Page 39 of A Dawn Of Blood

“What do you mean?” Jaeger demands, her eyebrows pulling down.

“Freya did manage to use it to dismember Baldur, but she destroyed it in the process.”

“Is that correct?” Nuala turns to ask me, everyone else’s eyes fixing on me as well.

I think for a second. “I believe it is.”

“There’s no doubt about it,” Nimueh says. “Trust me. I was the one who forged it. I feel its absence in my very bones.”

“So what do we do then?” Dryden asks, frowning. “Was this for nothing after all?”

“It would be,” Nimueh says with a shrug, “if it weren’t for the fact I can forge you a new one.”

De Groot throws her a flat glare. “You couldn’t have led with that?”

“Do you think you can do ithere?” Nuala asks.

Nimueh shakes her head. “It doesn’t matter where I am.”

“There’s a forge within the castle,” Alaric chimes in. “I think we still have iron and all the tools in there.”

Nimueh shakes her head again, but she sounds a little mischievous when she says, “I can assure you, young vampire, you may have all thetools, but you don’t have any of thematerials.”

I register everyone around me getting impatient, so I throw her a look. “Nimueh,” I warn gently.

She raises her eyebrows at me. “Apologies,” she then says with a chuckle. “Spending hundreds of years in that place seems to have rendered me a little insufferable.” She glances around the table. “But it’s just such a joy, being part of a conversation again.” She looks up and away, that spark in her eyes again. “I’ve always wondered why it is that we were made to have to connect with each other in such a way that resulted in the evolution of language.”

She looks down to meet our eyes again. I sense everyone getting even more impatient, but I don’t have the heart to interrupt her. “Don’t you find it odd,” she continues excitedly, “that we have organs we use to blow air out of our mouths and produce images in our minds?”

Silence. Her eyebrows shooting up, she throws us a toothy grin. “No one?”

“Right now,” de Groot drawls, “all I want is for you to use them to tell us about those materials we’ll be needing so we can forge the sword and be done with it.”

Nimueh’s smile turns a little more serious. “You might not be able to make such swift work of it.”

“Letustake care of that,” Nuala suggests.

Nodding, Nimueh turns dead serious, for the first time since we found her truly looking like the woman I once knew — a focused, driven badass. “Alright,” she clips out. “You want the sword? The metal is at the Academy. Go get it.”

There’s a murmur around the table.

“Where at the Academy?” Jaeger lends to ask. “How do we identify it?”

“It’s Aesir iron. It’s the only kind of metal out there that can kill a god. Out of all of us here, only I can identify it, by feeling. So there’s not much I can tell you except… it looks, smells and feels like iron.”

“Of course that’s all you can tell us,” Lorcan quips with a scoff.

Nimueh ignores him. “As for the exact location, I wouldn’t know. I had someone I knew hide the rest of it there, the Academy being such a heavily protected place. But the person who hid it is long dead by now.”

Taking a deep breath first, I say, “We’ll find it.”

I look around, finding Lorcan staring at me. “Really? You’ll find some nondescript scrap of metal in a place as enormous, complex and magical as the Academy, all while being under siege by the most dangerous man alive?” He lets out a dragged-out sigh. “This is turning outnotto be the most efficient course of action to pursue, Anna. I’d like you all to forget about the cuckoo quest and focus on the options that are already available to us.”

“Would you?” Nuala demands with a bite to her words.

“Yes, I would, Emberlord,” he tells her, “unless you’d like to chip in and actually lead this the way it’s supposed to be led?”

There’s a moment of shocked silence before Nuala squeezes a single word out of her mouth. “Out.”

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