Seeing that, Theo had gone totally still. “Aimée,” he whispered, “don’t move.”

“Why not?” Aimée demanded, backing up a few more feet.

Instantly, the woman’s head swiveled and locked on Theo, who was the closer of the two of them. She got to her feet with predatory effortlessness that could not be human, her lithe and muscular body flexing with the ease of a warrior. She scowled at the two of them, eyes narrowed, as golden energy rolled away from her feet.

“Um,” Theo said, “greetings.”

“Greetings?!” the woman snapped. “Who the fuck are you? Where’s the god that summoned me? The fuck does he want?”

Theo’s mouth fell open. “Uh, I, uh…” He swallowed and took a step backwards.

Her glowing eyes widened. “It was you?” the woman demanded, in complete disbelief. “You?! A worthless vampire throwback? A man?! Summoned me?!”

There was something in the rage of the newcomer’s voice that left cold chills in Aimée’s very soul. She took a few more steps back, the Nótt Lagsmaðr’s caress not strong enough to make her stay.

“Look, Miss,” Theo babbled, “I’m really rusty and I didn’t know what I was—”

The woman lunged towards him, almost too fast to see, and grabbed the vampire by the throat. As if he were made of paper, she lifted him completely off his feet. “How dare you, you cow-toed blood-sucking nobody.”

“It was an accident!” Theo cried, squirming in her grip.

The woman narrowed her icy eyes and shook him like a doll. “Accident?! You really think I’m going to buy that, you bloodletting little creep?!” As she snarled, golden energy rolled off of her feet like ball lightning, sizzling in the mosses and shrubbery around them.

“Honest!” Theo cried, choking. “I didn’t do it on—”

“Lucky for me,” the woman snarled, leaning in, “you didn’t even have the good sense to bind the ground around the portal, you utterly dumb bacraut.”

“I wasn’t…” Theo gagged, “…binding…”

The woman’s icy eyes narrowed and she squeezed. Aimée heard bones in Theo’s neck snap. Then, with no more interest than one would discard a banana peel, she threw him aside, where he gagged and choked on the ground.

Even as the Nótt Lagsmaðr tried to stay Aimée’s feet, something instinctive and carnal made her take another step away from the glowing creature in front of her.

It was the wrong thing to do. Immediately, the woman’s ghostly visage found her, and she cocked her head. “You’re a mortal.” Like it was confusing for her. “Did you actually think you and your friend here could bind a Valkyrie to do your bidding?”

Bind a… Aimée froze. Valkyrie were over-tier immortals, the demigods of the Third Realm. Often, when naïve fools in the First Realms decided to summon Thirdlander demons, they would cast a circle upon the ground with a binding ritual… Aimée’s mouth fell open. “No, that’s not what—”

But the golden energy was sizzling again, and she took three steps and had Aimée by the throat and was lifting her, squeezing, making her choke…

“You pot-licking cow.” As she spoke, golden energy coruscated up her arm, rolling over Aimée’s body. “You dare summon a Valkyrie like a common peasant.” Her huge fingers started to tighten, and Aimée felt her windpipe being crushed like a paper bag.

A rotten birch branch exploded over the Valkyrie’s perfectly-pleated hair. “Get off her, bitch,” Theo croaked, head hanging at an odd angle.

The branch made no more impact on Aimée’s attacker than if Theo had smacked her with a pool noodle. Very slowly, the glowing, blue-eyed woman turned, still holding Aimée off her feet by her throat. “Excuse me?” As if she couldn’t comprehend what had just happened. “Did you just…” she dropped Aimée and took a step away as if she no longer mattered to her, “…strike me, you flabby goat penis?”

“Pick on someone your own tier,” Theo sneered. “Then again, being a woman, bullying the wildlife is probably how you get your kicks.” He ripped another branch off a tree. “You’ve probably never had a fair fight in your life.”

The glowing woman stiffened all over.

He’s baiting her, Aimée realized, in horror. Why is he…

Then she realized. Her. The vampire lord was trying to save her.

He can’t… Aimée thought, on a horrifying surge of the Nótt Lagsmaðr. She almost ran to him right then, to shield him with her body. Instead, a deep, carnal fear of the huge, glowing woman made her take a step backwards.

“Did you just…insult me?” the Valkyrie snapped.

“No, I insulted your fighting skills,” Theo said. “You’re just a horse-faced bitch. Barely worth fucking.”

The Valkyrie choked.

“Aimée, run,” Theo growled, tensing.

And then, in a soul-crushing shriek, the Valkyrie lunged at him, dragging the vampire lord off his feet and hurling him bodily across the next forty yards, slamming him through trees like a linebacker.

As the land started to roar with the crackling golden energy coruscating from her feet, Aimée backed away, her awe and terror cancelling the heady rush of the Nótt Lagsmaðr. She watched the vampire lord thrown about like a doll, then, realizing this was her chance, ran.

#

Theo watched the Valkyrie crawl out of the hole in the ground amidst a glowing sizzle of Freyja’s energy and he began to wonder if he was cursed. First the juiced-up vampire couple ambushing him, then a yatagarasu slicing him open with enchanted Masamunes, then Mandy getting kidnapped, then Buðlungr blood-binding him, then that damned genocidal Firstlander lord, then a stuck-up Inquisitor, then a fucking Valkyrie, all in the course of a few weeks.

Unlike the others, however, Theo needed to make absolutely sure that the Valkyrie didn’t try to kill him. He could afford to get roughed up a little bit by the other guys on his level. A Valkyrie, on the other hand, may as well have been a Fury or an Odinson for the kind of damage she could give and take without perishing. If a Valkyrie picked a fight with him, Theo might as well cut off his own head and throw it over the edge of a volcano—they were just as bad as a barghest, but smarter and more refined as they killed people.

Oh, and as immortal as an Odinson. Over-tier. Like that goddamn peacock Thunderbird.

Theo’s scalp still itched from the last time he’d scuffled with the demigod. The thunderbolt had been totally unnecessary, and had caught him mid-word, as he was telling the fancy pigeon where he could stuff his ‘territorial dispute’. Theo, of course, had taken the lick and held his tongue and started using the urinal and stopped casually pissing on trees when he was in the woods.

And, like Thunderbird, the Valkyries had a reputation for not taking kindly to under-tier who got in the way.

And somehow, in this massive catastrophe of a week, somewhere in his curses and tantrums and haphazard, clumsy incantations, he had summoned one. Summoned. Against her will, no warning, no asking, no explanation… Just a portal that snatched up the first Thirdlander soul that happened to come too close, typical of the usual idiotic séance-friendly Ouija-board bimbos who bought a book of spells at Barnes & Noble, got drunk, and drew some bloody runes in the floor and accidentally dragged a pissed-off Third Lander into their Friday Night coven party.

And it had been a fucking Valkyrie.

He was so screwed.

Aimée didn’t seem to understand how fucked, because she was looking at the huge naked Viking woman like she’d look at a sprite that was interrupting her vampire-friendly camping trip.

“Aimée,” he whispered, “don’t move.”

“Why not?” the Inquisitor demanded, of course immediately backing up.

Instantly, the Valkyrie’s head swiveled and locked on Theo like a battleship’s cannon targeting system. She smoothly got to her feet, her huge, naked body flexing with the ease of a someone who knew how to use it. Golden energy was rolling off of her in sizzling electric waves, meaning she was already pissed. Great.

“Um,” Theo said, praying she was in a good mood, “greetings.”

“Greetings?!” the Valkyrie snapped, clearly not. “Who the fuck are you? Where’s the god that summoned me? The fuck does he want?”

Theo felt his testicles shrivel. “Uh, I, uh…” He swallowed and took a step backwards.

It took the Valkryie a moment for what had happened to register in her unearthly blue eyes. “It was you?” she cried, as if it were absolutely inconceivable to her. “You?! A worthless vampire throwback? A man?! Summoned me?!” It was a disbelief that Theo thoroughly shared. By all rational understandings of the laws of the Realms, an under-tier or first-tier couldn’t summon an over-tier. It simply didn’t happen. The power of the summoner had to be stronger than that of the summoned, or they had to have a really good spell made by, preferably, another demigod, or even better, a god.

Theo had neither.

Behind him, Theo heard Aimée take a few more steps backwards, leaving him to face the Valkyrie alone. Probably, of course, hoping they got into a scuffle and she could use the moment to get to the highway, and damn the Nótt Lagsmaðr.

“Look, Miss,” Theo managed, carefully avoiding looking at the huge Viking woman’s bouncy pink areolas, “I’m really rusty and I didn’t know what I was—”

In a movement too fast to see—or avoid—the Valkyrie lashed out and grabbed Theo by the throat and lifted him off his feet with the hydraulic ease of a bulldozer. Even as Theo was choking and batting ineffectively at her steel-strong arm, she said into his face, “How dare you, you cow-toed blood-sucking nobody.”

“It was an accident!” Theo managed, his feet dangling and jerking as they tried ineffectively to find purchase.

The big blonde woman narrowed her glowing blue eyes and shook him like a martini. “Accident?! You really think I’m going to buy that, you bloodletting little creep?!” As she snarled, golden energy rolled off of her feet like ball lightning, sizzling in the mosses and shrubbery around them, making them pop and fizzle in little sparks of gold.

“Honest!” Theo cried, choking. “I didn’t do it on—”

“Lucky for me,” the woman snarled, leaning in, “you didn’t even have the good sense to bind the ground around the portal, you utterly dumb bacraut.”

“I wasn’t…” Theo managed, barely able to get air past his windpipe, “…binding…”

The immortal’s icy eyes narrowed and, looking directly into Theo’s eyes with the same vindictive malice as one might exterminate a particularly bitey insect, she squeezed. Something crunched in Theo’s neck that shouldn’t have, and he felt his legs jerk. Then, with the carelessless of someone flicking aside a dead mosquito, she tossed him into the undergrowth, where Theo struggled for air even as adrenaline and his Nightlander magic started to patch him back together.

Then, like in a nightmare, as he was helpless on the ground, the Valkyrie turned on Aimée.

Theo, who had professionally bashed heads together in the Nightlands for over three millennia, could handle a little roughhousing. The Inquisitor, however, could not, and he immediately felt a pang of protectiveness—part Nótt Lagsmaðr and part human decency—surging in his chest as he struggled to right himself. It wasn’t fair to Aimée that she be killed for his mistake. Yes, she was a judgy bitch, and yes, she would’ve happily put a bullet through the back of his head for most of the time he’d known her, but he’d taken her under his wing, and if there was one thing that got Theo doing stupid things that he probably shouldn’t, it was a damsel in distress.

The Valkyrie’s back was to him as she glared at the Inquisitor. “You’re a mortal.” She was clearly just as confused about the situation as Theo was, considering neither him and Aimée and twenty of their firstborn children bleeding out should’ve been able to summon a Valkyrie. They only showed up in the First Realm nowadays for things like prominent Viking funerals and ten-thousand-man slaughters on the battlefield. “Did you actually think you and your friend here could bind a Valkyrie to do your bidding?”

Just leave it to his foul luck that the Valkyrie automatically assumed he’d summoned her on purpose, then broke his windpipe before he could tell her otherwise. Damn it! His throat was healing, but too slowly to intervene.

Theo saw Aimée’s mouth fall open as she stumbled backwards. “No, that’s not what—”

But the Valkyrie clearly wasn’t in any mood to listen to reason. And, if the golden energy sizzling around her was any indication, she had literally climbed out of the portal ready to kill. The big Viking woman grabbed Aimée by the throat with the same ease a farmer grabbed a caged chicken and yanked the Inquisitor off the ground.

Seeing that, Theo grabbed the first thing he could lay his hands on—a rotten birch branch—and forced himself to his feet. His neck wasn’t working correctly, the bones crushed and tilting his head off to one side just from where the Valkyrie’s fingers had squeezed, but Theo had never been known as a guy who had been particularly brilliant when a pretty girl was in danger. And Aimée was about to die. He knew it as clearly as he knew he wasn’t going to survive the next ten minutes.

“You pot-licking cow,” the Valkyrie was snarling into the Inquisitor’s terrified face. As she spoke, golden energy rolled up her arm, coruscating over Aimée’s jerking, struggling body. “You dare summon a Valkyrie like a common peasant.” In her grip, Aimée started to gag.

Odin hates a coward, Theo thought. He said a little prayer to Freyja to control her champion before someone got killed, then lunged in and swung the branch at the Valkyrie’s head with all the might he could muster.

His cudgel exploded over the Valkyrie’s perfectly-pleated platinum hair in an impressive shower of wood shards and bark. “Get off her, bitch,” Theo managed through his mangled throat.

The Valkyrie went stiff. Then, like a curious lion about to crush a mouse, she turned, her one arm continuing to hold Aimée out as if she weighed no more than a pheasant. “Excuse me?” She looked completely baffled. “Did you just…” she dropped the Inquisitor turned to face him completely, “…strike me, you flabby goat penis?”

“Pick on someone your own tier,” Theo said, with a lot more confidence than he felt. He allowed complete scorn to fill his words as he continued, “Then again, being a woman, bullying the wildlife is probably how you get your kicks.” He ripped another branch off a tree. “You’ve probably never had a fair fight in your life.”

Comprehension filled the Valkyrie’s glowing blue eyes and she stiffened with the full-body indignation of someone about to remove the thought from his head—by extracting gray matter.

Behind her, Aimée took a nervous step backwards, her pretty gray eyes filled with indecision.

“Did you just…insult me?” the Valkyrie asked, still appearing baffled, like she was faced with a rabid canary.

“No, I insulted your fighting skills,” Theo said, hefting the branch. “You’re just a horse-faced bitch. Barely worth fucking.”

The Valkyrie choked. He watched his own death cross her face as her lip started to come up in a snarl.

“Aimée, run,” Theo growled, tensing for what he knew was to come. Just let this be enough of a distraction for her to get away…

He had just enough time to see Aimée turn to flee before the Valkyrie hit him with the force of a barghest, slamming him backwards before he even had a chance to swing the stick a second time. All around him, the Valkyrie’s golden power was hitting him like ball lightning, and Theo knew, in that instant, as she drove him through six-inch trees like a grizzly bear hurtling through tall grass, his body snapping into pulverized pieces against the crush of her chest, that he was going to die.