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She swung around in an arc of vertigo and dread.
He materialized on the sofa. Endless shoulders stiff, cabled forearms braced on his thighs, fists balled, knuckles white. But it was his face that squeezed her heart until it almost ruptured. It was as if bleakness and betrayal had seeped into his essence, snuffed it out. His eyes seemed focused into the depths of something devastating and macabre.
He’d been there all the time.
He’d seen Sigrun, heard everything.
She swayed a step toward him. “Vidar…”
He raised his eyes, sent her supplication backlashing in her throat, detonating in her chest with a flare of desperation.
“Let’s skip the shock and denial. The protestations, too, that I misunderstood what I overheard of that little ‘family’ chat you were having with ‘Aunt Sigrun.’”
She tried to swallow shrapnel from the heart that had shattered at his pain. “I’m…sorry you heard that.”
The despondency in his eyes deepened. “I’m sure you are.”
She attempted another begging step toward him. “I’m not sorry it’s out in the open, just that you found out that way….”
Words congealed inside her again.
God, he looked, felt, so…desolate.
He exhaled as she expelled every ounce of air from her own lungs. “So your aunt is one of the Dísir.”
That made her find her voice. “How did you know that?”
“After millennia living among Norse mythology figures, I can sense one a mile away. But those so-called ‘gods’ have their own place at the top of my Reviled List. Their judge-and-executioner-of-fate shtick got old long before the Dark Ages and having one in the vicinity gives me hives. But you always blind me to anything but you. I felt her only when I was a few feet away. And all I felt then was terrified for you.” His eyes were black now, as if everything inside him had been extinguished. “You had me so totally fooled, it’s tragically funny. I really have to give it to you. We were seamless. You could teach Loki himself advanced courses in deception.”
The need to scream denials boiled her blood. “I didn’t deceive you. At least, I didn’t mean to—”
“Spare me.” His growl was so hurt it made her plunge deeper into despair. “The charade is over. So just tell me. How did you intend to get my soul? And you want to barter it for yours? How did you lose it? To your aunt? What did you get in return?”
She hung her head. “It’s…it’s a long story.”
“So far, I’m still immortal. I have nothing but time. Entertain me.”
It was a shearing moment before she could bring herself to say the terrible truth out loud. “I’m…I’m a Valkyrie.”
He jerked up straight, his eyes flaring a frightening azure. “Enough lies. You’re a mortal. I can feel it.”
“I’m that, too. It’s really complicated.”
His gaze radiated distrust and disillusion. “I’m listening. Don’t skip a detail.”
She gave a painful nod. “From the time I was around six, I’ve been having flashes of…other lives. My parents thought it was hyperactive imagination until the fact that I ‘remembered’ only dying people disturbed them enough to seek help. I was diagnosed with high-functioning autism at ten, and strangely, that put their minds to rest. Not that it mattered. At my twelfth birthday party, a huge fire engulfed our home and Mom, Dad and older brother saved me and all the guests, but died themselves from smoke inhalation.”
Her tear-filled eyes overflowed, her heart twisting all over again with the loss and guilt that had never stopped hacking at her. Vidar’s face hardened. He now believed that every word she said, every emotion she displayed, was a lie. She couldn’t blame him.
But this terrible development had its upside. Being able to come clean at last was as relieving as it was agonizing.
“I felt I was responsible for their deaths, and no matter what counselors told me about survivor’s guilt, I withdrew into myself, had to be dragged into foster homes from which I ran, one time after another. That’s when I did my street time.
“When I was almost seventeen an all-female family took me in. I thought they were weird, but that made them perfect for me, since I believed I was a weirdo myself. They offered me a roof over my head and left me to my own devices, which was all I wanted. I could fend for myself, just wanted the system to forget about me. The casual company worked for me, too. I left when I was eighteen to go to college, but they’d become sort of my family, and I went back to them every chance I got.
“Then, last year, on my twenty-seventh birthday, they revealed a truth that made my fears that I was possessed or had an evil, split personality seem like a laugh. They started by telling me what they are, though they didn’t say they’re gods, just ‘agents of fate.’ They made it sound as if they had nothing to do with fate’s decisions.” His vicious snort put paid to that claim. “They told me Valkyries are a subdivision of their kind. I thought they’d mentioned them because they were famous ones. Turned out, they were telling me I was the famous one.”
His eyes widened. “You’re the Kara?”
