Total pages in book: 115
Estimated words: 112500 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 563(@200wpm)___ 450(@250wpm)___ 375(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 112500 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 563(@200wpm)___ 450(@250wpm)___ 375(@300wpm)
She never got the chance. Dozens more strigoi poured from the night, fangs and taloned wings glinting in the lightning. Though their flight was little more than vicious leaping, their strength was monstrous.
Eyrun shoved her darker self down, flung Chiyo aside, and drew her sword.
The fight crashed around them. Ven met her flank, steel flashing. Chiyo recovered quickly, throat bruised but weapon raised, falling instinctively into the Valkyries’ orbit.
“Did they follow you?” Ven demanded, ducking a talon slash to gut a strigoi mid-spin. Fur and blood flew.
Chiyo rasped, “No! I had nothing to do with this. No one trails me without my knowing.”
Ven raised her brows as if she’d just been given a fun challenge. “Then the witches portaled them in.” Her sword swept in a gleam of silver and crimson.
“If they did, I would’ve heard about it!” Chiyo sliced through a wing, membrane shredding like paper. “Vamps or demons could’ve teleported them here.”
The strigoi barreled toward them in a frenzy, but the three females unconsciously formed a fighting pod, each protecting the other’s back.
Chiyo risked a breath to say, “Does this mean you’re not killing me?”
Ven laughed, feral and bright. “Night’s young, shifter.”
She and Chiyo moved in concert, striking and dodging in uncanny rhythm. Too well. As if they’d trained together for centuries.
Bad luck or not, this fox had timing.
Eyrun beheaded another, keeping an eye on her other sisters as they descended in waves.
Svána Spear-Song hurled her javelin, stunning two foes before beheading them with the razored rim of her shield. Battle-Ax Brigid’s twin axes mowed down fiends as if they were grass blades—until a strigoi dove from the air and pierced her gut with a wing.
Teeth gritted, Brigid dropped one ax, then used the offending wing to hold its owner steady for her other ax’s decapitation. She yanked the wing out of her body, shoved her entrails back in, clapped a palm over the wound, and fought on.
Whoever had sent this swarm had forgotten the folly of provoking shield-maidens. The initial outrage melted into pure exultation. For the first time in too long, they were using their training, and Freya’s daughters did nothing halfway.
Would they wonder—as Eyrun did—why they didn’t war more?
Their battle shrieks rolled like thunder across the fjords. Blood spattered their smiling faces and pooled beneath their boots.
The strigoi’s screams dwindled, drowned out by the Valkyrie’s wild laughter. Adrenaline pulsed in their veins, the joy of combat turning to sacred mirth.
Above them, auroras glazed the night, ribbons of color spilling like godlight, and forks of lightning struck repeatedly near the fortress tower.
The tower that held her.
Eyrun froze, blade dripping. The bolts kept returning to that same place.
Duck indeed, she thought grimly and sprinted.
She raced through the halls and up the stairs, blood trailing in her wake. She sheathed her sword and burst into the chamber. Pages of the Book of Warriors fluttered as she flew past.
The slumbering Valkyrie lay serene, skin flushed as if freshly emerged from a dream.
“Wake the hells up, sister!” Eyrun shouted, palms slamming against the coffin. “Why did you want Ven and me and even that fox alive? What’s unfolding?”
She imagined the Valkyrie’s eyes opening, could picture them based on Ven’s description: blank, shimmering gold, alight with laughter or prophecy.
Silence answered.
Eyrun pressed her forehead to the glass, fogging it with a hard breath. “You know something. I think you’re still seeing visions, even if you can’t tell us.”
A dim creak echoed through the room.
The Valkyrie’s hand twitched, one finger rising slowly, as if she awaited something like a bluebird or a butterfly to alight there.
Or maybe she beckoned.
To her tune, lightning danced closer.
Chapter 23
Arctos
“Faster, vampire.”
Instead of talking back to him, Emilia only nodded and pushed harder up the trail to the peak.
Weeks into this regimen, Berserkers across the ravine had started gathering to watch, their bemusement undisguised. Arctos wasn’t the only one who’d noticed how relentlessly she trained.
She’d made real progress. That first alder had fallen; more had followed. Her hands had blistered, healed, hardened. The vomiting had stopped. She ate regularly. Ate well.
And sitting across from her at meals had made it harder to view her as a vampire at all. Aside from her small, dormant fangs—no bigger than a Berserker’s canines—she appeared normal.
Her normalcy unsettled him most. If she survived long enough to complete her transition, would her thirst stay buried…or blaze? Could she drink animal blood, or would the scent of his people undo her?
Across the ravine, children played their new game of vampire chase, shrill laughter as they pretended to flee from invisible fangs. A cold thought lingered: one day she might make their games real.
She paused on a cliff near the summit, not winded, just looking out. Her cheeks were pinkened, eyes far-seeing.
When he joined her, he took in her scent, now that his sense of it had finally returned after his mission in Bloodreach. Sunlight, warmth, woman. No hint of incense.