Page 22

What finally pierced through the frustration and fear was the Raven’s snarling voice.

“Land ahead,” she said. “Einnland’s shores are within eyesight.”

Soon, we would disembark, and the chaos I saw would explode. My mother would be in danger, and I was no closer to finding Soren, locating the last piece of Drak’s soul, or reaching the castle and taking my sister down from her throne.

And we still needed to discuss a plan of escape with Finan.

Drak

The ether was fucking ugly—as cold as it was grey and as hopeless as Mara’s Keep. But the ether devoid of the life that Lux had brought to the castle with her auburn braid and perfect pink lips, warming the world inside the prison of that drafty stone. Now, I existed in a muted expanse of nothingness.

Here, I was alone…

Until she spoke.

Only then could I reach out to her, willing my awareness toward the sound of her voice. She clearly wasn’t touching my soul, as my awareness remained dull, quiet, and empty of anything but this wretched grey.

How the fuck had we connected through her dream? If only I could do it again. I tried, pushing my consciousness toward her whenever she was quiet for long stretches, assuming she slept. But nothing worked, so I determined that only within an hour or so after she spilled the blood of her rune carvings on my soul could we connect in such an ethereal and promising way. I had to wait until she restored the next shard to speak with her again.

At least I could hear her.

Hearing her speak of Soren messed me up in the best way possible. Axel must have finally told her about his son because now she knew his name and spoke about him. Though I could only hear her side of the conversation, I knew it had to be Axel. Nobody else alive today knew Soren’s name. That bastard…Hel I missed him, and I wished I could have told Lux about him. Besides Silver and Axel, Soren was my sole childhood friend; King Roderic made sure of that, as he kept me in the same shadows where Soren hid. In fact, if the former king had achieved what he wanted, I would have been erased entirely, non-existent.

I guess that asshole got his wish. Odin had wiped me from this earth, and I’d become nothing but ashes scattered among the torched remnants of Yggdrasil. But I refused to stay gone.

I pushed my consciousness forward, reaching for Lux, hoping she’d sense the warmth of my effort and touch my soul. I needed to tell her what Axel forbade me to say about Soren when I was alive. I’d been sworn to silence about Soren’s existence, and silent I stayed. Even when the Blood Council was torn apart, Axel had only trusted me with the information about the identity of his son. Though his erasure differed from mine, as it was for his safety and rather than because of the king's disdain, it was far more successful due to the intentionality.

Now, without a voice, I broke my silence.

Soren was more than a thief and Valkyrie’s son, Lux.

He was cunning, a damn prankster, wildly inappropriate but charming as Hel. He was my closest friend, a lost boy with no place in Mara’s Keep and yet nowhere else to go beyond the castle. And then he was erased.

Regret twisted my thoughts, and my consciousness became nothing but a dull ache, throbbing like ice hardening through the veins in my temples. Fuck, I didn’t even know I could feel pain without a damn body, but this agony of regret—grief—was far worse than physical pain.

The last time Soren placed his trust in me, I resorted to screaming and spitting at him, like a cruel man punishing a disobedient dog.

As painful as it was to relive one of my worst moments, I had no way to avoid it right now. Nowhere to go in the ether to run away from these thoughts. The bleakness of my surroundings did nothing to distract me from the memory of him, and my mind was drawn back to it, as if the memory were happening here and now.

I stormed through the halls, knowing his every hideout and searching through each one. Knowing he couldn’t hide from me forever. Soren was skilled at staying in the shadows, but we grew up together, and I knew his routine. When I wasn’t reading in the dungeons with Silver, I watched Soren play pranks on the Blood Council.

He was a fucking idiot for playing games with vampires, but as a reckless fifteen-year-old boy, I loved every second of it. Now I knew the truth about Soren; a truth his father had kept from me. One they’d both kept from me, and after Axel finally told me who Soren’s mother was, I swore to never lie to someone I loved.

“Don’t do this, Drakkar,” Axel said. His footsteps pounded behind me, still longer than mine though I’d shot up in height between the ages of fourteen and fifteen. “You will keep Soren’s secret, or he’ll be in danger.”

“Is any of this actually real, or is it just some fabricated bullshit Silver created with her childish tales?” I snapped, not wanting to believe Soren was actually anything other than human. As a child, I used to listen to Silver come up with make-believe stories about all kinds of creatures: horses with shimmering horns, faerie-winged people when she tried to get her mind off of her mother. Were half-Valkyries so different?

“It’s real.”

I spun around, looking up at the man I almost called father. Loose dark hair hung in a swoop over his forehead. He was handsome and distinguished enough that I was surprised King Roderic didn’t insist Axel wear a mask like the executioners he trained. But like his son, Axel knew how to stay in the shadows, and the king knew nothing about Axel’s friendship with my mother.

“You’re supposed to be Ingrid’s friend,” I snapped. Flexing my fingers, I tried everything not to shove him away from me and run off down the hall to find Soren. “All this time my mother has been suffering, and you knew he could help. Valkyries harness souls—” I froze as understanding dawned. That’s what those damn crystals were Soren always hoarded. I knew they weren’t jewelry, and Soren claimed he got them from the very veins of vampires, but I thought it was just a joke. No, the way he obsessed over the crystals and said they were pieces of who the vampires once were, meant they had to be parts of the vampires’ souls broken into bits. “The crystals. He does deal in souls, doesn’t he?”

Axel’s hair fell into his eyes as he shook his head, and a crease formed between his thick brow. “No, he’s only half Valkyrie, Drakkar. This changes nothing. Those crystals are just shattered bits that vampires bleed out, not like a human’s soul. Ingrid is human. She still has her soul intact.”

I clenched my fists, but kept them firmly at my sides. A muscle ticked in my jaw as I held my tongue from saying what I really thought of this asshole and his son. “He can at least try to save her.”

“He’s only eleven. He barely even understands how different he is from us or what that means.”