Heroes (Eirik Book 2) (46 page)

I focused on my back muscles, localizing the shift. The sound of my favorite duster ripping filled the air as the giant wings shot out. When they rushed each other, I bitch-slapped them face down into the snow and didn’t ease up.

“When I lift up my wings, you two had better be ready to act like grown-ups. Mother’s orders.” They tried to wiggle out from under the weight of my wings with little result. Echo started cursing me out. “Dude, shut up, or I will give you the thrashing you obviously need.”

“You could try,” he mumbled.

I would one of these days, but Mother would not forgive me. “I have places to go instead of refereeing you two. And you owe me a duster. This was a present from my grandmother, and my favorite. That alone is enough to make me want to whoop both of your asses from here to Earth and back.”

“Bring it on, Junior,” Echo retorted.

Seriously, the man had a death wish. I lifted my wings and set them free. They both left bloodstains on the snow and looked like crap despite their healed wounds.

“Stay down. Both of you.” Echo glared at me before his focus shifted to Rhys. His eyes glowed with hatred. “No one gets up until you talk this out.“

“This was none of your business, Baldurson.”

“When it bothers my mother it is.” The look Echo shot me was filled with hatred. I didn’t care. “Start talking. I had to put up with your attitude during our mission across the realms, but I will not do it again when it upsets my mother. So, who goes first?”

Silence.

“One of you will have to start talking, because no one is leaving until you do. And the longer I’m forced to stay here and wait for you two, the more pissed I’ll get. So unless you want me to go full dragon on your asses, someone had better start talking.”

They continued to glare at each other instead of talking. I shrugged off my torn duster and studied the rip. It was long. I waved Ranger over.

“Could you take this to Maera and ask her to fix it while I wait for these two boneheads?”

“No problem,” he mumbled, his eyes volleying between Echo and Rhys. I could tell he was dying to find out what the fight was about.

“Thanks, Ranger.” I waited until he left, then etched runes on my shirt and felt the rip in the back come together. Then I studied the two reapers. Damn Druids! I hated them at this very moment, hated their stubbornness. “So no one is talking? Fine. We’ll stay here, until you do. Call it a timeout. I don’t care if you turn blue because of the cold. I, on the other hand, have my scales, so I’m fine.”

Silence continued.

“Are you really going to make us sit out here like some damn two-year-olds?” Echo snarled.

“Until you quit behaving like one, yes. Or until I decide to shoot fire at your feet and make you dance.” Rhys chuckled. “You too, Rhys. How can two people hold a grudge for… what?”

“A millennium. And I’ll continue to do so if he doesn’t see there’s no excuse for betraying your own,” Echo retorted.

“Good,” Rhys shot back. “Because as long as he is so hotheaded and incapable of thinking before he acts, he’ll never understand that people make mistakes and when they are family, you forgive them.”

“That traitorous bastard was never my family,” Echo snapped.

“We took a blood oath, you sanctimonious piece of shit,” Rhys yelled. “You, Dev, and I were brothers in every way. You broke it when you killed him.”

“Oh, so this is about some dead guy?” I said.

“Shut up!” they both snapped at the same time, and I grinned. If they turned against me, they might actually agree on something.

“He betrayed us and many of our own died,” Echo snarled. “You never said a word when I told you I’d killed him. Instead, you turned your back on me.”

“No,
you
turned your back on me and Nara, and started making unilateral decisions. You didn’t trust anyone anymore after that except yourself. We became nothing to you, except puppets in your plot for revenge.” He jumped to his feet and started to pace. “We were perfectly fine being Valkyries, but
you
,”—he jabbed a finger in Echo’s direction—“decided being Grimnirs was better because we would take revenge on those who’d destroyed our race.
You
decided we should ignore Valkyrie laws, go to Nidavellir, get as many artavo as we could buy from the Dwarves, and turn thousands of our people into Immortals whether they wanted it or not.”

Echo’s eyes glowed and for one second, I was sure he’d leap up and snap Rhys’ neck. Instead, he stood and dusted off the snow from his coat. When he spoke, his voice was calmer, but deadly.

“Tell me where you are hiding his rotting corpse.”

Rhys sneered. “Why? So you can burn it? And it’s not rotting. I preserved it for the day I’ll find his soul and the right spell to bring him back.”

“He got his shot at being one of us and he screwed it, Rhys,” Echo said. “His soul is rotten. And like a coward, he took off instead of allowing us to reap him and send him off with dignity.”

Rhys growled and kicked at the snow. “Do you ever listen to the words coming out of your mouth? There’s no dignity in spending an eternity in Corpse Strand.”

“It’s called penance,” Echo shot back. “Knowing Dev, he’s done many despicable things in the last millennium, so whatever you bring back with your necromancy crap will not just be a traitor. It will be a monster. His dark soul deserves eternity in Corpse Strand.”

Rhys jabbed a finger at Echo. “Dev will walk again and when he does, you will face what you did to him. What you did to us.” He let out a string of words in a language I assumed was Druidic, then looked at me. “I’m done.”

Okay, that was very illuminating. “I don’t know, guys. Mother said you need to fix this and it doesn’t sound like you have. We’ll revisit this.”

“Are you kidding me?” Echo asked. “I’m done dealing with him.”

“No, you’re not. We’ll sit down again and discuss this at length. I don’t know this Dev person or your history with him, but whoever he is, you two have strong feelings for him.”

“I despise him,” Echo said. “Is that strong enough for you?”

“If it makes you sit down and talk, yep. I don’t know why you killed the dude, but you need to explain it to Rhys.”

“Damn right,” Rhys retorted.

Echo gave him the finger.

“And I don’t know why or how you preserved his body, Rhys, but bringing a dead body back to life is a nasty business. When the soul is dark, that’s another level of nastiness.”

“Exactly what I told him,” Echo chimed in.

“So you two talk and when I come back, let me know what’s next for this Dev guy.” I glanced behind me. Ranger was still in the hall, which meant racing back there for another duster before leaving. I focused on the quiet Druids. They still looked pissed, but they weren’t ready to rip apart each other’s throats. Still, someone would have to keep an eye on them while I was gone. “Where’s Nara?”

“She cannot know about this,” Rhys said quickly.

Echo laughed. “She doesn’t know?”

“Of course not. You know how she felt about him.”

“Is that why you want to bring the traitor back? For your cousin?”

“Stop calling him a traitor.”

“He snitches like one, so he must be—”

Rhys rushed him, but Echo was ready. This time, I went into superspeed after a partial shift, grabbed both their chins, and snapped their necks. I stepped back and let them drop onto the snow.

“Idiots,” I murmured.

“I agree,” Nara said. “Let me guess. They were fighting over Dev.”

“Yep. So who in Hel’s Mist is Dev?”

“A former friend whose worthless soul I’d love to personally reap. He was a pain in the butt alive and even more so dead.” She engaged strength runes, looped an arm around Rhys, and I took Echo. “I’ll make sure they sleep it off, but don’t hold your breath. This is not over.”

We carried them towards the hall.

“What was that about?” Daiku asked when we met him. He took Echo.

“I have no idea.” Grimnirs loved to gossip, and I wasn’t going start a rumor about some dark soul. Who in their right mind would want to put one in a body and bring them back to life? I went to find a coat. Hopefully Maera was done mending it because I was done waiting to see Celestia.

~*~

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Ednah Walters holds a PhD in Chemistry and is a stay-at-home mother of five. She is also a USA Today bestselling author. She writes about flawed heroes and the women who love them.

Her award-winning YA Paranormal Romance—Runes Series—started with Runes and has a total of 7 books to date. The next one, Heroes, will be released in March 2016. Her last book, Witches, was a Readers’ Favorite Awards winner.

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Whether she’s writing about Valkyries, Norns, and Grimnirs, or Guardians, Demons, and Archangels, or even contemporary Irish family in the west coast, love, family, and friendship play crucial roles in all her books.

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Then without any warning, a month before her eighteenth birthday, everything does change. A guardian finds her. He explains, in a strangely familiar accent, that she was stashed on Earth for safekeeping and has been lost to her family ever since. And it is time to return home. To First World; a land of unimagined beauty.