Chapter 18
Lux
Ragna is a vampire.
Repeating it didn’t help me wrap my head around it, and though my gut churned at the blood staining my friend’s teeth, I didn’t look away.
I didn’t treat her like a monster or act disturbed.
When the man she had fed on left, Ragna seemed like the same person she had always been, just with a stronger thirst for blood.
Really, Ragna had always been bloodthirsty, even if not in the literal sense. She was the one pushing for illegal battle training.
And I loved her for it.
I perched at the edge of her bed, sinking into the soft fur. Ragna had undone her braids, and while one side of her hair fanned out like a horse’s mane, she had shaved the other half of her head close to the skull.
My tough-as-a-wild-boar best friend didn’t exactly have tusks, but the gleaming white fangs in Ragna’s mouth made her look as terrifying as I knew she was on the inside. Red pooled in her gaze, and though she struggled to talk around her new fangs, she hadn’t shut up since I sat on her bed.
“Alva will get away with anarchy,” she said. “I just know it. She has Rolf wrapped around her finger. That child can do no wrong in his eyes.” She clicked her tongue.
A smile cracked my tense, stony expression. Vampire or not, Ragna was the same matter-of-fact witch I had always known, more concerned for her family than for herself. Fierce but protective, and a lot like Drak, if Drak didn’t have his selfish-ass side.
“This is all so freaky.” She ran the pad of her thumb against her fangs.
“You only just woke up,” I said, even though we had been talking for almost an hour. She had told me everything that had happened in Skaldir. How it felt when Silver’s army raided and threatened them when the vampires took her entire family captive. My heart pinched painfully.
“Okay, but why the Hel can’t I hide these things?” She tapped a fang with her finger. “It’s true I’ve only known about vampires for a couple of months, but I swear I’ve seen them retract their fangs back into their mouths like a tongue.”
“As I understand it,” I said, “you’ll learn how to do that with time. You’re a new vampire.”
“Great, a baby Draugr.” She rolled her eyes.
“Just what I always wanted to be.” A laugh escaped me, but it died as her lips tipped downward.
Ragna rarely frowned, only when she was concentrating while tilling the fields, scolding her children or husband, or focusing on a fight, especially back when sparring was still illegal and we had to hide beneath her house to practice with fake weapons.
Now, she frowned easily. “In all seriousness, I felt it happening.” Her hand splayed across her chest with her palm pressing heavily against the center of her ribcage, beneath her breasts.
“Felt what?”
“My soul.”
I drew a sharp breath. “What do you mean?”
“When my soul broke, horror came over me. It shattered. I know I felt it. My whole body, my mind, everything froze as if I had fallen into a fjord in winter, yet I was also on fire, and across the back of my eyelids I saw an impossibly bright light.” Her eyes went blank, unblinking.
“It cracked like ice and shattered like glass.”
She winced as if she were experiencing it all over again.
“That sounds…awful.”
“And now I no longer have a heartbeat.” She grabbed my wrist and forced my palm against her chest. “Do you feel that? Do you?” I shook my head, giving her the response I knew she was looking for. “Exactly. Nothing. My heart and soul are both gone.”
“I’m so sorry, Ragna. It’s my fault.”
“Don’t you fucking blame yourself, Lux Norn Quinn.
I’m still here, not in the afterlife.” She jabbed a finger at me like a weapon.
“I’m still here, and for that I am grateful.
I will learn how to use these, as I learned to use any other weapon.
” She tapped her fingernail against the tooth again. “And I will protect my family.”
She reacted just as Drak had predicted. He didn’t know Ragna like I did, but I had forgotten that he understood how tempting and powerful it was to become undead. He recognized that same fierce determination in her, so I should have known he’d be right about this.
“But I am the Gods’ huntress, Ragna. I’m chosen to kill vampires.” She only knew as much as the people of Vylheim had gleaned from the fragments of information about vampires, the Blood Council, and more, but it was enough.
“You are named after the Norns, Lux. I know you will thwart whatever destiny you do not want, because you weave your own destiny.”
I laughed again until Odin’s voice crooned at the back of my skull. “She will be destroyed. There is no destiny but death for all vampires.”
My stomach curled in on itself, but I forced myself to focus on the present. I didn’t know how much longer I’d have with Ragna before we left for Yggdrasil. Vampire or not, I cared for her.
A skip in my pulse left me momentarily breathless, and as hard as I tried to clear my mind, Odin’s words ground through me. As if he’d imprinted his will on my very bones.
“Listen, listen huntress…kill her now. Listen!”
I forced out a harsh breath and blinked. “I wish I could be as sure as you are.”
“You don’t need to be sure,” she said. “I remember when you were a teenager. Weaving records into the tapestries with your father’s new wife.
Remember when you wove the image of a whale into the winter tapestry?
And then, someone spotted a stranded whale on Skaldir’s beaches just weeks later?
We ate well all that winter, and you were the one who made that happen. ”
I smiled. “It was just a tapestry.”
“Perhaps,” she said, nodding. After a moment, she smirked. “I can use your guilt about this to make you weave again, can’t I?” I gave her a look of mock anger. “Like maybe you should weave a tapestry for me with an image of a soul.”
My brow furrowed. “And what would that look like?”
“What I saw was a beautiful crystal.” She snorted, tapping her chest. “As if anything inside here could be called beautiful.”
“Rolf would say everything about you is beautiful.”
“My face? My body? Definitely, but with how much I hated the executioners, I expected my mind and soul to be a little uglier.”
A soft knock rapped at the closed door of the bedchamber, and I turned toward it as Axel poked his head inside. Usually, his soft-spoken voice and steady demeanor soothed me, but a frown was fixed across his lips now.
My nerves hummed.
“What is it?” I asked.
“We’ve come upon the time to embark,” he said, using the phrase of our ancestors who often traveled by sea. Another reason I liked Axel so much.
According to Drak, Axel had always known that young Drak was sneaking into the library to read the sagas and runestones. But he’d never stopped him, and he’d never dared tell King Roderic that Drak wasn’t hiding out in his room where he was meant to stay.
“Leave Mara’s Keep?” I asked, more to hear it aloud than to confirm what he was saying.
When he nodded, his white-streaked hair bounced. “That’s right, my queen. King Drakkar has summoned you to the study. He will meet you there to prepare for the journey once he is ready.”
I squeezed Ragna’s hand before slipping off the bed and facing Axel. “What is he doing now?”
“Saying goodbye,” he said. My mouth popped open again, but before I could ask for more detail, he answered. “To his mother.”
With that, Axel’s head disappeared and the door fell shut. The hollow bang of it reverberated through the room.
I turned to Ragna, but she too spoke before I could. “Weave your own destiny, Lux, as you always have.”
“I’m sorry I can’t make you human again,” I said. If it was as simple as weaving a crystal into a tapestry, Freya and Odin would have told me, and I’d be a weaver, chosen to restore the vampires’ souls rather than kill them all…right?
Odin hummed low, a vibration through my mind that sounded like Thor’s thunder. But I hadn’t heard the crack of lightning or the howl of wind since Drak woke me and took me to Ragna. The storm must have stopped.
Now we could forge a path to Yggdrasil and fight Silver’s army in the Gods’ domain.
I was ready.
Ragna gave me a sad smile. “How about this? Weave a set of teeth for me so I can learn to harness all of this. The sooner I master this monstrosity, the sooner I can return to my babies. And if I’m being honest, I’m not sure I even want to be human again.”
My pulse skipped at her words, but I understood completely. The power coursing through Ragna’s veins gave her newfound hope to defend Skaldir and her family from Silver and the vampires. She could tear wild animals to shreds and feed Alva, Rolf, and the others.
But she didn’t have a soul; none of them did. Those were long shattered, destroyed, lost.
My heart sank slowly, dragging my stomach into a tight clench as I thought of Drak, hollow and devoid of a soul.
Ragna had only just turned into a vampire, but Drak had been undead for years, feasting on human after human.
Even if they hadn’t all died from his bloodlust, Odin’s voice at the back of my head confirmed my fears.
“Monsters cannot love.”
But was this the truth? I had a soul, yet I was a monster in my own right, and I knew how to love.
Listening to Ragna now, I realized just how fiercely I loved her, how I loved my mother and Stasia, and, as wrong as it felt, how my heart found comfort in Drak.
Especially when he had told me he’d waited a hundred years for me, though his claim made no sense, since Drak had only been on this earth as long as I had.
Whether or not it made sense, my heart, or perhaps my soul, relished his words.