Immortals After Dark 01 - The Warlord Wants Forever

mind, had for some reason immediately recognized Myst for what she was. “Swan maiden,” the girl had whispered, uttering one of the Valkyries’ more beautiful names.

    Both the careless mother and her innocent daughter had been killed, smothered under the weight of these men as they brutalized them. “I will live longer than them—and you.” A change came over her, like a bloodlust, thoughts turned feral, the rage…

    The frown on the attacker’s face was the last expression he’d ever make. She rose up, easily shaking off the powerful men. She had loved Carin for her very innocence and joy, and these beasts had stolen these things from Myst, from the world, which was poorer from the loss….

    As lightning painted the sky, she mindlessly slashed her way through them. When all but one were felled, she told the one she allowed to live, “Any time you think to hunt down a woman or to force her, wonder if she’s not like me. I’ve spared you, but my sisters would unman you with a flick of their claws, their wrath unimaginable.” She wiped her arm over her face, found it was wet.

    She crouched over the man and could see her reflection in his eyes. “There are thousands of us out there. Lining these coasts, waiting.” Her eyes were silver, and blood marked the side of her face. He was frozen in terror. “And I’m the gentle one.”

    She turned from him, dusting off her hands and said to herself, “This is how rumors get started.” But her swagger disappeared at the site of the rough gravestones atop the hill by the sea—Carin’s beside her mother’s. “You stupid human,” she hissed at the mother’s. “I’ve cursed you to your hell.”

    “Why did you disobey me? I told you to take Carin inland in the spring when they come down. Stay far from the coasts,” she said, her voice breaking on a sob as she flew to the girl’s tombstone. She curled up against it, her face resting against the crude inscription. Then she hit it, her blood trickling along the new jagged fracture.

    She stayed like that, unmoving for days, as villagers held a vigil at the base of the hill, offering up tributes fit for a goddess for her protection and benevolence. Wroth shuddered at the physical pain Myst didn’t seem to feel—her hand frozen in blood to the stone, her muscles knotted, and skin raw from cold. On the third day, her sister Nïx found her and lifted her from the snow as easily as a pillow. Tears were ice on her face.

    “Shhh, Myst,” Nïx murmured. “We’ve already heard the tales of your revenge. They’ll never harm another maid. In fact, I doubt that league of men will ever trouble this coast again.”

    “But…the girl,” Myst whispered, awash in confusion, tears streaming anew, “is simply gone.” The last word was a sob.

    “Yes, dearling,” Nïx said. “Never to return.”

    Myst was weeping. “But…but it hurts when they die.”

    Nïx pressed her lips to Myst’s forehead, murmuring, “And they always do.”

    Wroth’s chest ached with Myst’s sorrow as no physical wound had ever hurt him. She’d run from the men because the ones who would chase a “helpless” maiden were the ones who would die. Wroth wanted to stay with that memory, to make sure she recovered from this hellish pain, but another familiar dream began. Snow outside, packed so high it covered half of the window. The meeting around the hearth. “…teach her to be all that was good and honorable about the Valkyrie…”

    Myst closed her eyes against a memory—the one he’d struggled to see—that she could never erase, never alleviate. She remembered and she vowed again that she would be worthy.

    She was in the middle of her first field of battle, there as a chooser of the slain. She’d been sent young, barely fifteen, because she’d been born of a brave Pict who’d plunged a dagger into her own heart. Myst was supposed to be like that.

    But she wasn’t. Not yet. She was sick with terror.

    One hundred thousand men, cut to pieces, blood like a river up to her ankles. “They were all brave,” she said, peering around her, dizzily turning in circles as electricity rolled from her in waves. Sounding lost, she whispered, “How am I to choose? A beggar handing out coins…” She began trembling uncontrollably with fear.

    He wanted to be there to protect her, comfort her.

    Another memory. New to him. Could he withstand another?

    Myst ran to him when he returned to Blachmount from some errand, and as