He'd heard my plea, and he'd… rejected me.
Brown eyes focused on mine, their depths the only thing keeping me grounded as the Earth itself seemed to fall from underneath my feet.
“Modi?” Annabel asked, concern evident in her voice. Gloved hands closed around my wrist, the chill of them slowly bringing me back to my body. “What’s wrong? You feel…”
Our bond. She felt everything I did. I stared at her, knowing that the most intimate, the most painful moment of my life was laid bare to her—and through her to Bjarni, my enemy.
I breathed slow and deep, until my steel grip was back, forcing the depths of my despair down.
Finally, I freed my wrists of her grip and stepped back, unwilling to see the hope break in those pretty eyes.
“Thor is not coming,” I said. “We are on our own.”
Twenty-Nine
Bjarni
I frowned. “What do you mean, he’s not—”
Annabel’s hand on my arm quieted me. She shook her head just in time for me to catch on to why our bond echoed with pain: Modi.
“Thor’s not coming?” Loki repeated, the glee in his voice like nails on a chalkboard in the quiet hall. “How peculiar. Seems he’s really not bothered about bringing the so-called Betrayer to justice. Could it truly be he’s too busy knocking Jotunn skulls and drinking mead to save his little bastard?”
I glared at my father, but the smirk on his lips spoke all too clearly of his intentions. He wasn’t just unbothered about needling Modi—he was actively trying to bring him misery.
Once upon a time I’d have laughed at such antics, delighted in my enemy’s pain. But that was before a rope made of flesh and iron tied us together, making me feel every ounce of agony he did. Before I’d known for myself what pain came from your own father betraying you.
“I don’t know how we’re going to get back to Valhalla—but we will,” the redhead said, the determination in his voice subverted by the despair ricocheting through the bond tying me to Annabel.
I breathed in deeply, and without looking at my father, undid my thick winter coat to reach for the hidden leather pouch I carried close to my chest. “I may have a solution.”
Doubt mixed with curiosity was plain on his face when I pulled out the old map and knelt to spread it on the floor, smoothing the curled edges as I looked over it.
“Bjarni! No!” Loki jolted forward, reaching for the map. I jerked on the rope, sending him ass over teakettle without so much as a glance in his direction.
“What are you doing, boy? If the Aesir discover—”
“I don’t give a flying crap,” I rumbled. “Ragnarök is at our doorstep. Saga and Grim are in enemy hands. Modi can burn it if he wants, once we’ve put a stop to this mess. All I care about right now is getting to Asgard before my brothers are a head shorter, and all you should care about is how you’re going to plead your case to the other gods once we get there. One more word out of you, and you’ll spend the rest of this trek with a sock stuffed down your gullet. Got it?”
Loki gasped an insulted breath, but whatever biting words he wanted to sling at me, he was wise enough to only mutter.
“What is this?” Modi asked as he bent by my side, brows knotted in a frown.
“It’s a map of the nine worlds,” I answered, pointing toward a small, swirling vortex I knew all too well. An unexpected pang of homesickness threatened to distract my focus. I forced it down. “This is a portal to Jotunheim. We can locate a path from Midgard back to Asgard using these portals.”
Modi’s frown deepened. “This is… this is a backdoor through the realms? The gods would never let such an artifact fall into Jotunn hands! How did you—”
“Does it really matter?” I asked him, eyebrow arched. “Not all magic in the nine world belongs to the Aesir, and Jotunn hands or no, this is our best shot at saving our brothers. Our only shot, unless you have any other bright ideas you’ve yet to share with the class.”
He looked like he wanted to protest, undoubtedly pushed by eons of Asa superiority complex, but reason must have set in, because in the end he only nodded.
“This is Iceland,” Annabel said as she crouched between us, her fingertips grazing the swirl of the portal near our farm. “How are we supposed to get there?”
I smoothed my hand across the map. The ink shimmered and flickered, then slid into new shapes and forms until it displayed a detailed map of North America. “Hopefully there’ll be one not too far from us.”
It was harder to spot the portals on this map thanks to the vast size of the continent. I frowned and squinted at the map, hoping against hope that one would be close to Seattle.
“There,” Annabel said, pointing to a small black ink smudge. Far up in Alberta, Canada.
“We won’t make it there in time,” I said softly. “We need something closer.”
Silence fell again as the three of us stared at the map while Loki tapped his fingers impatiently against the floor, thankfully keeping his mouth shut.
“Is that one?” Modi finally asked after several minutes.
I followed his finger to a small smudge north-east of Portland, Oregon. My heart picked up speed as I caught the swirl in its center.
“Yes! It’s…” I stopped myself, cursing under my breath.
“What?” Annabel asked.
“It leads to Niflheim. Fuck!”
“Niflheim?” she asked as Modi spat out a foul oath from her other side.
“The realm of fog and mist,” Loki said, that damned smirk back in his voice. “Darkness and ice rule there. It’s certainly no place to bring a vulnerable little human.”
“What did I say about keeping your mouth shut?” I growled at my father.
“He is right,” Modi said. “We cannot bring Annabel there. It is not just ice and darkness that lurks in Niflheim.”
“Are you joking right now?” our mate asked, a snarl in her voice that had no business coming from an omega. “If this is the only way we’ll make it back in time, then this is the portal we’re using. The human world’s currently hosting an unending winter and a big fucking serpent planning on covering the world in acid. It’s basically already ice-and-darkness time here. So, unless someone spots a better portal, let’s go.”
I exchanged a look with Modi. The girl had a point.
“Let’s see where the next closest portal in Niflheim is located first. We have limited time, and with all this blasted snow it’s going to take at least five to six days to make it down far enough into Oregon,” I said, brushing my palm over the map once more.
It shimmered again, ink moving until the jagged edges of Niflheim lay in front of us.
“There’s our spot,” I mumbled, placing the pad of my index finger on the location we’d be arriving from. “Now where’s the nearest portal out?”
It took the three of us a lot of scouring until finally Annabel prodded a black vortex several inches from my digit. “There. Where does that one lead?”
I squinted at the mark, then lit up in a grin as hope seeped through my veins. “Asgard! Stars be blessed, it’s a portal to Asgard!