Page 3 of Battle of Witches
I looked over at Kaine. He didn’t look like a man who was about to punch a hole in the wall and throw a tantrum. Damn. Even I was slightly afraid right now. That lizard brain was plotting, and he was about to fuck someone’s day up.
“So, we use that vision against him. Beyla got invited to a party by her classmates, so, of course, I was going to let her go. I have a banshee who works for me that looks enough like Beyla in the dark to fool someone who has just seen her pictures. We’ll nab Valentine and bring him in. He strikes me as the type to snitch if he thinks it will save his ass.”
Kainestillwanted to arrest this fuck? Reyson and I had our ways of getting that information. It was horrifically painful, and Valentine would die at the end, but was that really such a bad thing? This was all his fault, and he clearly had no problem hurting children.
“I could—”
“I already know you can just pluck that information out of his brain, and it will kill him. Yeah, I could let you do that and say you got there before I did. No one would question it because you’re a fucking god. I don’t want him dead. I want him to suffer.”
I perked up. We all wanted him dead so badly that we weren’t really thinking about taking the time to savor it and make sure he really knew how much he pissed us off.
“I’m listening.”
“The shifters in prison aren’t like the ones on the outside. Prison gangs go by race, and they don’t accept outsiders. When the shifters and witches find out he murdered one of each to help bring the leader of the Cult of the Aether Sisters back from the dead and a hybrid to boot, he’s not going to have a good go of things in prison. He’ll probably get his ass beat a few times before they move him to solitary, so he doesn’t get stabbed with a toothbrush in the shower. They’ll leave him there until he goes insane because that’s what happens to wolves in solitary. Then, someone will take pity and let him out. The lifers don’t forget that kind of shit. They’ll shank him as soon as they get the chance.”
“I like your ideas and would like to subscribe to your newsletter,” I said.
“You don’thaveto unleash Loki on him to get answers. I get better visions if I’m touching someone. I can sometimes see the past if it applies to the future. I can try to see where Asfrid is and what her big plan is. Though, we’ve watched enough movies since we got back to know some of these movies would have been over after the first thirty minutes if they had just killed the bad guy as soon as he started misbehaving.”
“Asfrid wouldn’t be back if it weren’t for Valentine. Killian wouldn’t be cursed, and he was going to hurt a child. I watched those same movies. So, killing him seems like a perfect idea,” Sleipnir said.
“Excuse me, but I’m not a child. I’m sixteen,” Beyla snapped.
“No offense meant. I’m over a thousand years old. Being sixteen seems a million years ago,” Sleipnir said.
Kids, am I right? Sleipnir would always be a child to me, even at his age. I carried him until he was ready to come out, and I used to think Angrboda was overreacting when she threatened to cut my testicles off and feed them to me during childbirth. Yeah,totallydeserved that. It was excruciating. It was worth it to have Sleipnir, and I had no plans tostopgender-bending my shapeshifts, but there would be some birth control involved when I did it again.
And Sleipnir and Bjorn were right. Aside from the whole bringing them back from the dead and the whole ‘you killed my brother, prepare to die’ trope, we wouldn’t have been sequel'd to death by Hollywood with the same villain if the heroes had just killed that little bitch the first chance they had instead of trying to do the right thing.
Valentine was an idiot, but he was a slippery idiot, being guided by someone who’d fooled me for a very long time.
“I changed my mind,” I announced. “I want him dead.”
“I want the answer to waking Killian, to smash his balls with my good head-stomping boots, and then I don’t care what you do to him as long as we get Asfrid, too,” Ravyn said.
The mental picture of Ravyn rage-stomping his balls in big-ass boots before I exploded his stupid brain getting the information we needed gave me a bit of an erection. I liked that plan. We should totally do that.
“No. You shitheads just want to go around killing everyone without looking at the bigger picture. You don’tknowwhere Valentine and Asfrid are. They’d been covering their tracks better than I expected for someone who was drawing on rocks the last time they were alive. You know he’s going to be in the woods trying to snatch Beyla, but I’m the only one who knowswhichwoods. I’m also the only one with a badass banshee in his pocket, capable of fooling Valentine from a distance with a built-in weapon that can drop him before he notices she’s not Beyla.
“Now, she’s willing to do this because shelikescatching bad guys. She enjoys going to their trials and listening to them get sentenced. I’m not going to kink-shame her for that. Rowena is a stickler for the rules and has never had a bad bust in her entire career.
“She’s up for a big promotion, and she fuckingearnedit. If Valentine goes missing and is found dead on this bust, it could end her career and mine. If you ruin my career and hers, I’ll roast all of your asses, and you won’t have anyone at the Bureau keeping you in the loop and letting you get involved in cases when your Gemini Twin-level drama starts happening again. We're doing this my way if you want to be involved.”
Modern Midgardians were so strange. There was a time they’d sacrifice a whole goat andbegus to kill the enemy for them. Of course, this was kind of my circusandmy monkeys, so I shouldn’t be reined in by a dragon.
Then again, I wasn’t going to torch his career because I hated Valentine and Asfrid. I wasn’t a monster.
“You have a deal, but we want to be there in case something goes wrong. I promise not to get my god mojo all over Valentine’s brain, but you’re going to need Bjorn in there with him for a gentler approach.”
“Deal,” Kaine said, sticking his hand out.
I clasped his forearm and struck a bargain. I was a god of my word. I wasn’t going to kill Valentine… yet. Instead, I’d figure out how to do it where it couldn’t be traced back to Kaine.
Chapter3
Sleipnir
The little witch’s party wasn’t for a week. Kaine had an agent tailing her when he was at work. I don’t remember much about being sixteen, and I was stuck as a horse in Odin’s pen when I was. I don’t imagine I would have been thrilled at the idea of Loki having someone follow me about around my friends. I knew enough about teenagers to know they were vicious, little bastards fighting for power. They were kind of like the Vikings in that regard, but they battled for popularity instead of loot. The hybrids did that, too, at first.
