Page 131 of The Last Valkyrie

The men waited impatiently, guarding my six as the draug drew closer.

I chose a direction at random—right—and we streamed off. A short minute later, I was thankful for my decision, because I recognized the large room to my left that held a map of the Isle in excruciating detail.

In that room, Kelvar had shown his true colors by rescuing me, completing my escape after throwing a blanket of shadowover me that hid me from Tomekeeper Dahlia’s scrutinizing gaze a minute later.

Without any time to stop for a quick glimpse of the map, we kept on past the room. At least I vaguely knew where I was, and I yelled over my shoulder, “Two more halls then a staircase! Then a window!”

“A window?” Corym asked incredulously.

“Hope you know how to roll from height, elf.”

The laboratory room came up on our right, its door blown open. The white walls of the place were splattered with gore, and I grimaced when I noticed the slumped, dead corpses of four nurse acolytes.

One of them was probably the masked woman who had worked on me back then, sticking me with countless needles.

A figure emerged ahead of us on unsteady legs, hands raised like it wanted to eat our brains. Its skin was mottled with scars, puffed flesh, and worse than that, a dozen tubes stuck out from parts of its body—two out the shoulder, two out the neck, a few along the torso.

I came to a screeching halt, knowing we needed to get past the dead thing to move on. It was the thing’s face that made me gasp, and I went dizzy from the lurching of my mind.

“Oh. Fuck.” Arne pulled up short alongside me, with the polar bear and the elf behind us. “Magnus . . .”

“I know.” I gripped my weapon and shield harder, bending my knees as the draug shuffled closer, in no hurry to get to us. Its head was bent at an odd, broken angle, making her look all wrong. And hanging limply across her gaunt, dried-up cheeks, was a wet mop of yellow-green hair.

“Astrid,” I breathed.

The Tomekeeper’s dead daughter, risen. Apparently used as a test subject as well, if the pliable tubes hanging from her bodywas anything to go by. The young woman I had killed after she attacked Ravinica out of spite and jealousy.

“Gods save us,” Arne murmured. Grim let out a low mumble from his jaws, a sad sound.

The sounds of the draug horde behind snapped me out of it. They were drawing closer. Astrid limped at me, teeth bared in a gaping, mindless yawn.

I stepped forward and shoved my bloodblade through her open mouth, the red tip bursting out the back of her skull with a spray of black blood and brain fragments. It made a sickening cracking sound, yet Astrid kept coming.

Arne Shaped an icicle and pushed the crystal spear through her soft, leathery throat, pinning her to the wall behind her.

Then Corym spun with his sun-dagger and sawed at Astrid Dahlmyrr’s spine until she dropped, writhed, and stopped moving.

“Spirits save her soul,” Corym gasped as we all looked down at the poor creature. “Despite what she was like in life, no one in death deserves such a dishonorable fate.”

I grunted and nodded. Guilt hit me hard in the chest—the first I’d felt of such a thing in quite some time. Or was it regret? I always got those two feelings confused.

“She’s been tested on like you, Mag,” Arne pointed out.

Gulping, I didn’t trust my words. “Come on.” I ran past Astrid’s corpse before I could feel any worse about her.

I didn’t know where doors were located in this damned fort, other than at the front, but Ididrecall a window upstairs.

We climbed the nearest set of stairs, rushed past an eerily quiet hall, and I kicked the stained-glass window at the end in a splash of broken glass, just as growls and hisses of unseen draug wrapped around us like a deadly cloak.

“Better hurry,” I said, already starting to climb down—feeling like I had the first time I left Mimir Tomes’ third story window with Ravinica, to escape patrolling Huscarls.

A smile came to my lips. It was a much preferable memory than the one regarding Astrid Dahlmyrr.

Grim fucking ruined it by barreling out the window in his polar bear form—entirely too damn big to make it through without messing up the construction of the wall—and knocked me off my hand-hold.

I was lucky to land on his soft, matted fur twenty feet below, with little more than athud.

Luckier still that we had made it out of Fort Woden alive.

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