Page 26 of Reaper's Reward

Maddox rose and kissed my forehead. “You should get some sleep. We have a monster to hunt tomorrow.”

I scowled, the fun ruined. Next time, I would get what I wanted. This was the era of my life where I went after my own pleasure. Right?

I just had to grow a backbone and actually do it.

* * *

Hel was already waitingfor me in the gray hours of the morning. She barely let me have a cup of tea before she told me to sit and started in on her lecture. The hag dropped me into the sea of my power, the chill of the icy arcana freezing me to my bones.

That was one way to wake up. I really would have rather had a cup of tea.

“Every death is tied to a thread of fate,” Hel’s bodiless voice said. “Follow death to find the fate thread beyond it.”

There were many who’d died in my life, from Perse to the Reaper down the road. Neither came to mind first, though. Instead, my thoughts were pulled towards my mother and the bitter resentment that she’d been taken from me before she could tell me anything.

My thoughts of her pulled me against the current of the arcana sea. They led me to a thread drifting wildly, untethered. My stomach sank for a heartbeat. Then, Hel groaned.

“My descendants have always been defiant. Your mother did not move on. Her soul has been with you this whole time.”

My family rosary became heavy against my chest. I drew it out from behind my shirt and peered down at the twinkling light trapped inside the beads.

“Mom?” I asked.

The light of one bead flared bright.

I became a child all over again. The weight of everything I had to do was too much for my small shoulders. I needed my mother more than anything. “Mom! Mom, I need you. Please. Come help me.”

Hel covered my hands and the beads with her oversized human hand. “She isn’t who she used to be. While her power resides with you, her soul is incapable of communication. It was the tradeoff she made when she defied her own fate.”

Disappointment made my lips tremble. A sob nearly escaped me. I tightened my grasp on the beads until they bit into the soft flesh of my palm.

This time, when Hel sighed, it was a gentle sound. She felt sympathy for me, though I didn’t understand why. She’d never had a parent ripped from her. The gods weren’t born…they simplywere.

Bitterness roiled through my veins. It seared my insides until my throat was too raw to speak. I knew that my assumptions were wrong. The gods had familial connections, too. They had power, though. They could do what I could not.

They could save their loved ones.

“We must return to the lesson, little one,” Hel said softly.

If Hel was being gentle with me, then that meant she really understood. I wiped the hot tears from my cheeks and tucked the rosary back behind my shirt before lifting my chin. No one would ever take anyone from me ever again. I refused to lose anyone, even to Hel.

Could she see that in my eyes? If she knew, she said nothing.

“Take your mother’s fate thread. It is attached to nothing, so we might as well use it as practice. She can help chain up Fenrir once more.”

I plucked the thread from the rolling sea of cold power and paused. “Did you use unbound fate threads to chain Fenrir the first time? Or did you sacrifice lives to lock him away?”

“Do you want the answer to that?”

I scowled. There had to be a way to get around that, too. If Mom’s thread was unbound, there would be other unbound threads, too. I just had to find them. Which…would admittedly take time that we didn’t really have.

Fenrir had eaten amountain top. I wasn’t going to question how he did it. The only thing I knew for sure was that a piece of our landscape had been devoured. Had I been out, camping, then Fenrir would have taken me with it.

The thought pushed me to focus on Hel’s training. She taught me to manipulate the fate thread. All I needed to know was how to bolster it with my arcana and how to tie it so that it would never come undone. Of course, my thread chain unraveled more than once, but Hel never admonished me.

She was patient all throughout the lesson. That only added to my suspicion that she had something to do with Fenrir’s sudden appearance. When I opened my mouth to ask, she dropped us back into the mortal realm.

I gasped for air as the sound and color of the living world came rushing back. I’d gotten too used to the cool darkness of my internal realm. Out here, everything crashed into me all at once. It barraged my senses until my mind could barely make sense of my surroundings. My skin tightened, and my head throbbed.

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