Chapter 22 #2
Loki’s gleeful laugh echoed through my mind, and I felt Odin’s pride swell through me like a blessing, but that was all I heard from them about this.
Freya didn’t grant me another vision, and Odin said nothing.
I’d just destroyed two more of their enemies, but they weren’t going to encourage me to save Drak.
“Now you’re getting it.” Loki’s voice slithered around my skull like a snake hissing in the grass at my feet.
I focused on breathing instead of his words. When I stepped out from behind the structure, a wave of relief washed over me at the sight of Drak standing over a headless vampire.
“You’re okay,” I breathed. It felt so good to have enough air to talk.
“You were worried about me?” Drak turned at my approach, the thick hilt of his sword clasped in his fingers.
“Yes.” Worried about whatever he said that I’d missed.
You are a weapon. Though I didn’t hear them speak it this time, the Gods' intent still echoed in my mind, clear as ever. Bitterness swirled at the top of my belly like foam threatening to fill my chest and throat and mouth with filmy bile.
“What a show it will be to watch you kill the man you love.”
No.
I couldn’t tell if I argued that I wouldn’t kill him, or that I didn’t love him. Trying to figure it out felt like a distraction I couldn’t afford. I stalked toward the next shadows, the next sounds, the next vampires who’d slipped away to feed on helpless vessels.
Drak followed me.
He was right by my side when I staked another of his kind, effortlessly throwing off a vampire who had grabbed my forearm. One minute the vampire was hungrily pulling me toward him and the next, his head was rolling across the dirt.
We pressed on, picking our way deeper into the ruins. Structures surrounded us now, reaching their crumbling spires into the stained sky. If I squinted, I could make out the silhouette of a towering human—no, a God. Freya stood at the center of the ruins.
This was it.
This was the true site of the Battle of Sundered Sky, where she cried tears of blood and tore Myrah from her lover, claiming Myrah for Folkvangr, even though Valhalla had already marked the warrior for its own.
A haze came over Drak, or perhaps it was the fog that was growing thicker.
“Drak?” I called, but another vampire appeared, pulling me into the fight.
When the undead were finally destroyed, we counted twenty-seven vampires down from Silver’s army, and by then, I couldn’t push myself to my feet anymore.
After wrestling with the vampire, the world spun, and I couldn’t find the strength to rise.
I’d pushed my body too far. This sudden collapse didn’t drag me into unconsciousness, but I was teetering on the edge.
“Lux,” Drak’s voice coaxed me to peel my eyes open. “Silver is gone. While you were fighting, I found her and their stash, and I cut open all their blood bags. But she ran.”
“To Yggdrasil?” I mumbled.
“No, she fled with Ylva and Darius, just as Axel said, but they’ll have to backtrack.
The vampires have no vessels left, and now they have no stored blood.
Ylva and Darius are nothing if not gluttonous for blood so they won’t last long without it.
” His thumb brushed over my cheek, and the crook of a faint smile bent his face. “You did it.”
A flood of relief surged through me, warmth spreading through my veins.
It wasn’t just because we’d won the battle, but because this victory felt strangely familiar, even if I couldn’t understand why it felt so damn good to fight alongside Drak.
And hearing the result of our efforts spoken aloud in his voice?
The praise? A smile tugged at my tired lips.
“We did it,” I said, correcting his statement.
“Fuck yes we did.” A wicked grin spread across his face. Perhaps it was silly to celebrate such a small win, but we needed this. Hel, we needed any small sense of victory we could grasp while stranded at the broken heart of a wasteland, in the center of a world torn apart by monsters.
And Gods—according to Drak, anyway, and I was almost starting to believe him, but I dashed the thought away before Odin punished me for it.
“Our victory is only temporary,” I breathed. “She’ll be back with more vampires. So we did win…but only for now.”
“For now,” he echoed, “you have to rest. We’re staying here tonight. We’ll be safer hiding among the ruins, anyway.” Shuffled movement happened around me, but I couldn’t so much as lift a finger.
Drak carried me back, unpacked the skins, and set up the tent while I sat in the dirt, my head drooping with exhaustion.
The sound of his swallow told me he’d paused to consume some of the blood he’d brought with him into the wasteland.
Once the tent was erected, he beckoned me inside, instructing me to curl up beneath the furs and sleep while he stood watch.
I gratefully accepted, eager to slip into the quiet and let my heart and other muscles finally rest. But before I could close my eyes, I couldn’t help but notice the way Drak raked his fingers through his hair.
A heavy sigh escaped him as he pushed the fabric of the tent aside and stepped one foot outside.
“Drak?” I said. He paused and turned back to me. “Don’t you also need rest?”
He shook his head. “No, there’s just…” he drew a sharp breath. “There’s a truth I haven’t exactly admitted to you.” I pushed myself up onto my elbows, holding his fragile gaze as his throat rippled with a heavy swallow. “I couldn’t get to Silver; there were too many vampires.”
“You already told me that. It’s okay, we’ll stop her when she shows up at Yggdrasil.”
“No, Lux, listen.” He glanced outside again, his jaw working with anticipation. “Even after all that Silver’s done, I won’t be able to kill her either.”
“But isn’t that what you’ve been pushing for?” Confusion cracked my voice.
Flexing his jaw, he mulled this over, his eyes on me the entire time.
“It is, and I’m sorry. I should have understood that you couldn’t kill her.
But I really thought I could. I thought killing her was best for everyone until…
” His voice trailed off, his focus sharpening.
He stared at nothing, as if seeing an answer invisible to me.
“Until I saw her running away today. She didn’t look arrogant the way she did after the attack on Mara’s Keep.
Fuck, she looked scared, Lux.” I had never seen Drak like this before.
He was always honest with me, but this was different, like he was tapping into a well of sympathy he didn’t know he had buried inside.
“The only other time I’ve ever—ever—seen her afraid in her adult life was in the seconds before she made me a vampire. ”
Breath was ripped from my lungs, as if the alchemical stone had failed and the toxins in the air were draining me dry. But inside the tent, the air was almost completely clear.
A grim expression flattened Drak’s lips before he continued. “She saved my life when she turned me. I’d been planning to turn into a vampire for quite some time, but the final choice came when we were traveling across Drukna sea.”
I still couldn’t breathe. Drak and Silver dared to travel Drukna? “How did I never hear of this?” I asked.
“Before I became king, hardly anyone knew me. King Roderic made sure of that, since I wasn’t his son.
Only when you and your obsession with history showed up did I start to believe I could be seen as more than just a vampire king—fuck.
” He shook his head again. “That’s not the point.
I want you to know that I shouldn't have told you to kill your sister when I wouldn't hurt her either. Imprisoning her will have to be enough.”
“She saved you?” I almost didn’t believe it. Even as a child, Silver was…harsh, and though I forgave her for it and loved my sister, the other children in the village didn’t always do the same.
“She did. We were The Blood Council’s test subjects before The Age of Exploration.
I told you before that was always their plan, not mine.
It had been in the making long before I became king.
They used Silver as a witch to guide us to West Anglor so we could cross Drukna Sea and capture vessels for the council to feed on.
More people to grow our numbers, all for the sole purpose of filling vampire bellies.
King Roderic sent me with her and several executioners, hoping I’d die on the journey and be forgotten, and I almost did.
” He sighed and waved at the furs. “You’re supposed to be resting. ”
“I can manage.” I propped myself up a little higher. “Tell me more.”
“That’s basically all of it. Drukna is called The Drowning for a reason.
On the way back with the people the executioners had taken captive, the Gods raised the waves, attempting to drown us all and prevent the vampires from gaining more vessels.
Half the executioners and nearly all the captives were thrown overboard.
I almost drowned too, but Silver dragged me back onto the ship.
I couldn’t breathe with all that water in my lungs, but she knew what to do because I had said so many times before that I wanted to become a monster to overthrow King Roderic.
Being sent to sea pushed me over the edge.
” He laughed without joy. “It literally pushed me over the edge. My fate was to drown in Drukna until Silver changed everything by turning me.”
“She was your friend,” I said, noticing what he did not say.
“As a child, yes, I would say that she was. But she became something else on that trip across Drukna too. Unrecognizable. Once I turned and she realized the power she had over vampires, that power consumed her. I still stand by the plan to bring her down, just not by killing her. Her place is in the prison beneath Mara’s Keep. ”
“On that we agree.”
Drak forced a smile. “Now you know another story. Sleep, Skald.”
I didn’t argue with his command. Sleeping sounded divine, and despite being in the wasteland, I felt safer than I ever had before.
Drak had shared a side of himself I didn’t know existed: sensitivity, true empathy, or something along those lines.
Exhaustion blurred everything, and I drifted into a dreamlike state, Drak at the forefront of my mind and a faint smile on my lips.
I woke, reaching out with Drak’s name on my tongue. I quickly swallowed it, not wanting him to know how often he filled my dreams. As I propped myself up, I saw him sitting at the edge of the tent, his attention fixed through an opening, keeping watch just as he had promised.
When he noticed I was awake, he pulled me into him, and my body naturally curved against his. The warmth of his recently fed skin enveloped me, offering a sense of comfort I hadn’t realized I needed.
“Do you remember this?” he whispered.
I hummed through the haze of sleepiness. I remembered my body molding to the shape of his when we traveled from Skaldir to Mara’s Keep. “Drak?” I said. His steady breathing was broken by a sharp intake of breath. “What was it you said before we invaded Silver’s camp?”
“I said that I’ll follow you.”
I hummed again. “I know. What else?”
His hesitation was clear from the clench of his muscles. Something held him back. Had he suffered another one of his strange episodes?
“Into every life, Myrah,” he said.
Myrah? The sound of this name on his lips left me dizzy. A fire ignited in my skull. Sudden and awful and strangely different from the pain of the Gods’ voices. It felt as if the Gods were trying to burn the name out of my mind, but it lingered there, a memory from the sagas that wouldn’t fade.
“I think…I think I remember,” I said. But what I remembered was a story from the sagas, told to me as a child. A tale I had often pictured myself in as I grew older, imagining myself in the role of the bride.
As the bride, I pictured Freya towering over us in a mask of unmarred stone. Drak—or a warrior—vowing himself to me. Real vows, spoken in the language of ancients. An axe hung at his side and the hilt of a sword crossed his back. Runic ink covered my fingers where he closed his hands over mine.
“My wife,” he said, as if he could see it too.
Our wedding.
“My weapon.” Freya’s stone mouth split open in my mind’s eye, but it was Odin’s voice that emerged. Claws closed around my heart. “This isn’t real. You’re descending into madness.”
Odin cursed.
No. Tears burned at the back of my closed eyes.
I needed it to be real, but even Drak had said my madness would get worse.
I had to accept that these weren’t memories, but desperate thoughts strangled by the fear of more days like today.
The mindless battles and ash at my feet left my heart and body raw.
Even if I rid this realm of monsters, killing took its toll.
I had wanted nothing more than to dream of a simple life with a man I loved—one of the warriors from the sagas I’d adored as a girl. But Freya was right; this wasn’t my life, not now, not ever. And it hurt too much to wish for something that would never be mine.
Nerves and frustration swelled within me. “Don’t call me your wife again,” I snapped.
“You said—”
“I’m tired.” I shut the conversation down, and that was it for the night. I would not speak of it anymore. I would not allow the madness to take me.
And when I woke the next morning to the Gods whispering gently, their pride soft and low in my mind, I knew I’d made the right choice.