Page 1 of Heart of Mischief

Prologue

Three weeks after homecoming

From his seat on theplush velvetarmchair, Elias Everhart could see everything.

The dancers. The dwarves. The vittra. The reindeer. The pixie-size fairies and the elves with pointed ears. The guards standing at each of the entrances, all in mare form in the unlikely event of an attack.Highlyunlikely, if Elias were being honest.

No one dared to invade the underworld.

Loki had organized quite the show that night. Elvish women twirled on silks dangling from the eighty-foot-tall ceiling. Trapeze artists swung through the air, passing flaming torches to each other with their teeth. A pair of towering giants fought at the center of an enormous ring, much to the delight of everyone in a betting mood. And, as always, the mead flowed in abundance.

Holding court above it all was Loki and his daughter, Hel—the queen of the underworld. They sat on twin thrones, Hel with her legs crossed, back hunched, and face propped on one hand, ever the image of the petulant teenager. As far as Elias knew, for most of eternity, there had been onlyonethrone atop that raised stone dais. It was only when Loki was banished to Helheim that he insisted on ruling beside his daughter.

Elias tried not to look at Hel for too long. Her face—one halfalive and beautiful, all creamy olive skin and long eyelashes, the other half dead and rotting, eyeball stem and teeth visible even from his spot a hundred feet away—had always unsettled him.

At the foot of the dais, three ash wives danced, their bark-covered hips swaying to the sound of the fiddle and flute played by a pair of dwarves tucked away in some distant corner of the grand hall. Ash wife spirits were Loki’s favorite to watch. Normally, the god of mischief took in their performances with a casual half smirk on his face.

Today, he didn’t seem to be enjoying himself at all.

Something had been off with Loki since his brief visit to Silver Shores. Something beyond the god’s usual mercurial attitude and petty annoyances. Perhaps it had to do with what had happened to his son, the Fenrir wolf, who’d had half his teeth cut from his mouth right before Loki dragged him back to Helheim. Elias had no idea where the god was keeping the wolf now. He wasn’t even sure if the Fenrir should be considered friend or foe. Or maybe Loki was on the verge of making one of his proclamations, an announcement for a ball or tournament or whatever other seemingly random scheme he’d dreamt up to pass his time in exile. But Elias didn’t think so; for three weeks, the god of mischief had been in what could only be described as a “funk,” and he had no idea why.

Elias felt strangely restless himself. Usually, he enjoyed his time in the underworld, with its ample free alcohol and entertainment. Right now, he was seated on a deliciously soft armchair, surrounded by the souls of beautiful human women who, while technically dead, felt plenty alive in the way they sprawled across his lap and petted his hair. Between the gorgeous company and the mead flowing through his veins—with more waiting in the goblet dangling from his fingers—he should have been in a state of bliss.

But while Elias had done his best to enjoy this sure-to-be-brief vacation from his duties in Asgard, he hadn’t been able to fullyrelax. To let go. The theatrics were dull. The mead was sour. Even Helheim’s landscape seemed to have lost some of its strange beauty.

Though he didn’t want to admit it, Elias was in a funk, too.

It was strange. Mares didn’t feel “sad” or “down” or “depressed.” They didn’t feel anything, really. It was one of the biggest perks of the job: being free from messy emotions and a pesky conscience, the two things that make humans most miserable. Since the moment he’d completed his Trial to become a mare, he’d felt nothing. Nothing but thirst for fear, of course, and the delicious euphoria when that thirst was finally quenched.

For seven years, he’d let those two impulses guide him, assist him in carrying out whatever missions Loki assigned him.

Then he mether, and everything changed.

She did something to him. Coaxed out feelings he’d thought were gone forever. Resurrected them like the magician she was, skilled and sneaky. Always one step ahead. There hadn’t been one moment where he’d felt his emotions come back to life, no sensation of a light switch flicking from off to on. It had been a gradual thing. A pickaxe chipping away at the dam of his feelings, creating hundreds of tiny holes, so small that he didn’t realize they were even there until it was almost too late.

That night—homecoming—Elias had teetered on the precipice of something impossible. Something that would have brought the dam down entirely. Something intoxicating and delicious and absolutely, catastrophically forbidden.

But before that could happen, thank thegods, the girl had revealed the truth:

She’d never felt anything for him at all.

It had all been some stupid act. A ploy. Nothing more than a way to get the information she needed for her sister.

She had used him.

It was humiliating to think of how much the realization had hurt him. Like a knife through his newly revived heart. Chest boneshattered, aorta sliced open, blood all over the tiled hallway floor. It was too much to bear. In that moment, Elias realized that he would much rather go back to the pleasant numbness of the previous seven years than suffer through the excruciating pain of losing yet another person he…

In the brief seconds between deciding to dam his emotions back up and actuallydoingso, there was panic. Panic brought on by the fact that he didn’t actually know if he could. What if all of that repulsivefeelingthat he’d done toward that girl had made just one too many holes? What if he had opened himself up not only to the pain of her rejection, but to everything else, too? All the hurt that had driven him to trade in his soul in the first place?

Thankfully, there was no such issue. He gummed up the holes, plastered them over with six feet of cement, and went right back to being the handsome, murderous sociopath he loved seeing in the bathroom mirror each morning.

He suspected that he had done so just in the nick of time—and tried not to dwell on what would have happened if he’d waited even an hour longer.

After doing away with those pesky emotions, the path forward had become obvious: steal Lou, bring her to the Fenrir as an offering in exchange for the riddle, and murder anyone who tried to get in the way.

Ta-da! Problem solved.

Such was the beauty of thinking without a conscience: no idiotic “morals” getting in the way of what needed to be done to meet one’s goals.