That's when I realized it was a trail of treasures, piling up more as I went deeper into the cave. Old car parts, a titanium hip replacement, and even what appeared to be a wedding band. The Kalanoro apparently loved hoarding shiny things.
On the ground a few feet ahead of me, I spotted something particularly sparkly. It looked like stars, shimmering and glowing from a puddle on the floor. By now I had to crawl on my knees, since the ceiling was so low.
As I reached for those stars, a Kalanoro leapt out from the darkness. Its rows of teeth dug painfully into my right arm, and I beat it back with my asp baton. It took three hits before it finally let go and ran off screaming.
I grabbed at the stars, picking up a satiny fabric. The way it glimmered, it looked exactly like the night sky, and I now understood what Odin meant by looking "like the heavens." This had to be the Valhallan cloak. I hurriedly shoved it into my gear bag. The Kalanoro couldn't be happy about me stealing their treasure, so I had to get out fast.
I raced out of the cave and gulped down the fresh air. Around me, the trees had changed their tune, from the normal song of the jungle to something far more shrill and angry. I could hear the Kalanoro growling and screeching at each other, sounding like high-pitched howler monkeys. They were enraged, and they were chasing after me.
It was a ten-kilometer hike downhill, through thick forests, to the nearest village. There I would be able to clean up and catch the hyperbus back to Caana City. Back to meet Odin. The Kalanoro were now alerting the entire jungle to my presence, and even as I hurried ahead, deftly moving through the trees, I could hear them following me.
I ran down the hill, skittering through the mud and branches, swatting back giant bugs and the occasional surprised snake. My legs ached and my lungs burned but I pressed on, running as fast as I could. I had to make it to the town before dark, because I doubted the Kalanoro would let me out alive.
THREE
The sign above the driver on the hyperbus read AFORO MAXIMO 100 PERSONAS, but there had to be at least twice as many people cramped on the old bus as it lumbered through Central America. A hyperbus was like a regular bus except slightly larger, and it hovered, so it could go much faster than a regular bus, especially through the uneven, wild terrain here.
Since this one serviced primarily rural areas, its passengers included humans, immortals, more than a few chickens, and even a very pregnant goat. For the first three hours of my journey I was forced to stand, holding on to the grip bar and squished between a woman and large Cambion.
There were fewer immortals here than there were back in the city, which was a great big melting pot, with people and beings from all over the world living side by side. Nearer to the Gates of Kurnugia the population was ostensibly diverse and overwhelmingly supernatural. But out here there weren't many immortals that weren't indigenous to the area.
The Kalanoro themselves had been an exception. They'd actually become somewhat of an invasive species after being brought over on a boat from Madagascar, and if it weren't for the native Chupacabra and jaguars, they could have devastated the Panamanian rain forests.
Because of this, and other stories about humans and immortals like this, locals around here tended to distrust outsiders. For once, that worked in my favor, since they gave me a bit of a wider berth than they did for everyone else, which meant I had an extra inch or so to breathe.
Eventually I managed to get a window seat all to myself. I rested my head on the window and clung to my gear bag on my lap. It contained my one chance at stopping the underworld uprising and getting Asher back.
If there even was an Asher to still get back.
I'd been trying not to think about it, but the bus ride was too long, with nothing to keep my mind busy except the blur of the rain forest as we sped by it. I closed my eyes, willing the exhaustion of the last few days to overtake me, and finally, thankfully, I fell asleep.
My dreams were filled with images of a cloak made of the stars. I wrapped it tightly around me, but it couldn't keep the cold out. There was something chasing after me, but I could never quite see it, and I knew that I could never get away from it.
I awoke with a start, gasping, and immediately put my hand to my chest, over my heart. My seatmate--who had apparently joined me while I was sleeping--glanced over at me.
She appeared to be an older woman, possibly in her late sixties, and she managed to distract me from whatever strange dread had awoken me. Based on the symbol of triple goddesses hanging around her neck, along with several black tattoos on her temples trailing down her hairline, I guessed that she was a bruja.
Her salt-and-pepper hair hung down in a long braid, and she eyed me with an irritated scowl, since I'd momentarily interrupted her knitting. She was furiously knitting away, with a strange vibrant black yarn and two long needles--their mottled ivory and the sound of their clack when they struck each other made me think they were bone.
"Sorry," I mumbled as she glared at me from under her thick eyebrows. "Lo siento." Since I didn't know much Spanish and she continued to stare at me, I added vaguely, "It was a bad dream. A nightmare."
"No, pesadilla," she told me ominously with a thick accent. Even as she spoke, her dark mahogany eyes locked on me, her wrinkled hands working feverishly, the knitting needles continuously clacking away. "No dream. Es un mensaje."
I stared at her in disbelief, gulping back the rising dread. "?Que? What do you mean?"
"He is loud, even I oir." She finally stopped knitting and motioned to her ear with one hand. Then, using the long bony needle, she poked gently at my chest, right above my heart. "!Escucha! He is speaking."
I was about to ask her again what she meant, but then I heard it ... or maybe felt it. Whatever had woken me up. It was still here, sitting in my chest, burning inside me. It wasn't like hearing words, not like someone speaking in my ear, but it was something different than my own voice or thoughts. But it was strangely crystal-clear.
The bruja nodded and smiled, then went back to her manic knitting. But I barely even registered that. I was lost in a memory.
In bed, only a week ago, with Asher's arms around me. My bedroom was lit by the blue lights of the billboards across the river, and Asher was brushing back the hair from my face, letting his rough fingers trail down my temple as he looked into my eyes.
"My grandmother said that sometimes our ancestors--those that died before us and love us--leave us truths when we most need them," he had told me with a soft smile. "It's a thought that comes in, but it's truer and brighter, and it becomes branded across my heart."
And now in the hyperbus, alone, I realized it was just as Asher had said.
His words searing my heart were as clear as if he were speaking in my ear, telling me, "You must not worry about me. Forget me. Save the world." Somehow, from wherever he was now, he'd gotten his message to me.
He was still alive, but he didn't want me to go after him.
FOUR
It was early when I made it to Caana City, barely after five in the morning. The sky above the city had begun to change, shifting slowly from indigo to a soft amethyst. Here it wasn't as big or as bustling as it was back home in Chicago, not quite, but the streets were slowly waking up as the residents began their daily routine.
When I finally got to the Caana City Extended Stay Inn & Suites where I had left my friends, the sun had almost fully risen. Before I'd gone off to Panama, we'd decided to check into one of the cheaper motels we could find, since we didn't know how long we'd be staying here. That's why we were staying in the more-distant Canaa City anyway--the capital city of Belmopan was just too expensive on our shoestring budget.
Hopefully, we wouldn't be here for much longer. Although it was gorgeous in Belize and the clean air and bright stars were a nice change of pace from the smog of the city, I was eager to get back home. Mostly because I was hoping that being home meant that the underworld uprising would end before it really started. That Asher would be safe, and life could return to n
ormal.
I'd only just climbed the outdoor stairs up to the hallway balcony when Quinn Devane rushed out of our room and ran toward me. I must've been more exhausted from my travels than I'd thought, because I totally misread her expression for excitement, when in reality it turned out to be fierce anger.
"Hey," I began tiredly as she reached me, but before I could say anything more, Quinn slapped me across the face. Hard. "What the hell?"
"Don't you 'what the hell' me," Quinn growled at me, as I glared at her and rubbed my already throbbing jaw. Her nostrils flared in anger, and her usual lopsided smile was instead a sharp scowl. "Where were you? How could you leave without telling anybody?"
"I left a note," I insisted.
She scoffed. "You snuck out in the middle of the night and left a scrap of paper taped to the mirror that said, 'I'll be back in a few days. Stay safe.--Malin.'"
"I wanted to make sure you saw it," I argued feebly.
"That doesn't explain why you didn't reply to any of our texts or calls, or why you felt the need to sneak out in the first place," she shot back and folded her arms firmly over her chest. Above the low scoop of her tank top, a dark red scar ran between her collarbones, and soon the healing cut above her eye from our recent fights in the Gates of Kurnugia would match.
"At first I was ignoring you," I admitted. "I didn't want to argue about it until I was long gone, but then I didn't get any signal at all in Panama."
"You were in Panama?"
"I went to get the thing that the guy told us about," I said, deliberately being vague because we were outside, and I didn't know who could overhear us.
After Odin had talked with me, I had told everyone about it. I had just left out the part about the location, and then once Oona had made up her potions, I'd gone after it on my own.
"Why couldn't you have told me?" Quinn demanded. "What if something had happened to you? I should've gone with you."
"Oona was hurt, and I knew she wasn't up for the journey." I pointed at the door behind Quinn, where Oona was presumably hiding out with Atlas Malosi.
Quinn shrugged. "What does that have to do with me?"
"Because. If I told you, you'd want to come with, and then Atlas would have to come with because Samael tasked him to protect me, and then who would be here helping Oona while she healed?" I asked. "Not that she would be willing to stay behind if everybody else was going, anyway."
Quinn continued glaring at me, and then finally she exhaled and her shoulders relaxed slightly. "You still should've told us."
Now that she was softening, the rage in her eyes was replaced with concern and worry. The line of her jaw tensed, and her lips twisted ever so slightly, so she pressed them into a grim line. The early morning sunlight shimmered off her silver hair, giving her an almost angelic glow, and the air was filled with all the things that neither of us could say.
A few days ago Quinn had made it perfectly clear that she was done pursuing me romantically, which was what I'd been asking her to do since we'd broken up six months ago. But she wouldn't leave me to fight alone, and I knew all too well that emotions weren't something that you could flip off like a switch.
The brutal truth of the pain in my chest and the lump in my throat was that I cared for her still, that I always would. I wished desperately that I'd been able to love her the way she needed to be. The way she claimed she loved me.
But I couldn't. Not when we had been together. And definitely not now, when the world was falling apart, and I had feelings growing for someone else. Someone who may or may not be dead and trapped in the underworld.
I swallowed that thought back and tried to keep my cool.
"I was just getting something from the Kalanoro," I said as casually as I could manage. "It's the kind of thing I was trained to do, and I knew I could handle it on my own. And I did."
That finally registered with her, and an eyebrow arched above her brilliant green eyes. "You got it, then?"
I nodded. "Let's go back into the room and we'll talk about it."
She stepped to the side, allowing me to pass her, but she didn't move over enough, so I brushed up against her muscular bicep. Neither of us commented on this, and I kept walking toward the room, with Quinn following a step behind.
No sooner had I opened the motel room door than Oona leapt off the couch. With her hands on her hips, she shouted at me like an angry matriarch, "Malin Rose Krigare!"
Even though Oona was actually a month and a half younger than me, not to mention significantly shorter and more petite, she had skewed toward a maternal role with me for most of our friendship. Which worked for me, because most of the time I felt like she was the only one who really cared about me.
"I already yelled at her," Quinn said, preempting a lecture from Oona.
I rubbed my jaw, where it still ached from her slap. "Yeah, she really laid into me."
Oona deflated, and I imagined that she'd been practicing what she wanted to say to me since I'd been gone. But the good news was that she already looked a lot better than she had when I'd seen her last. Even jumping up from the couch was an improvement on her weakened state from before.
Her skin had been sallow and almost gray, but it was once again creamy brown and flawless, and her dark eyes were bright. Before, her short black hair had been listless, but the usual luster had almost completely returned.
"You shouldn't have gone like that," Atlas said, chiming in from where he stood leaning against the wall. "Samael called, and he was very upset when he found out what you'd done."
I cringed but quickly shook it off.
Samael was technically my boss--assuming that I was still a Valkyrie and I still had a job, which seemed less and less likely every day--but his investment in me currently had more to do with his relationship with my mother. He'd been in love with her, I think, and protecting me was a way of honoring her, now that she was dead.
"It was worth it," I assured them all and slipped my gear bag off my shoulder.
I set it down on the coffee table and pulled out the mounds of fabric that had left my knapsack bulging at the seams. There'd been hardly any room for my provisions, and I'd actually had to ditch some along the way to keep the cloak from spilling out.
Oona gasped when she saw it, which was a perfectly reasonable response. The bulk of the fabric was a strange matte black. It had this velvety black-hole appearance to it, but it was cool and satiny to the touch.
Interspersed throughout the fabric were twinkling stars and pale purple swirls of galaxies, all of which actually moved and glowed. It was as if someone had cut a chunk of the night sky out and turned it into a long, flowing cloak.
"Holy crap," Oona said and crouched down in front of it to get a better look. Her metal-stud angel bites--piercings on either side of her philtrum, just above her lips--glinted from the starry light as she wrinkled her nose. "What's that smell?"
"Yeah, it still stinks of the Kalanoro cave where it's been for hundreds of years, but I don't have a lot of experience washing mystical fabric," I explained.
"So this is it?" Oona looked up at me in wonderment. "This is the Valhallan cloak?"
I nodded. "It was just like Odin said it would be."
"Now we need to figure out what we're supposed to do with it," Quinn said.
"I couldn't find very much written about it, but I did research while you were gone, and it allegedly has concealing and protective properties." Oona reached out, tentatively touching it. "Wow. It's colder and smoother than I thought it would be."
"I don't think we need to do anything with it," I said. "We need to get it to Odin, and then--"
A loud knock at the door interrupted me, and I glanced around.
"Are you expecting someone?" Quinn asked me, her voice just above a whisper, and I shook my head. Her gaze hardened as she looked toward the door. "No one's supposed to know where we are."
Another knock, this time louder and more urgent, followed by a woman forcefully saying, "Open up. I know y
ou're in there, so let's stop wasting each other's time."
FIVE
My hand hovered above my sword holstered on my hip, and I bent down so I could peer through the peephole on the door. Through the tiny lens I saw a swarthy young woman standing outside, with large black feathered wings growing out from her back.
Her dark brown hair landed above her shoulders, falling in frizzy waves. Several black feathers ran along her hairline, blending between her olive skin and wild hair. There were a few more feathers on her bare shoulders, under the straps of her tank top, but other than the subtle plumage and wings, she appeared human.
She stared into the peephole, biting her lip in irritation, while her eyes settled on the door. Her eyes were wide and subtly protruding, so that they looked too large above her high cheekbones and rosebud lips. Shrouded by heavy lids and dark lashes, this gave her an oddly glamorous look that clashed with her unkempt hair and industrial black apparel.
"Who are you?" I asked without opening the door.
She let out a relieved sigh and replied, "Samael sent me."
I looked back over my shoulder at Atlas, who shrugged his broad shoulders. "I don't recognize her, but Samael is probably the only one that has any idea where we are."
Since she clearly knew who we were, and she seemed to be alone, there wasn't any point leaving her out on the balcony to shout through the door. I opened it and stepped back to allow her to come in.
She pulled in her sizable wings, folding them tightly against her back so she could fit through the doorframe, and set a duffel bag on the floor as I shut the door. Behind me, Quinn and Atlas were doing their best to look fierce and imposing, while Oona offered our new visitor a friendly smile.
"I am Valeska Voronin," she said, in a voice that was somehow both sultry and husky at once, with a subtle Slavic accent adding a heft to her words. Then she turned her gaze to me. "I assume you are Malin Krigare."
"That's me," I said dryly.
Her eyes traveled around the room, which had a general "bland motel" vibe going on. We were standing in the small living room with a "kitchenette" on the far wall that consisted of a sink, a mini-fridge, and an ancient microwave resting on a stainless steel counter. Avocado-green walls, worn stone flooring, and a convertible sofa with several mysterious stains were the highlights of the main room, along with a window view of a parking lot, and two full-sized beds were in the adjoining bedroom.