Perfekt Control (The Ære Saga Book 2) (23 page)

“Yeah.” I hastened out of Henrik’s arms and
walked to the edge of the black grass. “And by
my
calculations, we’ll be dead before we get halfway across.”

“Why do you say that?” Tyr asked.

“I sent out a scout net.”

“A scout net?” Tyr looked confused.

“Mia and I developed it last week,” I
explained. “Fortuitous, right? It’s got two tiers; the first
activates any airborne traps, the second tackles the ground. I
fired a net off and the first tier got sucked out of the sky by
something that was either really fast or really invisible—I never
saw it. The second set off a series of mines hidden in the grass.
Or maybe the blades themselves are the mines—I’ve never seen grass
that color before; it could be weaponized, or infused with dark
magic, or just plain possessed.” I dropped to the ground and stared
at the mystical field from a seated position.

“So I’m taking it I can’t just fly us across.
Whatever captured the net will capture us.
Förbaskat
.” Tyr
rolled his head in a slow circle. His neck cracked in protest.

“I fired a second scout net and the same
thing happened. I thought I might have detonated all the bombs with
the first net, but maybe they regenerate or something.” I fished
the net gun out of my backpack and offered it to Tyr. “If you want
to have another go, be my guest. But I’ve only got two more nets in
there. And we might want to hold on to them—I’m not sure what else
is up ahead.”

Henrik sat beside me and folded his hands
together. I chewed on a nail while I stared at the black
blades.

“What about the nano-molecular particle
accelerator?” Henrik asked.

“I thought about that. Imploding the mines
would activate the detonation, but if the bombs are regenerating we
wouldn’t have time to get across. If we tried to cross during the
implosion, we’d get sucked in with it.” I sighed. “I am flat out of
ideas.”

“Well, I’m not.” Henrik gave me a devilish
wink. “We can use the transporter to beam across the field.”

I gasped. “You brought the transporter?
Brilliant!”

“Won’t we get blown up going over the field?”
Tyr asked.

Henrik tapped his head. “We thought of that
during beta phase. We figured we might need to use it to get from A
to C without actually crossing the plane of B. The wormhole takes
us outside the realm and spits us back out at our destination. So
long as there isn’t a trap in Helheim’s atmosphere, we should be
good.”

Tyr narrowed his eyes. “And if there
is
a trap in the atmosphere?”

“Well, in that case we’ll be dead,
kille
.” Henrik grinned. “But we’ll die warriors, so it’s
Valhalla, here we come.”

My fist connected with Henrik’s shoulder.
“Don’t worry about it, Tyr. If there was a trap in the atmosphere,
it would have already been triggered by the Bifrost.”

“Oh. Right.” Tyr nodded. “Then let’s do
it.”

Henrik stood and I followed suit. He unzipped
his backpack and removed a small sphere with a red button. He
offered it to me. “Care to do the honors?”

“Gladly.” I pressed the red button, and a
small black oval appeared at the edge of the grass. “Seriously? It
couldn’t show up, I don’t know,
not
right over the danger
zone?”

Henrik shook his head. We watched as the oval
grew to the size of a doublewide door, purple energy swirling
erratically in concentric circles along its border. “It only stays
open for sixty seconds so we’d better move. Should we go separately
or together?”

“Together,” I answered. “Just in case we
configured it wrong and it sends us to different places,” I drew a
breath before muttering, “or sends our body parts to different
places.”

“It could do that?” Tyr sounded alarmed.

“It could do anything,” I admitted. “We
didn’t actually have time to test it out.”

“You said beta phase,” Tyr reminded me.

“It was a really rough beta,” Henrik
admitted.

“
Skit
,” Tyr swore. But he took my free
hand and stepped to the edge of the grass, so he and Henrik had me
bookended. “All right. Let’s give this a go.”

Henrik nodded. “For
ære
,” he said, as
he gripped my hand. Then he leaned down and whispered, “I told you
you’d have to touch me eventually.”

I stuck out my tongue.

“For Asgard,” Tyr chimed in from my left.

“For Freya,” I whispered. I closed my eyes
and counted down. “One. Two.”

“Three,” Henrik finished.

We jumped together, launching ourselves at
the portal. It took Henrik first, then me, and finally Tyr. As I
sent up a prayer, I felt a familiar suction. The portal used forces
much stronger than the Bifrost, making this journey every bit as
nauseating as the rainbow bridge I’d learned to loathe. We shot
through the wormhole in a jerky pattern, and each turn sent a new
surge of force from head to toe. We traveled too fast for sight to
be effective—I couldn’t even open my eyes. I tried to call out for
Henrik, but the rush of wind was too loud to allow verbal
communication. My fear diminished slightly at the steadying
pressure of Henrik’s hand on mine, and I clung tight to Tyr as I
pulled him along behind me.

I’d thought the journey would last a few
seconds, maybe half a minute, but as the forces pushed down and the
wind whipped us in a violent trajectory, I realized we’d grossly
underestimated the duration of this kind of travel. My muscles
began to fatigue from the constant battering, and my hand slipped
from Henrik’s. He clamped down tighter, locking his fingers around
my palm, but the forces were too strong for even his warrior grip.
As I clung to his grasp, our hands slipped again, then again. With
each twist of the sightless tunnel, our connection was loosened,
until finally I lost him completely.

“Henrik!” I shrieked as I felt his fingertips
slip from mine. But the word was hollow. It was like yelling into a
void. “Henrik!” I shrieked again, clawing at the darkness in the
vain hope that he’d reappear. But my hand closed on nothing, and as
the wormhole whipped me back and forth along the trajectory back to
Helheim, I lost Tyr too.

“No!” I stretched my hands out to both sides,
desperately reaching for the gods who were my security; my world;
my family. But there was nothing but air on either side of me. I
was alone, completely alone in a black vacuum that we’d programmed
to lead us straight to Hel.

And for the first time in a long time, I was
afraid.

* * * *

“Henrik! Tyr!” My volume alone would have
earned me a lead role among the Berserkers. The transporter had
dropped me in one piece right at the edge of the forest, but it
closed without ejecting either of my friends.

This was Helheim. Both literally and
figuratively.

I blurred through the trees, shrieking with a
tenacity that would have awed any lurking Helbeast. I hit every
corner of the forest, climbing to the navy-colored treetops when my
ground search proved fruitless. It wasn’t until I came to the edge
of the ravine and stared into the black abyss of Hel’s gate that I
gave in to my tears.

“No.” I cried softly at first, the drops
falling from my eyes into the void below. As the seconds ticked by,
my tears fell harder, coursing down my cheeks and disappearing into
the darkness. “No!”

I threw my head back and wailed. Henrik and
Tyr had been my world for, well, forever. They were the stinky boys
who’d dug for worms and made mud pies with me when all the girls
thought it was too gross. The only guys who fought me as hard as
they could in combat class, because they knew what it meant to me
to be treated like one of them. The boys next door who snuck me out
of my house on summer nights to watch the aurora borealis. My
childhood crush, who saved me from humiliation by stepping in as my
Fall Ball date when I got stood up. The young warriors who’d
refused to join the rest of the Elite Team on a recon mission the
last time we lost Freya, choosing instead to stay by my side… and
hold my hands through the entire ugly aftermath. The titled god who
let me on his team even though I didn’t have near enough seniority,
simply to honor our friendship. The adorable guy who was trying
so very hard
to ignore the awkwardness between us so we
wouldn’t lose a near-millennia-long friendship.

Tyr and Henrik were everything to me. And now
they were gone. The wormhole ate them.

And I had no idea where it had spit them
out.

“I hate you, you stupid, friend-eating
wormhole!” I shrieked. Then I sobbed. I didn’t care how ridiculous
I sounded. Nobody was around to hear me anyway.

“Now, now, Brynnie. Why would you hate the
wormhole? It got us over the grass safely. And it didn’t even
separate any of our parts.” The voice was so jovial, so welcome, I
was sure I’d imagined it.

“Henrik?” I turned around, not caring that
snot dripped off my upper lip. “And Tyr? How are you… how did…” I
took in the sight of my friends emerging from the trees with all of
their limbs intact. “But I saw the portal close. You were trapped
inside… weren’t you?”

“No idea.” Tyr shrugged. “We got separated,
then the portal spit me out on the east edge of the forest. I
hunted around for a good five minutes before I found this guy.”

“And I was dropped on the west edge. I heard
you shouting, but the portal broke my leg on exit. I called out but
you were screaming too loud to hear me. By the time my leg healed
itself, Tyr showed up, and we followed the sound of you cursing the
wormhole.”

My ponytail whipped back and forth as I took
in the overly welcome sight of the family I’d thought I’d lost
forever. Then I launched myself at my boys, catching them both in a
tackle hug.

“Do not
ever
leave me in a wormhole
again
.
Ever
,” I admonished. “You guys freaked me
out!”

“Clearly,” Tyr said drily. But he wrapped an
arm around me and pressed his face to mine. Thick stubble prickled
my cheek. “You’re stuck with us, Brynn. You know that.”

“I better be,” I growled. I pulled back and
appraised them both. “Are you okay to travel, Henrik? Or does your
leg need more time to mend?”

“I’m healthy as a pegasus,” he vowed. “And I
just want to recover Freya and Bifrost out of here. I’ve had enough
of this realm.”

“Agreed.” I took their hands and walked them
to the edge of the ravine. “So this is Hel’s gate. It looks to be
about a hundred-meter drop, though it’s so dark it could easily be
twice that. And I’ll be totally honest—I have no idea what’s on the
other side.”

“Nobody does.” Tyr studied the darkness below
us. “I’d assume there’s a guard down there. Garm used to protect
the entrance, but Hel might not have replaced the dragon since we
killed her.”

I repressed a shudder at the thought of
coming face-to-face with Hel. In school we’d learned that Hel
herself was an abomination—half flesh, half bone, wholly evil. But
for reasons only he’d ever know, Odin gave Hel dominion over
Helheim and its constituents, from the
ikkedød
to the
specters to the mortals who suffered an ignoble death—including the
ignobility of dying of natural causes.

“There’s something that’s never sat right
with me about Helheim.” I turned to Tyr. “Why is it ignoble to die
of natural causes? If a mortal lives a good life to old age, why
banish him to Helheim?”

“A noble mortal dies a warrior,” Henrik
parroted Odin’s code.

“Well,
ja
, but there aren’t that many
wars in Midgard at the moment. At least, not in first-world
Midgard,” I reminded him.

Tyr smiled. “Odin never meant it literally.
Not every noble soul can die in battle. A warrior is someone who
fights for
ære
in
any
capacity. Mortals whose choices
shine light on the glory of the Asgardian virtues—honor, valor,
truth, righteousness, and most importantly, kindness—are afforded
seats at Valhalla. Those whose choices contribute to the dimming of
Asgard’s light are considered ignoble, and cast to Hel.”

Well,
skit
. If Professor Meadows had
covered that in her lecture, maybe I’d have gotten a better grade
on my valkyrie entrance exam. Guess the assassins got a more
thorough dose of history of the realms at the Academy.

Henrik glanced down at the darkness below,
his hand still wrapped around mine. “Odin’s inclusion of warriors
of all kinds is at the very heart of
ære
. Every event, every
choice, every action creates a ripple. And every one of us has the
power to make those ripples beautiful… or choose to infect the
realms with darkness.” He met my gaze and traced a soft circle
inside my palm with one finger. The action sent a warm shiver up my
arm, and his words gave my heart a jolt. “I will always fight for
beauty. For glory. For love,
sötnos
. What will you fight
for?”

My breath caught at the endearment, and for
the millionth time I wished I didn’t have to live by Freya’s stupid
code. Because when Henrik talked about… well, all of
that
,
it reminded me that he was one in a billion—that his heart was so
kind, his mind so brilliant, his sense of honor so strong, I was
lucky to be able to call him my friend. And if Freya didn’t have
her stupid rules, I’d have clubbed him over the head and demanded
he release me from the friend zone right that very minute.

But Freya had her rules. And she needed our
help. And right now, my hot-as-Helheim friend stared at me in
earnest, awaiting some coherent reply. So I opened my mouth and
blurted the first thing that came to mind.

“I fight for us.” I squeezed Henrik’s hand,
then Tyr’s, and looked at each of them in turn. “For all of us. For
everything we’ve built, and everything we hope to accomplish.” I
drew a breath. “And I fight for the love I know the realms will
lose if we don’t bring back Freya. So let’s go get our girl.”