Claimed by Gods Read online

  I could adjust my usual strategies. A trickster was nothing if not adaptable.

  Thor was lumbering over to join us. I waved him back, my gaze staying focused on Ari. A muscle in her jaw twitched, and she clenched it tighter. She was frightened under the defiance.

  “Ari,” I said, low and soft and most importantly, honest. “I understand. We’ve whisked you away from everything familiar, and now we’re making demands and setting restrictions… Of course you don’t want any part in that. I don’t want to be doing this either. But it’s the best idea we’ve come up with, and I swear we’ll do whatever we can to ease your way—and it’s better than being dead, isn’t it? Because that was your alternative. The life you had is gone either way.” I snapped my fingers. “Like that. Would you really rather you weren’t here at all?”

  Ari’s shoulders started to come down. The angry flush faded from her face. She hadn’t thought it through before, had she? We’d told her she’d died, but how could a mortal mind wrap itself around that possibility when as far as she could tell she was still perfectly alive?

  “I was really dead?” she said. “Completely, not just… dying, or in a coma, or something?”

  I nodded. “The magic we used to summon you could only latch on to a spirit already—if recently—detached from its former body. We rescued you from the void, pixie.”

  That muscle twitched again, but it wasn’t fear this time. “I’m not a pixie,” she spat out.

  I let myself smile. “You haven’t met any pixies if you take that as an insult. They’re small, sure, but most of the ones I’ve known were tougher than I am.”

  With luck, she’d prove to be too. I needed her to be. The others had been hesitant enough about going along with my plan. If this situation went haywire, I wasn’t going to convince them of anything else for another century or two.

  If it went well, then maybe I’d get a little less grousing the next time I made a totally logical and insightful observation.

  Ari didn’t seem to know quite what to make of my response. She sucked her lower lip under her teeth. And abruptly I found myself noticing that along with being stubborn and bold and quick, she was rather pretty in her pixie-ish way. As if that observation helped us any at the moment.

  “You’re gods,” she said finally. “Can’t you do something about the whole dying thing? Bring me back to life as a human again?”

  “Baldur might have, if he’d been there before you completely kicked the bucket,” I said, nodding to the pale twin. “But he wasn’t. And now that’s done. We can’t just flip a switch and send you back.”

  “So it’s being dead or being trapped here.”

  “You’re not exactly trapped,” I said. “You’ll have plenty of freedom—when we know you aren’t going to run off and cause all sorts of chaos in the mortal world. We’ve given you a gift, really. We just want to be sure you’re going to use it… responsibly.”

  She wrinkled her nose at me, but her gaze had turned thoughtful. Her jaw worked. And I made an educated stab in the dark. Cutthroat or not, almost every human had a soft spot for someone other than themselves.

  “There are people back in that world you’re worried about, aren’t there?” I said. “People you care about? If you were dead, you really would be gone from their lives. Like this, you could at least keep watch from time to time. See them again. It might not be the same, but it’s more than you’d have otherwise.”

  She was quiet for a moment, locked in that awkward stance with her legs mid-stride. “All right,” she said. “I’ll see what I can do to help you with this Odin thing if you’ll teach me how to use these powers you gave me. And if you can get something for me.”

  Still making demands, huh? I managed not to chuckle, since she’d probably bristle at that. “What is it you want, pixie?”

  She grimaced at the nickname, but not as sharply as before. “When I died, I was carrying some stuff on me. I had a switchblade in the right hip pocket of my jeans. About four inches long folded, with a marbled dark blue handle. I want it back. It didn’t die, so you can do that much, right?”

  “I can,” I said. It shouldn’t even be that difficult, I didn’t think. “I’ll go get it right now. But I’ll need to touch you. Hod, I think you can unfreeze her now.”

  She stiffened up even as Hod flicked his hand to dismiss the chilly shadow that had held her in place. But she stayed there, braced, as I shifted a little closer. Just close enough that I could rest my hand gently on the bare side of her shoulder.

  The energy of her spirit tingled against my fingers. I absorbed the feel of it, the rush and the flow, the distinctive pattern that was hers alone. Then I stepped away from her and slipped out the door.

  Outside, hot muggy air washed over me. I set off, letting the power imbued in my shoes of flight carry me. My strides stretched farther and farther until I was taking miles with every step—invisible to the mortal eyes I flew past, of course. On and on I soared through a blur of scenery until I’d traced the fading trail Ari’s spirit had left to its source.

  I came to a stop under the dim buzzing lights of a morgue. A rather unpleasant one even as morgues went. The air stunk with disinfectant and an underlying odor of rot, and the steel doors lined along one wall were smudged. I could tell which one our valkyrie’s former body lay in; I could see in my mind’s eye the mash of skull and brain and hair, the splintered bones. I didn’t need to really see that.

  Her belongings. They’d stripped off the clothes and tossed them in a basket—here. And there was her precious switchblade. An interesting personal effect. I supposed it fit the girl.

  I fished it out of the bloody fabric and washed it and my hands at the sink. The stench of death crept deeper into my lungs, and a shudder passed through me. Ugh. She had better give me plenty of credit for this.

  I raced back the way I’d come, the knife nestled against my palm. When I strode back into our country house’s living room, I found everyone arranged much as they had been in the beginning—Ari back in her chair, my godly companions scattered across the seats around her. No one was talking. They all appeared to have been waiting for me.

  What a useless lot they were sometimes. I shook my head at them with a grin and held out my hand to Ari, brandishing the switchblade. Her face brightened. She snatched it from me and tucked it close to her chest.

  Humans were such strange beings. I couldn’t recall seeing a mortal that attached to a piece of weaponry since King Arthur and his legendary sword.

  “There you have it,” I said. “Do we have a deal?”

  “I already said I’d try to help, didn’t I?” she said, and paused. “There is something else that occurred to me.”

  I flopped back into my previous seat, stretching out my legs, only a tad winded from that lope across the country. “By all means, share your concerns.”

  She hesitated again. Then she said, “What would you do with me if I refused to follow your orders? If I told you to forget it, not a chance?”

  Oh. She hadn’t failed to think that aspect through. I waited, but none of the others spoke up. Thor looked at his hands, folding them in front of him. They’d decided explaining this aspect was my job too. It figured, didn’t it? Make Loki do the dirty work. That was how it always went.

  I sighed. “We aren’t cruel, Ari. We gave you this new life—we’re not in any hurry to end it. If you decided you were going to do nothing more than sit around the house all day, then so be it. But we can’t risk you endangering anyone else. You’re our responsibility. If we felt you were making yourself a risk to mortal society—or anyone else—we would have to return you to the state in which we found you.”

  “Dead,” she said, holding my gaze.

  “Yes.”

  “I guess you haven’t given me much choice then, have you?” she said, with a little smile so jagged it cut right through my chest.

  I’d picked her. This was my doing. And now there was one more person who’d be pissed off if it turned
out I’d been wrong.

  6

  Aria

  For such a large house, the kitchen was awfully cozy. Just big enough for a countertop and the usual appliances—retro-looking enough that I suspected they were older than me, and possibly older than Mom on top of that—and a four-seater table tucked away in the corner.

  I kind of liked it. I felt a lot more secure tucked away there, eating the sandwich I’d thrown together out of the wide assortment of options in the fridge and cupboard, than I would have at the vast dining table I’d caught a glimpse of on the way down the hall.

  I’d planned to get started on this whole becoming super-powerful being right away, but the second I’d stood up again after my most recent escape attempt, a wave of dizziness had washed over me alongside a stomach gurgle loud enough that Loki had grinned. So I was going to stock up on energy and gather my strength before I took anything else on. I guessed it made sense that dying and being reborn and all that running around would have taken its toll.

  Reborn as a valkyrie. My skin still crawled, remembering the alien weight of those wings. Could I actually fly with them? The idea made me shiver in a weird blend of anticipation and horror. My fingers squeezed around the handle of my switchblade, which I was still holding beneath the table. My borrowed slacks had pockets, but the warm plastic in my hand made me feel more grounded.

  This whole situation was so crazy. Gods. Magic powers. Coming back from the dead. But I’d seen the proof with my own eyes. I remembered dying. I didn’t know how anyone could have faked that or the stunts those gods had pulled. Those long minutes while my legs had been locked in place, prickling with the cold of the shadowy vise around them...

  That was over now. No point in thinking about it. I had to focus on what was ahead. I’d learn whatever powers this weird collective could supposedly teach me, and then maybe I’d be in a position to slip their magical safeguards and actually get out of here.

  From what I’d gathered, I’d lost less than a day. Petey wouldn’t be worried about not seeing me or any gifts from me, not yet. Sometimes I’d had to go a whole week before I could safely drop in, and I’d just secreted him away for part of his lunch hour at the elementary school a few days ago.

  Unless… What if the police had reported my death to Mom by now? What if she’d told Petey?

  The image of his sweet and way-too-innocent little face swam up in my mind. The squeeze of his six-year-old’s arms when he’d hugged me that last time. The excited sweep of his hands as he’d told me about the castle he’d built in class.

  And also the holes forming at the toes of his shoes, because Mom couldn’t bother to pick him up new ones. The shadow that had crossed his expression when he’d mentioned her and Ivan, her current guy.

  You could keep watch, Loki had said. I was going to do a hell of a lot more than that. I could keep out of the rest of the “mortal” world—good riddance to most of it anyway—but I couldn’t abandon my little brother. No way, no how.

  I had to get back to him as soon as I could, just to let him know that I was okay—and that I’d never stop looking after him.

  I took another bite of ham, lettuce, and mayo on rye, and Thor ambled into the kitchen. The gods had been giving me some space since our big talk, but I guessed his stomach had gotten the better of him too. He leaned over to peer into the fridge and pulled out a plate with a couple of leftover drumsticks, so big they had to be turkey or goose.

  “Mind if I join you?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “It’s your house.” Or was it? How exactly did real estate work when you were a divine immortal being?

  In any case, it was more his than it was mine.

  He sat down across from me and dug right into his meal, which as far as I could tell was a mid-morning “snack.” In the time it took me to finish the last quarter of my sandwich, he’d cleaned one bone and pretty much finished the other, plowing through the meat with an occasional smack of his lips and a pleased gleam in his warm brown eyes.

  “A body that big needs a lot of fuel to keep it running, huh?” I said.

  Thor looked up from the bone he’d just inhaled one last fragment of meat off of. He blinked at me. Then a deep chuckle rolled from his lungs. “What can I say? Big guy, big appetite.”

  “Hmm,” I said. “I could have polished two of those off.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Oh, yeah?”

  I jabbed my pointer finger at him. “Don’t make any comments about me being a pixie or whatever either. I could drink you under the table too.”

  At that claim, he let out a full belly laugh, so powerful it rattled the table his legs had barely fit underneath. “Now that I would really like to see. I haven’t even met another god who could out-drink me, unless it’s Loki winning by trickery.”

  “Maybe later,” I said, brushing the crumbs off my hands. “I’m thinking valkyrie lessons will probably sink in better if I’m sober.”

  “You can start with me if you’d like,” he said. “Since I’m already here and all.”

  Out of my five saviors-slash-captors, I had to say Thor made me feel most at ease. Maybe because it seemed like there wasn’t a whole lot of him that wasn’t right there for me to see. He definitely didn’t strike me as a schemer like Loki. And who knew what was going on in the heads of the others.

  Thor, I got the impression, said what he meant, and if you didn’t like it, well, maybe he’d convince you with that mythical hammer of his I figured had to be around here somewhere.

  “All right,” I said, getting up and sliding my switchblade into my pocket. “What part of valkyrie-ing are you an expert in?”

  He chuckled again. “Come on. It’s too hot to be running around outside, so we’d better use the great room.”

  The great room turned out to be a room even more vast than the living room we’d assembled in earlier. A huge brick fireplace dominated one wall, but the burnt logs in it looked old. An assortment of chairs, sofas, and tables had been pushed to the walls. Thor stepped into the middle of the empty space and wiped his hands together. I had the feeling he used this room for activities along the lines of what we were about to do fairly frequently.

  “It was usually Odin who picked and created the valkyries,” Thor said. “But we each have our own sort of connection to him and qualities we share that we were able to pass on to you.” He gave me a broad smile. “I gave you lightning.”

  “Lightning?” I looked down at my arms. I hadn’t felt all that zappy so far.

  “Strong reflexes,” he said. “Speed and power. You were obviously pretty tough before, but now you are even more.” He grinned.

  “Hmm.” I flexed my muscles. Did they have more juice than I was used to?

  “Your powers will only fully activate when they’re triggered—or if you consciously call on them,” Thor said. “Otherwise we’d all go around smashing every glass we picked up and stomping holes in the floor accidentally.”

  I cocked my head at him. “Somehow I think you’re speaking from personal experience there.”

  He laughed. “Maybe. Let’s just say it’s useful to be somewhat normal when normal is all you need. But I can help you get a sense of the strength you can call on, so you know how to reach for it. I’ll just need to provoke it a little…”

  He took a sudden step toward me and swung his fist at my head. My pulse jumped, and I ducked. He hadn’t punched that hard, I could tell from the breeze of his arm passing over my head, but he wasn’t going completely easy on me. His other fist was flying toward me an instant later.

  I scrambled backward across the smooth hardwood floor, and Thor followed. He was still smiling, but the glint in his eyes was so eager it was almost terrifying. He could pummel me into a pulp if he wanted to—I had no doubt about that.

  The thought sent a jolt of panic through my chest that seemed to splinter there, tingling through all my nerves. I wove and dodged, but each movement smoothed out, coming faster and easier. The frantic beat of my heart settled in
to a sharp but steady drumming. I slipped out of Thor’s range with a speed that took my breath away.

  Lightning. That was what this felt like, all right. Electricity dancing through my veins.

  “You can feel it now, can’t you?” Thor said, sounding not even slightly out of breath. This whole exercise was no effort for him at all. “Get a little creative. Play around with it. You can do more than you might think.”

  He ducked his head in an unexpected charge, and I leapt out of the way. The push of my legs propelled me up over him. I found myself spinning past him and landing with a thump in a crouch behind him. The impact barely rattled my bones. A startled laugh spilled from my lips.

  I was a fucking superhero now. Just try to let anyone stop me when I got the hang of this upgraded body.

  Thor upped his game now that I was finding my feet. He moved faster, swung harder, and tried to trip me up with slashes of his feet as well as his fists. I kept darting out of the way even more quickly, the air whistling in my ears.

  We circled the room at least a dozen times. I rebounded off the walls, vaulted from the furniture. Each move came even more effortlessly.

  A prickling burn was spreading through my muscles, but it was a good burn. Like I was pushing them to a limit they’d always wanted to reach. I didn’t know how long we’d been at this, but I felt like I could keep going for hours.

  An impulse gripped me to push him harder. Why did I have to be always on the defensive here? Anyone smart knew you didn’t go starting fights you didn’t need to get into—but they also knew to go for the gut if the fight came to you.

  I dodged another punch and sprang forward instead of backward. My fist swiped at Thor’s well-packed belly. His arm slammed down to block me. My knuckles smacked his gut for just an instant before his block sent me tumbling to the side.