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20
ADDIE
“You had him right where we needed him!” Hel’s voice bounced off the walls until it boomed from every direction.
Fists clenched at my sides, I was done being bullied. The sight of her gave me pause, though. She wasn’t as tall as I recalled. Her form seemed smaller. Her big, divine ass wasn’t as imposing as she’d been before. I didn’t need a chair to look her in the eye anymore.
As if she could tell that I’d noticed, she looked away. Her human lips pursed. The shadows gathered on the skeletal side of her face.
Fenrir had weakened her. There weren’t enough willing souls in all the afterlives put together to replace what he’d taken from her.
How could a goddess have fallen so far? I didn’t understand how Fenrir could have brought her this low.
She made a low groan. “Catching him will be nearly impossible now.”
She lifted both hands to peer at her open palms. I squashed the urge to reach out and touch her. When she tilted her hands towards us to reveal her palms, there were no lines on either hand. The human palm was pale and smooth. The skeletal hand looked as if it’d been made of pearl.
“My ties to fate have been severed,” Hel said, her voice heavy with grief. “The lines of my fate have been erased now that I’ve used my threads to bind Fenrir.”
I didn’t realize that Hel had used her own fate threads. This whole time I’d assumed that she’d been taking fate threads from others. I thought that she’d stolen them, but she’d used her own threads to make Fenrir’s chains.
Now that she had no fate and most of her power had been devoured, Hel was nearly a mortal. I could barely believe it, but it made sense. She’d used so much of herself in the first fight against Fenrir that she needed a mortal like myself to help her now. Everything clicked into place.
I couldn’t forgive her, though. My anger simmered righteously. My life was in shambles because this god couldn’t deal with her own ex-boyfriend.
Oh man. Fenrir’s confession hit me all over again.
I stole a look in Maddox’s direction. He tore his gaze away from Hel and reached out to open a portal. Through it, I could see home. Maddox’s bed beckoned me. I needed to collapse.
Potato wound between my legs before jumping through the portal. How was this cat surviving these fights? She didn’t even have nine lives left. The damn feline was living off video game cheat codes at this point.
“Go,” Hel said. “Rest. You’re going to need it…No, go enjoy yourselves for there’s no knowing how much time is left. Savor what little we have in the here and now.”
Another apocalypse was nigh. This time, it was a little more old-school than the Rapture. We were talking about Ragnarök.
Maddox
I liftedmy wife into my arms and let her wrap her body around me as I carried her through the portal. It closed behind us, leaving us in the blessed silence of our home. At least, that’s what I thought until Addie shot a glare at a space in the far corner. She threw out her hand, pointing in warning at someone I couldn’t see.
When she sighed and relaxed in my embrace, I knew that the peeking ghost had vanished. I wished I could see them and help her, but I didn’t have that kind of power. I was something else. I was a monster just like Fenrir.
At least, I had something to live for. I had a wife who would never betray me the way that Hel had betrayed him. I felt little for what’d happened to the goddess of the Norse underworld. She was the one responsible for this whole mess in the first place.
Addie buried her face in my chest. I dropped onto the mattress and clung to her. Though I should have felt sated from the arcana that Addie had given me earlier, I was oddly hollow. The fights had taken a lot out of me. There hadn’t been time to notice in the underworld. There, my hunger was nothing more than a thought in the back of my mind.
Staying there full time wouldn’t be that bad…
That was a bald-faced lie. I couldn’t leave Addie’s side. Without her, the hollow void screamed louder than ever, no matter where I was. Here, with my hands roaming along Addie’s body, the hunger subsided. The scent of her filled my nose and settled my stomach like I’d just eaten a five-course meal.
“Are you all right?” I asked into her hair.
She made a small noise that I couldn’t quite discern. I had to lean away from her and peer down to read her face. The distance in her eyes and soft purse of her lips betrayed the conflicted thoughts roiling in her mind. She would tell me what the problem was in her own time, but I couldn’t help feeling like the problem was me—even if Fenrir was still at large.
He could have crashed through the wall right here and now, and I still would have felt like the villain. That’s what I’d been for the past few years of my life. I’d thrown myself into my work as if putting killers behind bars might make up for the awful things I’d done in life.
“Paige betrayed us,” I said, almost absentmindedly.
She was the one who’d made me feel like a monster. According to her, I’d smothered her and kept her from living. Had I been a part of her transformation into the person she was now? Or had she always been like this, and I’d somehow been able to ignore it and blame myself instead?
