Amidst a sea of Nordic humans, bustling, unfamiliar fae, and gods I had yet to meet, for the first time in my years of traversing the soil, I met one of Hell’s own. A house collapsed behind him, kicking up a pillar of smoke. He nearly disappeared against the plume.
He clocked me before I’d finished processing the oddity of seeing one of my Hell’s own outside of my realm.
Black eyes wide, he dropped to a knee amidst the calamity.
“My Lord.”
A demon? When the chaotic goddess had told me Hell was welcome, could she have meant…whatever it was, it could wait.
I grabbed him by the shoulder, fingers digging into the muscular swell of slate-gray shoulders. I forced him to his feet. “You’re my citizen?
He was nearly taller, if only by the horns, and perhaps more bewildered than I.
“Yes, my Prince. I’m Farefax—” He cleared his throat. “My partner is…no, I’m here for my practitioner. I mean—I’m going by Farefax. A woman, a nun from Britannia was captured in the Viking raids. Instead of calling on Heaven, she asked for?—”
“Hell answered,” I said, cutting him short. Surely, this would be a fascinating story on a different day, in a different life, but for now, the clock was ticking, and Love’s environment seemed ferociously unsafe.
“I’m looking for a soul,” I said, gaining his full attention. “Help me now and gain my favor, Farefax. The Nordes and their might have confused my legion. I need a demon’s help. If you’ve been here for a while, surely, you’ve seen my glowing soul. Pearls. Opal. Starlight. She smells like the air above the mountaintops. Do you?—”
“Yes! Yes.” Black eyes shone. An iron finger pointed to a house on the far side of the fjord. “She?—”
I squeezed his shoulder as I pushed away. “You’ll be rewarded!”
The air before me split as I stepped through the veil, jumping from one side of the fjord to the other, throwing an off-handed command to my legion to ensure that the demon was bothrecognized and rewarded for his invaluable help. I trusted that they’d see to it, as the world around us fell, I had eyes only for…
The door opened before I reached it.
The storm and glacier steel-blue of a gown scraped the snow as soft, leather boots stepped from the threshold. A woman—a girl?—no older than nineteen hugged a fur shawl tightly against her shoulders. Pale hair hung in a loose wave down to her waist, taking on a life of its own as the wind whipped from the water.
A man’s voice wafted through the darkened doorway.
“Sigrid? Is it done?”
I stepped backward, perched on the edge of the cliff as she lifted her chin. Piercing blue eyes gazed at the village below. Unfeeling, she replied, “It’ll be gone by nightfall.”
“Excellent,” replied the man’s voice. “Come back to bed.”
Fuck that. The gods didn’t care that I was here? They danced in the city’s destruction? Then surely one more life wouldn’t matter.
I pushed past Love without drinking her in. It could wait.
By the time she returned to the pile of furs warmed by the fire, the nameless warrior, husband, owner, male,presence, was relieved of his ghost. I was still holding him by the throat, savoring the final hiss as his eyes went glassy, when she returned.
She left the door open as she made slow, intentional steps toward the lifeless body, as if she knew what she was approaching. A pale slice of gloom created a perfect rectangle around the man’s slack-jawed, limp frame. Her blue eyes had the dispassionate whitecaps of an unfeeling sea as she looked down at him.
She didn’t check him for signs of life.
She didn’t even call his name.
One long emotionless minute was wasted staring down at his corpse before she drifted toward a barrel beside the ornatelycarved table. She fetched a lathed cup from the table, examined the remnants within,humphed, popped the barrel’s wooden top, then plunged her entire fist beneath the liquid. Her fingers dripped with sickly sweet mead as she brought the drenched cup to her lips, sucking down the entirety of one cup, then returned her forearm to the barrel for another.
The honeyed alcohol ran dribbling down her chin, soaking the fur, dripping onto her feet as she finished a second, then a third.
She smacked her lips, wiped her face, took two wobbly steps towards the man’s corpse, then flung the empty cup at his skull.
It struck with a dullthunk, bobbling on the floor unceremoniously as a thin dribble of blood seeped from the shallow wound.
I didn’t need a mirror to know my breathy, grinning laugh set my eyes ablaze.
