Embrace of the Damned Page 8

  His lips twisted in a cold, hard smile that didn’t even begin to reach his eyes. They were haunted and tormented. “If we could die in the line of duty, we would.”

  She blinked and looked down at the granite countertop. “So immortality isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, then.”

  “No.” His voice came out cold and hard. There would be emotion there, if she scratched at the surface; she was sure. He moved to pour himself a cup of coffee and offered one to her, which she declined. “Your turn to share now.”

  “There’s not much to tell.”

  “There is.” His voice brooked no disagreement. “Think of it this way: The faster you tell me everything, the faster I can figure out why the Blight want you and the faster you can get out of here.”

  A spark of rage made her straighten and meet his eyes. “I’ll leave when I want, since I’m not a prisoner here.”

  His lips peeled back in a feral grimace to show his white teeth. The action seemed almost animalistic—territorial. “Don’t kid yourself. You’ll leave when I deem it safe. Now talk.”

  She sensed this was the moment to back down. Settling into her chair, she gave in to it. She was going to have to tell this man what she’d never revealed to any other person in her life, not even Lillie. She had to hope she could trust him.

  “Okay, fine. Here it goes.” She drew a breath and let it out slowly. “My aunt died three months ago. I was devastated. I held her funeral; I grieved; a part of me died inside. She was my last living relative. My parents died in a car accident when I was just a baby, so she’d been a mother to me. Her death hit me harder than I thought it would. I had to take a leave of absence from work and school to deal with it all. I had to manage the sale of her house and decide what to do with all her things. As I was going through the attic, I came across …” She stopped.

  What she was about to say wasn’t as strange as the tale Broder had told her, not really, but it was personal and painful.

  “Yes,” prompted Broder in his dark, deadpan voice. It only made her not want to tell him even more. She wanted to scream at him to show some of that emotion she knew teemed under the surface. To act human in some way. She knew he had it in him.

  She drew a breath and plunged on. “In records stored in the attic, I found a file of documents and pictures that led me to believe my aunt wasn’t really biologically related to me, that she’d lied to me my whole life. That would be disturbing enough, but the pictures I found of my mother and father made me wonder …” She swallowed hard and gave a laugh. “It’s totally impossible….”

  “I believe in the impossible.”

  “Good point.” She pressed her lips together and tried again. “I thought maybe the pictures were staged, or they were for a play, or maybe my parents were into historical reenactments, but the photos seemed genuinely old and there were so many of them. So I had them assessed by an expert—two experts, in fact, to get two opinions. Both of them said the pictures were very, very old. That means that the people who were supposed to be my birth parents, they lived a long time ago. The pictures showed they should have been my great-grandparents, not my parents.”

  “How do you know the pictures weren’t of some long-lost relatives or even two random people not related to you?”

  “Photos of folks who just happen to look exactly like my mother and father? No way.”

  Broder bit into an apple and studied her with his head cocked to the side a little. He looked as if she’d just told him she planned a trip to the library later.

  She glared at him, pissed off that he wasn’t as mystified as she was. “Sounds crazy, right?”

  He raised an eyebrow. “I’m a thousand-year-old Viking who fights demons. Not much sounds crazy to me.”

  Pressing her lips together, she continued, “There’s more. I’ve had some odd … abilities … cropping up lately. They surfaced right after my aunt Margaret died.”

  He zeroed in on her, hawklike, apple forgotten. “What kind of abilities?”

  She swallowed hard and glanced away. Saying this stuff aloud—something she’d never done before—made it all seem completely insane. “Uh, I can make people do what I want them to do. I don’t know how I manage it, but all I have to do is will them to perform some task and they will. Everyone but you, anyway.”

  “That’s why you were at the Office of Vital Records so late at night? You were breaking in to do research? Compelling someone to bring you restricted records?”

  She nodded, her cheeks growing warm. “His name was Roger. Divorced. He had a six-year-old son. He was really nice. He searched for my parents’ records of birth and couldn’t find them.” She slumped against the counter. “He found my aunt’s records, but they didn’t tell me much.”

  He studied her. “Anything else?”

  “Yes.” She hesitated, and then just plunged right into the heart of it. “It appears I have an affinity with certain types of electronics.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Apparently I can adjust the electrical flow of things, stuff like toasters, radios, et cetera.” She paused. “I, uh, managed to fix my aunt’s DVD player with my mind.”

  Broder stared at her.

  She babbled on. “I’m thinking maybe the two things are related, the ability to control and redirect electrical impulses in both humans and inanimate objects. I have no idea what that makes me. A temporary zombifier?”

  He kept staring, apple limp in his hand.

  Sighing, she rolled her eyes. “A penny for your thoughts,” she said with no shortage of sarcasm.

  He hesitated a moment, then threw his apple to the counter and moved toward her with purpose. Suddenly alarmed at the raw need in his eyes and on his face, she jolted from the counter and retreated backward as he approached her.

  She put the center island between her and him. “What are you doing?” He was way too close.

  He caught her up in his arms and whipped her around, pressing her to the counter. His thigh slid between her thighs as one broad hand cupped her nape and forced her to look into his eyes. “Hold still,” he murmured.

  Her heart thudded in her chest, ready to break through her rib cage. Hold still? Was he kidding? She was scared—and excited—right out of her mind. “I thought I made it clear last night. No k—”

  His mouth came down slanted across hers. His lips, warm and searching, tasted her slowly, gliding over her mouth so thoroughly that it made goose bumps rise all over her body. Then he parted her lips and slid his tongue within her mouth to stroke slowly up against her tongue. Broder kissed her the way she imagined he probably made love—deliberately, methodically, over and over his tongue colliding with hers.

  He tasted like coffee. Her knees went weak and she gripped the counter behind her to hang on so she wouldn’t fall—even though she was certain Broder would catch her. Desire rose up from the center of her like a flower blossoming. Her body ripened for him, became warm and willing.

  He kissed her deeply, his hands roving her body in a territorial way. His smooth yet hard body pressed against hers, making her shiver. His hands eased their way over her arms, stomach, and outer thighs, rubbing and massaging, until Jessa felt breathless, until all she could think of was the big bed upstairs and all the ways she wanted him in it.

  She twined her arms around his shoulders as he deepened the kiss, greedily slanting his mouth over hers. He brushed his palm over one of her breasts, making her nipple pebble instantly, and she arched into him, a moan caught in her throat.

  If he’d forced her jeans off her right now and taken her up against the counter, she wouldn’t have raised a syllable in protest. Instead, he released her so fast she nearly collapsed, then turned away.

  “Witch,” he snarled.

  SIX

  “Wait…. What?” She was still holding on to the counter and feeling sluggish and warm from his kiss. The word barely made it through the drugged haze. “Witch?” The insult registered and she stood up straighter. “Wait a minute! Ther
e’s no reason to throw insults. None at all! You’re the one who’s been aggressive, not me.”

  “No, I don’t mean it like that.” He pushed a hand through his hair and stalked away from her, as though trying to work out what he was going to say. Stopping a short distance from her, he let his hand drop to his side. “I mean, you’re a witch. Literally. I can taste it on you.”

  There were so many things wrong with that statement that she couldn’t even form a response. She stood, staring dully at him and resisting the urge to screech Are you crazy? at him.

  He could see that he’d lost her. “A witch,” he replied patiently, “a woman or a man who possesses magick.”

  “I know what a witch is.”

  He shook his head. “You’re a Nordic witch, not like anything you’ve seen in popular culture or in myth … well, other than Nordic myth, anyway. I don’t know what you’re doing so far away from your people.” He said that last bit under his breath, as though talking to himself. He looked pretty shaken up by this revelation.

  She was going to remain calm. Her life had shattered into ten thousand pieces of strange in the last few months, but she was going to hold on to her sanity, goddamn it all to hell … or Hel, as the case may be.

  Absurdly, she wondered what witches tasted like. Then she knew she wasn’t dealing as well as she’d thought and sat down.

  “I guess … I guess me being a witch could be true. It actually sort of makes sense. It’s bizarre, but bizarre is now a staple in my life.” She took a moment for the news to sink in, and it was a little as if the universe had somehow aligned. “I’ve always been out of step with people, my classmates, my friends. I’ve always felt different but never knew why.”

  “As a witch raised away from your kindred, I’m not surprised to hear you say that. You would have always sensed there was something a little unusual about yourself.”

  “You’re not kidding.” She paused. “You could taste it on me?”

  Broder nodded. “As you told me your story about your birth parents, the pictures, the special abilities, I realized you were probably either witch, elf, or Valkyrie. A kiss told me all I needed to know.”

  “Did you just say elves?”

  “Yes, they exist, but you’re not likely to ever meet one.”

  “Wait. No, seriously, you just said elves.”

  Broder looked like he might be counting to ten. “Yes. I did.”

  “I didn’t know elves were a part of Nordic myth, let alone witches,” she replied, feeling numb.

  “You are seidhr, one of the rare Norse witches and shamans left in the world. The Blight have been systematically wiping them out because the seidhr are a powerful force in preventing Ragnarök. That’s why they want to kill you. Somehow you’ve been hidden to them all these years, but something you’ve done lately—probably in pursuing this mystery about your birth parents—has revealed you to them. Now they have your scent, so to speak.”

  “And they’ve set the Hel hounds on me.”

  “Low-level demons.” Broder nodded. “They won’t stop until you’re dead.”

  And the good news just kept on coming.

  She blinked. “I can see how this explains my special powers, but how does it explain those pictures I found of my birth parents looking all young and beautiful back in the eighteen hundreds?”

  She could still remember kneeling there in the attic, a spread of papers and files all around her … her birth certificate listing different names than she’d expected, names she didn’t recognize. Then she’d found the photos, all kinds of them, all of one couple … all of them with the same names written on the back that had been on her birth certificate, listed as her birth parents.

  And the realization that she looked just like them.

  Broder was suddenly standing right next to her. She hadn’t even noticed he’d moved. He tipped her chin up to force her to look into his eyes. “Why do you think that is?” His voice was gentle, at odds with his demeanor and the ever-dark look in his eyes.

  She drew a breath, licked her lips. “Seidhr are immortal, aren’t they?”

  He nodded. “As good as immortal.” Something emotional moved across his face. “My condolences.”

  “I think I need a drink. Something strong, something that will make me wake up tomorrow morning and realize all this was just a bad dream.”

  “How old are you? Around twenty-two?”

  “Twenty-five.”

  He nodded. “Your biological clock has already slowed down. That’s how it works for the seidhr.”

  “I’m not sure I want to live forever.”

  “You won’t live forever, just for a very, very long time.”

  She paused, blinked, did her best to digest his words. Her mind was full of questions she was afraid to ask. “So, elves. Really? Did I hear you right?”

  “The seidhr, elves, the gods and goddesses from Nordic myth are not myth.” He paused. “Dwarves don’t exist, from what we know.”

  “Oh, good. I’m so relieved.”

  “I detect a note of sarcasm.”

  “You detect right, buddy.” She rubbed her temple. “So that explains my ability to make people do what I want them to do?”

  “Yes.”

  “And various household electronics?”

  He nodded. “All part of the same skill. That must be your inborn talent, since you need no spell. I believe they call it compulsion.”

  She nodded, tired. This was just too much.

  “You know nothing of who you are. For whatever reason, the seidhr lost you or buried you for a reason. If we find your biological parents—”

  “They’re dead. Died in a car accident when I was an infant. At least, supposedly.” She snorted. “Not so immortal after all, I guess.”

  “The seidhr age very slowly, but they can die from wounds at any time, just like a human.”

  Grief welled up dark and thick from somewhere deep inside her. She’d never known her parents, but she missed them all the same. Would she ever know why her aunt—if she could call her that—had lied to her all those years? She’d deserved to know the truth.

  Her aunt had been good to her, had loved her with all her heart. Jessa had never wanted for anything and they’d been incredibly close, as close as mother and daughter. Her aunt had seemed to cherish her. Perhaps she’d been protecting her from something—maybe from the Blight.

  Jessa had to believe that or she would go insane.

  Anyway, it was hard to imagine friendly, loving Margaret Hamilton as a kidnapper or as having some dark, nefarious purpose.

  But why, oh, why hadn’t she told Jessa the truth?

  Broder stared at Erik from across the room. Erik had his massive back to him, one hand on the mantel of the enormous creek stone fireplace.

  “Seidhr. I haven’t seen one in decades,” came his low, bass voice.

  Broder gritted his teeth. Of all the types of beings Loki could have paired him with, seidhr was the worst. It had been no accident, of course. The moment he’d kissed her he’d known and had squelched the urge to thrust her away from him, even though she’d tasted good—a little like peppermint and roses. Just like a witch … just like how Loki had taught the Brotherhood to recognize them. He’d never kissed one before today, of course.

  Erik turned. “Loki sent you to this woman? She’s to be your reward?”

  “Yes, but apparently this is more business than pleasure. She’ll need protecting.”

  Erik nodded. “So nice of Loki to be clear with us.”

  Broder shrugged. “We’re well accustomed to the games he plays.”

  “And the ways in which he likes to watch us squirm.”

  “Except the Brotherhood doesn’t squirm.”

  Erik cracked a smile. “Fuck Loki and his games. This is the first time in a thousand years you—”

  “Yeah, I don’t really want to talk about it.”

  Erik nodded.

  “I’m taking her to Scotland.”

  “To
the seidhr enclave. They won’t like that. Remember, we’re not allowed on their lands.”

  Technically the seidhr and the Brotherhood were allies, but that didn’t make them friends. There was an icy tension between them and a serious lack of communication. The seidhr were isolated, protective of themselves … to a fault.

  “I know.”

  Erik rubbed a hand over his mouth. “But they’ll be happy to recover one of their own. They should forgive you if you’re forced to enter their territory. You should take her there right away.”

  Erik didn’t know about Broder’s history with the seidhr and, if Broder had his way, he never would. Erik had no idea that the seidhr wouldn’t appreciate him riding up and dropping off one of their precious wayward witches—even if he could do that.