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She opens her bag and removes a few tattered paperbacks. The spines are unreadable, they’ve been cracked in so many places. One is missing a cover. All of them have a forest of neon tabs jutting out from their sides.
I hear Hannah’s audible gasp of delight and admiration. I’m surprised she doesn’t ask for brand, style, and inventory number of the tabs.
“Our pack is so obsessed with the story of our origins, we ignore the story of our ending.” She opens one of the books and it lays flat, pages perilously close to falling out. There’s a woodcut illustration of Fenrir devouring Odin.
“Ragnarök.” Tara braces her hands on the table on either side of the book. “It’s not an end, so much as a renewal. But for the gods, it’s very much an end.”
“I don’t like the sound of that,” I say, dread piercing my heart. “You know, since they’re using Nathan and I as avatars for gods in their little plan.”
Tara’s expression is grim as she looks each of us in the eye, one by one. “The thralls aren’t planning to end the world. They’re planning to end the gods.
“They’re planning to end us.”
CHAPTER 69
The thralls want to exterminate werewolves? “That doesn’t make any sense. They need us—”
“Needed us.” Tara stresses the past tense. “They have all the arcane knowledge they need now, except for one thing.”
“Dominion over life and death.” Nathan stands and paces the length of the room.
The earlier sense of proactive hope sucks from the room.
“They basically forced you two to breed,” Hannah says. “Dominion over life.”
“There’s more.” Tara steers us back toward her research. “After the gods fall and the earth is submerged in water, life begins again. Two humans survive Ragnarök: Lifthrasir and Lif.”
“How do they survive the end of the world,” I ask, silently tacking on and who would want to?
“They hide. They run away to the woods and hide until everything is over,” Tara says with a shrug. “And when they come out, they repopulate the world.”
“That would be dominion over death, wouldn’t it?” Nathan suggests. “Rebuilding anew on top of that destruction?”
“Are the thralls acting out Ragnarök, then?” Hannah wonders aloud, tapping her lips with the capped end of her marker.
Tara holds up her hand and flips it back and forth slightly. “They’re certainly using the symbolism. I think we can safely say that they’re trying to start something new, without us knowing about it.”
“How does all of this tie in with the Right of Accord?” Ryan asks. “If that’s how the binding was put on you, what’s the significance there?”
“Make that another thing your team investigates,” Nathan says, then, to Tara, “And perhaps you can find some parallel between the Right of Accord and something the mythology?”
“Nothing off the top of my head, but I’ll keep digging,” she promises.
“What I don’t understand is why they would want to get rid of us all, but kick that plan off by making another one of us.” I add, “And wait patiently for potentially millennia for that to happen.”
“What is it about this specific moment in history?” Nathan asks. “What is it about Bailey and me, in particular?”
Ryan scribbles those questions down, nodding. “This is good. We can definitely work with this. “And with Your Majesty’s permission, I’d like to ask the Lady Tara to join our committee.”
Nathan doesn’t answer right away, and every breath that passes before he does just winds the tension in the room tighter.
She’s come to help us, I plead silently, wishing telepathic arguments were part of the binding. Don’t reject her. She’s the best ally we have.
I can see these same thoughts turning over and over in Nathan’s mind, but each one must be branded with “traitor!” on them. Finally, he says, “Your sister trusts you. That’s enough for me.”
It’s not. He’s going to be watching her like a hawk. But I give him a grateful smile, anyway.
“I have a feeling we’ll walk away from this meeting with more questions than answers,” Hannah says grimly.
Ryan is quick to reassure us. “Questions are good. Questions point us in the right direction.”
“Eventually.” Nathan adds that caveat. “A lot of those directions will point us straight to dead ends.”
“We have to work fast,” Ryan agrees. “We need to know, by the next full moon, what’s been planned.”
“And how us uncovering the plan has changed it,” Tara adds. “Will thrall efforts ramp up now that they know we know?”
“Maybe we shouldn’t have gone to the Hierophant,” I say.
“That’s in the past,” Nathan replies. “There’s nothing we can do to change it, so we have to look ahead.”
“And at the moment, the thralls don’t appear to be your biggest concern,” Ryan points out. “It’s werewolves who’ve tried to kill you.”
“Werewolves working against thralls,” Hannah reminds us all. “Whatever the thralls are trying to do to all of us, the most immediate threat to Bailey and Nathan—sorry, the queen and king—seems to be werewolves.”
