Ragnarök Rising Page 8

  And the Jotunn fucks had me at a disadvantage, what with me being buck naked and still weak at the knees from the hardest release I’d ever had. Fucking an omega was always a treat, but I hadn’t been prepared for how completely Annabel’s sweet cunt had drained me with its fluttering squeezes on my knot. It was almost like her pretty little pussy had sucked part of my life essence right out of my dick, leaving me dazed as I fought the idiot alphas who’d tried and failed to claim her for their own lineage.

  Annabel might not understand the full picture, but that didn’t matter. I hadn’t claimed her for her sake, though she should be grateful she’d be carrying mine and my brother’s my offspring rather than theirs. I’d claimed her because I needed her. Because my family needed her.

  I knew why Loki’s sons were fighting so fiercely—without her they were doomed. Too bad I didn’t give a flying fuck about them or their treacherous father.

  “Give up, you’ve fucking lost!” I snarled, as Bjarni planted a fist in my shoulder. It would have been my jaw, but I managed to twist my body just in time to avoid losing a few teeth. My growls died on a hiss as Grim’s fist jabbed into my kidney, rocking me off balance. Where Bjarni was brute strength, Grim was agile, darting in to occupy all the spaces Bjarni didn’t, clever gaze always seeking out weaknesses, quick jabs or knees to soft places working to exploit them, often for Bjarni’s benefit. Every time Grim knocked me off balance, his bear of a brother would go in for the kill. It was fucking infuriating.

  And that smug bastard, Saga—

  Wait… where was Saga?

  I grabbed Bjarni’s fist on his next punch, crushing his knuckles in my grasp before shoving him aside to get a look past him. Annabel was close to where I’d left her, still coming to terms with having been mated… but Saga was there with her, holding her, her face buried in his golden locks.

  She was naked. His trousers were partway down.

  And he was still seated inside her.

  The dazed feeling in my body and brain washed away, replaced by a white-hot tendril of electric rage. My veins illuminated with its power, sparks dancing in front of my eyes as I strode toward them. Grim lunged, but a sizzling shock to his chest sent him on his ass, stunned and gasping.

  Bjarni came next, barreling at me from behind, but stealth wasn’t his strong suit. Thunder rattled my bones, followed by a streak of lightning that shot from my fingertips and ricocheted of the cave wall back into him. It took him off his feet, launching him into the shadows. I’d never been able to channel my magic quite like this before—but then, I’d never been this fucking furious in my entire existence.

  Annabel looked up from where she was panting into Saga’s shoulder, her eyes wide. She struggled to scramble off and away from me, but she couldn’t disengage; the other alpha was buried deep, his knot stretching her wide. A fresh bite mark marred the opposite side where I’d placed mine.

  He’d claimed her. Of-fucking-course he had. I could feel him now where once I’d only felt her, could feel the ache of his heart as it opened to her for the very first time.

  I had no patience for it. Or mercy.

  Saga turned just as Annabel yelped. I clamped my electrified fingers around the back of his neck and he seized, curving back so hard I thought his spine would break. His knot disappeared instantly, letting the girl clamber off him as though burned.

  “Jesus Christ,” she hissed, quaking with literal aftershocks. “What… what are you?”

  “I am the god Magni,” I said. “Son of Thor and Járnsaxa, brother to Módi the Brave. My name means Great. And I am your alpha.”

  “You’re a great fucking liar,” Bjarni snarled from the ground as he tried to claw his way toward us. “You’re only half a god, same as the rest of us.”

  Annabel’s eyes widened. “The… the rest of you?”

  “Yes.” I sneered, stepping past Saga’s twitching body. “They’re filthy spawn of Loki. Not all gods are worthy of the sacred halls of Valhalla.”

  She gaped at me, shaking her head. “No, that’s not….” Then she set her jaw more firmly. Defiantly. “That’s not possible.”

  I had no time for her existential crisis. Modern humans had long forgotten the Nordic gods, had forgotten about magic and the glory of Asgard. They lived their pitiful lives in ignorance, and not a single one of them understood that their end as a species was drawing near. That Ragnarök was coming.

  Annabel would have plenty of time to learn the old ways when I brought her to Asgard.

  I grabbed her arm, hauling her to her feet in front of me. “Look, I’m only going to say this once because we’re sort of on a time limit here: Ragnarök is coming. In fact, it’s already here. These storms? They’re the Fimbulwinter, the unyielding blizzard that will turn brother against brother and cover your world in eternal ice. The idiots you see behind me are three of Loki’s many, many illegitimate sons and not the kind of pedigree you want to attach yourself to.”

  Bjarni snorted. He’d gotten to his feet and was helping Grim do the same. “Please, like Sif’s so glad to have Thor’s bastard around.”

  I narrowed my eyes. My stepmother would be more than happy with me, once I brought home Annabel. “I was raised in Asgard, a boon to my father’s lineage and embraced by the gods. Can you say the same?”

  “This is insane,” Annabel muttered, trying to pull away from me. “Let me go. I don’t want any part of this!”

  “I care little for what you want,” I told her, grabbing her by both arms now. “Did you not hear me? The world is ending. You come with me, or you die like the rest of your kind. And I need you, little omega, so I’m afraid I can’t let you commit suicide just yet.”

  “You-you need me?” she asked, voice pitched high with obvious disbelief. “For what?”

  “You’ll find out soon enough.” I yanked Annabel’s body flush with mine so she couldn’t kick me. “There’s no more time for talk—I’m taking you to Asgard.”

  “Asgard? Realm of the gods-Asgard?” she squeaked, as if that was the part that disturbed her the most. As if any mortal shouldn’t count themselves blessed beyond imagination to be brought there. Even if not by their own choice.

  “We’ll follow you there,” Saga promised, pushing up onto his feet. His mouth was bloody from where he’d bitten his tongue. Electrocution was a bitch. “I swear it. The omega is ours.”

  Annabel clenched her hands into fists. “I’m not anybody’s. Leave me alone!”

  I smirked. “The marks on your neck beg to differ, pet. But don’t worry—once we’re in Asgard, we’ll see about getting the illegitimate one removed.”

  She shook her head at me again, struggling against my grasp in a way that was almost comical. Valiant, sure, but futile all the same. I swept her off her feet, throwing her over my shoulder with a yelp, her perfect, plump rear close enough for me to bite as I wrapped my arm tight around the backs of her knees.

  “You’ll understand when we get there,” I told her, running my fingers over the weave of reality around us, searching for the root of the mighty world tree Yggdrasil that had brought me here. When I found the place in the fabric of reality where the threads had grown thin, I spread them apart as delicately as possible. I didn’t want to cause a tear that would let the brothers run in after us. The gold bracelet around my wrist glowed hotly against my skin as magic as ancient as the the world tree flashed within the cave.

  All three Jotunns came charging toward me then, spurred by the sight of the portal I’d opened to take us to the gods’ realm. With a flick of my wrist, I summoned a chain of lightning that passed between them, scattering them in different directions.

  Then, holding my prize high and doing my best to ignore her enraged screams, I stepped through the portal before they could regroup.

  9

  Annabel

  What in the actual fuck?

  Everything had gone sideways in the last few minutes in ways I couldn’t even hope to fully describe, but my brain was sure as hell trying to
quantify them anyway. I liked lists. They made me feel comfortable. I took great pride in being organized. In the midst of chaos, my subconscious was apparently desperate to order things.

  I’d gone into heat. A real, actual heat.

  Which meant that I was an omega, not the beta female I’d thought I was—the woman I’d been raised to be.

  I’d fucked two guys in… what, under an hour? First I’d opened my legs for a total stranger, let him mate me, then begged for the cock of a man I just barely knew better while the first guy’s cum was still dripping out of me.

  And now I had two mates. Something that shouldn’t have been possible for me, because I was supposed to be a goddamn beta.

  But I wasn’t. Somehow, the two alphas who’d claimed me like a piece of land had brought out a truth from my body I’d never known existed. And now… now everything I was and had believed to be, was gone.

  My life was over. I’d never be anything but a broodmare. That’s what happened to omegas—they were nothing but walking wombs to the alphas of the world. And my two brand new mates seemed quite determined to stick with that tradition.

  Also they were gods. Or at least half-gods.

  Gods were apparently real, and I was staring at four at them.

  Magic. Real, visual magic existed.

  What the fuck.

  And while four demi-gods were squabbling over who got to own me, like I was some piece of meat, the actual, literal end of the world was happening right outside the cave, while inside the cave, I’d been thrown over Magni’s shoulder while he shot lightning from his fingertips and opened a…

  A portal.

  I stared at it. Magni had turned to address the brothers by electrocuting them all again. The air was pungent with burning ozone, sharp and overwhelming, even drowning out the musky fragrance of moss, earth, and sex.

  Each lightning strike made my small hairs stand on end, muscles tensing in anticipation of a clap of thunder that never came. And yet that mind-boggling reality I was expected to just accept, according to Magni, paled in comparison to the rift in time and space he’d so easily manifested out of nothing.

  He treated it like pressing the button on a key fob, or pushing aside a rug to reveal a trap door he’d always known was there. But just looking at it made my skin crawl and my brain go numb trying to get a handle on the physics of it. Everything about it felt alien. Wrong. Like I wasn’t even supposed to be looking at it.

  Yet Magni intended to carry me through this impossible gap into a world that didn’t exist. Shouldn’t exist.

  In times of great stress, especially psychological, humans could fixate on the weirdest things. Odd details were able to jump out at us, which was our psyche’s way of trying to protect itself by focusing on the one thing in the whole equation that does made sense. The goal to redirect our attention there giving the rest of our minds time to catch up and cope with the rest of the bullshit it was being forced to parse.

  Maybe that was why the first real thought that came to me as I stared into an other-fucking-worldly portal to a new dimension was….

  “Shouldn’t Asgard be… prettier?”

  I wasn’t an expert on Norse religions, or any religions for that matter. I’d taken the requisite courses to get a handle on the basics, sure, but my specialty was fact, not fiction.

  Still, I’d watched the Marvel movies. Magni claimed what lay on the other side of the rift was the land of the gods, and yet all I saw were rocks and the faint silhouette of distant ruins.

  He wasn’t listening, though. He was turning away from the brothers he’d just lain out, strewn like ragdolls along the cave floor. One of them was my other mate.

  Real, harrowing fear so intense it made my stomach lurch gripped me as I stared into Saga’s blue eyes, the moment of realization hitting both of us in the same instant. Once Magni brought me through this portal, we would be separated. Possibly forever.

  It made no logical sense. I hated Saga for what he’d done, just as much as I hated my would-be kidnapper. And yet I knew, into the marrow of my bones, that if we passed through this portal without him, the very essence of who I was would be rendered in two.

  When he claimed me as his mate, he tied us together in ways I hadn’t known were possible. That, judging from the wide-eyed expression of pure terror on Saga’s face, he also hadn’t understood before now.

  “Stop. Stop, you idiot!” I pounded my fists against Magni’s broad back, trying desperately to stop him from wrenching my soul apart. “You can’t!”

  Just as I dug my nails in, trying to break his flesh, he crossed the threshold between realities and wrenched a gasp from all the way down in my chest.

  That was where my bond to Saga lay. And with one small step, Magni had forced it to stretch through the vast gulf separating our worlds.

  I’d suffered heartbreak before, but it had been nothing like this. This pain, sharp and breath-stealing, spread through my limbs like a poison. My throat clenched around a sob and some distant, half-forgotten organ in my guts yawned to birth a black hole.

  It devoured all the light inside of me. All the joy. Left in its place was a cold rush of adrenaline. I had to get back to Saga, had to break away from Magni before the portal closed.

  “Stop!” I shrieked again, straining with all my might to penetrate his skin. I clawed and raked until I was sure at least one of my fingernails would pop off, until my cuticles bled and my jaws ached from biting at his shoulders, but it was no use. Nothing could deter him. Nothing could rend him the way he was rending me.

  As a last resort, I reached out, stretching as far as my body would allow—and to my utter shock, Saga grabbed my hand. Warm relief flooded me, a welcome reprieve from the chill of wherever Magni had brought us.

  Saga leapt through the tear in reality just as it closed. Magni whirled, ripping me away from Saga again. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

  “That’s my mate you’re dragging off,” the other god replied, teeth bared. “Put her down. Now.”

  Magni snorted. “Why, so she can run? So you can grab her and take off?” He tightened his grasp on my body. “Not a chance.”

  Being naked was bad enough, but having my ass and still-weeping pussy on display, thrust up into the air over Magni’s massive shoulder, was an indignity I couldn’t bear. The wind slapped at me ruthlessly, pins and needles flaring in my rear, my vulva, and the backs of my thighs.

  “Magni, please. I’m cold.”

  “That’s because this moron took you to Jotunheim,” Saga said. Though I couldn’t see him, I could hear the smirk in his tone. “Land of the Jotunns. The very people he turned his back on while he was busy playing the role of Thor’s long-lost son. Good news for me, bad news for him.”

  Magni paused, frowning as he looked around. “Jotunheim? How the hell did this happen?” A moment later, he slid me down the front of his body until my feet touched the ground. The blood rushing away from my head left me dizzy, the chill traveling up my soles and numbing my toes.

  “Guess the rumors are true—you can’t call on Bifrost to take you to Asgard, much as you claim to be a god,” Saga said. “You have to use treacherous dwarf magic to cross through the realms.”

  Magni turned to him, lip curling up in a silent snarl at the taunt. But I was having none of it—out of the three of us, I was the injured party here. Whatever quarrel they thought they had could wait.

  I folded my arms around me, trying to shield my naked body from the cold as I rounded on the redheaded alpha. “I can’t believe you did this. You just… abducted me!”

  Magni looked down at me, distracted from whatever he was about to say to Saga. He drifted his knuckles down my side, then wrapped me closer to his strong body. Despite the temperature, his skin was pleasantly hot. “I’ve saved you, pet. You have no idea how brutal Loki’s children are….”

  Saga lunged then, shoving him away from me, and I stumbled back away from them. “Neither do you,” he hissed, “but touch my mate again, and you
will.”

  “Your mate?” Magni laughed, breaking Saga’s hold on him. “Have you forgotten who claimed her first?”

  “Can we not?” I shouted, my voice coming out higher and more desperate than I’d intended. “For fucks’ sakes, what’s wrong with you two? Look at where we are! It’s….” I struggled for a word big enough to encompass it. “It’s a nightmare.”

  Saga turned to me, leveling me with a hard stare. “It’s home.”

  I was so not in the mood to be chastised about my choice of words for where he apparently grew up. “It’s freezing, is what it is. I’m so cold, and if you two keep this up I’m also going to be dead from hypothermia before we find a way out of here.”

  “Mortals,” Saga said, eying my quivering form. He sighed and unzipped his thick coat, and then shrugged out of his woolen sweater, leaving him in a white T-shirt that hugged his sculpted torso. “Come.”

  I stumbled toward him, the cold ground numbing my feet too much for a more graceful approach, but Magni stopped me by grabbing my shoulder with one freakishly strong hand.

  “You want to wrap my mate in your scent,” the redhead snarled, glaring at Saga.

  “I want to ensure my mate doesn’t perish from the cold before we can get her to shelter,” Saga said, raising an eyebrow in challenge. “Or has it been so long since you were around mortals that you forget how delicate they are?”

  I wasn’t thrilled with being called “delicate,” but right then my teeth where chattering too loudly to argue the point.

  “Magni, please,” I said, shuddering as another gust of icy wind beat against my naked skin.

  He growled again, green eyes gliding over my body as he took stock of my condition. With an irritated huff, he clearly came to the conclusion that I was, indeed, going to die without clothes. And since he was as naked as I, he finally relented and released my shoulder.

  Saga helped me get into first the sweater and then his coat, zipping it up around me as if I were a child. Honestly, I felt like one in his oversized clothes. The coat came all the way down past my knees. But it also enveloped me in glorious warmth, residue heat from Saga’s body still lingering in the fabric.