“Why?”
The word hung in the nothingness between us, expanding until it pounded in my temples and throbbed in my blood moving sluggishly through my veins.
“Why?” I repeated. The ice in my gut crawled through my body, numbing my arms, my fingertips… my chest. “Why, why, why?”
The last word came out as a wail, and Grim sighed, his lips parting slightly to expel his breath—the only movement on his granite features as he stared down at me.
Even in this place void of color, his eyes were mismatched—one light, one dark—and as bereft of emotion as the rest of his face.
“Grim!” Through the ice, through the agony pulsating in my chest where my matebonds hooked like barbed wire, fury rose. He had tricked me. He had taken me from my mates.
He had betrayed us.
My magic rose from deep in my body like a firestorm, and I shot to my feet as golden light blasted out of me and into him. “Why?” I roared.
Dark magic flickered like flames around Grim, absorbing my energy and leaving the god before me untouched.
I balled my hands into fists, narrowing my eyes as I reached for my magic deliberately this time. “Tell. Me. Why. Or I swear, I will blast you into next Sunday! Tell me right goddamn now.”
“You shouldn’t spend your magic needlessly,” he said, his voice soft even if the blank expression on his pale face didn’t change. “Hel is not a place to find yourself weakened.”
I lifted my arms and shot another blast of golden energy directly into his chest with a scream of rage.
Grim’s magic rose around him again, once more warding off my attack. With a wave of his hand, the air shifted around me, knocking me off my feet. I landed on the mossy ground with a grunt and found myself locked in place by invisible hands.
“Enough,” he said. “You will hurt yourself.”
“Why?” I ground out through clenched teeth. “Why do you care if I hurt myself? You killed me. I’m in hell, and you brought me here!”
“Hel,” he corrected. “You’re in Hel.”
“Really? You’re going to argue semantics with me now?” I hissed, squirming against my invisible ties. It did nothing, and I screamed with impotent frustration.
“It’s a bit more than semantics,” Mimir muttered from his place on the tree stump to my right.
I turned my head to glare at him. “And you! Are you in on this? Did you lure me here like some sort of grotesque bait?” Something dawned on me and I cussed, twisting back to face Grim.
“Loki! Loki sent me to you. He… He knew? He’s behind this? He’s the… Betrayer? Oh, God, he fucking tricked me! I can’t believe I trusted him!”
“It will do you no good to fret about what is done, Annabel,” Grim said.
“Are you fucking serious?” I snarled. “You killed me. You’ve doomed the entire world—your own brothers—and you’re telling me not to fret?”
Grim crouched in front of me, and something that could have been regret flickered across his features for the briefest of moments. “I have not doomed my brothers. Because of me, they will make it through Ragnarök. This prophecy of yours…” He gave Mimir a less than respectful glance. “They were foolish to place so much faith in you. Reckless to risk everything on a mortal’s strength, even if she has been touched by Fate. You ask me why? The answer is simple, Annabel: I will sacrifice anything and everything for my brothers. And so I did.”
I bared my teeth at him in another snarl. “You killed their mate! Do you not understand how a mateclaim works? They will die!”
“No, they will not. I took you through to the Realm of Death with your body intact. They will hurt, and they will suffer, but they will not die. Once Ragnarök has swallowed the nine realms, once the end has come and gone, I will be able to break their matebonds to you.
“They will be free, Annabel. And alive. Find comfort in that.”
“But I will still be dead,” I whispered, and finally the ice and fury seeped from my body like melting snow, leaving only the torment of my four bonds and an aching hollowness surrounding them. Tears pricked at my eyes, overflowing as the truth of what I’d lost finally set in. “I will never see them again. I will… be here? Alone? For eternity?”
“Yes,” he said softly. A chilly touch ghosted against my cheek, making me recoil before he pulled his hand back to look at the wetness coating his fingertips like the physical display of my grief was puzzling to him. “There was a time you would have done anything to be free of your Fate. Given anything—maybe even your life. Perhaps with time, you will come to see your new existence as freedom. Perhaps not. But it is your reality, Annabel. The sooner you come to accept it, the less you will suffer.”
I screamed in his face. It came out as a hollow wail—a sound as devoid of power as I felt, bound and trapped in Hel.
Dead. I was dead.
There was supposed to be peace after you died. I hadn’t thought much about any afterlife before I was kidnapped by Viking gods and sucked into living myth, but I’d had this hazy knowledge that once I took my last breath on Earth, there would be peace.
But this? This was anything but peaceful. This was agony, despair—rage and sorrow. I felt too much, hurt too much. How could this be death? How could this be the end when my body and soul still reverberated with emotion as powerfully as when I’d been alive?
Flashes of last night blazed through my mind, of the waves of lust and love I’d felt in the arms of my mates. So strong. So… unbreakable. At least, that was what it had felt like. Unending. Unyielding.
But I’d been wrong. Verdandi had been wrong when she wove my thread with my mates’. One of the men destined to claim me had chosen another path, and this was the result.
At least the Norn had been right about that part. Any diversion from our Fate and there would be nothing but misery for me.
“I don’t understand,” I whispered, my voice breaking with the grief still thick in my throat. “Why not let us try? Fate chose us for a reason. If you’d felt what it was like when we faced Loki and Nidhug… the strength of our combined power… That is why Verdandi believed in us, Grim. We… We could have won. We could have saved the world, but you chose… this. You’ve chosen death. Destruction. Ragnarök! You think your brothers want this? That they’ll be happy in a world of nothingness? Matebond or not, you’ve doomed them. You did that.”
Grim rose to his full height. Even through this world’s lack of colors, I could see his eyes glowing as he stared down at me. “You are wrong. You did not have the power to withstand what is to come, and you did not have the power to protect my brothers. You may rage against me if you wish, Omega. You may curse me, and you may refuse to accept your fate. It changes nothing.
“Once Ragnarök has eaten the world, I will break your bonds to my kin and the ties to your old life will be gone. Eventually you will succumb to the numbness of death. You won’t yearn any longer. You will just… be. Here. For eternity.
“There is no point in arguing. There is no point in asking me why. You are never leaving Hel, Annabel. Never. And your so-called mates are better for it.”