Chapter 38
Lux
Ikept my promise as I bore down, pushing the stake further and further into Odin. Though he did not die easily. He was a god, after all, both divine and a force of creation and wisdom.
But his need for control was his downfall. His hatred for vampires had driven him mad, and I had felt it. And now I felt him resisting. Resisting death. Resisting the stake.
Keeping one hand with the stake steady at Drak’s ribcage, Odin twisted and tried to grip the stake sinking into his own back.
I cried out when his grip found my wrist, and he wrapped his fingers around it so tightly that the bones crunched.
Another sickening snap came from where he crushed my hand, but I let out a feral scream, channeling every ounce of strength to drive the stake deeper and deeper.
A jolt of agony rippled from my cracking bones. My hand almost went limp, but I tightened my grip with my uninjured hand. Finally, forcing the stake deeper, and with the weight of my push, the weapon sank into Odin’s back.
And then, Odin’s stake bore into Drak.
Drak’s eyelashes fluttered, and black blood bubbled between his lips. A horrible gurgle came from his choking, and a sob ripped from my throat as I killed both of them at the same time. I killed Drak.
I killed my husband.
And I couldn’t bear to watch, so I fixed my attention on what was left of Kayn’s body—Odin—as he withered at my feet. Just as any other vampire body, his blood ran black, burning his flesh from the inside out. Every inch of him flaked into grey nothingness.
Flecks spread across the moss, catching on the grooves of my boots. Because I’d angled the stake just right and forced it all the way through his heart just as Kayn had taught me, his death was quick, over within a single breath.
Who could have predicted that Odin would be the one to lose his sanity? To come down here as one of the creatures he despised just so that he could speed up the eradication of vampires. So he could reach them. Finally.
All of this I knew as my mind adapted to the pieces of Odin’s wisdom I absorbed through his death. And through my hand, being the one to have destroyed him.
A sudden, terrible pain tore through me as godlike power surged through my veins.
All at once, I saw the strange and wonderful things I could achieve someday with time and practice.
I hadn’t had the chance to hang from Yggdrasil and awaken this wisdom as Drak had planned, so my reach as a god wasn’t what he had expected for himself.
But it was enough. More than enough, and Drak had made it possible.
My Drak…He’d sacrificed himself to give me all of this—power to change my fate. Power over myself and my own thoughts.
Glimpses of the moments in the immediate future were the most obvious ability I’d gained, because it was the only power I could feel now.
Odin’s other powers brushed by my consciousness, but I did not understand them yet, and I knew I wouldn’t without learning how to wield them. I shoved the thought of them away.
I could only focus on Drak now.
His death…
My knees buckled beneath me. Slamming bone against root, I fell to the ground and crumpled over Drak’s body. When the pain and the shock of my body adapting to Odin’s power subsided, I found myself still touching Drak’s arm. My fingers dug into his bicep with desperation.
“How?” I whispered. He was still here, not withered like all the other vampires.
And then I simply knew the answer.
Odin’s wisdom was a bright and clear pillar in my mind, showing me that my hold on Drak, my touch, kept the human pieces of him from disintegrating. This was another one of Odin’s abilities: creation, and the human side of Drak was once a piece of Odin’s creation.
But that meant if I let go, my husband would wither away instantly.
A massive hole ate away at the center of him, but it was slow. Roots and moss became visible from where his heart should be. The stake, no longer held by the muscle or wedged between rib bones, fell away as I grabbed at him.
Creation power or not, imbued touch or not, my husband was still disintegrating in my arms.
Anguish tore at my heart, each beat dragging and stretching time. I moved sluggishly, like thick blood flowing through the carved channels of an ancient altar. The crackle of Yggdrasil’s flames faded behind me, and Drak consumed all of my attention—what was left of him.
I barely heard my own cry, but the burn of it tore up my throat. Dragging his head into my lap, I brought my forehead to his. How many times was I going to lose him?
How long would it take me to remember him in the next lifetime?
That thought struck me harder than anything else, crawling through my skull and poisoning every inch of my battered mind with grief.
I was immortal now, but that didn’t mean a god couldn’t be killed.
That I couldn’t kill myself to try at our love story again.
His face swam in my vision: his beard, the slits of his closed eyelids, and the midnight hair that’d grown loose and wild.
I blinked the blur of tears away, but they filled the well of my eyes again immediately.
I was vaguely aware of footsteps approaching from somewhere in the distance.
Maybe Freya had found a way to Midgard too and had come to cut me down.
Though that wasn’t possible now, was it? Not with Yggdrasil turning to ash alongside Odin. Everything was cut away from me now: my powers as a witch, and the abilities granted me when I became a chosen huntress.
But Drak was the only piece of this that I could focus on for more than a breath. All else that I’d lost fell away as quickly as Odin’s body became ash and floated into the ether. Only my husband remained, a blur in my eyesight, a blade to my heart.
We didn’t even get one night together. Not one single night where we both remembered and knew who we were. Rune and Myrah, Drak and Lux, vampire and huntress, warrior and shield-maiden, Skald and farmer.
Husband and wife.
The claws of Odin’s ravens seemed to close around my heart as their squawks echoed from above, and my chest tightened.
Somehow, tears still spilled out of me, a flood of my sorrow turned tangible.
Hot and stinging, they rolled over my cheeks and slipped between my lips, tasting of salt and bitterness.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I’m sorry it took me so long.
” Hel, I’d wasted so much time. These past months hiding in Mara’s Keep, preparing to leave for the wasteland, the trek to Yggdrasil.
All of it could have been spent with us together, not just side by side.
Not pretending to be married, but truly and fully wedded in love the way we had in the little temple nestled in the center of Old Skaldir.
If only I’d listened to him sooner, we’d have become a true team the way we were at the Battle of Sundered Sky.
But even then, he hadn’t survived, and I was powerless to stop the Valkyrie from taking him.
Even then, I lost him, just not forever.
A shadow stretched over me, providing a weak relief from the heat of the fire ravaging the center of the nine realms. My mind was empty now, devoid of any other presence, of anything else except this moment.
Despite what I knew, I made a hollow promise to Drak anyway.
As stupid as it was, I couldn’t stop myself from saying it.
My lips stung, swollen and cracked as they parted.
“I’ll follow you, Drak. Into the next life.
Every life.” Feeling the solid bone of his skull against my forehead grounded me in the present.
“There won’t be a next life,” a voice said from overhead.
Craning my neck, I dragged my eyes up over brown boots, a simple black skirt, and then up to the tight bodice attached.
My sister stared down at me. Tendrils of auburn and umber hair framed her face, while the rest of the loose hair fell down her back.
Though we were nearly reflections of one another, white scars circled small punctures around her lips, remnants of where someone had once sewn her mouth shut.
My scars were more ragged and less uniform, torn by the fang of a vampire and a rose bush.
Where my face was thicker and rounder, hers was longer with sharper, fiercely beautiful edges, but it was her eyes that were the most different.
Hers was a warm dark brown while mine were all black.
Or at least they had been… Drak said they’d changed.
Fire cracked behind her head—her doing, of course, aided by Ylva and Darius who stalked at her side.
Ylva, the wisp of a vampire woman, stared at me with large, hollow eyes, like two moons balanced on a skeletal frame.
Darius was significantly plumper and paler, his skin nearly glowing white against the bright flames engulfing the gods’ tree.
I didn’t know if I cared anymore that Yggdrasil burned. What did any of this matter? I didn’t know if my mother or Stasia, or anyone in Skaldir, was still alive. Ragna had become one of the monsters I was supposed to kill.
And Drak was gone.
Silver cocked her head with a watery smile lingering on her lips. “There won’t be a next life,” she said again. Her brown eyes fell to the pieces of Drak that were left in this realm. The withering body that I clung to, but was steadily deteriorating from my hold. “Not for him.”
Not for a vampire whose soul had been ripped away by… me.
My heart stuttered. Fuck. I’d been so messed up, so selfish and desperate, and I didn’t care. I didn’t care that I’d made this wretched mistake because I’d done it for him.