Page 6 of Valkyrie Unknown

Instead, I wandered, and my mind tormented me by doing the same.

I lost my mom a few years ago. Sometimes I tried to pretend I didn’t know how long it had been, but I knew the exact date. Five years ago, right before my twentieth birthday, cancer took my mother and only friend from me.

Sure, we’d had some rough patches. My mother was a seer—she could see the future—and her visions were vivid and all consuming. They wore her out. They beat her down. They showed her that I would become one of the most powerful beings in the world and that others would come after me for it.

Great thing to tell a four -year-old. And Mom never stopped driving the point home.

My feet carried me without me giving them guidance, and the heat that lingered in the asphalt permeated my skin. We weren’t in Vegas, because Gwen insisted we needed a place where they could drinkandsee peen.

Which was why we were in one of the smaller Nevada towns with looser rules.

Speaking of rules… this heat sucked. New rule for me: no more parties in miserable hot desert towns if it wasn’t February.

I wasn’t afraid of walking alone at night any more than I was worried about protecting a group of drunk-off-their-asses girlfriends. Mom made sure I was prepared for myascension,and I knew how to fight in more styles than most people knew existed. The pair of daggers strapped to me were backups if my hands and feet weren’t enough.

During my various training sessions, I’d learned my mom wasn’t the only one who had visions. Among the others were three dragons—at least dragons were real, and that was pretty cool. They’d seen modern life, millennia ago. They’d seenme.

I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t been a firsthand witness to my mother’s visions.

The dragons saw me meeting someone else like me. My equal but opposite in every way. Cryptic fucking words. And he and I would try to kill each other.

Yay.

The same prophecies said that my mother would somehow fuck an imprisoned goddess of chaos, to give birth to me. That had happened—a goddess who was sealed away from the world had reached out to Mom, because my mother’s gift made the walls between worlds and magical prisons thinner around her. I wasn’t the result of a virgin birth, but the fact that half of my parentage was godly reinforced Mom’s insistence about my destiny.

I tried not to think about that part of my bloodline too much. That I was descended from chaos and destruction. That if my other-mother was ever freed, she might rain down darkness on the world not for her imprisonment, but just because she could.

That wasn’t one of my prophecies though. Some of the other things mine said were that gods would hunt me. That Loki himself would try to destroy me before I brought him to his knees.

Not movie-Loki. From what I knew, the real thing was far more willing to kill for the Hel of it and laugh it off after.

Double yay.

When my feet stopped, I looked up. It took my eyes a moment to focus.Weird. The neon sign had a cowboy on a bucking horse and proclaimed itself theB&B Grill.

Food. Booze. I could do both, now that I wasn’t on the clock. I headed inside and found a table in the back.

There were some older men—hard to tell if they were forty or sixty—at the bar. They gave me a look and went back to their conversation. A large man a few seats down from them didn’t so much as glance in my direction. A couple closer to my age sat so close to each other in a booth, they might as well be in each other’s laps. The place was empty otherwise.

Thank the gods.

Not that any god deserved my thanks. After I lost my mom, I’d been so lonely. So lost. She was my beacon, and I didn’t know what to do without that light. I’d wandered for a while, doing what she and I had always done—moving from town to town to train.

I fell into this work by accident. I’d been trying to find someone to fuck my mind into oblivion for the night, and there was a party of girlfriends who were being harassed. I stepped in, kicked the guy’s ass, and sent him on his way.

Bykicked his ass, I meant that I deflected a few wild punches, returned one of my own straight to the gut, and pushed him outside as he flung an entire dictionary of profanities at me.

The women invited me to spend the rest of the evening with them, fed and paid me, and made me feel like I was part of more than my sad memories.

Then they told their friends.

I was still doing the work now. For the longest time, I’d kept hidden outside of that. I used talismans Mom had made for me to keep me out of sight of any sort of magical radar.

A few months ago, I ditched the protection. None of the prophecies said I would die, and I was tired of cowering and waiting. After a lifetime of training, if my equal-but-opposite—ifLoki—was going to come for me, I was prepared for the fight.

In fact, I was in town for a second reason. I’d been looking for a way to get more powerful, magically—to make the prophecy that said I’d become a god come true faster—and rumor had it there was someone here who might have useful information.

“Hey, Ginger Kitty.” The voice of the dancer from the strip club drilled into my ears, and he dropped into the seat across from me.

---