Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
Adrenaline’s metallic prickle filled my veins.
I rolled onto the balls of my feet, eyes wide, ready to run.
An incomprehensible clash of fire, finger-painted smear of warpaint over pale skin, screams, the high clang of weapons and a flash of white-gold braids swarmed to my right.
Frigid wine and ice blew from my left, swelling with the staccato slapping of saltwater against anchored, wooden ships.
Seaworthy vessels burned, ornate dragon-heads smoldering, the air reeked with the putrid melding of rotting corpse, burning hair, and fishy stink of salted cod as it fell from drying rods, curling into briny dust among the ash.
Love, where the hell are you?
Electric tendrils cut through the snow as a lightning bolt doomed a thatched roof to join the flames.
Mountains.
Sea.
Ice.
Thunder.
This had to be the Nordes. I looked to the sky for Thor’s fabled lightning. I spied the peeling paint on a fallen shield as Yggdrasil, the Nordic tree of life, sizzled and popped.
And if so, I’d landed amidst the Vikings. The rise to power had been a flash in the pan, and if this was any indication…another in a long line of short but impactful peoples, and not the least of my worries.
The tether that bound us didn’t pull me to the smoldering huts or the ships that succumbed to slate gray waters. I scoured the sheer cliffs, the moss, the trees, the very clouds and the relentless god who rained his white blaze of explosive fire and destruction upon the village.
“Where are you?”
I was here for a reason. Someone knew where she was.
What did I know of the Nordic fae? Their trolls were infamous. Their skosgr?, beautiful, nymph-like entities, were renowned for their beauty. If Thor was preoccupied, then someone, something, had to know where she was.
I could have laughed my relief when I spied a bipedal puff of smoke. I scooped the shadow as it neared, squeezing the member of my legion by a tendril.
“You brought me here, right? Explain yourself.”
“We were only tasked to find—”
I could separate the fizzle of its throat from the rest of its body with a single, furious pinch. I had no patience for excuses. I bared my teeth. “What’s happening?!”
“The collapse!” It sputtered to relay a message as information poured in from hundreds of its counterparts. “She’s here, Sire, but the people, the village, the nation—”
Another flick of pressure and I’d smite it where it stood.
“Speak!”
It was spared by the first pair of eyes that grinned at me through the veil.
A woman with hair that matched the flames—no, it had to be a goddess, given the way she looked into my core—threw her head back in delight. With deer-like movements, she crossed the space between us in two strides and swatted my legion from my hand with an irreverent, backhanded swat.
My legion evaporated to join the throng before I locked onto doe eyes alight with a wild sparkle.
“Save that for later. This is a party!” She whipped her head to the side, a flash of red curls obscuring her face as she gestured for me to follow. “Join the chaos!”
Who the fuck was this person, fae, god, being, and what business did she have interfering with—
“Hell, right?” she asked. She pointed somewhere over the charcoal. “Demons are all about the war until it’s time to burn shit to the ground. Your friend is somewhere over there.”
I reached for her wrist, missing it as she danced away. “My human?”
“Ha!” I didn’t understand the joke. I had no say in whether or not our conversation continued. She’d already turned on her heel, giggling as she disappeared against the sparks. Just before the bonfire road overtook her, I could have sworn she’d shouted for me to make myself at home.
The others…how many of them were immortal?
Whisps of my legion traveled down the smoke. I caught the second closest and shook it for the parts of me that could understand what the fuck I’d fallen into. These fragments of my power, these extensions of my will, they could only tell me what I, on some level, already knew.
“My human!” It came out in a bark.
“She’s alive,” the shadow insisted. “We know she’s here. There’s so much power, Your Highness. The gods, the immortals…they walk among the people. We…”
It continued to speak, but my shoulders slumped as I took it all in.
This was truly the end, and Love was lost amidst the ruins.
The Viking age, it seemed, had come and gone in the time it had taken me to fight with a succubus whose moniker no longer deserved breath.
The seafaring people, it seemed, had enjoyed their powerful bedlam as they exploded onto the scene, establishing trade routes from their frosty land of Nordes to Britannia, then Constantinople, on to the Caspian Sea, and eventually, the Silk Road.
From what I gathered, their gods were nearly as close to their humans as I was to Love. The Nordes answered the Viking calls, carving impossible paths, facilitating their progress, disregarding known possibilities, and laughing in the face of tradition.
I released the legion’s arm, absorbing the cinders, the inferno, the trees, the mountains, the gust of chilled, salty air swirling off the fjords.
I knew these gods, didn’t I?
The Nordic gods had wisps of power at the conclave.
One thousand years later, Odin, Frejya, Thor, and Loki laughed, swords drawn, as I joined their Valkyrie on the battlefield.
A demon was just another spirit in a slew of chaos as their experiment toppled.
Yet this was not the air of a defeated people.
There was a thrilled cackle, an unrequited power, an unkillable delight to burning it all down.
I watched the city crumble, fascinated by an energy that said: we have nothing to lose, and everything to gain. Try, try, try again.
I brushed past the highest of deities in the pantheon as they answered the songs and dances of their people. I didn’t understand the circumstance, nor the custom, but holy shit, the people called, and their gods answered.
And for the first time in my existence, I was surrounded by gods who fucking loved demons.
I would have marveled forever, but I was on a mission.
I was here for Love.
If the milling chaos of deities were unbothered by my presence, then I wouldn’t trouble myself with proper introductions. A tip of a hat, a squeeze of a bicep, but my presence was little more than a fraternal passing amidst their calamity.
A chuckling soothsayer rolling on psychedelics met me outside of Love’s village.
“Fire at our door in more ways than one?” The human pulled their lips back to reveal blackened teeth, rattling in rotten sockets. She rattled the necklace of pearly white canines and incisors to replace those she’d forsaken to practices I had yet to understand.
Could the humans see me here, too?
Disoriented, I put one foot in front of another. I listened for a familiar voice, scanned for a shape, a color, a scent. My time within Northern Europe gave me a head start on their language, but before finding my human, I found something else entirely.
In a crowd of six-foot-something raiders was a taller figure.
He was muscled, black of hair, with a strong jaw that could fit in with the crowd, but this was no human.
In a sea of pallor stood a man made of slate with charcoal horns curling upward from his tousle of hair.
He wore a thick, black fur coat, and a silver chain around his neck marking his sigil.
Amidst a sea of Nordic humans, bustling, unfamiliar fae, and gods I had yet to meet, for the first time in my years of traversing the soil, I met one of Hell’s own. A house collapsed behind him, kicking up a pillar of smoke. He nearly disappeared against the plume.
He clocked me before I’d finished processing the oddity of seeing one of my Hell’s own outside of my realm.
Black eyes wide, he dropped to a knee amidst the calamity.
“My Lord.”
A demon? When the chaotic goddess had told me Hell was welcome, could she have meant…whatever it was, it could wait.
I grabbed him by the shoulder, fingers digging into the muscular swell of slate-gray shoulders. I forced him to his feet. “You’re my citizen?
He was nearly taller, if only by the horns, and perhaps more bewildered than I.
“Yes, my Prince. I’m Farefax—” He cleared his throat. “My partner is…no, I’m here for my practitioner. I mean—I’m going by Farefax. A woman, a nun from Britannia was captured in the Viking raids. Instead of calling on Heaven, she asked for—”
“Hell answered,” I said, cutting him short. Surely, this would be a fascinating story on a different day, in a different life, but for now, the clock was ticking, and Love’s environment seemed ferociously unsafe.
“I’m looking for a soul,” I said, gaining his full attention.
“Help me now and gain my favor, Farefax. The Nordes and their might have confused my legion. I need a demon’s help.
If you’ve been here for a while, surely, you’ve seen my glowing soul.
Pearls. Opal. Starlight. She smells like the air above the mountaintops. Do you—”
“Yes! Yes.” Black eyes shone. An iron finger pointed to a house on the far side of the fjord. “She—”
I squeezed his shoulder as I pushed away. “You’ll be rewarded!”
The air before me split as I stepped through the veil, jumping from one side of the fjord to the other, throwing an off-handed command to my legion to ensure that the demon was both recognized and rewarded for his invaluable help.
I trusted that they’d see to it, as the world around us fell, I had eyes only for…
The door opened before I reached it.
The storm and glacier steel-blue of a gown scraped the snow as soft, leather boots stepped from the threshold.
A woman—a girl?—no older than nineteen hugged a fur shawl tightly against her shoulders.
Pale hair hung in a loose wave down to her waist, taking on a life of its own as the wind whipped from the water.
A man’s voice wafted through the darkened doorway.
“Sigrid? Is it done?”