Page 140 of The Last Valkyrie

I inhaled and sniffed something sharp and unpleasant.

Spinning to my left, I noticed a plume of thick black smoke mottling the bruised sky.

The power inside me surged, and my breath stuck in my throat. “Vikingrune!”

Even from this distance, without a visual on Academy Hill, I knew in my heart what was happening.

The Dokkalfar had somehow skipped over a day, managing to get to the academy faster than I had thought possible—probably through their dark ground-portals, their shadow pits.

The academy was under attack.

Bunching my hands into fists, I leveled myself horizontal in the air, hammered my wings against the wind, and launched through the sky toward the academy.

Chapter 45

Grim

ONE OF THE WATCHTOWERSon the wall had burst into flames. A section of the high stone wall was down, letting in a flurry of dark shapes and a much, much larger shape behind them.

The Huscarls and cadets manning the wall were dead, and the ones on the ground were fighting for their lives in a panicked display of discord, trying to stem the flow of invasion. They were courageous, valiant defenders, and my bare feet hurried toward them as I drew closer with Magnus and Arne, until our trot became a run.

“Here!” Magnus said to my right, and I glanced over just in time to see him pick up a sword from a fallen soldier and toss it through the air at me.

It was no war-axe, which had been left in Fort Woden after my first shift, but it would do. I spun the blade in my hand, snagging an errant shield from the ground as I charged and yelled a battle-cry to let the defenders know reinforcements were on the way.

We were only three—not much against the dozens flooding the gates—but my call-to-arms was met by an echo of raised voices behind us.

Glimpsing back, I saw a gold-armored wall rushing to help in defense, and a bronze hue of bare skin behind them.

The Ljosalfar and Skogalfar would be joining us.

Lifting my sword, I careened into battle, the first dark elf in front of me turning around from his battle with a Huscarl just in time to earn a blade through his back.

I wiped the impaled menace off my sword then spun to meet the next in line. There were at least ten behind him, yet I fought without care or forethought. I simply acted.

Arne began with his customary sheets of ice, slicking the battlefield and sending elves sprawling to their knees and backs as they slid. Magnus wielded his coagulated bloodblade and shot into the brawl with the same fervor as the rest of us.

If Vikingrune Academy was going to survive, it would happen here. This inflection point, this bottleneck at the southern gate, was where the main force of Dokkalfar had focused their attack. The draug had simply been a distraction—a well-timed, well-orchestrated one that nearly brought the academy to its knees.

But still we fought on, despite the overwhelming odds against us. Because this was our home, a place for outcasts like me and legacy students alike, with generations of memories and stories and training sculpting our collective lives. We couldn’t simply let it fall to invaders from another realm. It didn’t fucking matterwhichrealm—Jotunheim, Svartalfheim, Muspelheim, Hel.

I drew a lot of attention because of my large size and nude stature, a berserk brute on the cusp of losing my mind to the red curtain that always nagged at the back of my head.

I knew a trance-state would put my own people in jeopardy, so I held back as long as I could, swinging into the crowd of bodies and hacking at dark elves as quickly as they popped up.

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