Hearts of Shadow (Deadglass #2) Read online

  “I don’t think Sven took it to his grave. The Kivati Rudrick stole it and used it to open the Gate to the Land of the Dead. Maybe it’s still down in the caverns beneath the city. We need witnesses. Who else was down there when the Gate fell?”

  “Besides Rudrick? Your brother and four Kivati: Hart, the Wolf; his mate, Kayla; the Raven Lord and his fiancée, Lucia Crane.”

  “Corbette. He was exhibiting unusually strong Aether activity. I sound like Zetian when I say it, but maybe he’s hiding the Tablet. It might explain his erratic, but powerful, new abilities. We need to talk to him.”

  “We?”

  “You wanted a job, didn’t you, Miss Mercer?”

  They reached the door to his lab. Rotating the large brass dial, he picked out the five-digit combination lock, unlocked the thick steel door, and let her inside. He had the perverse desire to carry her across the threshold, but squashed it. Nonsense talking. Besides, she’d already been in his lab. The first time he’d carried her through the door, but she’d been unconscious. The gesture was lost on her.

  And if that thought made him some sort of demonic Quasimodo, so be it.

  Corbette landed on the flat tower roof, Changed to human form in a burst of Aether, and began snapping orders to the guards. His second in command, William Raiden, head of the Southern House, waited for him at the edge of the parapet. Like all Thunderbirds, Will was a tall, brooding mass of muscle. Unlike the others, he was too old to let his fiery nature rule his good sense. Will had been Corbette’s father’s advisor before him. Without Will’s guidance, Corbette would never have been able to wrestle his people back from the brink. He wouldn’t let a power-hungry human, a two-faced soul-sucker, or an undead demigod destroy what he’d worked so hard to create.

  “Kingu is here,” Corbette said. “He’s not playing around the hinterlands anymore. He’s brought the fight directly to the foot of the hill and slashed through the human’s silly pack in one brilliant move.”

  “And Jameson?”

  “The admiral ate it: hook, line, and sinker. He actually thought he’d arrest me.”

  Will laughed. He turned his blond head to the south where the ghostly towers of downtown huddled in the dark. “And the Unktehila? Kingu destroyed their whorehouse. Norgard would have jumped at the chance to blame us.”

  “Asgard will do the same in time. His blood is just as damned. We can’t trust the humans or Drekar to do anything but get in the way. It was a Kivati who freed Kingu, to our great shame, and it will be a Kivati who sets things right. We will draw Kingu out and finish him ourselves.”

  “But a demigod—”

  “He’s no god of mine.” Corbette stalked through the tower door and down the circular staircase to the main hall below. “We must continue to draw him away from the city until we find some way to defeat him.”

  Will followed. “Can you match him with the Aether?”

  Corbette curled his fists. “No.” He could barely hold on to the tenuous threads of power. He felt like a raw boy again with his first touch of Aether. He had no control then, and his adolescent emotions made him a danger to all. “If only my father had done the necessary thing, we would never be in this mess.”

  “Halian was wrong. You will avenge this taint on our sacred honor.”

  Corbette glanced back. “You’ve always had faith in me, Will.”

  “You need to rest, Emory. Find yourself a loyal woman and settle—” Will broke off as they turned the corner and almost ran over a thin young woman dressed all in black. She could be a ghost for all the noise she made, or the pallor of her skin and hair. Had she been sneaking out again?

  “Lucia—” Corbette said, but she’d heard Will’s unthinking remark. Her spine straightened, and she spun on her slippered foot. “Wait!”

  Will put out an arm to block his way. “Let her go, Emory. She’s been through a terrible ordeal. She needs peace, not a man who singes the air around him. Give her room to breathe.”

  Corbette stopped and watched her flee down the long mahogany paneled hallway. The biodiesel lamps flickered over her thin retreating form. Paintings of his ancestors lined the walls; the ghosts of the past watched her go. Their eyes turned to him. You failed her.

  “The best way you can help her is to defeat Kingu and wipe his kind from the face of the planet, as you swore to do.” Will dropped his arm. “Only the Lady can heal Lucia now.”

  Corbette concentrated and drew his emotions into himself. He felt the shimmering water retreat. It took a long moment of silence before the Raven stopped beating its wings inside him to go after her. “Have we found the Tablet of Destiny yet?”

  “Kai’s team has been diving for it for three days. If it’s in the crater, it’s only a matter of time.”

  “Time is something we don’t have. Alert the four Houses. No one is to leave Queen Anne Hill unescorted.” Especially not Lucia, but she always found a way. How could he protect her if she wouldn’t stay put?

  “What about the Needle Market?”

  “Draw guards around it, but let it go unmolested. We can’t withdraw completely.”

  “Why break ties with Asgard then?” Will asked. “Why not use him to draw out Kingu, and then sacrifice him to the fight? As long as he’s willing to send his troops to their death, we might as well use him.”

  “But how do we know he won’t join Kingu first chance he gets?”

  “I’ve taught you better than that,” Will said. “Asgard might be soulless, but he is still a man.”

  “Right. Find what he loves,” Corbette murmured, staring down the now-empty hall, “and control it.”

  In Asgard’s lab, Grace studied the corkboard covered in diagrams and illegible notes in a sprawling hand. Tacked in the corner, tin types gave way to black-and-white photographs: Asgard with friends at a pub. A white house on a bluff. A Wagnerian Brunhild in a horned helmet and a bronze bustier on stage. The actress had light-colored hair and the broad forehead of a Swede. The same large eyes as Asgard. His mother?

  It was unusual for a human woman to survive the birth of a fledgling. The baby sipped from the soul of its mother in utero. She’d heard it Turned in the womb, baby claws and fangs and scales scraping soft pink flesh and delicate internal organs.

  Drekar lived too long and saw too much death to be sentimental. It was always an act. She thought of the Kivati hung up on their Golden Age, heads too far up their asses to see the end of the world coming before it was too late. Stuck in the past like a great dying mastodon.

  Grace might be mortal, but she knew better than to get hung up on the past. Her own pictures of her mother, of her childhood and whole extended family, had been thrown out with the trash when the house was sold. Her parents’ unsolved murder and her own disappearance had left her childhood things without an owner. Her mother’s piano had been sold at auction, her father’s good pots and pans given to Goodwill. Her toys and books had brightened up some other kid’s room.

  She was left with nothing except her promise of vengeance and the cold comfort that she had nothing left to lose. Even her memories were fuzzy, except the last—a woman drowning in a pool of her own blood, throat torn out, long black hair plastered to the reddish brick, her grey eyes unblinking.

  Grace ruthlessly shoved the memory into her mental black box and dragged the iron manacles around it once again. The box shook, angry memories thudding against the lid, trying to claw their way out.

  Her father might have told her that trick, but Sven had helped her perfect it. Many of the creatures now howling in the dark interior were his creation. “If you’re brothers, why don’t you have the same last name?”

  “Half brothers.” Asgard fiddled with the ring on his finger, slipping it up to his knuckle and back. “Have you ever heard the prayer, ‘Save us, oh Lord, from the fury of the North men?’ It was written by some of Sven’s early victims. He liked it so much he adopted Norgard as his last name, which means ‘north’ in Norse.”

  Grace wrinkled her nose. Sh
e could easily see Norgard doing that. He was in love with his own importance. “And Asgard?”

  “My mother named me after the palace of the Norse gods.”

  “She thought you were a gift from the gods, is that it?”

  He shrugged. “You think me too damned for even a mother’s love? Harsh, Reaper. Even for you.”

  She crossed her arms. “Your sire let her raise you?”

  “My mother was an opera singer in London, and Fafnir was only passing through. He didn’t know about me. She had me in secret and dumped me on the north shore of England with her parents. Morfor, my grandfather, was a Lutheran minister. They raised me when she returned to the stage, but I saw her every summer during the off season.”

  “How did a couple of humans know what to do with a fledgling dragon?”

  He smiled with real fondness. “They were Swedish immigrants. My grandfather outlawed the old tales, but my great-grandmother lived with them, and she was a pagan and a heathwitch. She was a thorn in the old man’s side, and he forbid her to practice. Between the four of them, they kept me alive and hidden, gave me a modern education and brought me up in a culture that valued science over superstition and fear.” His smile faded. “Sven didn’t have that luxury. Fafnir was all he had, and he wasn’t the best role model.”

  She didn’t want to feel sorry for Norgard, so she didn’t say anything. He’d never told her anything personal about himself, only asked questions. She’d spilled her guts, thinking he cared. She’d been wrong.

  Asgard turned from the picture of his mother. “I didn’t meet Fafnir until I was full grown, and by then his magnetic persona had little left to impress me.”

  He was trying to humanize himself with these little personal vignettes. She didn’t want to hear any more. “What do you know about Tiamat’s Heart?”

  He raised one eyebrow. “Not much. Why do you ask?”

  “I asked one of the aptrgangr,” she said slowly, realizing how weird it sounded. “It said it wanted Tiamat’s Heart. Some spirits are more sentient than others. Like Kayla’s sister. She anchored herself to the Living World so that she could tell her sister where to find the key to the Gate.”

  “Go on.”

  “Well, this aptrgangr didn’t seem too smart, but it was focused.”

  “You think the aptrgangr have flooded the city looking for Tiamat’s Heart?”

  “Could be. Maybe Kingu is looking for it too.”

  “Strange.” Asgard turned away and strode to a bookcase at the opposite edge of the room. The floor-to-ceiling dark shelves were stuffed to the gills with old, leather-bound books. She watched him walk, a smooth arrogant roll like a large cat. His boots made no sound on the slate floor. He ran his fingers over the books until he found the one he was looking for. Pulling it out, he flipped through the yellowed pages, but shook his head. “The dragon tomes only have our creation story and the myth of how the Gates came to be. It says nothing about Tiamat’s Heart, except that her other limbs and organs became the sky and the sea and the land.”

  “You don’t sound convinced.”

  He slid the book back with a thud. “I am a man of science. While I understand the presence of the gods is real, it’s hard to reconcile what I see in the world with the old myths. Our earth is made out of the body of a goddess? What were they standing on before she was slain? I’ve always thought it more allegory than fact.”

  “But you’ve seen Kingu—”

  “And he is the first demigod I’ve come across. Where are the gods, I ask you? Sleeping at the bottom of the sea until our darkest hour, as some say? Where were they when the Gates fell and the world forever blackened?” His fists clenched at his sides. “The old tales of the gods paint a picture of avaricious, vain, and at best indifferent creatures. They were not all powerful; they engaged in petty, selfish squabbles no better than human kings, with no care to the damage their games wrought. And when Kingu first rampaged across the earth, was it the head gods who rose up to stop the slaughter?”

  “No.”

  “No, it was a human: Marduk. A warrior who might have been exemplary, but mortal. Because it is only mortals who care enough, who are invested in their communities and the outcome of their short life threads. There is the irony; only mortals, who have such short sweet passages upon this earth, are willing to sacrifice it all for their fellow men. Immortals—vainglorious, self-centered bastards all— care only for prolonging their miserable existence.” His green eyes looked haunted.

  He cared, she realized with a shock. Vainglorious immortal or no.

  “But Marduk became a god once he won,” she said.

  “And he became just as much of a selfish ass as the rest of them. His human progeny were enslaved so that the gods could be at leisure. The stories were rewritten to give him divine parentage and wipe out his shameful beginnings.”

  “Norgard believed—”

  “Sven believed in whatever would get him farthest. He was his own god. Or how else do you explain his plan to unleash Kingu? Sven would’ve had to be greater than a demigod to control Kingu and his horde. The cult of Sven.” Asgard shook his head, and she read real sorrow in his eyes. “He must have finally believed his own bullshit, and that has always been the undoing of powerful men.”

  “You weren’t helping him?”

  “Gods, no.” She watched him warily. She noticed lines of strain around his eyes for the first time. “Sven was secretive, even if I was willfully blind. I didn’t know about your . . . situation. I’m sorry.”

  An apology.

  She felt some of her defenses crumble. Her stark hatred of all things Drekar couldn’t stand up to this new picture. Asgard was different. Younger. Brought up by religious humans, of all things. What in Freya’s name was she supposed to do with this information? It shook her picture of the world, and she’d already had her world shaken enough, thank you. Since the Unraveling, there were only one or two things that had stayed constant: Drekar were the spawn of Satan, and she wanted all of them dead.

  But now she couldn’t say that with the same force.

  Ye gods damn it.

  “Well, they may be absent,” she said, “but I wouldn’t want the old gods around anyways. And if Kingu is really looking for Tiamat’s Heart—the heart of the goddess of chaos—then I don’t think anybody, mortal or immortal, wants to be around when he finds it.” She paced back down the aisle. She had new scrapes and bruises, and she’d twisted her foot in the fight. She tried to hide it, but she stepped wrong.

  Asgard was there in an instant, steadying her elbow, keeping her from falling on her face. She didn’t need anyone to catch her, but for one moment of weakness she wanted to lean into that embrace, to rest against him like a tree curls against the mountain in a thunderstorm, to let his heat trickle into her weary bones.

  “You’re injured.” His voice was low with carefully leashed anger.

  She set her jaw. “‘S’all right.”

  But he didn’t let go. He picked her up and turned her to face him. “Spitting nails will only prolong your torment.” He kept those green eyes set on her face, daring her to look away. She didn’t blink from sheer mulishness. A little smile played at the corner of his mouth. He raised his wrist to his mouth, and his teeth flashed in the dim light. Sharp. Feral. And then blood welled from a small cut on his wrist. The droplets beaded, taunting her. To refuse now would only play into his hands. It would only prove what he thought of her: she was contrary and stubborn and reckless.

  She wasn’t reckless; she was brave. She wasn’t stubborn; she stood firm to her ideals.

  Slowly, he lowered his wrist, stopping an inch before her mouth, forcing her to move, to accept his healing blood. To ingest his essence of her own free will.

  What’s it gonna cost me? she wanted to ask, but she knew that the question would only make her look weak. She stared him down as she moved that extra inch. It felt more like a long mile to executioner’s row. The challenge was plain.

  The tip of her
tongue darted out to taste those ruby droplets before her lips pressed—oh, so softly—against the firm skin of his wrist. His pupils dilated and slit to an inhuman cat-eye. A golden sheen spread over the emerald of his iris. She licked his wound, drawing his essence into her.

  Bold. Brazen.

  Shockingly intimate.

  Closing her lips over the cut, she sucked and watched his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed hard. The shock of cinnamon traveled like liquid fire up her tongue and down the back of her mouth, warming her from the inside, knitting together her torn and bruised places, smoothing the soreness and easing the pain. She squeezed her thighs together. His nostrils flared. The cords stood out in his neck. His lips parted, skin glowed, body practically vibrating with energy. All her fear dissipated, because she knew he would hold himself back if Armageddon erupted and they were the only two people left on this bloody hunk of earth.

  In this battle of wills, they were at an impasse. She wouldn’t back down. He wouldn’t let his baser instincts overrule his honor and prove her right.

  He thought she was scared, but she would kick fear in the teeth when she saw it.

  The gods help them both.

  Healed, renewed, senses overwhelmed with the same hunger that showed on his face, she tempted fate just to prove she could. Her lips left his skin with one last kiss.

  Chapter 10

  Snow had started falling across Leif’s vision, interspersed with little electric bolts that didn’t exist. He was quite sure of that. The snow, not as much. His vision must be malfunctioning, because Grace Mercer had just willingly kissed him in a shockingly intimate manner of her own volition.

  A man had reason to hope. He would be the first to admit that his coldly rational brain lacked the proper imagination to conjure the sheer pleasure of her tongue rolling over his skin and her usually stern lips soft and caressing.

  Sucking his essence. Ye gods.