"You don't have to leave, you know," Joshua said in a low voice, his words slightly smudged as he hunched over, elbows on his knees.
I hesitated. Maybe talking to him right then was not the smartest of moves. But I wasn't famous for the smartness of my moves.
Before I decided against it, my feet dragged me the handful of paces to the nearest deckchair: a strange contraption that resembled an armchair but was constructed of pure white stone. Maybe poured concrete or marble? Whatever the deckchair was made of, one thing was pretty clear—it wasn't a creation meant for comfort. The stone seeped cold into my flesh, and the bleak morning light added not a drop of warmth.
A palpable silence blanketed the little balcony. This high up, the space needed to be closed off from the gusting winds by a sheet of glass. So just an illusion of being outside.
Joshua cleared his throat. I shuffled in the cold seat, my butt slowly freezing itself against the icy concrete. At last I drew up enough courage to ask, "You okay?" I wasn't a coward. It was just that this experience was new to me, and I was completely out of my depth. I'd be lost if he ignored me. Or stopped being my friend. Even the thought of it twisted me up inside.
Again with the silence.
I'd just decided Joshua was best left to his own company and started to rise when he said, "Yeah. I suppose I'll live." He didn't shrug; his shoulders just drooped as if gravity worked especially hard to keep his body, mind and spirit down.
"I'm sorry." I snuck a glance at his face, but all I saw was a cheekbone and hair hiding his eyes. "Are you going to be okay?"
No response.
"You still angry with me?" I stared at his face; tears threatening to overflow.
"Why would I be angry with you?"
I did a double take at Joshua's question, the dam of threatening tears no longer an issue. "I thought . . . the way you looked at me in the hall when I revealed Mi—" I fumbled, trying not to mention her name. "When I revealed . . . what happened. You looked like you hated me."
"I was upset." He spoke so matter-of-factly, as if the whole Mika episode wasn't that big a deal at all. I wasn't buying it.
"I can imagine. I was furious and hurt, myself." I touched his arm. "Can't imagine how you felt."
Nothing.
At least he didn't shrug my hand off.
"When did you figure it out? Her real agenda?" At last Joshua threw me a questioning scowl.
"When we left the dwarf palace. I hadn't paid much attention to Mika; my mind was focused on the goblet, not to mention a tad creeped out by the queen's stone head. Then when Mika attacked me, everything sort of fell into place. Like how she refused to leave my side when Steinn came to tell me about his daughter. And how she insisted she come with me to find the goblet. I would never have imagined her intention was to steal the thing, or to destroy it." I shook my head, still not quite accepting what Mika had done.
"Yeah. She would've known that no elixir meant Aidan would die," Joshua said softly.
"I'm sorry." And I was. I hated hearing the sadness in his voice. Since when did Joshua's feelings affect me this much?
"No. I am sorry. I should never have trusted her." Joshua shook his head, the sharp, sudden movement emphasizing his anger.
"We all made the mistake to trust her. Look at Fen." As I spoke, I realized how true my words were. If she could pull the wool over her own father's eyes, why should we feel in any way obligated or responsible for her?
Joshua shrugged. "I guess."
Silence.
"Will you go to see her?" I asked, tentatively offering a neutral standpoint, and hoping like hell he would say no.
"What? Are you kidding?" His voice fairly vibrated with rage, the skin on his cheeks pink with anger.
"I just thought . . ."
"I liked her, okay. And she liked me—or so I thought. Didn't mean I was about to marry her. And why the hell would I want a relationship with a girl who betrayed me, who tried to hurt someone I. . . someone I care about? Why would I care about a girl who thought it would be okay to let my friend die a slow and painful death in Hel?" Despite his anger-tinged bravado, his voice held an edge of sadness. I understood his pain. But I didn't say anything.
No words could erase how Joshua felt.
***
An hour later, we were just finishing up a lunch of steak sandwiches and mocha lattes when Karl strode into the room, asking for Aidan.
Aidan looked around the table at each of us, eyebrows raised in question. He swiped a towel over his mouth and followed Karl out the room.
Ten minutes later, a tense and harried Karl rushed into the room again. "We have an address—the location of the remote estate where we will quite likely find einherjar Brody." He went to Joshua and pressed a copy of the address into his hand.
At that moment, I noticed two things. One, that Aidan hadn't come back, and two, that I didn't particularly like the fact that Karl had walked straight past me to hand the paper to Joshua, the only other male in the room. "Thanks, Karl," said Joshua as he raised a dark eyebrow and promptly and deliberately handed me the paper.
Karl watched the exchange, a cool expression in his eyes. How did he manage that? Harried, geeky and yet cool? I met his gaze with an equally cold one, chin raised just the tiniest bit. Flustered, the geek turned away and exited the lounge without a word.
In my annoyance at Karl's outright rudeness, I forgot to ask where Aidan had run off to, only remembering as the team filed out of the office to head back to the Bifrost.
I rushed past a startled Betty, popping my head back into the office. "Karl, where is Aidan?"
The Warrior wrinkled his nose in puzzlement, but the expression of surprise seemed strange when his eyes contained so little emotion. "Erik needed him. I didn't ask why." He folded his arms as if daring me to push the issue.
"I need to speak to Erik, then. Without Aidan we're short on numbers in our team."
"I'm sorry. Erik and Aidan are no longer in the building. And Erik requested that he not be disturbed." The smug expression on his face made me want to punch him in the mouth.
I frowned. No longer in the building? Erik had taken Aidan off somewhere without telling us, and now they were gone and incommunicado? But I really didn't have the time to waste arguing with Karl.
"Fine then, guess we'll have to do this without him." I didn't wait for him to respond, just shut the door and hurried back to my team to fill them in.
Strangely, I found I was angry with Aidan. He could have let the team know where he was running off to in the middle of a mission. Not that I wanted to go all chain-of-command on him, but a little bit of information would've been nice.
Now we hurried to our stinky alleyway and gathered beside the putrid blue dumpster. The midday sun, despite its bleakness, still held the power of putrefaction in its rays. Yuck.
Behind us, a dog rooted inside a garbage can that had tipped onto its side. The animal looked up, his mournful black eyes bringing to mind the little Labrador, Rex, who'd almost caught me retrieving Aidan's body in the park in Craven. Aidan had been dead then, a Warrior-to-be, but still just a corpse awaiting his turn to get his life back.
The dog watched as we gathered in a loose circle, a curl of rotting lettuce hanging from his mouth, liquid eyes staring. Then we disappeared into thin air.
To the keening, mournful wail of a New York stray.
Chapter 40
Icy air grabbed the breath from my mouth, curling and twisting the warmth until it melted away in ethereal tendrils.
The house sat in the palm of a small valley, hemmed in by snow-laden trees on three sides. The property rose at the edge of the mountainside, a sentinel of civilization within the lush greenery.
It looked empty.
Abandoned.
And yet Brody was imprisoned somewhere within this dark sentinel that pretended abandonment. Not a light shone from any of the multi-paned windows on the mansion's two floors.
Our heat sensors claimed otherwise, though. I studied the panel. Four deep orange blobs floated around in small concentric patterns, while a single smudge circled around the other side of the estate.
I frowned as one blob glowed, unmoving, in a corner of the basement beneath the silent house.
Brody?
Joshua, Aimee and the two other Valkyries spread out, strategically positioned in the shadows at one side of the property. Both Warriors glowed, a pale golden gleam, so beautiful on this moonless night.
How come I’d never noticed this moonlit einherjar beauty?
We were in position only a few minutes when a rustling in the shrubs beside me made me brandish my sword. The intruder shoved the bushes aside, revealing the silhouette of his spiky hair, and I halted my swing just in time.
Karl.
His eyes widened with consternation, and a touch of fear. He set my teeth on edge with his very presence.
What was Karl doing here anyway?
Worse, he'd come alone. No Aidan.
Karl squatted beside me, only the outline of his face and the whites of his eyes visible in the thick darkness. He didn't waste time with pleasantries. "We have one guard outside, who should be coming this way in—" he examined his watch. "—about ten seconds." We fell silent until the guard trudged into view around the far corner of the grand house. Karl strained his neck toward Joshua, a few feet to our left. "Einherjar Joshua, could you get to him fast, knock him out quietly?"
I gritted my teeth, because Karl had once again dissed my authority.