Gears of Mischief (The Valhalla Mechanism Book 1) Read online

  “Don’t let him touch you!” Loki yelled. “He’s a bloodletter!”

  “What does that mean?” I growled back, keeping my gun aimed at his heart. I had no idea if it would kill him, but it might slow him down enough that I could gut him.

  “It means that your blood is my tool,” the elf purred in a husky voice, his eyes raking my body. “Such a pretty thing the Gods have for a pet.”

  “I’m no one’s pet.” I pulled the hammer back on the gun, stalling for time. “And you don’t look like much to me.”

  He laughed. I could feel Thor and Loki fighting off their own sides behind me, knew they wouldn’t be able to reach my side without putting the humans in the center at risk. There were still a handful left, waiting for the signal to climb the ladder, too many already hanging from the length. We only needed a few more minutes. I was on my own, but then again, I was used to such odds.

  The Bloodletter laughed, tilting his head in curiosity. “I can see the attraction. You might not have wings, but you have the heart of their Valkyries. Pity you will perish with the rest of your world.”

  “You can piss off, goblin.”

  Someone snorted out a startled laugh behind me, but it was impossible to tell who, and I wouldn’t look away from the threat before me.

  There were three more humans waiting their turn for the ladder then, two men and a woman. The children had been lifted first. There were no others waiting to cross the makeshift bridges. We were almost there, almost finished.

  The Bloodletter sneered at me, at the insult he had not expected. I had guessed an elf wouldn’t like to be called anything else, same as people, and I had been right. The anger on his face almost made me laugh at the absurdity on it. It was so easy to create fury in males.

  “Goblin?” he growled, taking a step forward. “You dare insult me?”

  “My apologies,” I shot back. “I meant troll. Shouldn’t you be living under a bridge somewhere?”

  I hazarded a quick glance behind me, barely a split second to see the last human grab hold of the rope and begin to climb.

  That was when the elf moved. He was fast, but so was I. His claws passed over my head when I ducked and jerked away, backing towards the center where I knew Thor, Loki, and Skadi were working towards.

  “Rise!” I screamed, loud enough for the airship to hear.

  “Ottilie—” The Queen, shouting for me, but I had my own weapons at my back, and they wielded magic, lightning, and winter.

  “Rise!” I screamed again, dodging another attack from the Bloodletter, his fingers just barely missing my throat. I slashed out my dagger, cut him across his chest, which only served to anger him more.

  “Midgard will drown in blood!” he promised as he fought to grab ahold of me. After all, I was considered the weakness in the group, but that was his mistake. I would never be weak, even if I lacked the power of Gods. “And I can’t wait for Asgard to do the same!”

  I came up beneath him, slammed the gun into his stomach and pulled the trigger before he realized I had moved toward him instead of away. On my knees, I hovered there long enough for the boom of the weapon before I faked to the right and dove to the left instead. The gun shot echoed loudly, even with the sound of the airships and people watching from above. The dark elf stumbled backwards, his face twisted into a snarl as he looked down at where black blood leaked from his wound.

  “Go back to the hole you crawled out of, goblin!” I spit and slammed my dagger down into his shoulder for good measure, kicking him backwards towards the edge.

  “Tillie!” Thor roared, and Loki’s arms wrapped around me just as lightning exploded around us, dancing across the surface of the building and zapping the elves it touched, frying their skin. The Bloodletter saw he had lost, and instead of dying with his brethren, he narrowed eyes on where I was clutched in Loki’s arms, protected from the electricity in the air by a sphere of fire.

  “We will meet again,” he promised, before he dove over the side of the building and disappeared into the churning water below.

  Fenrir howled on another rooftop in the distance, Jӧrmungandr answering him with a roar I would have thought a dragon rather than a snake.

  The lightning vanished, and we stood there in a circle, panting heavily, battle wary, blood splattering our bodies. I had no doubt I looked like a drowned rat, and I would be bruised tomorrow, but I couldn’t help but smile at the fact that we had survived this stage.

  I felt their eyes on me as Loki withdrew his fire, turned to meet various expressions of shock, as if I had grown another head. I checked just in case something strange had happened, but I was still wholly me, ordinary, double life, Tillie.

  And then I realized what all this meant.

  “My mother,” I cried, and peered over the side where the water slowly decreased until it left nothing but waterlogged streets and chaos.

  “Let’s go find her,” Thor murmured, offering his hand. Loki took my other, and we stepped off the rooftop onto Jӧrmungandr’s back, the giant serpent slithering slowly in the direction I pointed.

  Chapter Thirty

  We moved along the edge of the massive crack. The glimpses I got of the inside of it, there did not appear to be a bottom, as if they opened out into Hell itself. It was strange, seeing such a large portion of the interior of earth opened wide before us, something that no one should have ever been able to see. The entire time we passed, I looked down, if only to search for those lost souls who suffered the fate we nearly had, making sure there was no one we could save. Not once did we stumble upon a living body. Not once did I hear anyone cry for help from below.

  When we reached my street, my stomach sunk, a numbness crawling along my arms that had nothing to do with the cold. Jӧrmungandr slowed, Fenrir stepping up beside us as I stared at the street before me.

  It was gone.

  The street my house had once resided, the street I had grown up on, the street that housed Lady Smith, the phantom Lady Caroline, and so many others I had attended parties at their homes.

  It was all gone, as if it never existed in the first place.

  “Tillie. . .” Thor murmured, his fingers touching my shoulder, but I couldn’t handle the tone of his voice.

  I slid from Jӧrmungandr’s back to the debris covered cobblestones, staring in disbelief at the massive cliff that now took the place where I had lived. The street beside ours was untouched, completely intact except for damage from the tidal wave. Why had that street been left whole but mine was wiped away?

  “Mother!” I called, stepping close to the edge and looking down. I didn’t truly expect to see anything. I hadn’t seen anything the entire time I had been looking down. “Mother!”

  “Tillie—”

  “Mother!” I screamed, my voice shrill as I whirled, searching, searching, praying.

  I prayed that the person I cared for most in the world was okay, the thoughts loud in my mind. I saw the two Gods standing behind me flinch with the demand in it, almost a threat.

  Someone bring my mother back before I set the world on fire.

  The first tear leaked from my eyes, my masks completely lost as I searched along the edge of the canyon, screaming for someone that couldn’t be alive, not if she’d been in the house.

  “Can we go inside?” I asked, my voice cracking as I turned to Thor and Loki. “Is there a way to go to the bottom?”

  Thor hesitated but it was Loki that stepped forward and took my face in his hands. It was Loki who made sure I was paying attention, who used his fire to warm me. He may have been out of energy for his natural magic, but his fire burst around us, fed by the grief that was swallowing me the same as the tidal wave had.

  “Tillie,” he whispered, his eyes so full of compassion, I could hardly bear it. “Loss is no easy thing to bear in this world or any, but I know your mind is working through solutions logically in the face of this, so I will speak through what you ask logically.” Another tear dropped from my lashes and he wiped it away with hi
s thumb. “We cannot see the bottom of the crack, which means that it’s incredibly deep. We have no way to know where it stops, no way to see. For a crack to be that size, that deep, no Midgardian who had fallen inside would survive, and that is before the tidal wave emptied inside its belly.” The tears came faster. “Your home is gone, but we have no way of knowing if your mother was inside. We can search the city. We won’t give up, just because the situation seems dire.”

  I wrapped my fingers around Loki’s wrists as I stared into his eyes. “How did you survive it?” I croaked.

  The God of Mischief clenched his jaw, hard enough I heard it crack, and leaned down to place his forehead against mine.

  “I didn’t,” he whispered. “I was a shell, only able to laugh again at the end of the nine realms, because a little spy held a knife to my throat and challenged me.” He wrapped his arms around me. “You don’t survive it, Tillie.” He tightened his arms. “You feel it, and then, when you’re able, you take a breath, and then another, until you can stand up again.”

  I never expected the large arms to circle us both, never expected Thor to hold us all together, and when I looked up into his eyes with swollen ones of my own, he kissed my forehead. He may not have known the right words to say, but he offered his warmth and support, doing more than enough to hold my pieces threatening to shatter together.

  “Tillie?”

  I froze at the voice, and then when it registered inside my brain, I shoved my way out of the arms of the two Gods, hardly daring to breathe.

  I stared at the woman that appeared, a woman dressed in trousers and blouse, her feet bare, her hair loose around her shoulders. She looked like some avenging angel with the large sword she held in her hand, her favored weapon, but it was the clear, healthy green eyes that nearly made my knees buckle.

  “Mother.” My voice came out in a soft whisper, as if I hardly believed she was there, a phantom like Lady Caroline.

  “You’re not crying over me, are you?” she teased. And though there was a smile on her face, I could see the relief in her eyes, too. She had thought me lost the same as I had thought her.

  Whatever spell I was under broke and I rushed across the distance. My mother dropped the sword in her hand to wrap her arms around me, my tears turning into full out sobs of relief. My mother was alive. She was safe.

  “But how?” I asked, holding her tightly, nearly strangling her, but she didn’t complain.

  “I saw the small crack when the first rumble hit, saw it in the center of the street, and because of what you told me, I looked at it as a threat instead of an anomaly.” She leaned back to peer into my face. “I managed to get the whole street out before the crack swallowed them, even silly Lady Smith. Would you believe her first complaint was that she couldn’t host her masquerade next month?”

  A watery chuckle slipped out. “I believe it. But how did you survive the tidal wave?”

  “Ah, we were already on top of the building over there searching for any sign of you.” Her eyes dragged over to Fenrir and Jӧrmungandr. “Imagine my surprise to see these two show up.”

  Thor, Loki, and Skadi stood behind us, watching the exchange, giving us a moment of relief, but when I turned and gestured them forward, they all did so without hesitation.

  “Ragnarök isn’t over,” I murmured. “But we warned the Queen.”

  “What did she say?”

  I grimaced. “I’ve been ordered on a mission to another realm to retrieve an object that could slow the stages.”

  My mother’s jaw opened, and she looked between me, the giant snake and wolf, and the Gods and Goddess standing near. “Another realm? As in Hell?”

  “We are not going to Helheim,” Skadi clarified. “That would have been far better.”

  I shot her a look, one that told her to not expand anymore on the subject. I hadn’t known that where we went would be worse than Hell, but I supposed it was fitting. We had to go to Hell and back to save the world.

  Loki peered over at Skadi, a slow smile pulling at his lips. “What’s the matter, Skadi? Not looking forward to seeing the dwarves again?”

  She scowled, her eyes narrowing on the trickster. She crossed her arms and the glare on her face rivaled the bitter winter we stood in. “Nine realms,” she growled. “Nine realms, Loki, and you piss me off in all of them.”

  Thor rolled his eyes and moved over, unhooking his hammer from his waist to drop it to the ground with a solid thunk. Then he simply sat down. The God of Thunder sat in the middle of the street, his hair still wet and draped around his shoulders, his shirt torn in places to reveal tantalizing flashes of skin. I blinked down at him in surprise.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, the others going quiet.

  “I’m sitting down.” He frowned. “After everything that happened, even if it’s on ice and snow, I just want to sit down.”

  Smiling, I sat down beside him, taking his hand in mine as the others all did the same. It was nice, if even for a moment, to take a respite, to be able to breathe without the earth collapsing beneath us or the sea drowning the world. I stared around at the circle that had become my home. My mother, a winter Goddess and her two wolves, a God of Thunder and a God of Magic, a giant serpent and a giant wolf. We all formed a circle, Jӧrmungandr’s tail circling around us to block the wind, Loki’s flames keeping us warm, and we breathed.

  “So, what now?” Mother asked, pulling her hair over her shoulder and forming it into a quick braid. She didn’t even seem to notice that her feet were bare in the coldest wrong season winter we had ever seen.

  “Now, we go fetch a cauldron, slow Ragnarök, and save mankind.” I smiled. “In that order.”

  “It’ll be difficult,” Loki murmured, threading his fingers through mine. “But I think if anyone can master Ragnarök, it would be us.”

  I leaned over and kissed him on the cheek, before doing the same to Thor, grinning at the two of them. “My first time outside of England and it will be to a whole different realm. I can’t wait.”

  Because yes, what we would face would be difficult. We would no doubt encounter old enemies and new, find allies and foes, but perhaps, if the three of us stuck together—thunder, magic, and a little espionage—then we might stand a chance. There were other realms we had to visit, people we had to meet, an Allfather I had to pick a bone with, memories to overcome. The nine realms were crumbling, the end near, but we wouldn’t back down. Never would we back down.

  The thrones of old may crumble, the very ground beneath our feet may split, but we would look Ragnarök in the eyes and tell it to piss off. This is our world. This is our home, and we would not be swayed.

  I may have only been a Midgardian, my only powers a skill with weapons, but that didn’t mean I would not succeed. With Thor and Loki by my side, we would take on all who dared to stop us, and we would save all nine realms at the end.

  When those who stood in our way dared to forge their hate into weapons, I would tell them one thing, and one thing alone.

  I am Lady Ottilie Kingsford, spy of no Guild, assassin in times of need, and your forged weapons of hate will not form us in your image.

  Because I am iron. . .

  . . .and I will forge myself.

  TO CONTINUE ON WITH THE JOURNEY…

  Grab Gears of Thunder HERE

  Acknowledgments

  I think y’all are tired of hearing me talking about Loki so I wrote a book instead! lol.

  I always have to thank Poppy Woods, Katie Knight, and Mallory Kent because y’all are always so supportive, cheer me on, and listen when I’m like, “So, I know we have a million of them, but here’s another plot bunny”. I couldn’t do this without y’all.

  Thank you, Mom & Dad, for always being so supportive, even if you have no idea what i’m talking about when I’m ranting about a new world or book terminology. Y’all show me what it is to be strong. I love y’all!

  Thank you to all the readers who share in my excitement every day! Thank you to everyon
e who reviews, reaches out to me to tell me what they think, and make up my ARC team. Y’all are amazing and I appreciate the hell out of y’all!

  Thank you to Ruxandra Tudorica of Methyss Designs for capturing my vision for the covers for this series! You made this series amazing with the covers and I can’t wait to have them all in paperback!

  Thank you to everyone who continues to support me and get excited for new adventures! You make this all worth it! Let’s start another one together!

  About Kendra

  Kendra Moreno is secretly a spy but when she’s not dealing in secrets and espionage, you can find her writing her latest adventure. She lives in Texas where the summer days will make you melt, and southern charm comes free with every meal. She’s a recovering Road Rager (kind of) and slowly overcoming her Star Wars addiction (nope!), and she definitely didn’t pass on her addiction to her son (she did). She has one hellhound named Mayhem who got tired of guarding the Gates of Hell and now guards her home against monsters. She’s a geek, a mother, a scuba diver, a tyrannosaurus rex, and a wordsmith who sometimes switches out her pen for a sword.

  If you see Kendra on the streets, don’t worry: you can distract her with talks about Kylo Ren or Loki.

  #LokiLives #BringBackBenSolo

  To find out more about Kendra, you can check her out on her website or join her facebook group.

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  Also By Kendra

  Sons Of Wonderland

  Book 1 - Mad as a Hatter

  Book 2 - Late as a Rabbit

  Book 3 - Feral as a Cat

  Companion novel - Cruel as a Queen

  Daughters Of Neverland

  Book 1 - Vicious as a Darling

  Book 2 - Fierce as a Tigerlily (coming soon)