Page 120 of A Curse Carved in Bone
“Freya!”
“Bjorn.” His name came out as little more than a whisper and, sucking in a breath, I shouted, “Bjorn!”
Digging my hands into the damp earth, I began to crawl back to him. Clawing through earth and stone, I dragged my dying body back into the mortal realm, fighting toward the sound of his voice even as my strength failed, my heart stuttering in my chest. Breath kept from me by more than just the dirt pressing all around.
If I could just make it to him, I would live.
If we were together, we could have a future.
I controlled my fate.
I controlled my fate.
I controlledmy—
As the roots exploded from the earth and wrapped around Freya, I lunged. Cutting and slashing at them, but more appeared to take their place. I reached for her, my fingers brushing the side of her face as the roots dragged her, and the beast that was Harald, down into the ground.
Leaving only undisturbed dirt in their wake.
“Freya!” I screamed, flinging myself down and clawing at the ground. “Freya!”
I couldn’t lose her. Not like this, knowing that she’d sacrificed herself. Not for any reason, because she was my life. My heart. Where she went, I went with her, yet she’d gone somewhere I could not follow.
“Freya!” I howled, digging down and down, but there was nothing but dirt and rocks and roots from the trees around me. “Freya!”
“Bjorn!” I turned my head to see Tora running toward me, Guthrum and Voland on her heels. “What has happened?”
“She’s gone.” My nails tore from my fingers as I dug, flinging aside rocks and earth. “Hel took her and Harald.”
Then cold hands closed over my wrists, tendon and bone visible where skin had fallen away, and I looked up into what had once been Geir’s face, now barely recognizable.
“She has gone to the place between realms.” His voice was awful and strange. A draug’s voice. “No matter how deep you dig, you can’t reach her.”
I ripped my hands from his grip and kept digging. “I’ll find her. I have to. She can’t be…”
“She’s not dead,” Geir said. “Else our souls would be liberated from the shells she bound us to and we would have moved on to Valhalla.”
Cold comfort, because I’d seen the wound on her leg from Harald’s stinger. How she’d staggered beneath the weight of the venom. How her skin had been deathly pale. She needed a healer. Needed a child of Eir to save her life, but I needed to find her first. “Freya!”
“She can’t hear you. She’s beneath Yggdrasil.”
His words were noise in my ears, because I needed to find her. “She’s hurt.”
“As are you,” Volund said, the healer stepping closer. “You are no good to her if she returns to find you dead.”
They didn’t understand. If she didn’t come back, life meant nothing. My path was at her side. That was my fate. The only future I wanted. “Freya!”
Next to me, my glowing axe disappeared, casting us in darkness; but I didn’t care. I kept digging. No one stopped me, and I cared not for their silence. Their pity. Because as long as Geir and the other undead were still standing, she was alive. And I’d never stop fighting my way to her. “Freya!”
“Bjorn!”
I froze, not certain if I’d heard my name or imagined it, only that it had been Freya’s voice. “Did you hear that?”
Geir shook his head.
“I heard her,” I whispered, then shouted, “I hear you, Freya!”
My fingers were a bloody mess, but I didn’t care as I clawed at theearth. Geir dug too. Everyone around me dug to find the woman who had fought to save us all.
