Chapter 43
Fenris opened the door of the bedroom and shifted in the same breath, the change rolling over him in a rush of heat as his mate darted past and into the hall. She was all gray-silver fur and a tail that wouldn't hold still, too pleased with herself to stand and wait like a sensible creature.
The ward Linnea had set on the outer door still hummed across it. Her magic reached out from her with no hand to guide it, free and unafraid, and pressed against the seal. The door blew wide open on a gust of gold light, and the two of them poured out through it into the country of the dead.
The uncanny darkness that had closed in on them in an ambush was gone. Overhead hung a sky scattered with stars, a low white moon riding over the black pines.
The dark still stood in the trees. There was nothing left in it that wanted them. Whatever had reached for them out of every shadow had let go of its grip the moment they had mated, and Linnea walked out of her own cage, and the country had gone quiet and enormous and almost kind.
Was it all another trial of some kind? Fenris tried to scent any danger but found none. Linnea didn't wait for him to make sense of it. She bolted.
She sped across the open ground in a streak of silver, low and fast, drunk on it, and he went after her because nothing in him could have done otherwise.
She ran like a mad thing. No fear. No looking back.
She ran because she could, because her body was finally her own.
Fenris ran at her flank and let her set the pace, infatuated as a puppy.
She wheeled without warning and slammed her shoulder into his, a bratty glancing check that nearly took his legs out, then peeled away with her tongue lolling, daring him. His wolf surged up, joyful and stupid.
Mine, it said proudly. Ours. Look at her.
He caught her and let her escape. She circled back and nipped at his ruff and dragged her whole side the length of his in a long, luxurious pass of scent, marking him, claiming him back, and the new thread between them sang with how happy she was.
Fenris had never really had anyone play with him.
He liked it more than all the rest put together.
Something moved under his paws, and he lifted his nose to the wind. Threaded through the clean night air was a scent he knew in his marrow. It was green things growing, smoke, cleverness, and mischief with teeth.
Father.
Linnea skidded to a stop at his flank, every scrap of play gone out of her, reading the change in him down the bond. He tracked the scent across the hollow, past the little hall, to the far side where the wall of black onyx stood.
Every rune cut into its face was gold and molten red, glowing out of the stone like veins of trapped lava. Where there had been unbroken black stone, there was now an opening.
Fenris and Linnea stood shoulder to shoulder and stared into the dark of it. He didn't have to say a word to her. The thought took shape in the pair of them at the same instant, one certainty passed along the thread with nothing spoken.
They turned as one and ran for the hall.
Von was already awake, hammering his fist on one sleeping room after another and shouting.
"Up. Up. All of you, up. There's big magic happening very close by, and I'm not dealing with it on my own. I can feel the power of it in my teeth! It could be anything!"
Fenris shifted back to a man between one stride and the next.
Linnea came up beside him on two feet, bare and glorious.
He drew his own magic around her before the first door opened, making dark trousers and one of his own shirts settle over her skin to cover her.
She glanced down at herself and back up at him, the corner of her mouth curling in amusement.
Von took in the two of them, the shirt on Linnea that was very plainly Fenris's, and his whole face split into an impish grin. "At least somebody had a productive evening."
The rest of the doors opened, everyone spilling out in stages of half-dress, hair wild, blades already in their hands. Tor had a knife and no shirt. Ciara had a sword and Tor's shirt. Layla had managed a shirt, a bow, and a boot.
"What the fuck is going on?" Layla demanded. "What's the emergency?"
"A door opened. That's the magic you're feeling," Fenris replied and nodded at Von. "It belongs to my father."
"Fuck! Why didn't you say so straight away?" Von demanded, rushing back to his room.
The rest of them were right behind him, snatching up packs and weapons until the whole ragged company crossed the moonlit hollow toward the seam in the black stone.
"Would you look at these runes? They are…" Von said, reaching out for them.
Fenris caught his hand. "Don't do it. They'll burn."
"Always have to go straight for the touch. This is bloody Yggdrasil all over again," Arne complained, wrapping Von on the forehead. "No touching magic until you know what it is."
"That's a dumb rule."
"Getting back to the gaping door of doom. Who's going first?" Ciara interrupted.
"Fenris," they all said at once, even Linnea.
"I'll be right behind you," she added quickly. "I figure Loki is less likely to blast you in self-defense if he's awake and pissed."
"I wouldn't count on that, but if he were already awake, we would know."
"How?"
"We would hear him bitching about still being tied up."
Fenris stepped through the door and onto the stairs that wound down into the rock, tight and steep. The path lit up with the same molten glow that bled from the runes above. They went down and down, until the steps let out into a low, round chamber at the bottom of everything.
"This feels uncomfortably familiar," Linnea mentioned behind him, her hand moving to touch his back in reassurance.
"It's made into the Gap like my prison, but this wasn't made by Havi and Freya. Only Loki could build something to contain Loki," Fenris replied as the stairs ended and opened out into a chamber.
In the center of it, on a slab of raw black rock, lay a body. Green and gold serpents, thick as a man's arm, wound around and around his father from throat to ankle, scales catching the light, so still they might have been cast in metal.
Where the coils gaped, there was no living thing under them. There was a husk of skin gone to gray parchment stretched over bone, lips shrunk off the teeth, hair brittle and colorless across the stone. Whatever had once been Loki had dried down to almost nothing inside its cage of serpents.
"Oh, shit, that's not good." Layla stopped next to Linnea. "That's a crumbling mummy, not a god."
"For fuck’s sake, we are too late," Ciara said, already pissed off.
"He doesn't look fit to blow his own nose, let alone blow half a realm away," Tor added. "A stiff wind would end him completely."
"Shut up, all of you! Have some respect." Von pushed past them to the edge of the slab and stared down at the husk. "He's not gone, or there wouldn't be this much magic getting up in my business right now. We need to get the snakes off him."
Linnea moved up to the slab and took Fenris's hand.
"It was always going to be us," she said slowly, staring at the snakes.
"The whole of this fiasco was made for us.
Think about it. The last trial was the two of us facing the worst thing in our own heads and no one else's.
The monsters in the dark let go the second we stopped being afraid of ourselves and our mating bond.
This door opened while we were still in that room.
None of it was ever a quest that just anyone could walk.
It was cut for you and me. Our wyrd. Our fate. Our sacrifice. It has our names on it."
"Wait, wait, you fucking like bunnies opened the door?" Layla snickered.
"Sex magic," Arne whispered.
"Shut up, both of you." Von's breath hissed out through his teeth. "Of course. Blood binds and blood unbinds, and the Norse never once in their history met a problem they didn't bleed on for good luck. It wants the blood of the two it was made for. Both of you."
"It's worth a try, though blood magic was never my father's style."
Fenris looked at Linnea, who had already drawn the knife from her belt. She opened her palm before giving him the blade so he could do the same. They laced their bleeding hands together, letting it drip down between their fingers and onto the green and gold scales.
The serpents slithered, opening their mouths, to catch the blood on their fangs.
"That's disturbing as shit," whispered Layla.
The serpents lit up from the inside and suddenly unwound into ribbons of colored light that spiraled up from the slab and were gone, leaving the husk bare on the stone.
Nothing happened.
The dried thing didn't so much as twitch. It lay shrunken and empty, and the whole chamber held its breath.
Fenris looked down at the corpse of his father, and something old and familiar moved in him. He knew this feeling. He had been on the wrong end of it his entire childhood.
"Stop fucking about, Father. You've had your joke. The bit is over. Time to get the fuck up," Fenris growled.
For a moment, there was only silence, and then out of the shrunken mouth came a dry, dusty cough of a laugh, delighted and horrible.
Everyone scrambled back a step from the slab except for Fenris and Von, who leaned in closer to get a better look.
The corpse kept laughing as the gray parchment skin flushed and filled.
The brittle hair drank in color until it ran long and shining across the stone, red as blood.
The shrunken frame lengthened and settled into the long lean lines of a living man, and the lips softened off the teeth into a mouth already, unmistakably, grinning like a maniac.
His eyes finally opened. Brilliant green, clever, and ancient.
They focused on Von, hanging over him with his golden hair loose and his face wide open in undisguised wonder.
Loki smiled, sleepy and seductive.
"My savior," he purred. "Please tell me you aren't into bondage."