Kissing Chris was nothing like kissing Brad.
Brad had always been abrasive, fumbling; his tongue moved like a jackhammer the moment I’d part my lips, and his mouth was almost always dry. It felt like kissing a fish. With a jackhammer tongue.
Even in the world of the dead, Chris’s kiss was infinitely different; his lips were warm, the perfect mix of soft but firm, and when I felt his chest expand against mine, my own lungs lit with heat. With desire. I had never liked kissing Brad. It had always felt like a battle for dominance. With Chris, it was opening up. Both offering. A mutual communion.
He wrapped his arms around me, falling against me, letting himself be heavy and light.
I hadn’t planned on kissing him. I hadn’t planned on saying I needed him.
But I did.
And I meant it. Both actions.
He had said he loved me. Had he meant that?
“Kaira,” Freyja said behind me. Her hand was on my shoulder, and my happy little daydream snapped into reality. I pulled back from Chris and opened my eyes.
We were no longer in Chris’s hell.
To be sure, we were still in the Underworld; a field of skulls paved the ground around us, stretching into a hazy infinity. But Chris was there, held in my arms, his forehead now nuzzled against my neck. I didn’t want to admit how comfortable it felt, having him there. How natural, the scratch of his scruff against my skin, the warmth of his breath. He was warm. So warm. I wanted to fold myself around him and soak up his heat for eternity.
Gods, why was I so cold?
“You did it,” I whispered. Then Chris leaned back and looked around. He didn’t let go of me though. If anything, his hold tightened.
“What?” he asked. He sounded groggy, like he’d just woken up. If only this could just be a nightmare. When was the part where we woke up and everything was okay? “Where are we?”
“The Underworld,” I replied. I tapped the ground with my foot, the one small tile in the entire landscape that didn’t contain a skull. “And you, my friend, were just right here.”
“I don’t—”
“We can discuss this later,” Freyja interrupted. “We must go. Now.”
I shifted my body, slid my hand down to Chris’s. It was the only thing that felt warm out here. The only thing that felt solid. Chris’s hand tightened in mine. He tried to take a step back, but the moment he did, he stumbled over a face and would have toppled had I not been beside him.
“Kaira. What is this? Where are we?”
“I already told you,” I said. “We’re in the Underworld.” I tried to be calm, but Freyja’s words had me on edge. I was acutely aware that Heru was out there. Somewhere. And injured. Unless that, too, was just some figment of Chris’s inner hell . . . It wasn’t a risk I was going to take.
Chris wasn’t looking at me, though. Just as he wasn’t looking at the faces beneath his feet. He was staring at Freyja like she was death incarnate.
And I guess, in many ways, she was.
“What is that?” he whispered.
It was stupid, that his words made me cringe. Not because I was worried about what Freyja would think or do, but because . . . because she was part of me.
That realization made me look at her with a completely different awareness. It also made me wonder what would happen on the other side of this journey. With Chris back in the land of the living, what would she and I do? Would we still be battling for control over my body? Or would this whole endeavor grant us a certain understanding?
“That,” I said, trying once more to keep my thoughts in line, “is Freyja.”
“I recognize her,” he said. His voice was a low growl. “She was the one trying to control you.”
“Was,” I said. “But not anymore.” I looked at her, raised an eyebrow, but she didn’t catch my unspoken question. She was too busy staring at the hazy sky. “You can trust her.”
“She’s a god. We can’t trust her. She’s just trying to use you. Us. If you’d seen—”
“We don’t have time for this,” Freyja said. She looked back down, stared between the two of us like she was tired of babysitting. “We must get moving.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you.”
“Chris,” I said, squeezing his hand to remind him I was there. “She’s on our side; it’s—”
“No!” he said, pushing me away. “You can’t believe her. She’s just like him. She just wants to use you.”
“We really can’t be doing this right now,” Freyja said. “We have to get out of here.”
“I won’t go back.”
His words were steel. I stepped to the side and looked at him, a knot of fear in my chest.
“What?” I whispered.
He wasn’t looking at me. He was staring straight at Freyja, his hands balled into fists.
“I’m not going back with you. I know what you want. I’ve seen what you’d have me do. You’re no different from him. You only want to kill. I’m not going to let you use me like that. I’m not going back.”
“Chris,” I said. I tried to keep my voice level. I saw a glimpse of what he’d been dealing with in his own hell; I couldn’t blame him for being reticent. But I didn’t have time to fill him in on the blanks. “I just came through the Underworld to get you. What the hell do you mean you aren’t coming back with me?”
“He’s still out there,” he said. He didn’t break eye contact with Freyja.
“We really, really don’t have time for this,” Freyja said. “The Aesir is not here. Which is precisely where we should be. Not here.” She leaned in. “Even if we aren’t attacked, neither of you will last much longer down here. We must leave now.”
“We attacked him. In there.” My words were hesitant. “Is he gone? Trapped?”
“It is not important. None of it will be important if the both of you fade out before we reach the mortal world. The Aesir is the least of our worries.”
But I knew her by now. I knew she didn’t believe it, not really. But I also knew her explanation wasn’t for me.
“I’m not going—” Chris began, but I rounded on him.
“Shut up,” I hissed. “Do you trust me or not?”
He opened his mouth, then shut it again. His eyes searched mine. Those eyes . . . they glimmered gold, but they were so muted. He looked like a washed-out painting.
“I do,” he said finally. I’ll admit: It made my heart flip over.
“Then trust me in this,” I replied. “Heru is gone; he can’t hurt you, and he can’t make you hurt anyone else. And if he isn’t gone, I’ll handle him. But look”—I held up my hand, to show him how pale I’d become, how translucent and frail my skin had gone—“we’re already fading. Any longer, and we’ll be worse than dead. Don’t let him win. Don’t leave me. Please.”
He looked like he wanted to argue, right up to my last plea. Instead, his whispered words were a spear to my heart.
“I just don’t want to hurt you.”
So unlike Brad. So why did my ex’s words echo within Chris’s?
“You won’t,” I replied. I tried to grin, felt it falter, and looked back to Freyja to hide it. “I have a goddess if you get out of line.”
He didn’t respond. I didn’t press him. It took all my self-control to keep Brad’s face out of my head. I needed to get out of here. I needed to get to a place where we could think straight.
“How do we get out?” I asked her. I’d jumped into the River Styx to get here, and there was no way we were going to swim upstream. . . . I couldn’t imagine there were elevators in Hell.
“There is only one way up,” she replied.
“And how’s that?” I didn’t like the inflection in her voice. Like she knew a terrible secret she couldn’t quite hope to share.
She didn’t answer right away. Her violet eyes shifted from Chris, to me, and then back again. Was I wrong in what I was seeing? Freyja could read my thoughts, and right then, I thought I could feel hers. And if I was right, she was bitter. And envious. When she answered, however, her words were deadpan.
“You already saw how to return to the mortal world,” she said, her gaze returning to me. “The same way I ascended. By making a sacrifice to the Norns.”
My stomach clenched. Another sacrifice?
She had killed her lover to come to my aid. But I had come down here to rescue Chris—surely the Norns or the gods or whatever wouldn’t make me give him up. They weren’t that cruel.
Then I remembered all the myths and fairy tales.
Of course the gods were cruel.
They were rarely anything but.
We followed her, mute, Chris’s hand firmly in mine. He didn’t speak, didn’t even seem to be himself. He stumbled along at my side, watching the horizon, a grim expression on his face. Not like he was worried we were going to be attacked. But like he knew it would happen, and he was ready to die when it did. Despite the warmth coming from his hand, he felt like a shade of himself, the barest echo of a memory, as though I hadn’t actually rescued the boy I cared for. I’d just pulled forth the idea of him.
He mumbled something. It took me a moment to catch it.
“It won’t work.”
“What?” I asked. I nearly stopped, but Freyja’s pace didn’t allow for it.
“It won’t work,” Chris said. “It never works. Think of Orpheus. He failed. Right at the end, he failed. All the heroes fail.”
My stomach twisted with the thought. He was right—I couldn’t remember a single myth where the hero brought back the loved one. Orpheus failed to bring back Eurydice. Persephone stayed in Hades.
“Yeah, well,” I said, trying to kick my dull thoughts into gear. “Those stories are about men. I’m a girl. I’ll get shit done.”
He laughed. Slightly. But it honestly felt like the sun coming out from behind the clouds. If only for a moment. Then the clouds drew back over, and he was silent and reserved once more.
Still. It gave me hope. Down here, that seemed as rare and necessary as ambrosia.
Every step, I expected the heavy clouds overhead to part, for harpies to screech down from the sky and attack. I expected the faces below our feet to wail, to drag themselves up from the soil, because surely it couldn’t be this easy. Surely the Underworld would try to keep us down. Or I expected Heru, that golden god that bore Chris to do this, to split the skies and take back what he had tried to steal from me.
I wanted to believe we had trapped him in Chris’s hell. But I knew better. I wasn’t that lucky.
The silence that cloaked us, that only grew thicker with every passing yard, made my hair stand on end. Not only because of the sound our feet made as they slapped on flesh. But because I knew, if the Underworld was letting us off so easy right now, something terrible waited ahead of us.
This place was what you made of it. And millions of people had collectively made this world a land of misery. There was no way we’d be let go without a catch.
All the heroes fail. Chris’s words were a mantra in my head, one I desperately wanted to quell, but that only grew louder in the silence.
I wasn’t a hero, though. I was just a girl. And I would succeed. I would succeed.
I wasn’t going to let my story end this way.
It felt like we walked for an eternity.
It felt like it was over in the blink of an eye.
One moment we were walking over human skulls.
The next, our toes dug into sand.
The River Styx raged before us. It should have filled me with relief. Instead, it just made my pulse race with dread. So close. So close. And that meant we were still so far.
I shuddered when we neared the water. The memories of what I’d seen in there were still fresh in my mind: all those bodies, littered around Islington like fallen leaves. And the presence . . . the voice that chilled me to the bone. Maybe it was just some wayward god from down here, trying to scare me away.
So why had Freyja seemed so concerned by it?
There were so many things I wanted to ask her. And Chris. And right now was not the time for any of it. It was going to drive me insane.
“Where do we go now?” I asked. There was no way I was jumping in there again. No way.
Again, that look from Freyja, that guarded expression that made me rail against the fact that she could see into my mind, but she was still an enigma to me. I expected there to be a boat to ferry us across—where was Charon, demanding coin for passage?
“Down.” Her word dropped like a drachma into the waters, swallowed up into nothing.
I looked into the water. My heart dropped to my feet as Chris’s hand clenched tighter in mine. Tighter, and yet it still felt like he was fading away.
“The water leads to the base of the Tree,” she continued. “It is there the Norns rest.”
“I’m not going back in,” I whispered. I didn’t want to see the shadowed figure again. I didn’t want to smell the innards of my friends rotting in the air.
She sighed. For the briefest moment, I thought maybe she would respect my reluctance.
“We have no choice. We cannot make it on foot. Not anymore.”
She took my hand.
She didn’t ask if I trusted her. I didn’t ask Chris if he trusted me. He didn’t even seem to register what was happening. Freyja dragged us toward the river. Then she leaped, and we fell in behind her.
• • •
Shadows.
I panicked. I didn’t want to be back here. Back with the shadowed man in his shadowed robes, the owls watching.
But then I realized—I was realizing, and wasn’t that better than before, when I’d lost myself to the illusion? I’m tumbling through the river. I am holding Chris’s hand. Soon, Freyja will pull us from here, and this will be a bad dream.
“But what if she doesn’t?” came a voice. His voice, harsher than snow, colder than the void. “What if this isn’t an illusion but the truth?”
He appeared from the mists, or maybe the mists disappeared from him. But he stood there, in the dim streetlamp, in the alley, and the world was heavy. Heavy as my limbs. As my empty hands.
I am still holding Chris’s hand. I am still safe.
“Oh sweet Shadechild,” the figure said. He didn’t move toward me, but his every word was the sharpening of a dagger. I cowered back and stumbled against something. Something that cried out.
I turned on my heel, looking at the child at my feet. A baby. With dark skin and dark hair, clean as crystal. A raven’s feather clutched in her palm.
“Did you ever wonder,” the figure asked, “why she calls you that?”
I shook my head. Backed away from the child now squirming on the concrete. It was cold. So cold. How was she still alive?
“Because you were born in shadows,” he whispered, right behind my ear. “That is the game they play, the gods. They create their spawn, delight in their cleverness. The Aesir’s avatar killed his mother coming into existence, as the Aesir wanted their hero to sow blood in his wake, to make the world bend knee. But you . . . the Vanir had darker desires. They wanted something else. A different sort of worship. They don’t want blood. They want to seep into the consciousness of every mortal, the shadow to the light—the constant fear and reminder of mortality. They don’t want humans to tremble in fear. They want mortals to bow in subservience, to the inevitability.”
The figure moved past me, knelt down to the child. To me. His robe was gray and mottled, like a snowy owl, like snow itself. I swore I saw the nubs of wings protruding from his back, but when I blinked, they were merely folds of fabric. I knew him then. The same figure I’d seen behind and within Jonathan.
The same figure Freyja was sure she’d banished.
“And so they crafted you, sweet one. Have you never wondered about your history? Your own flesh and blood?”
He stroked the baby’s forehead. I wanted to scream at him to stop, but I couldn’t move. Couldn’t open my mouth. Ice froze my veins, even as the snow began to fall around us like broken prayers.
I had wondered. When I was younger. When I learned I was adopted. I’d loved my mother and father, but the moment they told me the truth, I felt the rift. I wasn’t theirs. Not really. And according to them, I’d never truly know. My biological mother had left me with no word, no way to be traced, at the doors of a hospital. I’d been taken into the system, and my adoptive parents had taken me in soon after.
But I hadn’t let myself wonder for too long. I knew it was a dangerous road to travel. My adopted family had shown me love. It was more than my blood had ever done. I wasn’t going to throw that in their faces by being indignant or demanding information they didn’t have. The past was the past. I preferred leaving it there.
“This is your history, Shadechild. Child of the shadows. You were crafted from darkness the moment the godchild was born in the roots of the World Tree. You were her compliment. And like her, you have no family save for the Tree itself. No relatives. No blood.”
The figure stood and turned to me. I couldn’t see his face through the shadows of his hood. I stepped back anyway. I didn’t want to see that face. I didn’t want to let him in.
I looked back to the child.
“You want to have a future,” the figure said. “You think you can win this little battle. But you have no future, Shadechild. You have no family. No reason to defend. Those who love you only do so out of pity, and those who help you only do so to further their own desires.”
A raven appeared then, bleeding from the shadows, like ink pouring into water. I knew him immediately. Munin. The raven cocked his head to the side, seemed to study the child. Me. And I knew, in the deepest recesses of the Underworld, the Allfather was telling Hugin to watch over Freyja. To turn her into a weapon. While Munin turned me into a sheath.
More shadows curled around the baby, coalescing into a blanket as black as night. Munin clutched the blanket in his beak and unfolded his great wings, and then silently, effortlessly, took off into the darkness, disappearing into the sky like a mirage.
“Why are you showing me this?” I whispered.
“Because you wish to have a future. You wish to save humanity. Why? When you have no past. When your humanity is itself an illusion? You have flesh and you have blood, yes. But you have no ties to mankind. There is no future for those like us, Shadechild. We are nothing but names in the book of history—a purpose served, and a life unlived.”
Those like us? I shivered. And not from the cold. “You don’t know anything about me.”
He laughed. The sound of an unfurling avalanche.
I’m going to have a future. I’m going to save Chris, and then we’re done. Heru is gone. The battle is avoided. I’ve won. And now I can have a normal life. . . .
“With a god of the Underworld in your head?” he asked. “If you believe that, you are not the girl I thought you were. She will not rest until she has felt vengeance. There are reasons she can see into your head, but you cannot see into hers. If you knew half the things she felt . . .”
He stepped up to me, placed a frozen hand on my shoulder.
“You will kill everyone you love because of her. The future I showed you, that was not my doing. But hers. Yours. The world will run red with her anger. The loving life you desire will never be yours. She would never let you have happiness, not when she was denied it.”
I thought of what I’d seen in Mimir’s well. Freyja and Bragi. Her love’s sacrifice. And I thought of the resolve in her heart at the very end. The desire to scorn the gods. To make them pay.
“Why are you here? Why are you telling me any of this?”
“Because I am tired of being played by the gods,” he said. “And if you had any sense, you would be as well. Remember this, when I am proven right. She will never be your savior, and you will never be his. You are nothing but shadows, Shadechild. Shadows and regret. And that is the only future you will ever know.”
He turned, then, and stepped away. Into the pooled light of the streetlamp. Into the center of the circle.
“The battle nears,” he said. “But not the one they expect. Prepare yourself, Shadechild. The end comes.”
Deep in the shadows of his cowl, I could feel the coldness emanating from his smile. Then he spread his arms, and his cloak spread like wings, and in a gust of snow and pearlescent feathers, he was gone.
Leaving only the circle in the snow. Only the drifting feathers. Only the light.
Only the words echoing in my head, the ones I’d seen written in ink and blood.
The Tree will burn.