Dead Embers (37 page)

He gave us a ghost of a nod in greeting, ebony skin gleaming
in the fluorescent light. "Thank you for getting here so quickly." He
had a slight accent, and I had to remind myself to pay attention to his words
instead of trying to place that curious rise and fall in his voice. He looked over
at Sigrun beside me and asked, "Valkyrie Sigrun?"

"Well met,
einherjar
Erik," Sigrun
responded, her voice filled with the utmost respect. Seemed Sigrun knew this
enigmatic Warrior. And they were familiar enough with each other to elicit a
mutually warm greeting. Now Erik intrigued me more than ever. "I have a
message for you. Is there somewhere we can talk?"

"Of course." Erik inclined his head, and I found
myself admiring the regal tilt to his neck. "Please follow me," he
beckoned. We entered the inner room behind Betty. Inside, fingers tapped away
at keyboards and the low hum of voices made a soft backdrop to the rapid
clicking.

Erik led us through a warren of cubicles to a large,
glass-walled meeting room— very professional boardroom type, fitted out in
mahogany and soft leather. Very plush and so not typical of Asgard. Everything
at this New York location, from the ID tags to Erik, seemed out of place.

He threw a quick glance at the gathered team and said,
"Karl here will get you up to date while I speak with Valkyrie
Sigrun." He nodded to a Warrior who stood stiff-backed at the doorway, a
pile of files in his hands, hair sticking up in all angles, frazzled to the
max. "I will return shortly."

I watched, curious, as he led Sigrun away. They disappeared into
a room a few doors down the hall. Then Aimee tugged on my arm, and I directed
my attention back to Karl.

Karl's dark eyes bounced from face to face before he cleared
his throat. "Okay, guys." He stepped forward, and the pile in his
arms jiggled, threatening to tip over his jittery elbow. "This won't take
long. I think we have a situation."

I wanted to snort. From the look of him, I doubted he even
knew what a situation was, much less how to handle one. He looked as if he
belonged behind a computer, not as a Warrior of Asgard.

Karl made a quick lap around the room, passing out files,
then sank into the empty chair at the head of the table. The leather squawked
and Karl blushed. His finger went automatically to the bridge of his nose as if
he meant to push up a pair of glasses. The finger stopped in midair, hovered
for a moment, then lowered back to a pile of papers on the table.

He cleared his throat, and the sound echoed around the room,
grating on my nerves. From Aidan's wince and Aimee's frown, I wasn't alone in
my impatience with this bumbling fool.

"We've had a report from the field. Our last Retrieval
was successful in more than one way. Not only were we successful in retrieving
a healthy Warrior, but the assigned Valkyrie
also
reported a sighting of
another missing Warrior,
einherjar
Brody."

I sat bolt-upright, shocked. The silence in the room lay
thick and palpable. When Karl looked up, clearly expecting some sort of
reaction from us, nobody stirred. Nobody dared to interrupt his speech for fear
of missing the slightest detail. "She reported Brody to be healthy and in
good condition. But there is one problem."

He paused in his nervous recital. It was, perhaps, this
little
but
that the team had been waiting for. A
but
we had all
been dreading. We all so desperately wanted to get Brody back, but the sense of
the surreal still permeated the air. The blood beat steadily in my ears.

Erik chose that moment to enter the boardroom, without
Sigrun. I felt slightly deflated that she'd left without a farewell, but that
was Sigrun. All business when it was business.

The ebony-skinned Warrior stood by the door, arms folded.
And I wasn't surprised when Karl glanced nervously at his superior. The big guy
certainly possessed an intimidating presence.

Karl looked around the table before continuing. "Brody
has been found imprisoned in a cell, in a basement, within the grounds of an
estate in Virginia."

"Do we know who the owner is?" A weary roughness
tinged Aidan's voice.

Karl shook his head. "The team is still looking into
it. It shouldn't take too much longer." He flicked a glance through the
glass windows and into the outer room for a few seconds, as if hoping one of
the many people now seated at their workstations would rise and bring forth the
required information.

Nothing happened.

He turned his gaze back to the table, threw me a nervous
glance before directing his response at Aidan, "I will let you know as
soon as I hear something."

He did not just do that.

In that moment, I realized that Karl's glance was not one of
nervous regard. It was a more antagonistic emotion; Karl didn't like me too
much.

Not that it bothered me who he did or didn't like. The only
thing that mattered right then was that he'd already gotten on the wrong side
of me.

He had completely disregarded my authority.

And he had just completely pissed me off.

With the meeting over, Karl herded us into a large lounge,
waving a hand at a refreshment table set up in one corner. Some real bucks
funded this particular branch of the Asgardian scout teams. Compared to the HQ
in Cairo this place was a friggin' palace.

Another small room, an enclosed balcony, led off the main
lounge, and I snuck out into the grey sunshine, hoping to get some quiet time.

No such luck.

One of the two stone deck chairs was already occupied. By
Joshua.

I froze, unsure if I should leave him alone or if he even
knew I was there. Inching backward, with a hand on the handle of the slider, I
meant to duck back into the room, but he turned. Clearly I wasn't as quiet as
I'd hoped.

His dark eyes raked over my face, flicking for the briefest
second to my wings as they danced with trepidation at my shoulders. Despite the
weak sunshine, his face remained shadowed, probably darkened by the pain of his
every thought. My heart twisted in sympathy, though a touch of anger edged the
pain.

"You don't have to leave, you know," Joshua said
in a low voice, his words slightly smudged as he hunched over, elbows on his
knees.

I hesitated. Maybe talking to him right then was not the
smartest of moves. But I wasn't famous for the smartness of my moves.

Before I decided against it, my feet dragged me the handful
of paces to the nearest deckchair: a strange contraption that resembled an
armchair but was constructed of pure white stone. Maybe poured concrete or
marble? Whatever the deckchair was made of, one thing was pretty clear—it
wasn't a creation meant for comfort. The stone seeped cold into my flesh, and
the bleak morning light added not a drop of warmth.

A palpable silence blanketed the little balcony. This high
up, the space needed to be closed off from the gusting winds by a sheet of
glass. So just an illusion of being outside.

Joshua cleared his throat. I shuffled in the cold seat, my
butt slowly freezing itself against the icy concrete. At last I drew up enough
courage to ask, "You okay?" I wasn't a coward. It was just that this
experience was new to me, and I was completely out of my depth. I'd be lost if
he ignored me. Or stopped being my friend. Even the thought of it twisted me up
inside.

Again with the silence.

I'd just decided Joshua was best left to his own company and
started to rise when he said, "Yeah. I suppose I'll live." He didn't
shrug; his shoulders just drooped as if gravity worked especially hard to keep his
body, mind and spirit down.

"I'm sorry." I snuck a glance at his face, but all
I saw was a cheekbone and hair hiding his eyes. "Are you going to be
okay?"

No response.

"You still angry with me?" I stared at his face;
tears threatening to overflow.

"Why would I be angry with you?"

I did a double take at Joshua's question, the dam of
threatening tears no longer an issue. "I thought . . . the way you looked
at me in the hall when I revealed Mi—" I fumbled, trying not to mention
her name. "When I revealed . . . what happened. You looked like you hated
me."

"I was upset." He spoke so matter-of-factly, as if
the whole Mika episode wasn't that big a deal at all. I wasn't buying it.

"I can imagine. I was furious and hurt, myself." I
touched his arm. "Can't imagine how you felt."

Nothing.

At least he didn't shrug my hand off.

"When did you figure it out? Her real agenda?" At
last Joshua threw me a questioning scowl.

"When we left the dwarf palace. I hadn't paid much
attention to Mika; my mind was focused on the goblet, not to mention a tad
creeped out by the queen's stone head. Then when Mika attacked me, everything
sort of fell into place. Like how she refused to leave my side when Steinn came
to tell me about his daughter. And how she insisted she come with me to find
the goblet. I would never have imagined her intention was to steal the thing,
or to destroy it." I shook my head, still not quite accepting what Mika
had done.

"Yeah. She would've known that no elixir meant Aidan
would die," Joshua said softly.

"I'm sorry." And I was. I hated hearing the
sadness in his voice. Since when did Joshua's feelings affect me this much?

"No.
I
am sorry. I should never have trusted
her." Joshua shook his head, the sharp, sudden movement emphasizing his
anger.

"We all made the mistake to trust her. Look at
Fen." As I spoke, I realized how true my words were. If she could pull the
wool over her own father's eyes, why should we feel in any way obligated or
responsible for her?

Joshua shrugged. "I guess."

Silence.

"Will you go to see her?" I asked, tentatively
offering a neutral standpoint, and hoping like hell he would say no.

"What? Are you kidding?" His voice fairly vibrated
with rage, the skin on his cheeks pink with anger.

"I just thought . . ."

"I liked her, okay. And she liked me—or so I thought.
Didn't mean I was about to marry her. And why the hell would I want a
relationship with a girl who betrayed me, who tried to hurt someone I. . .
someone I care about? Why would I care about a girl who thought it would be
okay to let my friend die a slow and painful death in Hel?" Despite his
anger-tinged bravado, his voice held an edge of sadness. I understood his pain.
But I didn't say anything.

No words could erase how Joshua felt.

***

An hour later, we were just finishing up a lunch of steak
sandwiches and mocha lattes when Karl strode into the room, asking for Aidan.

Aidan looked around the table at each of us, eyebrows raised
in question. He swiped a towel over his mouth and followed Karl out the room.

Ten minutes later, a tense and harried Karl rushed into the
room again. "We have an address—the location of the remote estate where we
will quite likely find
einherjar
Brody." He went to Joshua and
pressed a copy of the address into his hand.

At that moment, I noticed two things. One, that Aidan hadn't
come back, and two, that I didn't particularly like the fact that Karl had
walked straight past me to hand the paper to Joshua, the only other male in the
room. "Thanks, Karl," said Joshua as he raised a dark eyebrow and
promptly and deliberately handed me the paper.

Karl watched the exchange, a cool expression in his eyes.
How did he manage that? Harried, geeky and yet cool? I met his gaze with an
equally cold one, chin raised just the tiniest bit. Flustered, the geek turned
away and exited the lounge without a word.

In my annoyance at Karl's outright rudeness, I forgot to ask
where Aidan had run off to, only remembering as the team filed out of the
office to head back to the Bifrost.

I rushed past a startled Betty, popping my head back into
the office. "Karl, where is Aidan?"

The Warrior wrinkled his nose in puzzlement, but the
expression of surprise seemed strange when his eyes contained so little
emotion. "Erik needed him. I didn't ask why." He folded his arms as
if daring me to push the issue.

"I need to speak to Erik, then. Without Aidan we're
short on numbers in our team."

"I'm sorry. Erik and Aidan are no longer in the
building. And Erik requested that he not be disturbed." The smug
expression on his face made me want to punch him in the mouth.

I frowned. No longer in the building? Erik had taken Aidan
off somewhere without telling us, and now they were gone and incommunicado? But
I really didn't have the time to waste arguing with Karl.

"Fine then, guess we'll have to do this without
him." I didn't wait for him to respond, just shut the door and hurried
back to my team to fill them in.

Strangely, I found I was angry with Aidan. He could have let
the team know where he was running off to in the middle of a mission. Not that
I wanted to go all chain-of-command on him, but a little bit of information
would've been nice.

Now we hurried to our stinky alleyway and gathered beside
the putrid blue dumpster. The midday sun, despite its bleakness, still held the
power of putrefaction in its rays. Yuck.

Behind us, a dog rooted inside a garbage can that had tipped
onto its side. The animal looked up, his mournful black eyes bringing to mind
the little Labrador, Rex, who'd almost caught me retrieving Aidan's body in the
park in Craven. Aidan had been dead then, a Warrior-to-be, but still just a
corpse awaiting his turn to get his life back.

The dog watched as we gathered in a loose circle, a curl of
rotting lettuce hanging from his mouth, liquid eyes staring. Then we
disappeared into thin air.

To the keening, mournful wail of a New York stray.