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With his next step visible in my mind, I flung in between him and the next captive. My stake was still coated black at the tip with the other vampire’s blood. He tried to grab my jaw, but I saw it coming. Vampires were predictable now, even without foresight. They always relied on their strength and speed to snap bones or suck us dry. It was simple brutality, quick and pleasurable for them.

Hel, it was too easy to see the shape of his body as he stepped toward me, to pinpoint exactly how he’d bend, where his arms would go, and how I could slip through and jam the stake up and through his ribs. Muscle memory did the rest. I shoved it inward hard enough to burst his heart.

As soon as he fell to his knees, I whipped around, expecting another vampire, and then another, all compelled to torture me, but Silver wasn’t paying any attention to her army. She’d climbed onto the altar and lay spread over our mother’s body.

“Mother!” she screamed as she cupped Laurella’s face.

Only then did I notice that the blood wasn’t our mother’s. The altar was replaced with a new, wider one to accommodate two bodies, and the one beside her bled out.

A captive lay next to her. An aged man with snow-white hair and unseeing violet eyes lay with an odd arch to his back, his head tilted back slightly, and every cut Silver had described to our mother was etched into his skin. Runes I didn’t recognize decorated his wrists, the center of his throat, his ankles, and the inside of his legs. His nearly naked body was a mural of strange symbols. Only a ragged cloth covered his groin, and with this much of him exposed, I marveled at the folds of leathery material attached to his back.

“It didn’t work,” Silver cried. “It didn’t work.”

I tore my gaze from the dead man, whatever he was, and stood over Silver, searching for any sign of life across our mother’s body like the shifting of her eyes beneath her thin, veiny eyelids, soft breath rising and falling at her chest, or a throb of pulse at her throat. Silver hadn’t cut her open, but nothing I saw said Mother was alive.

“What didn’t work?” I asked.

Silver bent her neck and glared up at me through oily umber strands of hair plastered to her shiny face. Puffy, red eyes met mine, and she scowled. “She’s dead.”

My heart stopped because I already knew she was right, and it wasn’t by Silver’s hand, or a vampire’s. It wasn’t a sacrifice that ended her life. That same pale, sallow look hollowed Mother’s cheeks. She was as sick as she was the day I sent her with Ragna. Worse.

“She’s dead,” Silver repeated, her voice raw, tears pouring down her cheeks and soaking our mother’s white dress. So white, her flesh looked as yellow as the sun wrapped in the wispy fabric. “She’s dead, and she never said it.”

Lux

“Said what?” I asked. Curiosity and confusion were the only things keeping me from collapsing. My mother was dead, and nothing I did could have stopped it—no amount of foresight, no calling upon a Valkyrie, nothing. Even my breath of life could not call forth a soul back into the lifeless body, and I was not in Valhalla to greet her and determine where her afterlife should be. I filled Odin’s role, but I wasn’t Odin, and for the first time since killing a god, I felt entirely powerless.

Silver seethed, and without looking at me, answered through clenched jaws. “That. She’s. Sorry.”

“Sorry?” The question popped out of me.

Silver’s fist slammed against the altar inches from our mother’s ear. “This is your fault.” She slunk off the altar and straightened, hands coiled into fists. I tensed, expecting an attack. “I was healing her and you fucking destroyed everything. Why aren’t you at the castle? That’s where the throne is. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

A hundred questions seized me, but I could only say one stupid word. “What?”

My sister’s eyes burned with rage. “I gave up my reign for this, and you took it from me.”

“For what, Silver?” My voice came out small, reminding me of when we were kids, whispering together in bed under the same blanket during the dead of winter.

“To heal her.”

Tears singed hot behind my eyes. “Why would you heal her when you hated her? You hate everyone. You built an entire temple to showcase your need for revenge and control⁠—”

“Are you as thick-headed and blinded by fear as you were when you were six and hiding in the hatch door under our bed?” She tilted her head and did not blink. The eerie sight left me as cold as her tone. “Everything has led to this moment. If I’m so evil, why wouldn’t I have hurt her, or used her as leverage against you?”

“You did.”

“You thought I did.” She huffed. “You were always so predictable. Always Mother’s favorite. Two witches and two kindred spirits.”

I shook my head as everything I thought I understood about Silver sloughed away. “You’re not making any sense.”

“What did I say about thick-headed?” Her laugh was hollow and haunting. “I’m speaking perfectly clearly, and even though your eyes have lost their all-black, god gaze, you’re still as blind as the shadows of Niflheim. You thought you knew all the history of Vylheim, but you know nothing of the full history of Midgard. You think because you’ve lived in different lifetimes that you’ve seen it all, but I lived among the sagas for twenty years. All I had to keep me company were stories.” Her lips curled up, and she gave me a wry look. “Stories and Drak, of course.”

“You’re saying that you did all of this?” I splayed my arms open, flicking my gaze to the battle that raged on. Vampire ash littered the temple floor, but too many humans lay dead across it. “You waged war, captured West Anglans, tortured hundreds of thousands of people, and invited selfish gods back to Midgard just to hear our mother say she’s sorry for…what?” I swallowed. “For forgetting you? We thought you were dead⁠—”

“No,” she shook her head, tears still clinging to her eyes. “Being the queen of Vylheim saved our mother. She was damned to die on Drukna with the Blood Council’s Age of Exploration. I saved her.”

“Drak dissolved the Blood Council. He changed that.”