A Vigil in the Mourning (Soulbound #4) - Hailey Turner Page 0,102
his shields just enough to let her through.
Let me see, Jono demanded.
Fenrir obligingly turned his head, and Jono stared at where Patrick kneeled beside Thor, both hands slick with blood, while Wade hovered over them. Eir folded to her knees beside them, face a stone mask in the low light.
“The veil is tearing,” Eir said as she pushed Patrick’s hands aside. Jono watched as she dug her fingers into the ragged, gaping hole in Thor’s chest, her words ringing like a death knell between them all. “Niflheim is coming home to rest at the roots of the world tree.”
19
One of Patrick’s hands was covered in Thor’s blood. Patrick clutched his dagger in the other. He still almost shot Huginn and Muninn out of the air with a mageglobe when Odin’s ravens came flying through the shattered windows. The pair didn’t stop to aid them; instead they dived at the people on the stairs, their sharp beaks pecking at people’s skulls.
“What the hell are they doing?” Wade asked, hands curled over his head as if to protect himself. “Are they hungry?”
“For memories. They’ll take the thoughts and memories of what happened here tonight, and no one will be the wiser,” Eir said, white magic covering her fingers so bright Patrick couldn’t see them.
More blood gushed through Patrick’s fingers from the hole in Thor’s chest. “Forgetting isn’t going to fix this mess. You said that’s Niflheim coming to shore?”
The Norse realm of the dead was a threat no city or country could ever be prepared for. Patrick could fight the Dominion Sect with what power he had on hand until reinforcements arrived, but he sure as fuck couldn’t fight an entire hell without an army.
Eir never took her eyes off Thor and the wound she was healing. “The Dominion Sect must have taken the tithes owed to Odin to break the veil. That is over a century’s worth of souls.”
Which meant it was maybe enough power to cause the end of the world.
“I’m not getting my yearly bonus,” Patrick said, lifting his hand out of the way of Eir’s so she had space to work. “You brought a hell to Chicago, and I know I joked about scratching the Bean, but I didn’t mean like this.”
Thor suddenly heaved beneath Eir’s hands, spitting up blood. Patrick grabbed him by the shoulder and turned the god onto his side so Thor could better clear his airway. It gave Eir room to work on the wound in Thor’s back.
“The veil can still be closed,” she said.
“How?”
“How else but by sacrifice?” Fenrir said through Jono’s wolf form.
Eir glanced at Fenrir, her stormy eyes shining with magic. “Not with Thor and not with Odin. Not with any of us, wolf. This will not be our Ragnarök.”
“I have not tasted Odin’s blood in an age, valkyrie. Perhaps it is time.”
Eir moved so fast Patrick had no time to react. She spun her spear until the point came to rest right between Jono’s wolf-bright blue eyes. The spear never wavered even as she poured all her magic into Thor to heal him with her other hand.
“You will not taste it here.”
Fenrir moved his head and licked the spear point. “There is a price for everything. That has never changed.”
“No one is paying anyone anything until we know what the fuck is going on,” Patrick snapped.
“Uh,” Wade said, staring through Patrick’s shield in the direction of the broken windows. “Is that supposed to be there?”
Patrick followed where he pointed, squinting at the pillar of light that burned bright even through the snow. It hadn’t been there earlier, and its presence didn’t promise anything good. Within the light was a twisted shape growing and reaching for the sky with impossible branches, hints of eternity blooming between its sprouting leaves.
“It is Yggdrasil,” Thor said in a voice that sounded as if he’d swallowed nails. He got one arm underneath him and shoved himself up, blinking rapidly. “It is the world tree.”
The living connection that tied the Nine Realms together ruled over by the Norse gods, a myth that wasn’t so forgotten if it was digging its roots deep into the earth of Millennium Park.
“Fucking great,” Patrick said.
“Careful,” Eir warned, her hand hovering over the barely closed wound in Thor’s back. “I am not done healing you.”
Thor grunted as he sat up. “I am well enough to fight. Thank you, Eir.”
Patrick eyed Thor’s blood-soaked button-down that had been white before Loki stabbed him in the back. “Sure you are.”