Page 20 of Ravenous
Vendela
“Fuckity-ugh,” Eyrun muttered when her wager lost.
“Pay up, sucker,” Ven sneered to her sister as they used their supernatural hearing to listen to the drama in the Berserker court. “I told you that vampire princess wasn’t a ditz. Even if she fainted like one!”
Snort. “Went down like a bad joke. I could pity Arctos.” Eyrun’s smile faded, and her gaze flickered silvery with emotion. “Seems he’ll never be free of leeches.”
Most of the Skein despised them, but Arctos had reason that made the hatred a deeper, animal thing. Horde hunters had annihilated his family in a night.
Eyrun and Ven had stumbled upon him after it’d happened, two shadows among the trees.
They’d watched the boy emerge from hiding to find a scene no child should ever behold: murdered bodies half eaten by a bear.
He had lunged at the beast to protect those remains. One swipe of the bear’s claws had ruined his cheek and eye; another had nearly gored his torso. Ven remembered, with a flare of pride, the way he’d bitten the bear’s face with his first Berserkerage until the creature fled.
How much did Arctos remember of recovering body parts?
His brother’s head here. His father’s there. A piece of his mother.
As Arctos had collected his macabre pile, his eye had hung loose, swaying from the frayed nerve like a ball-and-cup toy.
The sisters had not taken him home. They’d left him a jug of water and a spear where he could find them. Coddling a future warrior—one among those who worshipped Wóden—was not the Valkyrie way.
Voice low, Eyrun said, “That Berserker is going to destroy his new vampire wife. Yrsa’s pushed him into a corner.”
“I won’t bet against that prediction,” Ven said, believing this would occur as well. “Yrsa wants him to disobey her. She loves neutralizing threats, is happy to pawn a vampire’s life to do it.”
“I mean, aren’t we all?”
They chuckled, their natural mirth recovering.
“Let’s go report back.” Ven hopped to her feet, her scabbard doing a wag. “The ramifications of Arctos’s fall could be massive—”
Inkletter Scribe materialized on a gust of morning-cold air, looking like a fuckable mirage. With his bald head and insane body, he approached seven feetof glory, looming over the much shorter sisters.
Eyrun rose, craning her head to meet his penetrating gaze. “So the spy spies on spies who are spying.”
He didn’t deny it. “Why does the Berserker queen want her most trusted shieldchief neutralized? A warrior who is also one of her gods-sons?”
Eyrun’s grin settled somewhere between flirt and scorn. “Maybe we should take a page out of your book and make you pay for information. For currency, we accept cockandcock. Off with your drawers, sir!”
He raised one brow.
Ven peered at her sister. “Is that not legal tender?”
“We’ve watched this one work.Tenderis the last word I’d use.” They dissolved into laughter.
“Do you Valkyries take nothing seriously?”
“Yes.” Eyrun’s honey-brown eyes twinkled. “Nothing is a very serious subject.”
A crack appeared in Inkletter’s customary composure, and his notorious contempt for Valkyries shone through. “Foolish females. I’m old enough to remember when immortals thrived in plentiful Gaia, but you weren’t satisfied. The gods warned us not to interfere with humanity—such a simple dictate—but your kind toyed with their mortal favorites. As promised, they punished us. You were architects of the Exile.”
Ven was old enough to remember Gaia too. Unlike Eyrun, she was a first-generation Valkyrie, born of three parents. Eyrun was a second-gen, native to the Skein.
A memory of the Exile flashed like lightning—one heartbeat Ven and her sisters had been roaming all over Gaia, the next ripped into the Skein. This realm had become their cage, their home, their war front.
After the All-Battle, the Valkyries had claimed a misty territory of hills and fjords and called it Valhalland. They’d made the best of it, but they could never recreate what they’d had.
