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A wave of silence crashes through the room. The sheer intensity of it echoes in my ears, loud and ominous. In the thick tension winding its way through the air, I feel Reaper's hand squeeze mine tighter, his skin rough and warm against mine.
"By the Gods," Adriel swears under his breath.
"What's wrong?" I ask Reaper. "Why did they need my blood?"
What new horror awaits me now?
It's not Reaper who answers, but Rissa. "They took mine too," she says quietly, the revelation startling me.
"Why?"
"When the Forsaken destroyed the portal to Valhalla, they destroyed the last remaining piece of the Bifröst, the bridge between realms," she explains. "Valkyries are the only ones able to travel beyond the Veil without it."
"I don't understand."
"The Forsaken didn't just trap the Fae here when they destroyed the portal. They cut the souls off from moving beyond the Veil." Something flashes in her eyes—anger or grief, I'm not sure. But it's powerful and vast. "And they cut off their only way of reaching those souls. They haven't been able to reach them for three hundred years. They need our blood to reopen the portal to claim those souls."
A shudder runs through me at her words, the air in the room growing colder. My parents' souls are trapped, along with the soul of everyone else who has died since Valhalla fell.
God. That's millions.
If the Forsaken use souls for their dark magic, what could they accomplish with millions of them? It's a terrifying question. The only thing more terrifying is the possibility that we may live long enough to find out.
The silence is an entity of its own, consuming the space around us.
Yet again, Adriel is the one to break it. "They have the blood of one Valkyrie," he says. "They wanted the blood of another. Their portal magic must require more than one." He locks that one black eye on Damrion. "We have to get her out of Eitr. Whether you want to admit it or not, she is a Valkyrie. You can't deny it after what happened last night."
Damrion's jaw clenches, frustration rolling from him in a hot wave.
I look at Reaper, hating that I only have half the pieces to this particular puzzle…confident they aren't talking about me this time. "What happened last night?"
"The Forsaken and their hellhounds attacked Eitr yesterday," he murmurs, his voice pitched low as Adriel and Damrion argue over how to proceed. "A girl in town killed dozens of Forsaken."
"How?"
"We aren't entirely sure," he admits, shrugging one broad shoulder. "Abigail isn't entirely sure how she did it, either. She was in the throes of a vision."
"A-Abigail?" Hearing her name pulls up a memory from the dredges of my subconscious. Two of the Forsaken standing over me in the bathroom, talking about a girl—a Seer—hiding in a village in the mountains. Their leader desperately wanted her and was prepared to wage war to get his hands on her.
Her name was Abigail.
"Ja. Abigail. You'll like her, solsken."
"We can't just abandon Eitr, Adriel."
"You don't have a choice."
Everyone in the room turns to look at me. I flinch, unease whispering through me as I stare up at four fearsome warriors and a powerful Valkyrie, licking my lips.
"Speak, little Valkyrie," Reaper encourages me, his voice gentle.
"I-I heard them," I say, my voice a trembling whisper that grows surer with each word. "The Forsaken. They were talking about Abigail, the Seer hiding in a mountain village. Their leader wants her, desperately so." I swallow convulsively. "He's willing to wage war to get his hands on her."
A heavy silence falls over the room at my words, every eye boring into me as if they might unlock precisely why the Forsaken want her simply with the weight of their gazes. I'd give them those answers if I knew them, but like so much else, all I have are disjointed fragments…the tiny scraps of memory left behind by the poisonous powder the Forsaken drugged me into submission with. Those scraps aren't nearly enough.
Reaper's the first to break the silence. "It seems we weren't wrong, after all. She's not merely valuable to us. She's a beacon to the enemy as well."
"Ja," Dax agrees solemnly. "Either she's Valkyrie, or they know something about her visions that we don't. She may help us defeat them, or they believe she's their key to defeating the Valkyrie. If they get their hands on her…"
