“What happened?”
Patrick waved tiredly at the entrance to the bar. “I’ll tell you inside. Let’s—”
He broke off as the sound of heavy, rumbling engines filled the air. Jono looked down the street in time to see the first of many motorcycles turn the corner and drive toward them. The riders were all women. The motorcycles ranged from Harley Davidsons to Indians to Suzukis, the sound of the engines like thunder in the air. They brought with them an overwhelming ozone scent that had Jono putting himself between his pack and the new arrivals, who parked in a line on the street in front of the bar.
The engines cut off, but none of the women immediately got off their bikes. Then the lead rider took off her helmet, gloved hands wet from the rain. Blonde hair tumbled out, falling down her back. A too-beautiful face was revealed, dominated by eyes the color of the fog that lived in the veil between worlds.
“I see you’ve finally come crawling home, wolf,” the woman said.
Fenrir howled a name through Jono’s mind, and he stared at the immortal—the valkyrie—in shock as he repeated it. “Brynhildr.”
The valkyrie commander offered Jono a cold smile he couldn’t be sure was meant for him or his animal-god patron, or both.
“I want one,” Wade said, staring avidly at the motorcycles with a covetous look on his face.
“No,” Patrick told him. “You don’t even know how to drive a car yet.”
“Those are winged horses. They can drive themselves.”
“You already have wings. You don’t need a pegasus in order to fly.”
Jono eyed the motorcycles with a hefty dose of wariness. Rather than carrying the scent of oil and metal, the various motorcycles carried the same ozone burn as the valkyries who rode them. Glamour, maybe, or some other kind of magic to hide or change their form.
Brynhildr dismounted from her Harley, leaving her helmet on the seat. The other valkyries followed her lead, none of them bothered by the rain. Jono’s gaze skipped from one to the next, taking in their different faces that all had the same strange gray eyes. All of them wore some combination of leather trousers, jacket, and gloves, though the styles were different. Each valkyrie wore a pendant of a carved wooden spear on a leather cord around their throats.
Fenrir howled restlessly in his soul, and Jono couldn’t tell whether the god wanted to greet the valkyries or maim them a little. He turned to look at Patrick, raising an eyebrow. “Norse gods this time?”
Patrick grimaced, mouth pressing into a hard white line. “Not just them.”
“Hel attempted to burn my altar down as a distraction while the Dominion Sect kidnapped the Allfather. I summoned the valkyries to aid us in his place,” a deep voice said from behind them. “Well met, Brynhildr.”
“Thor,” the valkyrie in charge replied. “I wish it was under better circumstances.”
Jono looked at the tall, broad-shouldered god who filled the charred doorway and had to bite back the instinctive growl that didn’t come from him. Jono focused on the god’s words through Fenrir’s annoyance. “Odin was taken?”
Patrick sighed. “Ethan is like a one-trick pony with this stupid shit of his. Let’s get out of the rain and behind some wards before we start talking.”
Jono ran a hand through his wet hair, shivering a little in the face of the cold wind howling over the street. Thor stepped aside and Jono followed Patrick into the scorched bar. He curled his lip at the smell of smoke and the bitterness of hell that stung his nose. Fenrir didn’t seem bothered by it at all, but then, if Hel was the one who had spearheaded the attack, this probably felt like home to the wolf right about now.
When Fenrir first started to speak to him and Jono realized he wasn’t going insane, he’d dived headfirst into Norse mythology. Dry and half-forgotten as it was, he knew those stories better than the others he’d started to learn once Patrick came into his life.
“Hel did this?” Jono asked. “The place is still standing. Is she just that weak or have bad aim?”
The bar, for all that it was badly scorched and had lost many tables, chairs, and barstools, was mostly intact. The strange animal antlers on the wall were dirtied by smoke but not charred. If Jono squinted, he could see rune lines carved into the walls, bits of magic crackling through them here and there like electric sparks. Considering which god owned this place, that wasn’t surprising.
Magic made Jono’s ears pop as someone set a ward around the place. It wasn’t Patrick, because Jono knew what his magic smelled like.
“Eir, I would have you see to the ones Hel harmed,” Thor said.
A young-looking valkyrie took a seat at the bar, her dark hair twisted around her head in a crown braid. She’d been the one with cat ears on her motorcycle helmet. Her gray eyes were ringed by black eyeliner that ended in a cat-eye flick.
“It’s what I’m here for,” Eir said. Her gaze flickered Jono’s way, and she nodded at him. “I can heal you, too, if you want.”
Patrick’s head snapped around, pinning Jono with a sharp, worried look. “What the fuck happened?”
Jono grimaced, figuring he was fine after Victoria’s potions. He hadn’t felt any symptoms for a while now. “Nothing.”
“It’s not nothing if Eir is offering to heal you.”
“Later, okay? Let’s deal with your problem first.”
Patrick gave him a look that promised a row later on. Jono inwardly winced but pressed on with the gathering at hand.
A thunderous boom high overhead outside rattled the plyboard nailed over the broken windows. A man who smelled like electricity sauntered into the bar a few seconds later, brushing rainwater off his beaded and fringed leather jacket and smelling of ozone.
“My favorite wing mates,” the man said with a pleased smile. “Any of you seen a serpent in the lake
