“The Valkyries have special skills, too, though I’ll let Myst and Regine tell you what theirs are. It’s not my business,” he continued.
“What about Hrista?” I asked. “What’s her ability? The joy-bringing? Is that really a thing?”
“Hm… no. I would consider it a talent, or perhaps a side effect of her powerful spirit, at most,” Brandon replied. “Hrista’s ability is much worse and far more dangerous. She reads souls, Astra.” Whenever he called me by my name, my skin tingled and the blood rushed through my veins. There was a certain seriousness in his address, demanding my full and unlimited attention. “She reads souls, and everything she finds inside a person, well… Hrista is very good at using our own nature against us. We’re all just open books for her to read and play with.”
I was a half-sentry. There wasn’t much I could do, other than reading someone’s spiritual aura, albeit shoddily. I could identify a state of mind or a general sensation. I could also detect the presence of a living soul inside a body. That was my best, actually. But what Hrista could do struck me as truly dangerous. Being able to see that deeply into someone’s soul… the idea scared me. I sure didn’t want her ever doing it to me. There’s no telling what she might find if she dug deep enough—even things I’d forgotten about. Thoughts I’d thrown away ages ago.
“Knowledge is power, I suppose.”
“Indeed,” Brandon said. “Like I said back in the cave, Hrista is behind this. The longer I’ve stayed with you and your people, the more convinced I am that I have a better shot at getting Hammer back with your help than with my brothers.”
“Aren’t you afraid they’ll destroy Hammer right now?” I asked. “Why haven’t they done it so far? You’ve screwed the Berserkers over more than once by interfering on our behalf.”
Brandon smiled. “That’s the one thing Hrista never truly understood about Berserkers. No matter how mean or how dark or how vicious we are… we appreciate and revere the spirit. Destroying someone’s Aesir is not done lightly.”
“I can appreciate and understand that, but then… why does Haldor have so many destroyed Berserkers?”
“It’s his talent. They’re drawn to him. It’s kind of hard to explain, really. Aesirs are lost or destroyed in many ways. There are occasional skirmishes between the Berserkers and the Valkyries. There are souls that are simply too powerful and dangerous, and some of my brothers underestimate them, thus losing their Aesirs in the melee… point is, the shadow hound is what remains of a Berserker when his Aesir is vanquished, and they all flock to Haldor, whether they like it or not.”
The thought of seeing Brandon turn into one of those entities scared the daylights out of me. I couldn’t even consider such an outcome. Not anymore. “We can try and get Hammer back, if you’ll let us help you,” I said. “You’ve done a lot of good things for us to make up for the bad. I’d like to reciprocate.”
He stilled, his blue gaze fixed on me. For a moment, I feared he might look deep into my soul like Hrista. I felt powerless and speechless, mesmerized by the dancing flames in his irises, the azure shifting into a soft white, and then back into an intense sapphire glow. “I’ve done you more wrong than right, if you think about it. I’ve been sneaking around your Shade, stealing DNA, kidnapping your friends, syphoning military secrets and passing them on to HQ.”
“You also guided us to safety more than once. You saved my mom twice, even if it didn’t seem like it at first. And you helped us get Isabelle and the others out, too,” I said, raising my chin. “I think we have a balance here.”
I was actually surprised to hear myself talking like this, but my reasoning made sense. We needed people who could help us, regardless of their powers and origins. This was a new and frightening world, and we would fare better with allies than with one more Berserker on our enemy list. Besides, Brandon was clearly trying to be a friend. Why push him away?
He leaned closer, the space between us shrinking with an alarming speed, and I held my breath as he smiled. “You could help me get Hammer, sure. But first, I need to get those two Valkyries on our side. As you said, Myst is easier to convince. She never truly worshipped Hrista the way Regine has. The irony doesn’t elude me, of course, considering that Myst is ‘younger’ than Regine in Purgatory. I suppose age isn’t just a number.”
“I didn’t know you even tracked time in Purgatory,” I murmured, unable to break eye contact.
“We don’t. But we do have relative notions about who came first or before or after ourselves. It’s experience we appreciate,” he replied. “For us, the present and the past are combined, lived at once. The future is never really there because it always becomes the present. It’s a little hard to explain to a creature who only perceives time in a linear fashion.”
Clearing my throat, I inched back, unable to take the tension building between us. I wasn’t sure what it was about Brandon that shook me up with such intensity, but I didn’t want him to see how he was affecting me. “How do you plan on convincing both Myst and Regine that Hrista is behind all this?” I asked, trying to steer his attention away from my face. My cheeks felt hot, and I was having a hard time concentrating.
“I’ll show them where Hrista has taken up residence,” Brandon replied. It almost irked me that he hadn’t done this sooner, but I did understand why he’d had his reservations about
