When the Crows finished burying the bodies, they tracked down the mobster and dealt with him personally, forcing his wife to have him declared legally dead so she could deal with his estate. The cops believed it was a rival crime family that made the man “disappear” but no. It had been the Crows. And those old-school girls had made him suffer before they were done with him.
Crows today, though, avoided unnecessary torturing . . . unless a guy was really asking for it. Like Tommy. Tommy had asked for it. He should have just left Erin alone.
Someone knocked at Stieg’s door and he barked, “Yeah?”
Erin had to laugh. He was just so dang unfriendly. Everyone thought that Ludvig Rundstöm was the unfriendly one, but he was just painfully shy and looked incredibly terrifying. But it was Stieg who was the archetypal Viking at heart. Rough, gruff, and of little patience.
The door opened and a very tall, very beautiful woman strutted in. She was lean with exceptionally large breasts that pretty much screamed stripper.
Erin rested against the sliding door frame and watched the woman walk over to Stieg and toss a thick stack of bills at him that had been wrapped together with a rubber band.
“Who’s this from?” Stieg asked, holding up the money.
“Joel.”
“When did we start taking cash?”
“When they hand it to us.”
“I don’t—”
“Are you a pimp, Engstrom?” Erin had to ask. She walked back into the room. “Is she giving you your cut for the night?” She pointed at him. “Do you have a street name? Like Whitey-Tuff, spelled with two Fs, of course. Or White-Boy, White-Boy? I think the repetition gives it a nice ring, don’t you?”
“Look at you,” the woman said to Stieg, “finally making friends. I’m so proud.”
“You, shut up.” Stieg looked over his shoulder at Erin. “And you shut up, too.”
“So is that a yes?”
“That is not a yes!”
“But I think we can all agree it’s not a no, either.”
Stieg growled and his best friend since he was fourteen quickly cut across the room toward Erin, her hand out. “Hi. I’m Karen.”
“Erin. Now is your name just Karen?”
“Oh, my stage name is Sharelle.”
“Of course it is!” Erin replied, sounding truly gleeful.
“She does not have a stage name!” Stieg barked. “And both of you, stop it. You’re freaking me out!”
“Everything freaks you out,” Karen said, winking at Erin. “And Stieg . . . why don’t you offer your guest some refreshment?”
“There’s beer in the fridge.”
Karen rolled her eyes and Erin laughed.
“Give me a minute, would you?” Karen said to Erin before walking over to him and whispering, “Why are you being such an uber-asshole to this girl? She’s cute.”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“Wouldn’t understand or wouldn’t care?”
“Both.”
“She’s here. She must like you.”
“Nope. The last thing she’ll ever do is like me.”
“So she comes to your house? Alone?”
“She needed a place to crash for the night.”
“Is she a heroin addict?”
“What? No!”
“Then crack? Meth? The ponies?”
“No. She’s not an addict of anything except making me miserable.”
“Then trust me. Girls don’t go to guys’ homes unless they like ’em. At least a little. Not unless they’re full-blown addicts. Besides, she seems really sweet.”
“She called you a hooker!” he finally barked, fed up with the conversation.
“I’m sure she meant escort. Right, uh . . .”
“Erin.”
“Yes. Erin. Right, Erin?”
“Exactly right.”
“There’s a difference?” Stieg asked.
“Between a twenty-dollar-a-blow-job hooker and a fifteen-hundred-a-night escort? There’s a huge difference.”
“Huge,” Erin insisted.
“I don’t like you two getting along,” Stieg finally admitted. “So both of you stop it.”
Erin laughed again. She did love laughing at him.
“Why is it so dark in here?” Karen demanded, flicking a switch near the kitchen. Her eyes widened when she looked at Erin.
“Oh, honey, your face! What happened?”
“I fight hobos for cash.”
“Make a lot of money with that work?”
“More than you’d think.”
“I’m getting irritated,” Stieg complained from the couch.
“Ignore him,” Karen said, dismissing Stieg with a wave of her hand. “He’s being bitchy. You stay here; I’ll get my first aid kit. We’ll get ya cleaned up.”
“Thank you.”
Once Karen was out the door, Erin quickly walked over to the couch and flipped over the back, landing beside Stieg. She rolled her way onto his couch like she did it every day.
As a man, he enjoyed the way her lean, gymnastics-and-ballet-trained body found its way beside him, but as Stieg Engstrom, he just wanted to shove her out the front door. Or off the balcony.
“Your girlfriend’s hot,” she told him. “I can’t believe you’re pimping her out.”
“I am not pimping . . .” Why was he defending himself to this crazy woman?
“She’s not a hooker. You’re not a pimp.” She lifted the large stack of money that Karen had given him. “But you’ve got all this money lying around your house. Pimp money.”
“It amazes me that more people haven’t shot you in the head.”
“That’s mean! People love me.”
“Imaginary people?”
“They talk to me and tell me I’m pretty and inform me when the neighbor’s dog is stalking me in the name of the high god Satan . . . so how imaginary can they be?”
“What bothers me is that I really can’t tell if you’re joking.”
She grinned. “I know.”
Karen walked back into the room. She held her ridiculously sized first aid kit—she had enough equipment to do open heart surgery if she needed to—and a magazine.
She shook the magazine at Erin. “I knew I recognized you!” She placed the kit on the couch and flipped through a recent issue of Rolling Stone that had Erin’s sister-Crow Yardley on the cover. When she found the page she wanted, she pointed at it and exclaimed, “This is you! Isn’t it? Isn’t it?”
“You need to calm down,” Stieg told his friend.
But Karen was in a zone. “You should see the people she’s tattooed. Movie stars. Rock stars. Those people who don’t do anything and have no obvious talent, but are stars anyway. She’s huge.” She pointed at the front of the magazine. “She knows Yardley King. The Yardley King.”
“So?” Stieg asked. “I know Yardley King.”
Karen snorted. “Yeah, Stieg,” she laughed and winked at Erin. “Sure you do.”
“Yeah,” Erin mocked him. “Sure you do.”
“Your work is amazing,” Karen babbled on to Erin.
“Thank you.”
“So . . . discounts for friends?”
“Subtle, Karen,” Stieg muttered.
“What? She can say no. She’s not required to help me even though I’m taking time out of my evening to help her painful-looking wounds. And knowing I’m doing it with loving care . . . she could still say no. If she wants.”
Erin didn’t answer, but her smile was ridiculously wide. She was clearly enjoying herself, despite the obvious sympathy-pumping going on.
“I need to pee,” Erin announced, chuckling and heading off to the bathroom.
“I didn’t need that information,” Stieg let her know.
Erin went into the bathroom, closing the door behind her.
Karen sat down next to him and asked, “And what’s wrong with her?”
Stieg stared at his friend. “What?”
“Come on,” Kare
n pushed, “she’s cute. She’s a redhead. She’s got that killer little body. What’s wrong with her?”
“You have no idea.”
“Don’t be an idiot,” Karen stated flatly. She’d always had little patience for what she called Stieg’s “weirdo belief system,” a term she applied to anything that went against what she was saying. “Ask her out.”
“She called you a hooker.”
“No. She asked if you were a pimp.”
“What’s the difference?”
“It’s the fact that you can’t tell that bothers me.” She slapped his bicep with the back of her hand. “Come on. What’s the problem? Really? She’s sweet. She’s funny, and God knows, you need some funny. I can’t be around to entertain you all the time with my effervescent personality.”
“You do not have an effervescent personality and—”
“Shit!” Erin barked before stumbling out of the bathroom, still holding a towel to dry her hands on. She spread her arms out wide and demanded with obvious glee, “Engstrom, you need to explain to me why there’s a goat in your bathroom. And you need to do it right now!”
* * *
Kera stood in front of the table with Ludvig “Vig” Rundstöm standing behind her. Like most Ravens, he towered over everyone but he wasn’t nearly as devious as his brethren. He was, Ormi knew, one of the most dangerous Ravens. It was often said that if the Clans ever wanted to take out the Ravens, the first to go would have to be Rundstöm.
“He can’t stay,” Brandt Lindgren of the Silent mouthed off to Kera. A woman who obviously hated him with every fiber of her Skuld-committed soul. “Clan leaders and War General only.”
Sadly, the Silent weren’t actually silent. Although, as Inka always pointed out, they clearly should be.
“You should sit over there, Rundstöm.” Brandt pointed to the other side of the diner. “Far, far away from us.”
“What is wrong with you?” Kera asked in that way Ormi loved. She wasn’t being mean or sarcastic. She really wanted to know what was wrong with Brandt Lindgren. And if it was something that could be managed with medication.
Brandt had no answer for her, so Kera looked back at Vig and said, “I won’t be long.”
The man grunted and, with a glare at Brandt that should have had him wetting himself, the Raven went to a table nearby and sat down . . . and stared. At Brandt.
Inka’s grip on Ormi’s thigh tightened, because they both knew she was loving this. She loathed Brandt, too.
“Thanks for meeting me here,” Kera began. “Now to start—”
“In future,” Brandt cut in, sounding as condescending as he possibly could, “we usually have these sorts of leaders-only meetings at a more secure location.”
“Chloe told me we couldn’t use the cave again. That was only for All-Clan meetings.”
“And Miss Wong is correct. But for these kinds of meetings we use churches. Or temples. Or synagogues.”
“For meetings involving Nordic gods? That seems . . . rude.”
“It’s not. We all have an understanding.”
“But why do it in any one of those places?”
“Because,” Inka explained to the confused girl, “the priest, imam, or rabbi always makes us promise not to kill each other on their hallowed ground.”
“And you guys stick to that?”
“Mostly,” they all said in unison.
Ormi watched Kera struggle to understand the logic, but it was all due to agreements centuries old. When things were different. “I’ll keep that in mind for next time,” she finally muttered, going through her messenger bag.
“You do that.”
Josef Alexandersen, leader of the Ravens, locked his eyes on Brandt. “Okay, now you’re starting to piss me off. You keep using that tone and I’ll let Vig over there tear your head right off your body.”
“Why are we here?” Rada Virtanen, leader of the Claws of Ran, asked. In a few hours, her people would be out surfing in Malibu and she was not about to miss that.
Kera grabbed a chair from another table and sat down in front of them, dropping her messenger bag onto the floor near her feet. “The research that the Protectors and Jace Berisha have been doing . . . they may have found something. Something we can use to destroy Gullveig.”
Mist Falker of the Isa pushed her half-eaten sandwich away. “Has she come back to this world?”
“Not that we know of,” Kera admitted. “But she will return. I think we can all agree on that.”
“So they have a way to kill her,” Rada said. “I don’t know why we needed a meeting for that bit of information. Why don’t the Crows just do it already? You started this.”
“We started this?” Chloe Wong snapped back.
Before either woman could tear into each other across the table, Kera calmly laid her hands down and sternly ordered, “Ladies, that is enough. So let us retract our talons”—she pointed at Chloe and then Rada—“and whatever those things are.”
“They’re claws.”
“Whatever. And to your point, Rada, there’s no just doing it. It won’t be that easy.”
“I think we all knew that,” Inka suggested, “when even Odin and Thor couldn’t kill her. Even Loki tried and he has quite the god-heavy body count.”
“So then what’s the plan?” Freida asked. “What do you think will work?”
“We think . . . Surtr’s sword will do the job.”
Mist shook her head. “Surtr? Surtr who?”
Rada, however, was quicker. She leaned forward. “Surtr the fire giant? The giant who will destroy the world during Ragnarok with that fucking sword?”
Kera shrugged. “That’s the one.”
“So you want to unleash him on us? So he can bring Ragnarok before Gullveig can?”
“Not him. His sword. We use the sword on her.”
“Do you know how big that sword must be? The man’s a giant.”
Inka held up her hand. “We can make it smaller. It’s a spell. It makes giant things tiny. Well . . . normal sized for us, tiny for them. So it’s doable, but . . .”
“But?” Brandt demanded. “But what?”
“It’s the sword’s location that’s the problem.”
Rada shoved a fry into her mouth. “If it’s in Muspellheim with Surtr, we’re all screwed. No human can walk through the land of the fire giants.”
“The sword is not with Surtr,” Kera told them.
“Oh,” Brandt said, relieved. “Then maybe—”
“It’s with Nidhogg.”
Freida fell back in her seat. “The dragon?”
Kera cringed a bit. “Yeah, that’s the one.”
“That sounds like a suicide mission,” Rada muttered.
“But,” Mist reminded them, “Nidhogg lives at the roots of the World Tree. A human can walk around there. Maybe sneak past him to get the sword . . . ?”
“Nidhogg lives near the roots,” Inka explained. “But the place he calls home is actually Náströnd.”
“Corpse Shore?” Josef’s lip curled. “Gross.”
“That’s not the only problem,” Sefa Hakonardottir added, the leader of the Valkyries finally saying something. “To get that sword, someone’s going to have to go into eight of the Nine Worlds, where none of us are actually welcome anymore. Rada is right. That’s a suicide mission.”
“The Valkyries can go,” Brandt insisted.
“We go to Asgard. We come home to here, AKA Midgard. That is the extent of where we can go in the Nine Worlds.”
“Since when?”
“Since the twelve hundreds. And that’s not going to change now. Trust me.”
Mist asked, “Can’t the Maids summon the sword?”
“From the other worlds? No. We got cut off from them in the sixteen hundreds.”
“Excuse me,” Kera interrupted. “This has all been discussed, analyzed, everything. We’ve done all this work already.”
She was right. They had. For hours, days. They’d discussed, argu
ed, and dealt with all this.
“And?” Rada asked.
“And we think there’s only one person with a chance in hell who can go to Nidhogg’s domain and get that sword. Physically touch it and bring it back here.”
“Who?” Josef asked.
Kera opened her mouth to reply but the pause . . . that pause said it all.
“Oh, God,” Mist gasped, her entire body recoiling in her seat. “Not her.”
“Anyone but her.”
“Have you lost your minds?”
“Stop.” Kera held up her hands. “Everyone, stop. Look, we have been over this. And we’re still looking for another way. Any other way. But I don’t think there is one. Erin Amsel is our one and only shot at getting this sword. She has the power of flame at her disposal. She can also be touched by fire without being harmed. And to be quite blunt with all of you—she’s the only one with the guts to do this.”
“Sweetie,” Rada said, leaning forward, “that’s ’cause she’s insane.”
CHAPTER THREE
“The goat?” Erin pushed when Stieg didn’t answer her. She wanted to know. She had to know!
“Do I come to your house and ask you stupid questions?” Stieg asked.
“Yes,” Erin replied. “All the time. And yet I’m kind enough to tolerate it.”
“No, you don’t.”
Karen got up, turned on more lights in the apartment, and set up a little station on the kitchen counter so she could tend Erin’s wound.
Erin leaned over the back of the couch and softly taunted Stieg with, “You get freaky with that goat, don’t you?”
His jaw clenched, which was amazing to watch, because Stieg’s jaw was so cut in the first place.
“Admit it,” she went on, trying to get him to loosen up. Just a little. “She’s a good-looking goat. I’m not sure I blame you.”
“I do not get freaky with the goat, I am not a pimp, and Karen is not a whore. You, however, are kind of a pain in the ass.”
“Just kind of? I must be off my game tonight.”
“Why are you torturing me? I did a nice thing tonight. I didn’t have to, but I did. And now I’m getting hell for it.”
Erin hated to admit it . . . but he was right. And it wasn’t fair. Especially since she wasn’t loosening him up at all, but making him ridiculously tenser. Besides, it wasn’t nearly as much fun messing with him when Kera wasn’t around to get all defensive and protective of Vig’s brothers.