Chapter 17
Drak
After the thunder silenced and the sky cleared, the aftermath seemed to lay bare across Lux’s sagging body. Lying with her legs and hips and ass curled into me, I let her rest.
Deep sleep pulled her away from me, but I held her tightly and watched her rise and fall with each breath.
She had called me Rune, but there was no recognition in her eyes. She didn’t fully believe it; she only said it because I had beckoned her to use the name.
Lux saw me as a warrior from the sagas, as if that were my true self.
But I had no proof. The idea of claiming myself as part of the sagas—Myrah’s lover—was almost madness, even for me.
The thought that I had once been valiant and strong enough to leave Valhalla behind was everything I wanted to believe about myself.
Yet I had been alone and for my own goals for too long to truly think I would have walked out of Valhalla and returned to this realm for someone else.
Sighing, I brushed a wavy tendril back from Lux’s face. Once she woke, we’d leave for Yggdrasil, and everything would change. Tonight was our last moment of peace together before she turned her full attention to hunting Silver’s army, and then—then I’d have to convince her to burn the tree.
The simplicity of sleep blanketed her features.
Instead of tension in her jaw, Lux’s face was relaxed, her lips parted slightly.
There was no crease between her brow, and the vein at her temple didn’t pulse because, in sleep, the gods seemed quiet.
Only sleep and sex protected her from them.
That much I could tell from her thoughts.
But once she woke, they’d return louder.
Freya would chide her.
Loki would laugh at her.
And Odin would wrap his fingers around her mind and control her like the fucking doll Kayn and his stupid gods convinced her to become. I couldn’t blame her for falling into the role, not with the power of the divine speaking through her own thoughts.
It was either rise to the challenge, or watch everything fall to the vampires. I had chosen the same thing as Lux. When the gods ripped everything away from me, I rose to the challenge.
I became the undead creature they hated.
Footsteps echoed in the hall, then stopped outside the door. Axel wouldn’t dare bother us, and no one else knew the library’s location, buried within the maze of Mara’s Keep and hidden beyond my bedchambers.
I’d chosen an old, forgotten bedroom deemed too drafty and at the end of a winding corridor for privacy. Anybody could have followed us here, but they didn’t. I would have heard them, scented them.
So who the Hel knew?
Silver.
Kayn had tracked Lux here and led Silver straight to her sister. I didn’t dare blink as I listened. Only the soft rise and fall of Lux’s breath filled the air until this intruder moved again, a shadow dancing beneath the door.
I bared my fangs. Another of Silver’s vampires was likely the culprit.
One who’d returned immediately after the battle at the castle, knowing Lux would be weakened.
She’d fought so well, taking on multiple vampires at once.
Pride swelled within me, but it was quickly dashed by the flicker of the shadow.
No damn way they were interrupting her sleep.
Lux didn’t need the practice right now; she needed as much rest as she could get before we left for the wasteland.
“Sleep well,” I whispered, grazing my thumb across Lux’s cheek. Carefully, I eased myself off her and padded across the room, leaving her to rest, curled beneath my cloak.
I waited at the door, biding my time for just the right moment that wouldn’t wake Lux. When her breath rose, I would yank the door open and silence the bastard on the other side before he even had time to flinch.
Matching the rhythm of her inhale, I gripped the handle and twisted, bursting through with lightning speed. A snarling face met me as I lunged for the vampire’s throat, pinning him against the hallway wall. The door shut behind me with a soft click.
The young man bared his fangs and hissed at me, his eyes glowing red as his fingernails clawed at my forearm.
I tightened my grip around his neck. Though he didn’t need to breathe, his eyes widened at my hold, betraying a flicker of fear beneath all that anger…
anger at being bested before he even came close to Lux.
I tilted my head. “If it isn’t little Alfie. Wasn’t it just yesterday you turned into a vampire?”
His hissing dropped an octave, and I couldn’t help but laugh.
He was barely twenty, a boy who had begged to become a vampire to avoid being chosen as an executioner.
Coward. Though I couldn’t blame him for not wanting to serve as a vessel for the Blood Council, even if he had to sacrifice his soul to do it.
I swallowed any pity for this traitor before I spoke again.
“Why would Silver send someone so…inexperienced with their own abilities? Does she want you dead? Or was it because you were the only one stupid enough to volunteer to try going after Lux, again, when so many of you have already failed spectacularly?”
I let up on my hold so that he could speak.
The red in his irises flared. “If you must know,” he seethed, spit gathering at the corners of his mouth in foamy bubbles.
My fingers tightened again. “Speak quietly. Whispers only.”
He continued, frowning, but speaking at a lower volume now. “Silver trusted me to send a message.”
“Oh?” My eyebrows ticked up. I feigned interest by releasing a little more of the pressure on his throat.
“She’s set forth for Yggdrasil. The tree will be burned in a fortnight, and your wife will be powerless once the gods can no longer reach her to grant their powers.”
My wife.
My wife.
Hel, I loved that he called her that, even if it was fake. About as fake as this shit Alfie was trying to sell me. I snorted. “You’re such a fucking liar. Just like you were as a human, always sneaking around.”
When he smiled, I cringed at how ugly betrayal looked on a once handsome young man. In my eyes, he was just a snake now. “If you want to stop us, you have no choice but to leave your little hole.”
“It’s a trick,” another voice joined us. Axel marched up, calm as always, hands clasped in front of him. He dipped his head quickly to pay his respects, then spoke. “Several vampires are hiding in the forest behind Mara’s Keep. They’re lying in wait to capture you, and of course, the new queen.”
I loved Axel even more for calling Lux that. As one of the few who understood that binding a witch to a vampire stripped her connection to the gods, he knew Lux was never truly my wife, having recognized the gods’ madness in her after years of seeing it in my mother.
I grinned at Alfie and squeezed his neck again. “Good attempt, I guess.” My words came out lazy, bored, and it made him stiffen under my hold, frustrated that he had done nothing but march toward his own destruction, though Silver had already expected it.
Alfie was definitely a sacrifice, bait to force us out of Mara’s Keep while Lux was at her weakest. Silver was relentless, but this attempt at least showed her desperation.
She had failed so many times to draw us out.
There was no way she was braving this storm to travel back to Skaldir in search of Ragna’s family again.
If they even returned there. The only thing that would work was when they finally left for Yggdrasil.
Because she knew the truth about that tree.
Thanks to the hours we spent together as children, reading the records and sagas stored in Mara’s Keep, she was the only one besides Lux who knew how treacherous the gods’ domain was. For vampires, at least.
Fear took over the anger in his eyes now. Poor little Alfie. I almost felt bad for what I was about to do. The idiot should be dead before I took another breath; his neck snapped and then removed with the sword that Axel had hanging in a scabbard across his back.
But I released him instead.
Alfie lunged at me, but I smashed him back toward the wall.
Axel drew the sword and tossed it to me.
I held the side of the blade to Alfie’s throat, pinning him only with my eyes now.
The sword didn’t touch him, but if he moved, I’d cut off his head.
“I’m going to let you go.” The stupid bastard didn’t know Silver’s way of killing him would be so much worse.
I grew up with the girl, so I knew how twisted her thoughts were.
“But you will tiptoe back where you came from so that you don’t wake my wife.
Not a sound. Got it?” When he didn’t nod, I let the silver blade dip into his flesh, singeing the pale skin at the knot bobbing with his every swallow.
“Got it?” Finally, he nodded, and the sword cut deeper with the movement, flaying his flesh.
“And then you will remind Silver that she has lost. Again.”
A shudder rippled through Alfie. Poor guy.
I let my arm fall to my side with the sword, and Alfie shot down the hallway in a blur, running with his damn tail between his legs.
Such a shame he had chosen to follow Silver.
When she and I were children, she’d always had an affinity for reading the sagas that spoke of torture.
Full of ways in which our ancestors tormented their enemies.
And Alfie would be her test subject.
I shook my head and offered the sword back to Axel. “As always, thank you. You’re one of the few people I can trust.”
“I came to tell you both.” He paused and nodded toward where Lux was still asleep in the library. “Ragna, the fresh vampire, has completed her transformation. She is asking for Lux, and your mother is asking for you.”
I snapped my eyes to the closed door. “Give Lux another hour of sleep, and then I’ll bring her to Ragna. For now, I’ll say goodbye to my mother.”
With a quiet nod, Axel accepted this and retreated down the hall.
I slipped back into the library and let out a sigh.
Lux was still out cold, curled beneath the coat, her long lashes brushing her rosy cheeks.
She looked perfect asleep, but the room itself was incomplete.
I wished I could finish the shelves and give her a chance to see her favorite room whole before we risked the journey to Yggdrasil.
But there wasn’t enough time to return to the workshop, and I wanted to savor every moment of my mother’s clarity before she forgot me again.