“A good man?” Louhi repeats with a curl of her upper lip. God she’s so ugly and beautiful at the same time. “What does that have to do with anything? Good means nothing. Do you know how easy it is to poison good? To corrupt it? It takes but a moment to cross over. In the end, darkness prevails.”
I shouldn’t laugh at that, but I do. “Darkness prevails? How original. No wonder Death was happy to see you go.”
I don’t see it coming.
Louhi opens her mouth and a long, forked gray tongue shoots out, wrapping around my throat like a python and picking me off the ground, twenty, thirty feet in the air.
For the second time today I’m being choked to death, a scream dying inside me.
Louhi’s slimy tongue swings me out in front of her, dangling me high above a patch of seemingly innocent snow.
“In your world you have such a thing as Russian Roulette,” she says, sounding sinister despite her tongue being in use. “Let’s play my version of the game, shall we? If I drop you, there’s a chance you’ll land in snow. There’s an even greater chance you’ll land in the void of Oblivion, just as your unicorn friend did.”
I curl my fingers over the tongue to loosen the pressure on my throat, but she’s far too strong and her tongue is too slippery, coated with a fine black sludge that makes it hard to get a grip. I don’t want her to drop me into Oblivion, but if I don’t take my chances, she’s going to strangle me to death, and that’s a one-way ticket to Oblivion, too.
“Rasmus,” Louhi says to her son, puffing up her chest. “In my world, you’re just a bottom feeder with an empty brain. If you’re going to get anywhere, then you must watch and you must learn and you must do. In order to have power, you must let power corrupt you. Then everything is limitless.”
Rasmus is still lying in the snow, breathing hard. He lifts head to see me.
Fight her, his broken voice projects into my brain. She’s going to kill you.
I can barely form thoughts enough to answer Rasmus, but I know he’s right.
A little magic would be nice, I think to him, the corners of my vision going blurry and gray as I lose oxygen.
I can’t, he says painfully. The collar, I think it’s draining me. But you’re the daughter of Torben, too.
Too bad I don’t know any magic to draw upon.
But I do have a knife in my boot.
Using what little strength I have left, I bring my legs up and reach into my boot, pulling out the selenite blade. Before Louhi can act, I swipe the glowing white knife at her tongue, severing it. Black blood splashes everywhere.
She screams in agony.
I scream in fear.
And then I’m falling.
Falling fast.
About to smash into the waiting snow that rushes up at me.
Suddenly the air vibrates with energy. Out of the corner of my eye I see something large and black flying toward me at breakneck speed.
Seconds from crashing into the snow, a hand reaches out and grabs my arm, jerking me upward.
A hand I know too well.
A metal hand.
Chapter 7
Death
“The Ex-Wife”
We were almost too late.
After a day and night of flying and searching the land for Hanna, we finally came across some intel this morning. According to Tapio, God of the Forest and a fairly good ally at times, Hanna and Rasmus had been spotted at the Pile of Decay and had recently taken flight on a unicorn.
Tapio’s daughter, Tellervo, then said that she overheard the fungi talking, and that they were heading toward the portal to the Upper World at Shaman’s Way. Thank fuck for that, otherwise we wouldn’t have been there in time. Sarvi took off in that direction, maybe twenty minutes after they left, and all the while I was preparing for the worst. There may have been a grain of guilt in thinking that my storm may have caused them to take the shorter route out of this world, but knowing that Louhi’s lair was close by, and knowing now that Rasmus is Louhi’s son, my guilt was replaced by suspicion.
The unicorn, which Sarvi said was named Alku, was just a speck in the sky when I saw it fly down toward the ground. By then I had to say a few spells with help of the shungite key around my neck to conjure up some favorable winds to get us there faster.
I felt Louhi before I even saw her. She feels like a freshly drawn bath at first, something you can slip into and let your inhibitions down. That’s what makes her so lethal, so poisonous, so insidious. There’s something about how pure and honest her evil is that pulls you in and makes you want to stay. Then the water gradually gets hotter, and hotter, until your skin is burning off and if you don’t act fast, you’ll just be another bag of bones for her to claim.