“Please, not again,” Gunvor gasped. She had barely opened her eyes before the Odinsons had grabbed her and once again bound her to a fresh log. She kicked and struggled, but there were too many of them. At least twelve, though she hadn’t gotten a good count. She’d once again been caught in a tusen dødsdager, except this group was more refined than the other four times, with these men having some sort of axe to grind.

Probably just lost another of their brothers to the sickness, Gunvor thought, horrified. If it were true, the Thousand Death Day would go on and on until she broke and they cut one of Freyja’s Chosen from the Nightlands to even out the score. They weren’t just entertaining themselves—they seemed determined to break her. After they had gotten bored humiliating and defiling her, her tormentors had decided to use fire to kill her, over and over. Fire was the worst. Her immortal body tried to heal even as the heat burned away her skin and flesh, creating a cycle that could last for hours…

And it wasn’t going to end. They’d already killed her with it at least twenty times, cheering as they sat around and drank from their alehorns and watched her scream.

“Please don’t,” Gunvor babbled, already feeling her mind start to crack. It was the first time she’d been caught in the Thousand Death Day for almost two hundred years, and the first time she’d been caught outside Freyja’s territory alone in twice that long. She’d been given a message, delivered by one of Freyja’s ravens, to be in this place, at this time. Against her better judgement, she had gathered up her sword and armor and had climbed the wall of Fólkvangr to go out into the no-man’s-zone between Odin and Freyja’s territories to see what her mistress wanted.

Only to be captured, disarmed, and disrobed by Odionsons, her weapons and armor cast down the cliffside, her mistress’s wings torn from her feet. “Please,” Gunvor said, her voice raw with panic. “I’ve never taken part in a tusen dødsdager.”

And she hadn’t. The Thousand Death Day had been utterly repulsive to her, something she had always tried to stop when she saw it happening to an Odinson caught in Fólkvangr, separated from his fellows, or in the Sessrúmnir Guðrhöll, when her sisters brought home a prisoner of war.

“Well, today’s your lucky day,” one of the Odinsons laughed. His green eyes were bitter, his sneer filled with hate. “You’ve got the starring role.” He gestured at the bonfire that even then lit up the night.

“I helped Björn escape!” Gunvor cried, willing to say anything to keep from being dropped upon the fire again. “And Halfdan and Troels! I gave my sisters enchanted mead when I knew they were unbound. I distracted the guard…”

A couple of the Odinsons glanced at each other in hesitation, and for a moment, she thought she had gotten through to them. She allowed a desperate surge of hope to ease her terror as she watched them deliberate. Then the bitter one sneered, “I’m sorry, I don’t think you’re begging loud enough, Freyja whore.” The Odinson who had spoken grabbed her chin and lifted it, licking her tears from her face. “Maybe if you scream with conviction, we’ll fuck you next time, rather than give you the fire.”

‘With conviction’ had been something Signe had used, whenever she was tormenting her latest unfortunate Odinson. Which, now that she thought about it, was why the green-eyed man leading them seemed familiar. Seventy years ago, he’d been trapped in Guðrhöll, chained to Brynhilder’s throne. He’d been one of the intrepid ones who had escaped on his own, within the first week, but his two companions had not been so lucky. Neither had survived their stay in Sessrúmnir.

Ødger saw the recognition in her face and his face twisted in a malicious smile. “Throw her in,” the Odinson said.

“No, please!” Gunvor cried, thrashing against the enchanted ropes that held her naked body against the log. “Please not again!”

Then, as she struggled, eight Odinsons lifted her and set her entire body face-down over the roaring blaze, nestling her face, chest, belly, and thighs directly in the coals, crushed in place by the log overhead. Gunvor sucked in a breath to scream, only to sear her lungs to ashes with the heat. She felt her own flesh start to sizzle and burn, and her screams became ragged and wretched, her mind already starting to dissolve with the knowledge her tormentors wouldn’t stop until she broke.

“Freyja smite me with a fucking Valkyrie, open a fucking portal!”

The words came to her dimly amidst her screams, carried on an ethereal wind that was crystal clear despite the roar of the flames and the roasting of her own flesh. A moment later, she saw the fire part around her, and a golden flash that took her by surprise, nothing at all like the blessed Void of death she knew was coming and welcomed with all her soul.

Gathered at the fire, Odinsons were gasping and jumping away, cursing as they grabbed their swords and scrambled out of the way. “Summoning!” they were shouting as they fell over each other trying to escape. “It’s a summoning, get clear!”

Then the hole that had appeared in the fire grew, showing a darkened scene in a northern forest in the First Lands. It moved to surround her, until it was all she could see.

Gunvor’s battered mind barely registered that fact as the pool of blessed darkness swallowed her, enveloping her in a cocoon of cold. Sacred, consecrated, pure cold—never before had she felt so fortunate to receive it. Gunvor climbed away from the log, felt her body crawl away from the fire in a desperate reflex. Once her hands found purchase outside the coals, she fell to the ground and curled into a ball, unable to even think as she shivered on the ground.

Minutes went by as she soaked in the darkness, her skin healing from the wounds in the fire, but her mind still tarnished by its smoke.

Damn the Odinsons, she thought, clutching herself and shivering, too grateful for the reprieve to wonder how she had received the blessing. They still think we killed Nökkvi. Were they all just mentally ill? She and her sisters had tried to explain to Odin’s thugs that Nökkvi was alive and dressed as a barghest in the First Realm, but it had fallen upon deaf ears. Almost as if they hadn’t wanted to accept that their friend was still alive and had simply failed in his mission…they found it more convenient to believe it was Freyja’s fault somehow.

The Pact was all but in shatters, and the tusen dødsdagers had begun again, after the many-century stay that had been forged by the marrying of the two halls’ Champions.

Then Nökkvi had disappeared, then Mardöll had followed him, then the cancer had spread within the Odinsons’ minds…

And not just Valhöll, Gunvor knew. She had seen that taint in her own sisters’ eyes in Guðrhöll, as they tormented their vanquished foes. It was some malignancy, some underlying putrescence of the mind that was slowly claiming more and more of Freyja’s hall, just as it had done in Odin’s. Sometimes she wondered if she was the only sane one left.

But it had started with the Odinsons, sometime around the same year Nökkvi had disappeared to fight Pestilence to avenge Mardöll’s former soulmate. And, instead of try to use the new alliance to go figure out what happened to him, the stubborn fools would rather believe in some grand conspiracy to destroy Odin’s name and stain Valhöll’s honor than realize that Nökkvi ran off alone to a fight he couldn’t handle and had gotten his ass handed to him by Pestilence, like a punk, and then Mardöll, feeling obligated to rescue him, had somehow been lost to the reincarnation cycle of the First Lands, instead.

Very slowly, her surroundings started to come into focus. All around her, the warm, dark northern forest crackled with her stress-energy, the welling of Freyja’s power that came to her in preparation for battle, still rolling off of her from her struggles in the tusen dødsdager. Beneath her, she found she was lying in a pool of what smelled like vampire blood. A lord, probably an older one, probably a follower of Loki judging by the meddler’s stench all over the portal and its surroundings. Gunvor blinked up at the darkened Firstlander birch trees, the skinny spruce and cranberry bushes that she remembered from her own brief time on Earth, before she was chosen for Freyja’s court. When her body had stopped shivering enough to lift her head, she righted herself and started to look around. She could hear Firstlander chariots-of-steel down the hill, the sounds of their passing muffled by the forest.

A sound behind her made her swivel.

She saw the two practitioners that had summoned her standing in the forest, eyes wide and mouths open. Immediately, she realized that they couldn’t have been the one to have summoned her, as they were merely lower-tier fools, meaning their master was close by.

Suddenly humiliated by her state of undress and the fact that these two non-events had seen her beg for the mercy of Odinsons, Gunvor lunged to her feet to confront those who had summoned her. She squinted. They didn’t look like the types of people to know a high-caliber blood magic spell that could summon an overtier from another realm. In fact, they looked…lost.

Which only made her humiliation that much worse. She narrowed her eyes and went to put the two of them in their place…

#

Gunvor slumped on her ass in the shrubbery, wondering if she had been cursed. First Nökkvi calling them in dressed as a barghest and breaking her sword, then the Odinsons attacking her and her sisters when she tried to deliver word of his survival back to Valhöll, then Freyja’s raven luring her out alone, then the tusen dødsdager, then getting summoned like a common imp, then a mortal seeing her naked, then a parasite enthralling her.

Even then, she was fighting the overwhelming urge to put her arms around the vampire’s body and pull him close. The idea of crushing him, like he deserved, made her so ill she had already vomited twice.

It stank of Loki. The whole affair stank of Loki. Even the ground stank of Loki. When she found the fish-sniffing coward, she’d kill him.

Unfortunately, the man before her was clearly not Loki. He was too nervous, too fidgety, not confident enough, not cunning enough.

“Who do you know?” she demanded finally, trying to take her mind off the desire to take him to bed. The vampire had offered her his coat in a gesture of kindness, then, when she held out her hand expectantly, his pants. They fit well enough, despite being crusted in Loki-stinking vampire blood.

“What do you mean, who do I know?” the vampire asked warily. He hadn’t objected to giving up his pants, but he now eyed them longingly.

“Which gods,” she snapped. “Which gods do you know? Who did you piss off?”

The vampire called Theo grimaced. “I was wondering if I’d been cursed by Loki. Ever since I lost that villa eight hundred years ago, I’ve felt afflicted by something.”

“What villa?” she asked.

Theo frowned as if he were trying to remember the exact location. “It was somewhere in the First Lands. France, I think.” He looked perturbed. “It was some sort of bet. A chest of gold…” He hesitated. “Or maybe it was payment…”

“I don’t care about gold or old villas,” Gunvor interrupted. “Who do you know who deals with Loki?”

“It had grape vines up the side,” Theo said. “A fountain…” He squinted and shook his head. “Really fancy. Someone important lived there…” It almost looked like his head was about to crack, so hard was he thinking. “I can’t…remember.” His brow was furrowing, sweat standing out on his face, and it almost looked like he was trembling. “Really…important…”

“Fuck the villa,” Gunvor growled. “Tell me about Loki.”

Theo’s head came up suddenly and there was a startling purple flare to his eyes. “Loki is trying to do something very important to his personal mental health, and if you could just refrain from opening your mouth for half a second, he might actually be able to break this curse, you busty sword-swinging barbarian.”

Then the purple flare went out, and Theo was blinking at her, frowning. “Huh. That was weird. It was like I blacked out for a sec.”

Gunvor jumped to her feet and backed away from the man on the ground. She had known that sarcastic, confident voice, had heard it a thousand times on Loki’s visits to Sessrúmnir.

The vampire blinked up at her, looking acutely nervous as he watched her feet slide away. “What?”

Gunvor stared at him, heart pounding.

“What did I do?” the vampire on the ground asked, starting to get up.

“Think about the villa,” Gunvor blurted.

The man blinked at her. “What villa?”

“The one you were just talking about!” Gunvor shrieked. “Think about it. Right now.”

Theo squinted at her. “I literally have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“You said it had grape vines and a fountain!”

The vampire looked at her as if she were going insane. “Um, I’m really sorry, but I have no idea what—”

“Theo?” a female voice whimpered from the woods.

Gunvor spun. The mortal in black combat gear was standing at the edge of the woods, sweating and shaking like a drug addict. She was watching Gunvor nervously. “Is it safe to come back now?”

Theo was still frowning curiously up at Gunvor. “Yeah…” he said, “I think so. You aren’t gonna kill anyone, are you Gunvor?”

When Gunvor hesitated, glancing at the mortal that reeked of self-righetousness and thinking she very much would like to smite another thrall, should she get between her and the vampire lord.

That’s the Nótt Lagsmaðr talking, she realized, in horror.

Casually, Theo went on, “I mean, considering how I might just have to kill myself in shame if something happened to one of my thralls…?”

Gunvor felt the sudden rush of horror at the idea of Theo killing himself, and took two steps toward him before she could get herself back into check.

But the Inquisitor had caught it. She watched from the bushes with wide eyes. “You enthralled her?”

“It’s temporary,” Theo said quickly. “Very, very temporary.” He got to his feet, giving Gunvor another nervous look. “I’m not a great blood magus,” he said, “but I know a gal who has a copy of On the Use of Blood, and maybe we could use it to get you home.”

Loki, she thought, feeling like someone had yanked her out of her armor in Sessrúmnir and dropped her in silks in the Second Lands. What did Pestilence do to you?

“You’re sure?” Theo insisted, almost…playfully? “I mean, I could always run down to the highway and find a huge truck and put myself out of my misery…”

“No!” Gunvor gasped, on a panicked rush of Nótt Lagsmaðr. This time she did rush to him, putting his hands on his chest like a lover. She stood taller than he by a couple inches, but her hand wasn’t as big as his as he gently pulled her fingers free from his chest. “So we’ve got an understanding?” he asked, eyes twinkling as he glanced up at her. “No killing any of my friends?” For the briefest of seconds, Gunvor thought she saw that purple flicker again, before it was gone.

Looking down at the once-god with acute unease, wrapped up in the heady crush of the Nótt Lagsmaðr, Gunvor slowly nodded.