,” I said, causing him to laugh warmly.

  It was such a wonderful sound, and I wondered dimly when the last time I’d heard him laugh had been. When was the last time even I had laughed?

  “Okay, so just a vacation,” Asher agreed. “I assume we’ve been seeing the sites?”

  “Of course! We took a tour of the rain forest and saw the temples.”

  He managed to look suitably impressed as he said, “Ooh, those were really fantastic, weren’t they?”

  “They were, but what we really enjoyed was getting some sun.”

  “Oh, yeah, we don’t have sun like this back in the city.” Then he looked out the window, at the setting sun splashing on the jungle around us, and there was a wistfulness in his eyes that wasn’t just pretend.

  For him, it had been weeks that he’d been in Kurnugia, without sun, without fresh air, without anything.

  “What do you think we’ll do tonight?” I asked, making my words sound extra cheery. I wanted to bring him back here, with me in the moment, and not thinking about whatever he’d endured in Kurnugia.

  He waited a beat before turning to look back at me, an easy smile returning. “We could check out that cute little restaurant the concierge recommended.”

  “What kind of food do they serve?”

  “It’s a taco/sushi fusion, but what they’re really known for is their ice cream,” Asher said, totally deadpan, and it was enough to make me burst out laughing.

  “That is a very unusual menu,” I said as I stifled more laughter.

  “We wouldn’t want this vacation to be ordinary, would we?”

  “No, of course not,” I agreed. “I can’t wait to try the black bean California roll. And maybe tomorrow we’ll do some shopping.”

  “We should really have a relaxing day,” he suggested. “Sleep in late, have breakfast in bed, and hit the souvenir shops in the afternoon.”

  “Oh, yeah, that would be nice! I could get a shirt for Oona, and maybe a shot glass for Mar—” I’d started to say Marlow. I’d gotten so caught up in the fantasy of being carefree, on vacation with my boyfriend, that I allowed myself to forget—just for a second—that my mother was dead.

  But now the illusion had been shattered, and real life crashed down on me. The sun didn’t seem as bright anymore, and the scenery flying by was nothing but a dark blur.

  Asher sensed the shift in my mood, so he put his arm around me and pulled me closer to him. “Right now, with you and me on this old bus, it’s honestly the best vacation I’ve had in a long time.”

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Quinn hugged me first. I don’t know exactly how I had expected her to react, but it definitely caught me off guard when she grabbed me and pulled me into her arms.

  There was an intensity that reminded me of when we had still been together. It was a little too tight, almost bone-crushingly tight, but it only hurt because of how fiercely she cared. Sometimes she couldn’t help herself.

  We were inside of the doorway to the motel suite at the Caana Extended Stay Inn & Suites—I’d barely had a chance to get inside before she pounced on me. Atlas stood behind her in the main room, where the bland motel living room and tiny kitchenette looked immaculate. Quinn must’ve been stress-cleaning while we were gone.

  “I’m so glad you’re safe,” she said, her breathy voice in my ear.

  Then she let me go, just as abruptly and intensely as when she’d first embraced me, so I almost stumbled backward into Asher.

  “We weren’t even gone that long,” I argued lamely, which was true from her perspective. For me, it felt like I’d been gone for almost a full day, but in earth time it had only been four hours we were in the underworld.

  Quinn’s attention had already moved on to everyone else anyway.

  “Asher!” Quinn gasped. She raised her arms like she meant to hug him, but then changed her mind at the last second and let them fall back to her sides. “You’re alive!”

  “Yeah, it would seem that way.” He rubbed an eye with the palm of this hand. “It’s been a long … week, I guess. And I’d really like to shower and change back into my own clothes and get something to eat.”

  I showed him where the bathroom was, then got his bag of clothes that we’d carried with us since Gugalanna had taken him. Meanwhile, Quinn made a big show of greeting Oona and Valeska. She hugged Oona, too, and she was about to go in for one with Valeska, but Valeska told her firmly, “I don’t hug.”

  Quinn and Atlas had a thousand questions for us, and fortunately Oona
was more than happy to answer them. She sat on the couch, filling in every detail with lots of excited hand movements, while Valeska sat on the stainless steel kitchenette counter eating a day-old plantain sandwich and chasing it with an energy drink called Ādityas Elixir.

  Asher came out of the bathroom wearing a threadbare motel robe when Oona had just gotten to the middle of her story. He went into the bedroom to change, so I followed him and quietly closed the door behind me.

  “Are you feeling any better?” I asked and sat down on one of the beds.

  “Some.” He slipped off his robe, leaving him wearing only a pair of boxer briefs.

  While most of his wounds seemed to be healing nicely, the marks on his chest continued to look angry and inflamed. The edges were puckered and bright red, and the wound itself was a dark brown gap that only seemed to be widening.

  I grimaced and motioned to his chest. “It looks worse.”

  “What?” He looked down at it. “Yeah, I was scrubbing at in the shower. I was hoping that would help somehow, but I think I only made things worse.”

  “You should have Oona take a look at it. She has all kinds of potions and salves that would help.”

  “Maybe.” He shrugged noncommittally and pulled a black T-shirt on over his head, hiding the marks. “I don’t want to bother her.”

  “It’s not a bother. She likes to help people.”

  “Maybe,” he repeated as he put on a pair of jeans, then changed the subject with, “What’s the plan? Now that I’m back and you have the spear. Are you supposed to be meeting Odin?”

  “Yeah, but not until late. Like a quarter to midnight,” I said, and Asher raised an eyebrow, presumably at the oddly specific time. “He asks to meet when the moon is the highest in the sky. Vanir gods run on different time.”

  Asher glanced over at an alarm clock with its bright green numbers. “That gives me a few hours to eat and rest up.”

  “Well, I was thinking that you should stay back,” I told him gently. He looked at me sharply, but before he could protest, I went on. “You’ve already been through so much. You don’t need to go out tonight.”

  “They know you have the spear,” he insisted. “And we don’t know who Gugalanna and Ereshkigal are communicating with up here or how they’re doing it, but they obviously are, since they were working with Tamerlane Fayette and somehow got him to trick your mom into sparing him.”

  I looked past Asher, out the window behind him, so I wouldn’t have to see the conviction in his eyes. Night had fallen, and thick clouds were rolling in, blocking out the moonlight and the stars. In the distance, the clouds lit up with a burst of lightning.

  “I know,” I said finally. “I won’t go alone. Quinn and Atlas can come with me. You and Oona and Valeska should stay here and rest.”

  “Malin,” he said.

  “Have you talked to your grandmother?” I asked, and that was enough of an emotional startle to get him to stop arguing about whether or not he should go with me.

  “Not yet. Did you talk to her while I was gone?”

  I shook my head. “I didn’t know how to contact her, and I wouldn’t have known what to say even if I had.”

  “I should call her now.”

  He dug through his bag looking for his cell phone, and I snuck out while he was distracted, hoping we had put that argument to bed.

  THIRTY-NINE

  The argument was not put to bed, but eventually Atlas and Quinn were able to convince Asher that they would be more than enough protection for me.

  Samael had wired Atlas money, so we rented a sturdy little side-by-side ATV. It was basically like if a golf cart and a Humvee had a weird little baby.

  The sky was rumbling, and long tendrils of lightning were spidering through the clouds. We didn’t want to risk getting caught in the rain, and also, Asher was right: Ereshkigal would be sending someone after the spear as soon as she was able. So I wanted to get it to Odin as quickly as possible.

  Quinn and I sat in the two seats of the ATV, with her driving, and Atlas sat on the rear rack, hanging on to the backs of our seats so he didn’t bounce off. The forest surrounding the Caana temple was dense, but it wasn’t impenetrable. Quinn had to take it slow in several spots, but when we got on a well-worn game trail, it was smooth sailing.

  As much as I would’ve loved to take the vehicle up the many stairs of the temple—and as much as Quinn assured me that the ATV could handle it—I didn’t want to risk desecrating an ancient pyramid to make my life a little easier. So we parked at the bottom and made the arduous trek up the stone steps to the grassy mezzanine, and then waited for Odin.

  And we waited, and waited some more.

  Because of the cloud cover, I couldn’t see where the moon was at or how high it might be, but Oona had been certain that it wouldn’t be until after midnight this time—12:44 A.M., to be precise. He’d been a little late last time, but he still arrived before midnight, and now it was going on 1:30 in the morning.

  “At least we have a show,” Atlas commented.

  He was sitting on the steps, watching the dazzling array of lights above us. Every few seconds the sky would light up as another burst of lightning shot between the clouds. So far the flashes had yet to hit the ground, instead preferring to leap between clouds. Most of it was bright white, the way it always was, but the occasional burst appeared to be shades of purple and blue.

  The strangest part wasn’t even the unusually colored lightning—it was the eerie silence that accompanied it. There hadn’t been a single clap of thunder or even a faint rumble. It was silent flashes, without a hint of rain or any sign of an incoming storm.

  “It is sort of amazing,” Quinn agreed tiredly. She sat up a little higher on the steps than Atlas, leaning back on her elbows, with her legs crossed at the ankles. Her gaze was on the sky, but her expression was far more indifferent than amazed. “Any sign of Odin yet?”

  “He’ll be here soon,” I insisted for the tenth time, but with less and less conviction each time I said it.

  “Do you have any way to contact him?”

  I paced. “No. He just told me to meet him here. So far, he seems to know how to find me when he wants to.”

  “What do you think the holdup could be?” Quinn asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said, but my mind was racing through a thousand scenarios, all equally horrible.

  “I mean…” Quinn stopped and ran a hand through her hair. “He couldn’t be hurt or anything, could he?”

  “I don’t know,” I repeated.

  “Can Vanir gods even be hurt or held captive?” Quinn asked, but it sounded more like she was thinking aloud. “I know they’re powerful, but they’re not all-powerful. They have weaknesses, right?”

  “Everyone has weaknesses,” Atlas said.

  As if to punctuate his statement, a gust of wind suddenly came up, breaking through the stillness. It had been warm since we’d been in Belize, even in the dead of night, but the wind brought a chill with it, dropping the temperature by several digits within a matter of minutes.

  “How long are we going to wait here?” Quinn asked.

  “As long as it takes,” I replied firmly.

  “You want to stay here until the sun comes up?” Quinn asked.

  “Of course I don’t want to, but I will.” I stopped pacing to look over at her. “What else am I supposed to do? I don’t know how to reach him, and I don’t know what to do with the spear.”

  “I understand the situation,” Quinn said, keeping her tone calm and reasonable. “But I’m being realistic here. There’s a storm coming, Malin.”

  “Quinn’s right,” Atlas agreed, giving me an apologetic smile. “We don’t have to go yet, but it won’t be safe staying out here all night in a storm. We’ll have to go back.”

  I looked away from them, instead scouring the sky for any signs of Odin or his ravens. “He’ll be here,” I said, then, more quietly, “He has to be.”

  We lapsed into a silence after th
at, and I was fine with it. The wind had picked up, blowing leaves and dust as it roared over the temple. I began pacing again, both to keep the chill at bay and because of the anxious energy coursing through me.

  Then I realized that it wasn’t exactly anxiety, and I couldn’t feel the chill from the breeze anymore. I could still feel the wind rustling through my hair, but it was more like being aware of it and less actually feeling it.

  My mouth tasted metallic, and a dull buzzing was growing around my heart. My muscles tensed, wanting to charge after everything.

  This wasn’t anxiety or impatience.

  This was my Valkyrie instincts kicking in.

  I stopped pacing, forcing myself to stand perfectly still. “Something’s wrong.”

  “What?” Quinn asked, sitting up more.

  “Do you feel it?” I looked over at her, and I saw the confusion in her green eyes.

  “What do you feel?” Atlas asked, and he was already on his feet walking over to me.

  Before I could answer, thunder rumbled. An angry deep roar that echoed throughout the ruins, and the hair on the back of my neck stood up.

  “Maybe you sensed the storm?” Quinn suggested as she came down the stairs to join me and Atlas in the center of the mezzanine.

  “No, I…” I trailed off as the thunder rumbled again, and the pressure grew in the base of my stomach.

  I tilted my head, listening closely to the thunder. It was coming from the sky, but there was something beneath it—something closer. A murky growl mixing with it.

  “That’s not thunder,” I said, and my hand went to the sword sheathed on my hip. I’d left Sigrún at the motel, deciding instead to take the dragon sword Kusanagi, and it felt cool and heavy against the palm of my hand.

  By then we all heard it—the guttural growl of an enraged big cat. Then there it was, climbing up over the walls that surrounded the mezzanine. A massive beast of a cat, at least the size of a donkey, with paws as big as a bear’s, and a brindled coat of dark gray fur.