To save the Valkyrie who broke his heart, the Fae Sea God makes a deal with the Demon Prince of the Aerial Kingdoms, but Pazuzu has a history of stealing the women Manannan loves.
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When Mist visits her parents' home in California, she assumes th...
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"Fuck me," I groaned, lifting a hand to my head. My mouth tasted ashy and gritty, but it was the throbbing in my temples and queasy stomach that had me hissing through my teeth as I rolled from being sprawled on my side to my hands and feet. Did I try drinking Thor under the table again or something equally foolish? Ugh.
"Umm... you probably don't want to encourage them."
The whispered voice came from my left and I cracked open an eye, squinting at the reddish light around me. Despite the pounding of dwarven hammers in my brain, I turned my head and made out a vaguely humanoid shape. It took a few seconds of blinking to get my eyes to focus, but when they did, my confusion deepened.
A thin, naked female with a short cap of white hair met my gaze. With unusual yellow eyes, an oddly hooked nose, and thin lips turned down at the corners, she appeared frail. The way she jerked her lean face was almost bird-like.
I opened my mouth to ask what she'd meant, but she put a finger over her lips, again jerking her head. Shifting my weight back onto my knees and rising, I peered in the direction her eyes were focused.
A jolt of alarm stiffened my spine, seized my lungs, and burned the fog from my brain.
Thick black bars surrounded us. And on the other side of those bars, multiple tones of grey scales stretched over the coiled, muscular serpentine bodies of two Mushhushshu. I'd never seen one of the massive snake dragon demons before. Just three-dimensional images in Valkyrie training.
By the Nine, they are huge.
A rasping sound reached me as one of them moved slightly, the scales rubbing against each other, reminding me that these demons were not images projected by our mages. Poison dripped from one fang-filled maw as a head turned sideways enough for me to glimpse two- metre-long fangs on an elongated snout and a silver eye. The dark pupil expanded, a nictitating membrane blinking sideways to cover it briefly before retreating again.
Yggdrasil's heartwood, they were intimidating. My pulse pounded a heavy rhythm in my veins, warning me with every beat not to fuck with these creatures. I did not want their attention.
I caught the female's eye, placing my own fingers at my lips to let her know I understood, then carefully crawled away from the bars to the far side of the cage where she sat against a basalt rock wall. And it was a cage, with a fine-grained, almost black, dirt floor that left smears on our skin, rough-hewn walls on two sides and even bars on the top. We were outside, open to the unusual red-coloured sky, that once I noticed it, created a sinking sensation in my chest.
My eyes closed, fists clenching.
Unless I was dead and had joined the others in Helheim, only one world in this region of the galaxy had red skies. The enormous gas giant that loomed in this ominous sky confirmed the location.
Damn it. I might prefer to be dead.
Muspelheim. The planet—moon really, since it orbited the gas giant planet—ruled by dragons and other creatures terrifying enough that they'd been the basis for demon myths on Midgard.
