Sabotage, p.1
Sabotage, page 1
Sabotage
NEON Book 3
Allyson Lindt
Acelette Press
This book is a work of fiction.
While reference might be made to actual historical events or existing locations, the names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2022 by Allyson Lindt
Cover Art by Melony Paradise of Paradise Cover Design
All Rights Reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Contents
1. Bragi
2. Nicodemus
3. Magnus
4. Bragi
5. Nicodemus
6. Magnus
7. Bragi
8. Magnus
9. Magnus
10. Nicodemus
11. Bragi
12. Nicodemus
13. Magnus
14. Bragi
15. Bragi
16. Nicodemus
17. Magnus
18. Bragi
19. Magnus
20. Nicodemus
21. Magnus
22. Nicodemus
23. Magnus
24. Nicodemus
25. Magnus
Bragi
For my eternal dragon
One
Bragi
Few things soothed the soul like Mozart filtering through a series of invisible speakers, accompanied by the crackle of a fire, while a storm raged outside. My soul needed a lot of soothing, given the gods I’d betrayed and the tension of hiding from them.
With Vidar gone, I could relax a little, but I know the remaining members of the TOM board—gods determined to destroy whomever it took to ensure they lived through Ragnarök—wouldn’t let me survive for long.
I’d been one of them, and betrayed them. For what? A stunning redhead who was barely more than a quarter of a century old?
If only it were—
The chime of the doorbell, followed by a strong pounding that quickly faded to weak, filled the room.
Once upon a time, I would’ve had staff to answer that for me. A butler to greet guests and show them to the sitting room, where I could be waiting while they made a grand entrance. But centuries of bathing in the emotions of others had caught up to me. Now my empathy and I preferred to live alone.
Speaking of—the pain radiating from my front step would’ve suffocated me once upon a time. It was so potent, I couldn’t tell who it belonged to. I also couldn’t ignore it.
Loneliness, grief, and agony enveloped me as I strode quickly to answer the door. When I opened it, my heart sank. “Magnus?”
She was in her Valkyrie form, but her auburn wings were as tattered as her clothing, and she was using her sword to support her. Slashes and burns cut deep through several parts of her body.
She was supposed to heal immediately. Always. Whoever had done this to her was powerful and knew how to make her injuries last.
She looked up, the clouds in her gaze lifting for a moment as she focused on me. “I didn’t know where to go.” Her voice barely reached above the rain hammering around her. “Everyone else is… gone.”
Magnus stumbled and fell to one knee, and hopelessness spilled from her, sharp and foul when mixed with her other emotions.
I stepped in before she could hit the ground, scooped her into my arms, and carried her inside and up to my room. No other bed would do tonight; I needed her in the most comfortable room in the house, and where my energy was the strongest.
I set her on my bed and brushed her hair from her battered face. Even unconscious, she radiated fear and the heartbroken ache that came from being betrayed.
“Who did this to you?” I muttered, though she couldn’t answer in this condition. Some of her wounds were slowly knitting back together, but not many and not fast enough.
I cut away her clothing. Modesty wasn’t a concern with the severity of her injuries. I cleaned and dried her as best I could with her in this condition, dressed the wounds, and wrapped her in fresh clothing and blankets.
Every few minutes, through the entire process, she whimpered or growled or lashed out, but she never woke up. The various pains that radiated from her were cloying.
Cutting myself off from them was an option. When another’s emotions were so potent, it took focus, but I could force myself to ignore those feelings.
Being an empath surrounded by gods who fucked and fought all the time had been rough when I was younger. Centuries ago. As I grew older, I learned to revel in the pain and lust and rage others radiated. I absorbed it and fed on it.
A lot of beings—god and human—thought being a god of music and poetry, a bard, was a useless power. But being able to absorb hate and pain, and project it back out, could be as potent as any physical attack.
Tonight I wanted to soothe, rather than harm, the woman lying in my bed. It was tempting to bathe in her fear and rage until it consumed me, but that wouldn’t help her. Instead, I summoned a center of calm, to transfer the same to her.
Magnus didn’t know it, but she’d saved me. She was loyalty and love and fierceness, all for those she considered family, regardless of the storm she got caught up in. When I first recognized it in her, I resented it. But over time, I learned to crave it.
I may never tell her that, but tonight I could save her in return.
A brush of my fingertips across her forehead, and a push of soothing emotion, and her whimpers and thrashing stopped. Her wounds weren’t healing any faster though. If I didn’t know any better, if I wasn’t looking at her wings and the sword now propped up next to the nightstand, I’d think she was mortal.
The way she used to be. Fragile, but still fierce.
As the night wore on, her wounds seemed to be getting worse instead of better. I couldn’t rouse her, and her fever was climbing.
She had friends with healing powers, but they were very much my enemies, and there had to be a reason she was here and not there.
I’d alienated most everyone, regardless of which side of the coming war they stood on.
My options were limited in who I could call to help. I could only think of one individual who could both heal and wouldn’t attack either Magnus or me on sight.
I brushed my lips over her forehead—a gesture too intimate for our relationship, but that felt right. “I wouldn’t do this for anyone else,” I whispered.
Two
Nicodemus
The phone on my wall rang.
Considering it hadn’t gotten calls since manual switchboard operators were replaced with their electric equivalent, it could only mean one thing: some god somewhere had decided to interrupt my morning tea.
I picked up the delicate cup and carried it across the kitchen to the antique device whose bells were jangling loudly.
“Hello,” I answered.
“Nicodemus. Good day.”
Bragi’s familiar voice cut through me, not as sharply as it once had, but enough to kill my interest in my drink. I set my tea aside. “It was. I don’t know that it is anymore.”
“Join the club. I need you to heal someone.”
I pulled the earpiece away to stare at it, then pressed it back to my ear and spoke into the receiver mounted to the wall. “Beg pardon?”
A lot of immortals could heal, and it seemed for almost as many, it was no big deal. In my case, my tears were the magic ingredient, and they had to be tears of sorrow. Whatever mind of evolution or creation decided that was the only phoenix tears worked could go fuck itself.
“No one else can do this. Even if they could, I don’t trust anyone else.” Bragi sounded… desperate? That couldn’t be right.
I knew better than to be fooled by his lies again. “Anyone else can do this. Who did you piss off enough to get hurt?” A better question was—why was I still on the phone?
“It’s not for me. Please.”
His tone pierced centuries of apathy. If he were in the room, I’d wonder if he was influencing me. Tugging my heartstrings the way he had when we were together. His desperation grabbed me and refused to let go.
“Come get me,” I said. I couldn’t teleport, though I could fly like the wind when I was in my bird form. Even if I could blink from one place to another, rumor had it Bragi no longer stayed on this plane—he preferred to make his home someplace where he could easily block himself from the whole of the world’s emotion.
I grabbed a necklace from the hook on the wall, where it hung near my keys. I’d wondered on several occasions if I’d ever have a need for the crystal that hung from a leather cord. The talisman that kept me from feeling the influence of gods who were capable of projecting their will.
With Bragi, I’d need it.
He appeared in my kitchen, grabbed my upper arm without a word, and took us back to a bedroom I knew instantly was his, from the decor and the air of emo.
“That’s the last time I’m leaving while she’s here.”
I didn’t have to ask who he was talking about. The woman lying on the bed, the auburn-haired Valkyrie who radiated less life than the wooden frame holding up the mattress, captivated me. She was impossible. Another Valkyrie, when there were supposed to be none left . The one I’d dreamed of centuries ago, who didn’t exist.
“You found her.” I wasn’t sure I’d spoken the words aloud.
“No.” Bragi’s tone was sharp, but his answer meant he knew who I was talking about. “This is Magnus. Not an apparition or a fantasy. She’s real.”
I approached and knelt next to her, shock spilling through me. “She’s got a man’s name.” It wasn’t that I cared, one way or another. But when she’d haunted my dreams, the first time I saw her in my mind, that was part of the vision as well.
“She was raised by them. Us? The Order. Loki gave her the nickname when they adopted her, and it stuck. It has no significance beyond being another way they manipulated her,” Bragi said.
I followed the contours of her face with my hand, never making contact, and let what little life energy she had pass over me. She wouldn’t be here much longer. Some sort of magic was disassembling her a molecule at a time. Tearing a magic she hadn’t been born with from the human she used to be.
That explained why she was a Valkyrie I didn’t know.
“Can you fix her?” Bragi radiated ice.
He must be focusing a lot of energy into not giving off any emotion. I almost always felt at least a little from him—he bled feelings the way most people leaked life.
“What happened?” I had my suspicions, based on how she felt, but I needed them confirmed.
“I assume Vidar.”
That explained that. She must’ve really pissed Vidar off. I wanted to be callous and say no. To walk away, find a ride home, and pretend Bragi never called.
Seeing the state he was in, and seeing her, a creature who shouldn’t exist and who was plucked straight from hundreds of years old dreams…
“I can stop the magical damage,” I said. “If you can make me cry. After that, it’s up to her.”
Bragi hovered his hand near my face. “I can’t make you cry. But I can show you what she’s feeling right now.” He cupped my neck and brushed his thumb lightly over my cheek.
The pain that rushed by me was all emotional. Fear. Rage. So much grief it made me gasp. Loss. The kind that no one this young should know. I was drowning in sorrow. A quantity that nearly kept me from bringing her hand to my face to catch the two tears that fell.
I had the presence of mind to fold her arm gently onto the bed, but not much more. When I jerked from Bragi’s touch, I gulped the air to make sure I could still breathe.
“Did it work?” His question was laced with concern and fear, but he’d stopped spilling emotion again.
A small thing to be grateful for. I extended my senses again. “My part worked, yes. Now you owe me.” A larger debt than he could ever repay. “Start with an explanation.”
Bragi filled me in on the last few decades. That the last Valkyrie, the one who died and came back every few decades, was apparently back for good this time.
Good for her. I was all too familiar with the cycle of rebirth, and it was nice to know one of us might be over it.
He told me about how The Order of Mistletoe—TOM—was crumbling as their leadership either died, went off the deep end like Vidar and Loki were starting to do, or defected, like Bragi had. How the potential gods that prophecy had predicted were showing up everywhere; a whole new generation of immortals. And that somewhere along the way, he’d had a change of heart and decided perhaps burning the world to the ground was a bad idea.
I suspected that it had something to do with the woman in his bed. “That’s all well and good, but I meant tell me about her.” I needed to know who had broken him to the point where he sacrificed pride to call me.
“You already know she was one of their soldiers. She got out as things were crumbling. She’s close enough to Kirby that when Kirby gained the power to make more Valkyries, Magnus was the first. Now she’s immortal.”
Great. I could’ve figured most of those details out on my own. “How did she end up like this, and why are you the one helping her?” There was no earthly way I could ignore how much like my dreams she was. I knew that face—it had haunted me for decades after I first saw it in my mind.
“We brought them onto the TOM campus as kids,” Bragi said. “Twelve or thirteen, all of them without existing families, and all of them with the potential to become an immortal. Vidar sought them out, Loki recruited them, and Hel trained them as killers.”
I’d had a vague idea of what TOM was doing, but only from the perspective of hunting future gods. I’d been fine with ignoring the workings of the system, just as I was fine with locking myself away from most of humanity for the last hundred or so years.
The kids in the town I lived near taught me enough that I knew what computers were, and that they fit in the palm of the hand rather than taking up an entire room, but I preferred to read about all of that rather than live it.
Now I found myself in the awkward position of needing to learn more about the world of gods that I’d ignored for so long. “What was your part in it all?”
Bragi turned his gaze to Magnus.
Silence settled between us.
And there was my answer. “You fucking asshole.”
“I stopped because of her.”
“Oh, yes. I can see how that’s atonement.” I swallowed the bile rising in my throat. The reason he and I had ended our relationship, the reason I refused to speak to him, was because he’d used his ability to project emotion to influence me when we were together. He insisted he’d only done it once, but how could I trust him, knowing it had always been an option?
He had emotionally pushed those soldiers, those children, to comply. To feel whatever his counterparts needed them to at that school.
I was going to be ill. However, I refused to let him see my response or feel it, so I tucked the reaction under layers of disdain.
Bragi raked his fingers through his hair. “Several of the recruits—”
“Children.” I couldn’t let him gloss over that point.
“Several of the children Vidar brought in turned out to be his.” Regret washed through the room.
Someone was bleeding feelings.
With a shake of his head, Bragi’s emotions vanished from the air. “One of them connected with Magnus almost immediately. The two of them are closer than sisters. I don’t know the whole story, Magnus wasn’t in any condition to tell me when she showed up, but I know the two of them were actively hunting Vidar.”
There was more to this story, for instance, what about this woman had stopped Bragi’s destructive path, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to drag it out of him.
I was willing to stay here and make sure this Valkyrie, Magnus, survived, so I already understood at least on some level that she was compelling.
My reasons were different, though. I was staring at the tortured face of a woman who had haunted my dreams centuries before she was born, and I needed to know why.
So many whys.
Three
Magnus
At the sound of a gunshot, my heart sank. It shouldn’t. This was a room full of immortals, and bullets shouldn’t mean a fucking thing. But foreboding swallowed me and nausea surged in my gut, while a tiny little voice in my mind whispered that if I did things differently this time, I could save them.
This time?
Save who?
I stood in an office that reeked of Vidar, across from him, with Fen and Dahlia by my side. Except Fen was on his knees, tendrils of death spreading up his neck and down his arm.
Why didn’t I stop that?
I couldn’t have. Could I?
I had already extended the shield that was one of my powers as a Valkyrie, but that was too little, too late.
