Valkyrie Rising (18 page)

“That’s against the rules,” her companion said, genuine shock flashing across her wide brown eyes.

“We abandoned the rules weeks ago,” Astrid snapped.

“Why?” I shouted. “Why are you doing this?”

“Take him,” Astrid repeated, glaring down the objection brewing in her friend’s eyes.

A Valkyrie with raven-black hair grabbed Tuck roughly and pushed him toward the back door of the bar.

“No!” I shouted, struggling to push past her to reach Tuck. “Tuck! Don’t listen to them!”

He turned toward me, his eyes darkening as they shed their milky white armor. Familiar gray stared back at me.

His eyebrows furrowed. He was trying to get a hold on what was happening. But I didn’t have time to explain. The Valkyrie’s hand was still curled around his biceps, dragging him away.

“Get away from her!” I screamed as I threw the dagger at the Valkyrie. I hadn’t known I had that kind of violence in me until my fingers relaxed, letting the blade fly.

One manicured hand snatched the blade from the air without flinching. As flawless as the move had been, it forced her to release Tuck’s arm for just an instant. But that was all we needed.

“Tuck—run!” I shouted.

Tuck was disoriented, but he obeyed. He shoved the Valkyrie hard, taking her by surprise. Then he pressed through the crowd, reaching his long arms out to shield me, just as Astrid raised one arm and struck me. It wasn’t the type of slap you’d expect from a bone-thin, model-perfect girl. It was a brutal blow that sent me flying into the bar again. A stool collapsed under my weight. When I hit the ground, I actually spat blood, like an action movie star.

Astrid grabbed Graham and pulled him to the door. I watched, sprawled across the floor like a squashed spider, as Graham followed her, glassy-eyed and all too willing.

“Graham!” I croaked. My entire body was broken. My head was bleeding and my eyes couldn’t quite focus on anything. I felt drunk, delirious, and utterly helpless.

Graham turned, but his face was stone and the eyes that met mine were milky white. He looked away without giving me a second thought.

I closed my eyes, defeated and in too much pain to move.

“Oh my God,” Tuck said, suddenly at my side, “Are you okay? Can you hear me?”

“I’m fine,” I whispered. “I’ve got to stop them. They’ve got Graham.” I pulled myself up onto my elbows, gasping at the pain that stabbed through my ribs.

“No, don’t move.” He pushed me back down. “I’ll go after them. Just sit tight. I’ll get you a doctor as soon as I can.”

“NO!” I roared, grabbing his arm and pulling him so hard, he almost fell on me. “You can’t go after them. They’ll take you too.”

“I’ll be fine,” he said, flashing a smile that was dulled by fear and not at all reassuring. “But Graham won’t be if he leaves with some girl who just hit you. Someone roofied him or something, I swear.”

“Look around you.” I winced as I somehow managed to pull myself to my knees despite Tuck’s best efforts to keep me down. “Can’t you see what’s happening? They’ve all been hypnotized or something. You were too. I’m the only one who isn’t affected.”

Sure enough, as Tuck glanced around, his jaw muscle started twitching. Everyone in the bar was in varying stages of waking from a trance. Some were staring absently through partially clouded eyes, while others were shaking their heads and murmuring softly to themselves.

I rose and limped toward the back door. With each step, I pushed the pain further and further out of my mind, spurred on by the need, the absolute drive to save Graham. I flung the door open in time to see a black Range Rover peel past the bar. The enormous SUV was equipped for some serious off-roading, with roll bars on every exposed surface, spotlights, and massive tires that looked like they could climb right up the side of a cliff.

The red taillights disappeared around a curve in the road out of town, vanishing into the trees.

Graham was gone.

T
uck and I stood alone in the deserted alley behind the bar, utterly stunned. I stared at the distant trees that had swallowed Graham and the Range Rover whole, knowing I should move, should force myself back into gear. But there was no point. By the time I found a car to follow them, they’d be on the highway—halfway to anywhere.

I slid to my knees on the sidewalk. Failure paralyzed every muscle.

“Ellie?” Tuck sank down to my level. He put his hands on my cheeks. His fingers tangled in my hair as he tried to make me meet his eyes. “Snap out of it. Look at me. Where are they taking him?” He was practically shouting, like he already knew it was my fault. My cruel words had all but thrown Graham into their arms.

“I’m so sorry. So sorry,” I said, fighting a losing battle against the terrible, hateful lump in my throat. The fear and anger on his face were too foreign. They almost made him a stranger.

But then his eyes softened, and he was Tuck again. “Hey, hey, stop,” he said, his voice back under control. “Crying won’t help. It just makes you impossible to understand.” The smile he flashed just then was a few kilowatts shy of the usual, but even at its best, it wouldn’t have been enough to erase how resoundingly I’d failed Graham. And Grandmother.

The tears came pouring out—along with everything that had happened to me since I’d arrived in Skavøpoll. I told him about my first encounter with Astrid at the bar, Kjell disappearing, Grandmother’s strange behavior, and my certain knowledge that they were all connected. That Astrid had hunted Graham down.

Tuck took it far better than I’d expected. He didn’t question my sanity—not once—which surprised me given how wild it all sounded. Even after what he’d just witnessed firsthand, I half expected him to break out a straitjacket.

Instead he got quiet, so quiet that his silence unhinged me. I’d expected questions, interruptions, exclamations of shock. Yet there was only one question he had for me, after I’d dumped about a dozen crazy theories out onto the sidewalk between us, followed by Graham’s necklace, which I pulled from my pocket.

“You should keep this,” I said, surprisingly eager to release it into Tucker’s care. Not only did it burn my skin, something about the symbols on the front made the hair on my neck stand on end. “I think it’ll keep you safe. Although maybe not. It didn’t exactly work for Kjell.”

He gave me a funny half grin before slipping it into his pocket. I was instantly more at ease with it out of sight.

“Is that everything?” he asked. “Is there anything you’re not telling me? We can’t have any more secrets if we’re going to fix this.”

My heart started racing in my chest. There was. Even if he’d taken the rest in stride, I wasn’t ready to share the whole truth. The things I was learning about myself and my grandmother. What disturbed me most of all was how my grandmother and I could be so much like Astrid. I had to believe in my heart that we were different—despite the violent voice in my head and the weird way I felt in Astrid’s presence. How could I tell Tucker Halloway all of that?

“No,” I lied.

He studied my face carefully, in a way that almost made me wonder if he somehow knew. Maybe he could see the change in me and guessed what I was trying to hide. Lately, Tuck had been inconveniently observant. But then he touched the dried blood on my temple.

“I should have dragged him back to your grandmother’s house,” he said. “By the time I caught him, he was halfway into town. So I just followed.”

“Well, he wouldn’t have gone into town in the first place if I hadn’t provoked him,” I said. There was no way I’d let Tuck take even an ounce of the blame. It was all mine.

“It wasn’t your fault either,” he said. “You really think your grandmother’s rules would have stopped him? Sometimes you seem to forget Graham isn’t actually perfect. After all, he’s friends with me. You’ve gotta assume we’ve got something in common.” Tuck’s fingers curled around mine. “But right now, we need to go to Hilda’s house,” he said. “And we need to call a doctor.”

“No … I actually think I’m okay.” While we’d been sitting there, my strength had returned. Either I was going into shock or Astrid hadn’t hurt me as badly as I’d thought.

Tuck looked at me for what felt like forever. I waited for him to object. To call an ambulance. Instead he asked, “Can you walk?”

I was on my feet by the time he finished saying it.

He just stared at me again, like I was one of the seven wonders of the world. Like I was a stranger, exactly like how I’d felt a few minutes ago, when I’d seen him shed his practiced poise.

I couldn’t bring myself to meet his eyes, hoping he wouldn’t guess that the source of my new strength was the same as Astrid’s.

A car door slammed on the street. Three more slams followed in rapid succession. I could sense the tension on the air, the fear in the men as they approached. Margit had called her friends.

“We should get out of here,” I said. “We don’t have time to fight these guys off too.”

“What guys?” Tuck demanded, but then he frowned as shouts echoed through the deserted streets. Without asking another question, he grabbed my hand and we started running down the alley in the opposite direction, toward the older part of town, where the roads snaked their way up into the foothills. It was the long route home, weaving through the residential area, but we had no other choice.

While my mind screamed that I should be hobbling along, barely able to walk, my body said quite the opposite. Strands of moonlight filtered through the trees, soaking through my skin and deep into my veins. They recharged me, fueling every cell until my body nearly shook with the power of it. If I needed to, I could run for hours without tiring. I could do anything.

Given what we could be facing to get Graham back, I hoped that feeling wasn’t just the head injury talking.

A
S WE APPROACHED
my grandmother’s house, there was a sudden shift in the night air; it had faded before, but once again I could taste the bitter edge of danger on the wind. Every nerve in my body hummed to attention as I shifted from a run into a flat sprint. Suddenly I couldn’t get to the house fast enough. Grandmother had said we’d be protected there, but the warning snapping at the corners of my mind told me that might no longer be the case.

I barely broke a sweat as I sprinted harder and faster up the road. The air vibrated with violence, both recent and close. Violence involving two of us. Valkyries. Whatever power connected us was like a bat’s sonar. Silent communication and coordination that echoed through the night. While I couldn’t interpret it, I could sense it was there.

By the time I reached the driveway, I knew I was already too late. It was no longer the smell of battle that singed my throat, but its acrid aftertaste.

I ran up the driveway and slowed to a stop, standing just outside the circle of light cast by the porch lamp.

“What’s wrong?” Tuck was breathing hard when he finally caught me. He actually looked annoyed that I’d smoked him running home.

“Something bad happened here,” I told him.

“Well, things can’t get any worse, can they?” Tuck shrugged and started walking up the stairs toward the door.

“Careful,” I whispered, grabbing his arm and pulling him back down the stairs. My throat was dry. My legs and hands were trembling from the adrenaline.

“Easy, Ells,” he said, rubbing his forearm as I released it. “When’d you get so strong—and paranoid?”

“When I started to realize how much danger you and Graham were in,” I replied. Then, on instinct, I sniffed the air. All was quiet. Whatever had happened here was over. The house was empty. I could sense no one within.

“It’s safe,” I said.

“Nice work, Lassie.” It had felt so natural, I didn’t realize how strange it must have looked until I saw the wariness in Tuck’s eyes, the way he hesitated before he put his hand back on my arm.

“Promise one day you’ll tell me what’s going on with you,” he said. “Because that’s the only way I’m letting it slide right now.”

I nodded, grateful he understood I didn’t want to talk about it.

“Hilda?” Tuck’s voice echoed through the deserted rooms. There would be no answer.

The emptiness of the house was lead in my limbs. Grandmother was gone—she’d said she was leaving in pursuit of Odin. But whatever fight had just ended on these grounds might have changed things. Maybe her mission had been thwarted, or perhaps this meant it was well under way. Who had fought and who had won?

I didn’t know how to use these new instincts to find the answers I so desperately needed.

Tuck hurtled up the stairs, two at a time, and I followed more slowly, searching for anything that would give me an idea of what had happened in Grandmother’s house. “She’s not here.” Tuck’s voice broke off abruptly, making me double my pace.

Tuck tried to intercept me when I reached the top of the stairs. “I don’t think you want to go any farther,” he said, stretching his arms across the hallway, like that would stop me. I pushed past. “There’s a lot of blood.”

Of course there was.

That’s what I could sense—the physical aftermath of a brutal victory.

“I need to see it.”

“Her room is trashed—broken furniture, the works. It’s like there was a biker brawl in there.” His words were rapid-fire as he followed me down the hallway. When I froze, coming to a stop at my grandmother’s door, he hovered, expecting me to snap and have a meltdown any minute. From the looks of it, he was on the verge of one himself.