"That wasn't much of an adventure. It didn't last very long." I was leaning my head against the back of the couch. My knees were pulled up nearly to my chest, my glass of wine cradled between them, and my feet pointed toward him.
"Yeah, but you were badass," he said, sounding wistful.
His eyes were the darkest shade of blue I'd ever seen, like the sky just before it completely gave way to the black of night. Whenever he grinned, it drew attention to the scar on his lip, a tiny blemish on his otherwise flawless skin that somehow made him even sexier, and that felt like the perfect analogy for Asher himself.
Then, rather abruptly, he turned bashful--lowering his gaze and smoothing out nonexistent wrinkles in his pants. His cheeks flushed slightly, and his dark lashes landed on them heavily.
Asher cleared his throat. "I wanted to, um, apologize."
"For breaking in? I thought you already had," I said with a laugh.
"No." He licked his lips. "For kissing you the other night. I shouldn't have done that."
"Why not?" I asked, then added, "I wanted you to."
He lifted his head, his eyes filled with an unexpected eagerness and hope that made him appear more youthful. "You did?"
"Do you think I would've kissed you back if I didn't like it?"
"No, I don't suppose you would," he admitted with a small laugh. "But you just seemed too cool for it."
I raised an eyebrow. "Too cool for kissing?"
"Too cool for kissing me," he amended.
I laughed again. "I don't even know what that means."
"I don't know." He furrowed his brow, like he couldn't think of just the right words to say. "You seem above everything, sometimes."
I frowned. "I'm not." I took another drink. "But I think I know why I seem that way. Sometimes--well, most of the time, really--I'm afraid to feel things."
"What do you mean?" Asher asked.
My mind went back to a memory, a time when I couldn't have been more than five or six. I had a crush on this girl at school, and when I told her, she made fun of me in front of all her friends.
I came home bawling, and Marlow knelt down and looked me square in the eye, and told me, "Don't be a crybaby. You're a Valkyrie. Valkyries don't cry over petty shit like this, and they don't fall in love. You're stronger than this."
She meant it to be encouraging, but all I learned was that I should suck it up and shove down any feeling I had.
I took a deep breath and stared down at the wine in my cup. "I don't think I know how to have feelings, real ones like passion and anger and sadness and all that. Marlow always taught me that real Valkyries don't feel like that. That those emotions are just for humans. But I do feel them, and I always have, even when I tried not to."
Asher moved closer to me, putting his hand soothingly on my leg. "Real Valkyries do feel. My mother was emotional and passionate, and she was damn good at her job."
Suddenly tears were forming in my eyes. I didn't know why, and I hurried to wipe them away. "I know. I've only just begun to realize that this was another thing that Marlow was wrong about."
"I didn't mean to make you sad," he said, his voice low and soft.
"I'm not. It's okay," I insisted, sniffling a little. "These last couple weeks have just been so very long."
"I'm sorry. I shouldn't be here bothering you and taking up your time." He started to move away from me, but I reached out, putting my hand on his forearm to stop him.
"No, don't go," I said, and even I could hear the desperation in my own voice. It wasn't something I normally felt, but right now with Asher, that's exactly how I felt. Desperate to feel close to someone. For someone else to care about me and worry about me, so that, even just for a little bit, I didn't have to take care of myself.
He glanced at the doorway, as if having an internal debate, and he bit his lip before asking, "You sure?"
"Yeah. Right now, I really want you to stay."
"Okay," he said, and there was something about the way he said it--the weight of his words, the depth of his voice--that made me certain he knew exactly what I was asking.
He set his glass on the table and moved closer to me on the couch. I slid into him, so he wrapped his arm around me, pulling me to him. I curled up in his arms like that, relishing how strong and safe and warm I felt.
And he held me in a way that no one ever had before, not even Quinn. She would get feisty sitting still too long. But Asher seemed to have boundless patience inside him. He didn't try talking or kissing me or moving. He never asked a single thing from me--he just held me as long as I needed him to.
But eventually I realized I needed something more. I tilted my head up toward him, and his lips found mine, and all I wanted was to lose myself in him. I pressed my body against him, kissing him more deeply, and his hands were all over me, tracing the contours of my body.
It was less electric and insistent than our first kiss had been, but that didn't make it any less wonderful. It was gentler. Deeper. More intimate. This wasn't lust and adrenaline. It was something else.
His hand was on my cheek, and when we stopped kissing, he was looking me right in the eyes. He was right there with me, so close, and I felt a familiar panic inside my chest. I wondered painfully why it hurt so much to feel close to someone.
But at that moment, I thought it would've hurt more to be away from him. All I wanted to think and feel and be was with him, in the safety of his arms, until everything else just fell away and it was only me and only him and only us.
"Let's go back to my room," I told him breathlessly.
He lifted me up, and I wrapped my legs around him, allowing him to carry me to my bed before we both collapsed onto the mattress, ditching our clothes in a flurry.
THIRTY-EIGHT
The blinds in my room were open slightly, letting in the blue light from the billboard across the street, and I lay in Asher's arms in the sapphire afterglow. My head was on his chest, and his hand ran down my bare back.
In the dim light, I noticed a few jagged scars across his chest--all small and curved, dotting his smooth skin like angry bits of punctuation. I traced my fingers along the bumps, and Asher shivered involuntarily, but he didn't ask me to stop.
"What happened there?" I asked.
"It was from when I was a Vordr," he said.
I tugged at the paracord bracelet he still had around his wrist, the one with the Vordr emblem. "I was wondering when you were going to get around to telling me about that."
"Yeah, I was a Vordr," he admitted with a sigh. "But it didn't last long."
"Why not?" I asked.
"It's hard to explain."
I tilted my head to get a better look at him. "Try me."
"I'd always wanted to be a Vordr, ever since I was a little kid," he explained. "I couldn't be a Valkyrie, so I thought this was the next best thing. Proving my mettle, protecting and serving, saving the world. It all sounded so appealing."
"But it wasn't what you thought?" I asked.
"I don't even think it was that," he said. "After my mother died, everything changed. I changed." He paused. "I went after it anyway, because I didn't know what else to do, but my heart was never really in it. All that fighting and anger and death ... it just didn't seem worth it anymore.
"No offense to you," he added in a hurry. "I know how important your job is, better than most people, actually. It just ... it wasn't for me anymore."
"No, I understand," I assured him, pressing myself deeper into his arms, but something about his words hurt in a way I couldn't explain.
Maybe it was because he'd been able to get tired, to decide that violence wasn't for him, to leave it all behind, but for me it was in the very core of my being.
I had been born with an urge to kill, a calling inside me that intensified as I became a teenager. Getting rid of immortals brought me immense pleasure, and I couldn't imagine ever giving it up.
It was a strange, cold thing to realize I was born to be a murderer.
&
nbsp; "Hey," Asher said softly, sensing the tension in my body. He reached down, putting his hand under my chin and gently forcing me to look up at him. "You are strong, and you are good. You are more than your job, and you're not your mother."
"You don't know that," I whispered around the lump in my throat, desperate for his words to be true even though some deep, dark part of my heart was certain that he was wrong.
"No, I do know that," he insisted with a gentle smile. He must've seen I was about to protest because he explained, "My grandmother said that sometimes our ancestors--those that died before us and love us--leave us truths when we most need them."
"How?" I asked, staring up at him skeptically.
"It's a thought that comes in, but it's truer and brighter, and it becomes branded across my heart." He brushed back the hair from my face as he looked down into my eyes. "And when I met you, I just knew," he said as his fingers trailed down my temple. "I knew you were good, and I knew you were who I was looking for."
Somehow, he'd known how to say exactly what I needed to hear at the moment, so I kissed him gratefully and wrapped my arms around him. I wanted to stay like that forever, with him.
When I was with Asher like this--in the quiet moments between plotting to fight a demonic draugr--he made me feel like a girl, in a strangely wonderful ordinary way. I wasn't some monster or machine or tool of the gods. I was just someone he cared about, and for a little while, that was all that mattered.
Eventually Asher drifted off to sleep beside me. I lay awake, thinking about everything and listening to him breathe. But the sound of flapping outside my bedroom window drew me from my thoughts.
It was actually more than flapping--something was pecking at the glass. I sat up and peered through the blinds to see the large black raven, stalking me. It stared right at me, unblinking, and I swear it could see straight into my soul.
"What do you want?" I whispered, but it only squawked in reply, then flew off into the night.
THIRTY-NINE
Coming into class three minutes before it was set to start seemed like a good move on my part, but when I entered Professor Wu's class for the first time since my mother's death, I instantly regretted it.
Almost all the other students were already in class, and they had been talking among themselves. When they spotted me, there was hushed murmuring before the class fell silent, and I could practically feel their eyes burning into me.
Samael, I was certain, had done his best to keep the news of my mother's death and the circumstances surrounding it as secret as possible. But even within the Riks, hot gossip and rumors had a way of making its way through the city--and nothing was more scandalous than anything that happened with Marlow.
"Malin," Professor Wu said, and even his tone sounded off--more unsure and tight. He didn't seem to want to look directly at me, his eyes landing in the general area around me as I slowly took my seat. "We didn't expect you back so soon."
He had definitely heard something. How much he really knew--and how much of it was misinformed conjecture--I couldn't say, and I wasn't about to ask him. There was no point in explaining Marlow's actions, because the truth was damning enough, so I just had to keep my head down and barrel my way through the whispers and the stares.
"Getting behind in school wouldn't help anything," I said, dreadfully aware of all the ears hanging on my every word.
"If you need more time, you should take it," he persisted.
"I'll be fine," I maintained.
"Well, all right, then." He smiled cheerlessly, then turned to the whiteboard at the front of the class. "Since everyone seems to be here, we might as well get started. As we were talking about on Monday, there is one way for immortals to willingly return to Kurnugia, and that is through the Gates of Kurnugia--a city under impious control located just north of the equator, created by Ereshkigal a millennium ago."
As he began writing on the board, his demeanor returning to his usual dapper intellectual self, I heard two nearby students whispering. They meant to keep their voices down, but they were just loud enough that I could overhear them.
"I heard they killed her mother because she wouldn't do her job," one of them, a moody vampire, was whispering.
My heart pounded in my chest, causing my ears to flush with heat, and I bit my lip to keep from shouting out. The vampire wasn't wrong, not exactly, but I still didn't need to hear him gossiping about my mother so soon after her death.
"That's so weird, because she was just asking about what would happen if Valkyries didn't do their job last week," his friend agreed. "Do you think they were in on it together?"
"Hey," Sloane Kothari snapped at them. "Can you keep it down? Some of us are actually trying to learn here."
Professor Wu glanced back over his shoulder. "Thank you, Miss Kothari. If you don't want to be here, you don't have to be, but please don't distract the other students."
Sloane turned back to look at me, and instead of the usual disdain in her eyes there was sympathy, and something else. Worry, maybe? Her lips pressed into a thin smile, and I realized with some dismay that she might be the closest thing I had to a friend in this class. And as word got out about the suspicions regarding Marlow, I wondered how many friends I would have in the future.
For the rest of class, I kept my head down and dutifully copied the notes that Professor Wu told us to write and listed the chapters he told us to read. But otherwise I couldn't remember a single thing he said. My heart kept racing so loud I could hardly hear my own thoughts.
The second he told us we were excused, I bolted out the door, with no intention to try to stick it through any more of my classes. I hurried down the long halls, my footsteps echoing off the marble floors, when I spotted something that made me freeze in my tracks.
On one of the sterile white walls there was a large rectangle of white, even brighter and more stark than the surrounding area. Beneath it was a smaller rectangle where a plaque had been taken off, leaving an unpatched blemish in the plasterboard.
I looked around the hall, suddenly feeling disoriented and dizzy, and noted that all the other art pieces were still in place. All the paintings and sculptures created by former students remained exactly as they had been since I had started going to Ravenswood Academy.
All of them, except for one. The one titled The Desire of the Valkyrie had been removed, leaving only the white space behind it. Marlow's painting.
The school was already distancing itself from her. In life, she had been a hero, a mentor, someone to aspire to be, but now, in death, she would become a villain to be ostracized, to be hidden away.
"Malin," Sloane said, pulling me back to reality.
I turned to look at her, blinking a few times to assure me this was all real. Sloane stared at me, appearing as prim as she always did. Her black curls were pulled back in a tight ponytail, and her lips were pressed together in a thin line.
"I just wanted to say that I'm sorry about your mom," she said, and it sounded like she really meant it.
"Thanks ... I think," I replied, narrowing my eyes. "Why are you being so nice to me?"
She glanced around, confirming that we were alone. This part of the hall was just far away enough from the classrooms that it was generally deserted, and today was no exception.
"Most people here know that my dad is a Deva," she said. "That's fairly common knowledge, because I've worked really hard to keep it hidden that my mom was an Apsara."
I hadn't known that, but I also didn't know why it mattered. Apsaras were immortals, known for their beauty, their love of nature, and their lack of inhibitions. They were sort of like muses, in that they often inspired people to do more and create more.
"There's no shame in being an Apsara," I told Sloane in confusion.
"Just as there is no shame in being a Valkyrie," she agreed. "But your mother wasn't just any Valkyrie, nor was my mother just any Apsara."
Glancing back at the blank space on the wall where Marlow's painting should be,
I realized bleakly that I was going to have to get used to feeling shame when I thought of her. Before, it had only been pride and fear. But never shame.
"Because of the very nature of the Valkyries' existence, my mother did not believe she had free will, much like me," Sloane explained. "The fact that a being exists that decides when she should die meant that her life had to be preordained, at least to some degree. But she got it in her head that if she overthrew the Evig Riksdag, we would all be free to live as we wanted. That without the Eralim giving orders and the Valkyries to carry them out, nothing could be preordained or controlled.
"Though she held no vendetta against the Valkyries personally, she couldn't see a way to coexist with them and truly be free," she went on. "So she mounted an attack against the Riksdag, and it failed miserably, so you've probably never heard of it. She was thwarted almost before she began, and she was killed instantly."
I gaped at Sloane for a moment before managing a meek, "I'm sorry. I had no idea."
"I'm not looking for your pity," she replied haughtily. "I am only telling you this because I know what it's like to love someone and also be mortified because of their actions."
I felt a lump growing in my throat. "That is hard to explain or know how to feel. I don't even fully understand it myself."
Sloane went on, "There is also the bitter irony that if my mother was right about free will, it is not her fault that she did the things she did. She did what she was always meant to."
"I know how you feel about predestination, but I just can't believe that this is what my mother was meant to do." I shook my head. "Marlow wasn't perfect by any means, but her greatest mistake was letting someone she believed to be good live.
"But he's not good, not even a little," I said. "He's in bed with something evil, and if left unchecked, he could destroy so much. How could that possibly be the plan?"
"It may have been your mother's destiny to set evil free," Sloane said. "But it may also be yours to stop it."
"How?" I scoffed. "I'm barely even a Valkyrie, and I have no idea how to find who I'm looking for. I don't even know for sure who I am looking for."
She chewed her lip. "If it is your destiny, you'll find a way."
I waited for a minute, expecting her to say something more. There was a look of perplexed uncertainty on her face, pinching her eyebrows together and creasing her forehead. But she didn't say anything else, and while I appreciated her kindness--especially on a day when no one else seemed to want to show me any--I didn't have much use for her platitudes and proverbs.