Chapter 57
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Kade
The tendrils of an unseen power took hold of Kade and pulled. The nothingness ripped below, blinding light shining upward. The opening sucked Kade through and swallowed, thrusting him into the cold night of another realm.
Kade fell through the night sky, a forest of pines awaiting him.
He crashed through the canopy with a growl, the branches scratching across his skin.
His vision blurred to green and brown. Like a heavy stone, he landed with a thud.
His bones groaned with the impact, but the pain didn’t compare to the ice running through veins.
“Evelyn!” he shouted, righting himself. He turned in frantic circles as he searched for any signs of her. “Evelyn!”
Only crickets and the peaceful night responded.
He sprinted from the forest and into a glade.
Fireflies bounced and sparkled from blades of grass, mirroring the stars dotting a cloudless, midnight-blue sky.
The moon, so large Kade’s fingers itched to reach out and touch it, shined a pearly light across the forest.
Was this the Otherworld? Where had Evelyn gone?
Wood clattered, like the scraping of a chair against a table, and Kade whirled.
At the edge of the glade, a squat, circular cottage sat beside a centuries-old redwood tree.
It held a likeness to the ones in the Vadon Mountains—a hodgepodge assortment of stone, but inviting, nonetheless.
In fact, the forest, the sky, and even the white-tipped mountains in the distance reminded Kade of home.
Yet the air was still. Too still. The temperature too perfect, like it didn’t shift.
Kade’s wolf paced inside his blood, uneasy as he approached the cottage on light feet to investigate who or what resided inside.
Moons, what was to say whoever was inside was friend or foe? Instinct warred for him to find Evelyn, while another part of him—his power and wolf—urged him forward.
A fire glowed orange beyond the hazy windows, and smoke rose in lazy puffs from the cobblestone chimney. A figure cast their shadow across the hearth, and Kade squatted, falling lower than the windowsill and out of sight. Kade held his breath, heart racing—
The door swung open, and the light from inside outlined a tall, muscular frame.
A male built to massive proportions stepped into the moonlight. He appeared Eldrick’s age, at least physically, but there was something different about his features. Sharp, angular. Stonelike.
“Kade Drengr,” the male voice boomed like thunder. “You’re here early. Come, the stew’s about ready.”
He abandoned Kade, bewildered, outside, leaving the door open.
Kade tried to gain a sense of the risk, and yet his inner wolf didn’t pace with its usual restlessness.
In fact, a jarring sense of calm went through him.
The moon, the forest, the night. All of it eased his anxiety, stilling the cold tingling from his toes to the tips of his fingers.
But what of Evelyn? Where’d she gone? Would they see on another again?
The last horrifying thought had Kade’s heart thumping wildly in his chest, but it also got his legs moving. He entered the cottage, mind wary, and assessed his surroundings. The fire crackled, and the gamey scent of venison and onions braising over an open fire enticed his appetite.
“Sit,” the male said, motioning towards a stool at a small table. “I’m sure the journey jostled your bones a bit, per the sound of that landing.” A wry smile played on the male’s face, sharpening his jawline even more.
“My mate,” Kade said. “Did you hear her land, too? Can you tell me where she is?”
The male nodded, indigo eyes glinting with silver. “Evelyn has her journey, while you have yours. Sit.”
A growl rumbled through Kade’s chest. “You don’t understand. I’m part of a spell to get her to the Otherworld as well as back. We can’t be separated—”
“The spell worked. Welcome to Otherworld.” He spread his arms wide, like the cottage spoke for itself.
“But Evelyn—”
The male grunted. “Not like you to doubt her. Do you believe her incapable of making this journey?”
Kade pinched the bridge of his nose, inhaling so deeply his chest rose and fell. His next words came out shaky despite his efforts. “No, of course not.”
“Then sit.”
A baritone rang in the man’s tone, something that reached Kade’s wolf and made him pause. It was like the tug and power of an alpha’s command, something Kade, as Son of the God, had never felt before. His wolf relented, and Kade followed suit, sitting on the stool.
“So, this is in the Otherworld,” Kade asked.
“Indeed, it is.” The male waved his hand in the air, and the pot of stew appeared on the kitchen table.
“Who are you exactly?” Kade asked.
“I’m Odin.”
Kade paused, his haggard expression staring back at him in the bowl of stew. The name snagged a memory, and Kade paused.
“Wait . . . It can’t be.” He shook his head and rubbed his hands down his thighs. He had to be wrong. There was no way. “You’re not Matilda Moore’s lover, are you?”
Odin frowned, pausing his spoon at his lips. “That was a long time ago. A different life, a different path.”
“How are you here? Are you a soul?” Kade rushed. “You died.”
“Died?” Odin burst with laughter, so loud the walls of the cottage shook. “My kind don’t die.”
“What do you mean by your kind?” he asked.
Odin stirred his stew and sighed. “I should’ve known a relaxing meal wasn’t in the cards tonight. You’re always wound so tightly, so restless. But a god can always dream.”
A god.
Kade swiveled his attention out the cottage window. The moon sat so close to the glade’s edge, it was like a pearly boulder resting in the grass. He reached to his inner wolf, and it sat to attention, recognizing the likeness to something he’d looked to his whole life.
“You’re the Moon God.”
Odin tipped his head. “It is so good to finally meet you, Kade.”
Disbelief coursed through him. Stars above, the Moon God sat across from him. The god of his people, and supposedly who Kade was gifted by.
You’re her son, a hiss shot through his mind, disputing.
Kade gripped the edge of the table, knuckles whitening.
But he dismissed that doubt, a hundred questions tumbling through his mind.
“I don’t understand,” he said. “Odin was a witch, plagued by visions. If you did not die, what happened?”
Odin leaned back in his chair. “I chose a mortal life.”
“Why?”
“Why else?” Odin said. “There was a woman, and my heart couldn’t let her go. Gods experience the same bond you and Evelyn share. Our hearts, too, seek a mirror to the soul, and there is only one, even for us, in this life.”
Kade wrestled with what he had learned. “How did you meet Matilda?”
“By accident,” Odin said. “Unlike the other gods in this realm, I get bored and leave from time to time, visiting your realm. Nūa was a new, lively city, built on such hope after years of violence and heartache in the human world. It possessed an infectious energy. I enjoyed it, second best though, compared to Vadon Mountains. Yet, there she was, reading over a text like her life depended on it. When our eyes connected, I knew what she was to me before my next breath.”
Odin’s eyes became lost, the silver dimming. A howl in the distance broke him out of his trance. Wolves. Kade’s chest grew warm, his heart swelling at the sound much like his inner beast and his new power. It buzzed at his fingertips—
You are darkness.
Kade winced as a thousand voices shouted in his mind. Instinctually, he fisted his hands and pulled them onto his lap.
Odin’s gaze narrowed, but he continued. “I changed, became the kernel of an idea before life touched me and was reborn into a witch. It was decades before my path crossed with Matilda again, but for an immortal, time passes like a flurry on the wind. Decades felt like days, and with her, I found the purest happiness in my existence—I even questioned the lover I’d had in the past, told myself I was wrong, that she, Matilda, was the one.
So lively and colorful. She always made me laugh, even on my darkest days. ”
Kade leaned closer. “Were you aware that you were a god? Did you have the same power as one, but as a witch?”
Odin sighed, frown deepening. “In my mortal life, fate blessed me with two sisters.
We were three, you see, all arriving in the living world together.
I believe my immense power was too great, my Sight as a god plagued us all.
But unlike my time as a god, I had no way to control my sisters, no way to harness the power.
All three of us, Opal, Orla, and I, were cursed
with visions of a wretched future.”
“Why didn’t you leave or become a god again?” Kade asked.
Odin grunted, leaning back in his chair. “Would you ever leave Evelyn, the woman you love, in a different realm?”
Kade’s wolf howled at the notion. “No.”
Odin raised a blond brow. “Aye, so you know the workings of a heart. I couldn’t leave Matilda, but I sought a way to heal myself, for her sake at least.”
It hit a similar note with Kade—he hadn’t tried to heal himself, but mastering his power had been for Evelyn. Not only to protect her, but to stand by her side as the partner she deserved.
“That’s why you traveled to Drystan, to the vampyrs with Opal.”
“Yes, but they held a frightening familiarity.” Odin tugged his upper lip into a snarl and, for the first time, revealed his teeth.
No—his fangs.
They were thicker than Tovi’s, but two sharp fangs, nonetheless.
Kade sat frozen in his chair, gaze jumping between the god’s eyes and the fangs of a predator.
Kade already knew power sat across from him—and merciless power at that—but he’d never imagined the god his people followed, or the one woven into his prophecy, shared similarities to those cursed in Drystan.
“I don’t understand. Are you a vampyr?” Kade asked.
Odin shook his head. “No, though they are made in our likeness.”
“Our?” The center of Kade’s forehead ached.