His words only made me angrier. He didn’t want to hurt me because he believed I was needed to secure his lineage—and to save his own hide from Ragnarök. He didn’t care if his sons survived, so long as one of them stayed alive to tie me to his blood.
I fired another ball of energy at his stupid face, seething when his dark magic swallowed it up.
“Careful, Annabel. You have to conserve your magic,” Modi cautioned. The warm press of his hand against my nape steadied me, his magic flowing into me, sparking along my veins.
Loki’s dark magic swirled, and from it sprang two wolves the size of work horses. They snapped and snarled, bounding toward us with froth dangling from their maws.
“More trickery?” I asked my two companions.
“The kind of trickery that can tear your throat out,” Bjarni growled. He clutched his sword and leapt forward, swinging it at the two beasts. His blade sliced through the first wolf’s neck, cleaving the animal in two. It died with a haunting howl, its body disintegrating into a plume of smoke.
The other wolf snarled and threw itself at Modi. A sharp jab of pain lanced through my bond with the redheaded god, and I whirled just in time to see lightning strike, illuminating the wolf’s ethereal body from within before it too became naught more than fog.
Blood dripped from a gash on Modi’s cheek. He touched it with his free hand and cursed under his breath. “Damned trickster."
“Told you,” Bjarni said.
Modi snarled, hurling his arm forward. A spinning bolt of lightning shot at Loki, but before it could impact, he flicked a finger at it and it turned into a burst of brightly colored butterflies.
Again the God of Mischief manipulated the dark energy around him. Beneath us the earth rumbled, and I squeaked and reached on instinct for both my mates just as vines sprouted up from the snow, wrapping tightly around our legs.
“I’m sorry, I just don’t have time to teach you younglings how to wield magic properly,” Loki called out with mock regret. “I’ve really got to get going. I’ll see you on the other side of Ragnarök.” He gave us a wave and turned to walk away without any sign of urgency.
“Come back here, you scoundrel! We are bringing you to justice for what you have done!” Modi barked.
If it had been a less serious situation, I might have mocked him for his choice of explicative. Once again he raised his free hand and called down a bolt of lightning, sending it into the vine wrapped around his trapped legs.
Black scorch marks were the only indications he’d even hit his target—the plant bound him as tightly as ever.
“Shit!” I muttered, reaching for my own magic. Without having to ask, Modi guided me, and I sent a bolt of our combined energy directly into the unnatural vegetation keeping me trapped.
It swayed a little, but sprung back to form.
“Stop him—worry about getting free later!” Bjarni hissed to my right. He squeezed my hand. “Hurry, sweetie. If we lose sight of him, we’re never catching up to him again.”
He had a point.
“Guide me,” I said to Modi.
The redhead’s presence in me intensified as he took control of my flow of magic and reached. Loki, who’d gotten to the edge of the clearing while we fought his vines, stumbled as the snow beneath his feet wrapped up along his thighs before freezing to solid ice, locking him in place.
“Nice,” Bjarni chuckled. “See how he likes it.”
Loki twisted around to glare at us over his shoulder. “Careful—you’re starting to make me mad. I might need you alive, but that doesn’t mean I can’t very easily make you wish for death.”
“Ignore him,” Modi mumbled. “Work on the vines. Quickly now.”
“We’re not going to beat him with magic,” Bjarni said without taking his eyes off his father. “He’s too experienced. If we’re going to take him, it’s gonna have to be with brute force.”
“Brute force has a tendency not to work against experienced magic-users,” Modi grumbled even as he directed my flow of energy at the vines. “Case in point—two gods and a Norn-blessed girl currently stuck in a damned bush!”
“I think he might have a point,” I said, pointing at Bjarni’s sword. “Give it to me.”
My blond mate arched an eyebrow, but handed me his blade pommel-first.
Gently I placed my palm on the blade and called on my magic once more. Frankly I wasn’t sure what I was doing, but even without Modi’s guidance, my magic seemed to flow into the metal until it resonated with that well deep inside me.
I blinked my eyes open and handed it back to him. “Try it out.”
Apparently trusting my abilities far more than I did, Bjarni grabbed his sword and swung it at the vines around his feet. They parted with a satisfying slick of his blade, the brambles falling to the ground. A few more swings, and he was free.
“We do not have time for you to free us too,” Modi said, his voice urgent. I followed his gaze and saw Loki make quick work of the last block of ice still encompassing one of his feet. It looked like he was aiming a high-powered laser at it, the way it melted around his flesh.
“I’ve got this,” Bjarni rumbled, raising his blade. His handsome face was locked in a fierce scowl. “Cover me.”
He leapt across the clearing, his powerful legs carrying him faster than a regular human would be able to move. He roared a battle shout and the air vibrated around us all, raising the small hairs at the back of my neck.
More vines sprouted around his feet, but he slashed through them with a single swing of his sword, hardly slowing to do so.
Two more shadow-wolves leapt from Loki’s fingertips, and then another two.
One died from lightning, the other from a ball of golden energy, and the two remaining from Bjarni’s blade.
Loki bared his teeth at his son and raised both hands out straight, sending a shockwave through the air that shot Bjarni backward as if an invisible giant had kicked him in the gut. He landed on his ass by my side, gasping for breath.
“Damn!” Modi growled as I bent as best I could to ensure Bjarni wasn’t injured.
“Just winded, sweetie,” he panted. “Don’t… waste your focus… on me. Focus… on my… asshole father.”
I glanced at Loki, who’d finally managed to get free and was fleeing at full speed this time. Modi pulled bolts of lightning from the sky, but he only managed to slow the cowardly god by forcing him to raise his magic in protection or dodge the blasts.
We were never going to capture him this way.
Unless…
It came to me more as an instinctive pull rather than a thought. My hand still clutching Modi’s, I reached my other out to grab onto Bjarni too.
A current of awareness passed between us, not spurred by magic, but every bit as intense. And then, without giving any of us a moment to prepare, we became one.
All barriers of flesh and identity blurred and vanished, sweeping me into a warm, throbbing awareness. Anger, hurt, love, fear, desperation, longing—they were my emotions, and they were not. They belonged to all of us. I felt them—both of them—cocooning me from all sides, their consciousnesses shielding me.
And I felt their strength.
We were one.
My mind blinked back into reality, where I was once again staring into Bjarni’s blue-gray eyes. Only now they glowed with a light that seemed to radiate from within him—from within all of us.