Waking the Queen (3 page)

 Damn, I hated the perky ones. The happier they were, the crazier they were. Which effectively killed the glimmer of hope that Astrid Johanson was actually a Valkyrie—living proof that all my father told me was true.

 “It’s not safe for you to be here. This is condemned property. You’re trespassing.”

 “You know human laws don’t apply to you and me.” Astrid smiled at me, but it was more a fierce baring of teeth than it was a genuine smile.

 Yeah, completely batshit. Only she’d recognized the difference in me the same as I’d seen it in her. That could be a problem.

 “I need you to leave the premises.”

 “Always business, huh? That’s good. It will serve you well.”

 For the millionth time, it occurred to me that it was too fucking early in the morning for this shit. I rolled my eyes and that was when I noticed the pile of combat boots in the corner.

 The sight of those boots filled me with more dread than any dead body ever could have. The dead were just rotting meat, but those boots were the evidence of the life that had inhabited the body. Life that had been taken and destroyed by the woman in front of me.

 Not all human life was precious to me, but these warriors’ lives were. They were the good men I was supposed to protect. The ragged pile of boots was like an accusation and a testament to my failure to do just that.

 It reminded me of when I was little and my father had taken me to see the Holocaust Museum and the display of shoes there. Only they’d ranged in sizes and the smallest ones had been the most damning. When he’d asked me how it made me feel, I’d had to think about it very hard. I’d already detached myself from most emotion and I’d told him the same thing. It was a testament to the failure of man that the world had stood by and allowed so many of their own to die. I’d asked my father if maybe he’d been wrong, if the world was full of things like him. Like me. Maybe things worse than us, torturing and murdering, feeding on pain and suffering all masking themselves as prey. Otherwise, how could the world stand by and let this happen? And he’d said with such pride shining in his eyes such horrors lived and breathed because I hadn’t been born yet.

 I drew my gun. “Hands in the air, Miss Johanson.”

 “You’re arresting me?” Her laughter was light like silver bells. “For what?”

 For what, indeed? “Trespassing.”

 “Your father didn’t tell you, did he?” She smiled, a strange inner light blooming on her face. As if some happy memory had bubbled up to the present and brought joy with it. “Erik was always one to put things off.”

 Her words echoed my earlier thoughts and they were like a shotgun blast in my gut. I comforted myself with the knowledge she was a manipulator and my father’s name and crimes were common knowledge. It was why I was good at my job. Everyone knew that, and she wasn’t the first to try to use him against me.

 “No, he didn’t tell me.” I humored her while I focused on my breathing and prepared to fire. My training had taught me to shoot center mass, but she was wearing armor. I could shoot her in the thigh, but that wouldn’t guarantee I’d neutralized the threat. The head was my only option. Especially seeing as she’d put her hands in the air, but her eyes kept flickering to the sword on the table in front of her. I probably should have drawn her away from the table before I’d shot off my mouth, but part of me was looking for an excuse to shoot her. She’d never be convicted in court. She was too young, too pretty, and too goddamn manipulative for a jury to ever see through her machinations.

 “Pull the trigger,” she dared.

 How original. Suicide by cop. I wanted to know where the bodies were, though. “How about you tell me where the men went first?”

 “Valhalla.”

 
Valhalla
? Valhalla was a place in Norse mythology where warriors went when they died.

 She answered me so quickly and so easily, for a second I didn’t believe I’d heard her correctly. Her blue eyes were clear; there were no micro-expressions on her face to signal she lied. Her body language was open. She believed every word that she spoke.

 My first impression of her burst to the forefront of my memory yet again. How Astrid looked like every single illustration I’d ever seen of Valkyries in my father’s books. She was tall, golden, and fierce. With a wide, smooth forehead and hair like a pennant down her back. She was obviously strong, but blatantly feminine. There was a specificity about Astrid as well; the lines of her cheekbones, the hard ridge of her nose and even the raven tattoo on her bicep that marked a Valkyrie as Odin’s that reminded me of one particular Valkyrie. My namesake, Brynhildr.

 The realization struck home like a dagger that we were not so different, both in personality and appearance, but where she was golden like the sun; I was dark as the night sky.

 Fuck, but crazy was contagious. I believed everything my father told me, but I needed more than some armor and a couple comments about my father before I’d believe this woman was actually a Valkyrie. I jerked myself back into the game. “What about my partner? Is he on your list for Odin’s Ever After Party?”

 “No, but I’ll be back for him.”

 From that, I couldn’t even tell if she’d seen him. For all I knew, he could have been hit by a falling beam and passed out on an upper level.

 “You don’t believe me,” she continued sadly. “Your father was supposed to tell you. Selfish bastard.”

 She kept saying that, but there was no proof she actually knew him. “Move against the wall,” I directed her.

 “I can’t let you cuff me.”

 “And I can’t let you leave, so it seems we’re at an impasse.”

 “It seems we are.” She sounded strangely reasonable and was quiet for a moment before she spoke again. “It’s your birthday today.”

 Again, something that was common knowledge—information that was easily attainable. “And?”

 “It’s time.”

 Then she moved so fast, I never saw it coming. I only felt the cold steel of the sword as it split through my chest and bisected my heart.

CHAPTER TWO

 
I
fired wildly, my finger jerked back on the trigger more out of cellular memory than any actual intent. I couldn’t feel my hands and all I could hear was my blood thundering through my veins like a tsunami, but I knew the .40 had fired because I watched the bullets rip through Astrid Johanson’s pretty forehead.

 The back of her head should have exploded as my bullet tore through her skull, but it didn’t. Her smiling face peered into mine and the gaping wounds in her head closed like the tide washing away footprints in the sand. She caught me as I fell, my eyes focusing on the strange glint of the firelight on her armor. For a moment, I thought I saw the faces of dying men, but maybe it was my own death I was watching. My own face.

 I kept waiting for the pain, but it didn’t come. Only an arctic chill that was heavy like sorrow until Astrid drew back and took the sword with her, along with my heart. It was surreal to see it there, beating and pulsing outside of my body. More surreal still when it stopped and I was alive.

 This had to be a nightmare. My goddamn alarm was going to go off any minute and pop me from this hell into wakefulness. Or what passed for wakefulness until I had a cup of vanilla bean Folgers.

 Voices raised in song echoed inside my skull. I was damn sure those voices weren’t a choir of angels singing the angelic host to welcome me to Heaven, but there were no accordions, so I didn’t think I was in Hell either. The melody was soft and lovely, like butterflies flitting over my skin—a physical manifestation.

 Although, the more logical explanation was that the phenomenon was simply the mind’s way of coping with the trauma of death. Any minute, everything would fade to twilight and shadows and I would be nothing more than an empty meat sack in an abandoned warehouse.

 It wasn’t death that pissed me off; it was failure. I was supposed to ascend, I was supposed to be a goddess. Dying here hadn’t been part of the plan.

 The murderess’ hands were cool and soft on my face. “Don’t listen. I know it’s pretty, but stay with me, Brynn. Stay with me.”

 I wondered wildly why she’d say something so stupid after she’d pulled my heart out of my chest with a fucking sword. Dumb bitch.

 Maybe
I
was the dumb bitch because I was still alive. Or just so fucking stubborn, I didn’t know when to lie down and die.

 She pulled my hands up to cross them over my chest and I could see my fingernails were a strange shade of blue and the tips of my fingers purple. The rest of my skin had blanched to an alabaster white like the marble of some ancient statue. There was still no sensation there, only the absence of such that comes with the bitter cold.

 The music continued to reverberate in my awareness and I was flooded with sounds, scents and sights of things that were woven like a tapestry into every note. The white sands of Greece under an impossibly blue sky, the deep green of the sea and the scent of brine and figs. Visions of the sky as it shifted into black velvet and the foamy waves crashing over my feet beneath a gravid moon calling me out into the unknown and promising this for eternity if I surrendered. The green sea became the eyes of a man and he called to me, urged me to wade deeper into the water.

 I knew it wasn’t real.

 None of this could be real.

 Perhaps this was death, seconds stretched out in eternity as the brain ceased to function and all that was impossible became possible as we waited for the end.

 Well, it could hurry the fuck up. Dying shouldn’t be like the goddamn DMV. It was a simple series of actions. Breathing. Not breathing. Fuck you, you’re done.

 The music stopped and Astrid smiled at me. If I could have raised my arm, I would have hit her in the face just to make that saccharine smile go away.

 “Did the music stop, Brynn?”

 I found myself able to nod my head and I struggled to sit up. It was a certainty now that I was dreaming; there was no way I could live without my heart. Unless this was my first step to ascension, although I thought the lack of a heart would be more metaphorical.

  She yanked me to my feet and just as Astrid pulled me vertical, a man’s face loomed behind her. His visage was a horror—the left side a twisted and ropey monstrosity, the burned scar tissue stretched tight across his bones and the scarred half of his mouth twitched as he smiled. It wasn’t his face that held my attention though, awful as it was—his eyes were the ones I’d seen beckoning me out into the deep water as I lay dying.

 Astrid’s mouth curved into a pink O as those ruined lips whispered in her ear and she seemed to be lost in some kind of trance.

 He stepped out from behind her and I found myself unable to move. I couldn’t shake the imagery of seaweed tangled around my legs pulling me down. The unknown man was one of the biggest I’d ever met, taller than my 6’1 by at least five inches. His shoulders and chest were so broad he reminded me of a brick wall.

 Astrid suddenly crumpled, blood spread across her chest like the bloom of an English rose—petals reaching out underneath her armor. It didn’t surprise me that this stranger killed her; the hatred in his eyes was a wildfire. Any horror he could have perpetrated wouldn’t be any great shock, no, it was the bright light that erupted from her body. Waterfalls of silver and green sparks that consumed her.

 In moments, it was as if she’d never been. Astrid’s flesh, bone, everything gone.

 I shouldn’t have been surprised because I was dreaming. Any matter of the fantastic could happen and it meant nothing.