Fall (The Ragnarok Prophesies) (17 page)

The shards of ice inside me grew.

Even then, Dace didn’t bend. His determination to keep me safe flowed through me in painful rushes, lapping at my heart like erosive water against rock.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

I closed my eyes, defeated.

slept fitfully, my subconscious flitting from one hazy, upsetting scene to the next. None of them made much sense to me, but, even asleep, I knew they weren’t anything I wanted to remember. Not even the warmth of Dace’s body nestled against mine eased my mind. He and Geri tried to soothe me, but, eventually, they stopped trying and simply held me as one disturbing vision after another played through my head.

A lifetime later, the dreams played themselves out.

I slept hard then, too exhausted to fight the weight dragging me into unconsciousness.

“Ari, baby, wake up.” Dad shook my shoulder, his voice full of urgency.

I opened my eyes immediately, then thought about closing them again. My bedroom was still dark, the only light coming from the hall. Dace still held me in his arms, his snores sounding softly in my ear. It wasn’t morning yet, and I didn’t want to be awake.

“Wake up, hon,” Dad said again.

“What?” I grumbled, blinking up at him. My mind refused to work right. “What time is it?” I rubbed sleep from my eyes, trying to focus through exhaustion.

“Dace, wake up, son,” Dad said, ignoring my question.

The stress in his voice brought me wide-awake. Something was wrong.

I glanced across at the clock on my bedside table. 3:00 a.m. The witching hour. Nothing good ever happened at 3:00 a.m. I thought about throwing the blankets over my head and going back to sleep. I didn’t want to know whatever Dad needed to tell us. It wouldn’t be good, and my heart couldn’t take any more damage right now.

Didn’t look like I had much of a choice in the matter, though. Dad wasn’t going away.

“Dace, wake up.” I reached out to shake Dace, but his eyes popped open as soon as I said his name.

He never rested, never relaxed.

The fracture inside me widened.

He looked at me and then at my dad, blinking rapidly. “What’s wrong?” His voice sounded rough and gritty.

Dad’s grim expression made my stomach flip uncomfortably.

“Alex?” Dace sat up in one fluid motion. He pulled me up with him, setting me slightly away from him as if scared Dad would yell at him for spending the night in my bed.

“I’m sorry, son, but your house….” The frown lines around Dad’s mouth deepened.

“My house?”

“It’s gone. Destroyed.”

“What?” Shock thrummed through me.

Dace’s body tensed beneath mine.

I reached out through our bond, but found only silence, as if he wasn’t thinking at all. I couldn’t even sense his emotions in that moment.

Geri stirred in his corner.

“What happened?” Dace asked. The question carried no inflection, as if he asked out of necessity instead of surprise or anger. Like he expected something like this to happen.

“Thomas is waiting for you downstairs,” Dad said. “The fire department got there as soon as they could, but there wasn’t much left to save.” He clamped a hand on Dace’s shoulder, that grave frown still etched across his face. “I’m sorry, son.”

“His house…
burned
?”

We weren’t having this conversation. I was still dreaming. I had to be dreaming.

Dad nodded, his brown eyes wide in his pale, drawn face. His sad, frazzled expression didn’t waver.

A chilling dose of reality hit me then.

This wasn’t a dream.

“
When
?” I demanded, my voice breathless and screechy at once. The word were laced with the beginnings of panic and hysteria.

Sköll and Hati burned Dace’s house to the ground.

I felt like the walls were closing in on me. If he’d been there… if he hadn’t practically moved in to keep an eye on me… I wanted to throw up.

“About an hour ago. Naomi tried calling, but your phone is off,” Dad said, looking at Dace.

My lips were numb. My body started shaking, chills working their way through me in icy blasts. After the day we had, how could this be happening now? Dace had already lost so much, and now this. In what world was that fair to him?

I didn’t really need to ask that question, though. I knew the answer. This had nothing to do with fairness and everything to do with punishment. Dace wanted to draw Sköll and Hati out today, wanted to rile them up. This was their response. This was their punishment. Dace had kicked over a hornet’s nest.

He exhaled, his breath escaping his lungs in a sharp
whoosh
.

My heart shattered at the forlorn sigh rippling through him.

How could they do this? How dare they?

Rage coursed through me, hotter than even the worst of Dace’s anger. I was so freaking
sick
of being afraid and watching Dace hurt. I was tired of being helpless, of feeling useless, when my world imploded again and again and Dace paid the price. I wanted Sköll and Hati to die, and I wanted it to hurt. I wanted them to feel everything they’d put us through, tenfold.

I clenched my hands into tight fists, the urge to rage and scream and
kill
making my heart thunder louder and louder until everything but the sound of blood fell away. I reached deep, searching for more anger, for the strength it lent me in that moment. I felt powerful, stronger than the cowardly girl who cried at the drop of hat. Stronger than the girl who awoke screaming every night. Stronger than the girl who couldn’t save her boyfriend.

That strength built inside of me like a storm wind, ferocious in its intensity. Tornadoes spun to life in my soul, twisting everything inside me into hard, unrecognizable lumps of steely emotion. I embraced it, welcoming the rush of adrenaline shooting through my veins. Reaching deeper, deeper… into that place where Freki rested, bound by chains stronger than those holding Fenrir in his prison.

Freki
. I don’t know why I said her name, or what I even expected to happen, but she opened her eyes, and looked right at me. Before I could say another word, she rose, tearing against her chains as my anger swept into her, breathing life and power into a soul weakened into silence for too long.

Growls tore from that deep down space where she lived. She surged forward, straining to cast off her affliction and defend her mate. She attempted to claw her way through me, but, even with anger urging her on, she was too weak to do anything but rage inside my body.

Pain shot through me, so intensely that black spots danced behind my eyes.

I doubled over, retching as every inch of my body began to scream its protest. I heard my dad calling my name, but a thousand miles of lava separated me from him. I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t even answer Dace, whose thoughts swept into my head in a frantic burst.

My blood boiled in my veins, turning my insides into corroded ruins as Freki attempted to fight her way to the surface and force a change neither of us was strong enough to endure. I couldn’t shift anymore, but that didn’t stop her from trying to make me. Her mate had been attacked, and she was determined to respond.

Please
, I screamed at her, anger vanishing beneath fierce waves of pain.
Please stop!

She didn’t listen to me.

Geri launched himself into my mind, rattling me with the force of a sonic boom. He felt Freki, and he wanted her. As much as she fought to surface, he fought to get to her; both of them shredded me from the inside out in their attempts, neither thinking clearly beneath the animal instinct that made them such fierce and fearsome warriors.

I screamed aloud, pain ripping my head wide open. Everything hurt, as if my skin was being peeled off strip by strip. My bones vibrated, long ago memories of shifting urging them to take a different shape, a shape long lost to them. Freki screamed, the sound human, as my pain hit her, funneling into her along the thread that bound us one to another.

She fought harder, pushing with everything she had, determined to fight through it.

I sobbed, begging silently for relief, for death… for anything to make her stop trying to do the impossible. We couldn’t shift. All we could do was hurt, burn… explode into nothingness.

Stop.

Dace’s command pounded through me in a powerful roar.

Freki froze.

So did Geri.

And, just like that, the rage vanished.

Freki stopped fighting, falling back into that void where she lived, years and lives like weights tied to her paws. Geri howled one more time before Dace somehow jerked him from my head. He slammed walls between us, completely severing our connection for the first time since I woke in the hospital.

I slumped against him, sucking in great, gasping breaths. My lungs were on fire. My head felt ripped apart. My body ached so intensely that tears ran down my face. Death truly would have been preferable to the abject misery being alive presented in that moment.

If that’s what shifting felt like, I never wanted to do it.

But, despite the agony, threads of silver wove through me. I had never felt Freki so fully before. Not even when I first met Ronan had she reacted so powerfully.

Dace kept telling me she woke up a little, that she was the one who saved my life, but, until tonight, I hadn’t really understood what that meant because she’d been little more than a flutter of consciousness, a heartbeat in the back of my mind. She was so much more than that, though. Powerful, and very much alive, even if she was stuck. And, somehow, she heard me. She responded to me.

“What happened?” Dad demanded, sounding slightly hysterical.

“Freki,” Dace said to him, and then, “Are you okay, love?” He ran his hands all over my body, checking for physical damage. The walls were still in place, but I heard the frantic edge to his question.

I attempted to nod, but ended up moaning. Moving. Bad plan. Check.

“Answer me,” he whispered, cupping his hands around my cheeks. He brushed his lips across my eyelids, my temples, then into my hair. His breath shuddered in and out of his lungs. “Please, answer me.”

“Mother hell,” I mumbled, the only words my brain seemed capable of producing.

Dace’s entire body relaxed beneath mine.

“Thank god,” my dad whispered.

I focused on breathing. The pain receded in increments. Less agonizing feeling returned to my toes, then my fingertips. I twitched, sighing in relief as knotted muscles unwound and the pain in my head trickled away.

Relief didn’t last long, though. As the seconds ticked by, no one in the room saying a word, the memory of what started the entire battle for dominion began to return. Dace’s house was destroyed, burned down. I cringed, waiting for Freki to react again, but she didn’t. She didn’t even flutter.

I blinked my eyes open slowly.

“I’m so sorry.” My throat felt raw, the words ragged.

Dace’s sad smile broke my heart all over again.