Embrace of the Damned (7 page)

“Hungry?” asked Broder.

She was too uneasy to be concerned with food, but she nodded anyway. She just wanted to get out of this room and away from all these mysterious men.

Broder led her out of the room, and she cast a final suspicious look over her shoulder, wondering like crazy what the hell was going on in this place. Was it a halfway house for wayward underwear models? Some secret organization of crime-fighting superheroes? Oh, crap, the set of a Norwegian porn movie?

He led her into a huge industrial-style kitchen. She could probably fit her entire bedroom into the enormous stainless-steel refrigerator alone. She guessed she shouldn’t be all that surprised. After all, men as built as these guys must need to consume a lot of calories.

Broder set some bread, jam, and butter on the table, then went for silverware and plates.

She eased onto a chair at the center island. “Are you an Olympic sports team of some kind?”

He returned to the island and set a plate in front of her. “Is that what you think? Do you always pair bobsledding
with vicious monsters that move like snakes, have irises that turn jet-black, and sprout retractable fangs?”

She gave up her attempt to make rational sense of it all. Swallowing hard, she pushed the plate away, suddenly not very hungry anymore. “So you’re saying those things and the men in this house are connected?”

“Blight.”

“Excuse me?”

“The fanged monsters, they’re called the Blight. Yes, we fight them.”

She digested that. “So this is like some kind of superhero club.”

He frowned at her. “Super to a human, maybe. Definitely not heroes.”

“Blight are demons. Correct?”

He nodded. “Spawned from the depths of icy Hel, which holds the same name of the goddess who keeps that realm. Hel is Loki’s daughter and she’s imprisoned there. You could say she and Loki have a troubled relationship.”

“You mentioned Loki before. I remember him from my mythology class at school. He’s a Norwegian god, right? A trickster god. Kind of a prick?”

“You sum him up nicely.”

“So the Blight are trying to kill me.” She chewed on that for a moment, breathing deep and trying to remain calm. Apparently demons and Norwegian gods were real. Shock was keeping her from running around the room, holding her head in her hands. “So what do they want? Why are they here?”

Broder selected a piece of bread and began to butter it. “The mission of the Blight is to bring about Ragnarök.” He glanced up at her. “Sort of like the Christians’ version of Armageddon. Ragnarök is an apocalypse for the gods.”

“Apocalypse for the gods,” she repeated numbly. This just got weirder and weirder.

“Yes.”

“Do we care if the gods have an apocalypse?”

Broder shrugged. “I hate all the gods I’ve ever met, so I
don’t care if they live or die. However, their war would be bad for the world. There would be a series of natural disasters that would result in the destruction of the planet. Basically, Hel is trying to kill her father. Humanity is in the way.”

A little puff of air escaped Jessa. She gave him a slow blink. “Are you fucking crazy?”

“I wish I was. I also wish I didn’t have to tell you this next part, which is likely to blow your little human mind.”

“My little hum—wait a minute, you’re trying to make me angry, aren’t you? Well, forget it. You can’t. Tell me the rest of your whacked-out story.”

He set the butter aside and moved on to the jam. When he was finished with that, he folded over his piece of bread and calmly dipped it into his glass of milk. “We are the Brotherhood of the Damned, a group of men who committed brutal acts in our days as Vikings and have been punished by the god Loki to an immortal life battling the Blight.”

Jessa stared.

Broder took a bite of his bread. “Why aren’t you freaking out right now?” he asked around the mouthful.

“I’m freaking out on the inside.” At least now she knew why her mojo hadn’t worked on him. He wasn’t even human … if he was telling the truth.

He cocked his head to the side. “You don’t look like you believe me.”

“You have to admit it’s a little hard to swallow.”

“So you didn’t see the two agents of the Blight last night? You missed the bloodthirsty fangs, the freezing touch, the huge cobra mouth, all that stuff?”

“Yes, but you’re telling me that the god Loki is real and that you’re over a thousand years old. You’re saying that you’re some kind of … prison inmate for life, but instead of making license plates, you’re forced to fight demons. You’re also telling me that Loki and his daughter, Hel, are locked in some epic family squabble and the fate of the world hangs in the balance. Gee, what’s not to believe? By the way”—she gave him a head-to-toe sweep—“for a thousand, you’re looking really good.”

He bit into his jam sandwich, unfazed. “Humans,” he said after he’d swallowed, “never believe anything outside their tiny, limited sphere of experience.”

“You’re not human, then? So I was right.”

“I was, once. Then Loki stabbed me with a sliver of Blight and I became something else.” He paused. “Brotherhood.”

“So everyone in this house is suffering from the same mass delusion. Perhaps something happened to each of you in your past, something in which you felt out of control or helpless, so you decided to give yourself
special powers
and
immortality
”—she made air quotes around the words—“so you would never feel out of control or helpless again. I get it.” She pushed from her chair. “But I don’t want any part of it.” She turned and went for the door. Nothing was going to stop her from getting the hell out of here this time.

“I know you don’t want to believe this, but walk out that door and you will die, I guarantee it. I don’t know why the Blight want you dead, but they do. You don’t stand a chance against them.”

She halted, clenching her hands at her sides. “Why does everyone presume I’m so helpless?”

“Because you’re human.”

“That doesn’t mean I’m stupid.”

“You’re not stupid; you’re just not prepared. Don’t you remember last night? In the cab? All you did was flail and scream.”

She whirled. “I killed that thing!”

“
With my dagger
, yes. You don’t have my dagger any longer.”

That was a good point.

She put a hand on her hip. “Prove to me that you’re everything you just said you were. I want honest-to-god, irrefutable evidence that you’re not delusional and insane.”

“More proof than demons?”

“Okay, maybe I need proof
I’m
not delusional and insane.”

He set his bread down and rounded the island to walk
over to her. He stood so close, she could feel the warmth of his body radiating out and enveloping her. He smelled good, like leather and the faintest whisper of cologne. Reaching down, he picked up her hand, his strong, broad fingers closing around it, and pressed it palm-first to his chest.

Her breath caught at the feel of his strong chest under his shirt and the warmth of his skin. He was hard beneath the soft skin, all muscle.

“Close your eyes and reach out with your mind to the center of me,” he said.

After shooting him a look that clearly conveyed how futile she thought this exercise, she closed her eyes and sought the “center of him,” whatever that meant.

She expected to find nothing, but it hit her almost immediately. In her mind’s eye a long sliver of blue pulsed. She knew without a shadow of a doubt that it was lodged in Broder’s soul. It gave off a pulse of danger, of darkness, that made her want to back away from him, but she stood her ground.

Suddenly she was whooshed away to some building she didn’t recognize. She understood this was happening in her mind, but it seemed completely real. The chill in the room dissolved into her bones; the shift and rustle of material filled her ears.

Gasping, her eyes open, she turned in a circle, taking in the scene. Strong, big men, all in the clothing of Vikings, ranged around her. She recognized a few of them from the room downstairs. All of them were being addressed by a sleek, handsome man dressed in a suit—Loki? She could hear nothing, but she sensed that all the men in the room possessed pulsing slivers of darkness in their souls.

As soon as the vision had engulfed her, it spit her back out. She stumbled backward, disoriented, her hand going to her head. Nausea filled her. “What was that?”

“I shared with you one of my earliest Brotherhood memories. Proof that I am what I say I am.”

She took another step back, the world going fuzzy. Her breath came in short, panicky little pants and her chest was
tight. She turned in a dizzy circle, eyes wide, wanting this awful feeling to pass.

Her vision went dark and she collapsed.

Broder watched Jessa as she lay on his bed. She looked fucking good there. Too good to be true. She lay on her back, her head lolling to one side, her riot of thick, dark blond hair loose on the pillow. He’d covered her with a blanket and was keeping a close eye on her. When she’d passed out, she’d bumped her head on the floor.

Her body made an intriguing form under the cream-colored blanket he’d tucked in around her. He tried not to concentrate too hard on the pout of her lips or the tiny mole that marked her cheek just beneath her right eye.

All the makeup she’d been wearing was gone now. She hadn’t been wearing much of it to begin with. Jessa was one of those women who didn’t need it. She was a natural beauty, though not a perfect one. Her nose was a little bigger than what normally might be considered classically attractive, her body a size or two more curvaceous, and her two front teeth had just a slight gap … a gap he really wanted to explore with his tongue.

In his opinion, she was gorgeous, just his type, as Loki had known she would be. If, after all these years, it could be said he had a type. He was a little out of practice.

He pressed his hand to her forehead again, frowning. The bare amount of healing ability he possessed told him that she was okay. No concussion, even though she’d given her head a good knock. She should wake up all right. All right at least physically. Mentally and emotionally he wasn’t so certain how she’d fare.

Broder hated telling humans the truth—breaking their tenuous illusion of a world that made sense. People wanted things to make sense, went out of their way to create theories and philosophies that explained everything that was scary in life, or things they just didn’t understand.

The cold truth was that nothing made sense. Everything
was chaos and they were all just fish swimming around in it—an ocean of chance whose tides swelled at the fickle whim of the gods.

His gaze skated down the length of her for the millionth time. He wanted to lift the blanket and ease his hands beneath her clothes. He wanted to stroke his fingers down her smooth skin, find the places she most loved to have touched, and make her moan. It had been so long since he’d had a woman to touch, to care for, to stroke and to please. The last woman had been his wife.

Broder clenched his hands, holding himself back from jumping on her. Curse whatever situation Jessa was in. If she’d had no target on her back from the Blight, he simply would have seduced her, brought her back here, and fucked her until they both couldn’t walk. Now they were in this mess and he’d been forced to shatter her safe little world.

Somewhere, Loki was laughing right now.

Jessa roused, her eyelids fluttering open. Her big brown eyes locked with his. “If you’re not crazy, then I must be.” Then she winced and touched the back of her head. “Ouch.”

He leaned back in his chair and sighed. “It’s not you or me who’s crazy, it’s the world. Just relax. You bumped your head.”

She spotted the glass of water on the short dresser at the edge of his bed, pushed up, took it, and sipped. “Okay.”

“You’re taking this better than most humans do.”

She shrugged. “I don’t think having a panic attack and passing out qualifies as taking it well.”

“That wasn’t from shock; it was a reaction to sharing a memory with me.”

Setting her glass of water on the table, she cocked her head to the side and studied him. “So all the members of the Brotherhood are being punished for a brutal crime?”

“Yes.”

“What did you do to merit a sliver of demon stabbed into your soul?”

Broder turned away from her.
Fingers slick with blood clenching the grip of the sword, ax handle sticky and heavy
in his other hand. Turning in a circle, bodies everywhere….
 “None of your business, woman.” He stood. “Want an ice pack for your head?”

She stared up at him, eyes glittering with anger. “I think it’s totally my—”

“I’ll go get the ice pack.” He left the room and went down to the kitchen. Anything to get away from her questions and the look in her eyes.

When he returned to the room, she was standing at the window and looking out over the grounds. He handed the ice pack to her and she pressed it to the lump at the back of her head.