her side and winced as she limped closer, giving me a weak thumbs up sign before sticking her sword into the muck. She used it as a crutch which seemed really funny. Brody wheezed as he came up beside her, holding a limp arm that dripped blood onto his pants. He didn't seem to notice, just stared at the scene before him.
Three gods dead in the space of a few hours.
I stared at Loki, feeling the weight of the metal container. I hadn't been given the opportunity to fight Loki at all, no opportunity to use the water the Norn's had given me. My stomach twisted and I wondered why I'd even been given the water if I'd never been meant to use it. A part of me wanted to take the container and fling it far into the bloody field and I felt my fingers tighten.
Then Joshua came running up from behind my friends, his face smeared with blood. He seemed uninjured and I forgot about the water as I reached out to hold him, to make sure he was really alive, really unhurt because at the moment it seemed an impossible gift.
I sucked in a breath as he cupped my cheek. "Are you okay?"
His eyes glittered and I saw pain and fear and hope all swirling together in confusion. I nodded and gave him a quick update as a few warriors walked up gathered around Loki's corpse, satisfied looks on their faces. Suri flew in, holding something within her great dragon jaws. She glided passed and dropped her burden onto the ground beside us, giving me a satisfied, golden glance.
Jormungandr's head rolled over and over until it stopped at Freya's feet. The goddess gave it a distasteful glare then turned her attention back to Odin, her face filled with grief and pain, while my gaze went from the serpent's head to Thor's face as he laid eyes on the reason he still lived.
I watched Suri as she flew around and came in to land. She moved from blood-stained, golden-scaled dragon to equally blood-spattered golden eye girl within seconds, her feet touching the ground and immediately heading into a run toward me. Joshua released me so Suri could put her arm around me. Still weak, I was happy for the support.
With Loki defeated, his greatly diminished Jotunn horde had fled leaving the battlefield to Odin's army and the remaining citizens of New York.
Ragnarok was over.
Odin and Loki were dead.
And the words of an oracle from thousands of years ago had finally come to pass.
One Month Later
Despite the pink-tinged sky, I couldn't help but enjoy the sight of the beach before me. My bare toes dug into the warm sand and I tasted the salty air on my tongue.
Odin's death had hit us all hard, a kick in the guts and broken hearts were what we now dealt with. There was a strange emptiness that I wondered would ever be filled.
Loki was dead, and I don't think many people mourned his passing. His Jotunn had given up, retreating back to their realm, but not before passing to us a little education on the mind of the Trickster.
One of his higher-ups traded information with the new gods in Idavoll. Apparently the Jotunn King believed in new slates, and had encouraged Loki's former minions to come clean.
Most of it we'd managed to figure out on our own, but at last the reason for the list had been revealed. It had been a plot to abduct the delegates. Sort of.
Loki had put things into motion to extract each and every person on that list, key personnel in the most important organizations in Midgard, in order to replace them with Jotunn impostors.
We'd know he'd been doing just that with certain influential people, but we hadn't guessed he'd gone large scale. Loki had been so confident that he'd survive the battle that he'd put things into place to ensure that Midgard, people, politicians and business, would be at his mercy.
Asgard was no longer the place I'd once known. The rift had opened again, sucking in the palace and the entire valley, destroying everything. The quakes had continued, with waters rising from the depths of Asgard's earth, and when they subsided they left behind a new, rich land. This was Idavoll, the new realm of the gods, and where Frigga and the surviving gods now lived, without the need for warriors.
I'd found out much later that the destruction of the palace of Asgard had caused the