Valhalla Virus, Nick Harrow [simple ebook reader txt] 📗

laughing as water from the wrecked plumbing washed over her body. The cold didn’t bother her.

Nothing did. She had a job to do.

Hyrrokkin’s plan was clear to her now. If Hilda could secure the ring, they’d use it to open a new path into this world. And Hilda would be rewarded. She’d be a goddess.

If she got the ring.

And she wasn’t the only one out there looking for the thing. Hyrrokkin had gifted others with the change. The burning lady had also sent a few of her homeboys here to help the invasion, at great personal cost. If any of those assholes beat Hilda to the prize, they’d get the reward. Not her.

“Fuck that,” Hilda said, shivering as she let the splashing water wipe the remnants of sex and violence off her body.

She left the hotel room behind, glass crunching beneath her hooves, flies buzzing on the dead bodies scattered about. The sounds of carnage disturbed the early morning quiet, reminding Hilda she was far from alone. And that was just fine with her. Because those monsters out there were her monsters. They just didn’t know it yet.

Hilda didn’t bother with the elevator. The way the lights flickered, she doubted they’d work for long, and she did not want to be stuck in a dead car when that happened. Besides, she loved the way her new body felt. She’d always been a bit of a gym rat, but that had been more for looks than strength. Now, though, she jumped down flights of stairs and landed like a cat. She tossed corpses around like paper airplanes and kicked doors off their hinges.

Plus, she had magic.

She played with it as she descended to the casino’s ground floor. With a thought, she could hide herself, but it drained her hamingja. Fortunately, she could replenish that by killing humans.

The image of the ring and the skull came back to her thoughts. She knew exactly where it was. It’d be a bit of a hike to get there, but that was all right. Hilda could run like the wind now.

“Ready or not,” she sang at the top of her lungs, “here I come, motherfuckers.”

Chapter 10

GUNNAR FELT EVERY BUMP in the road on the way back to the underground house. The bones of his face seemed to slide around when Mimi bounced over a pothole, and the clots that formed in his mashed nostrils made it hard to breathe without sucking in dry desert air through his aching mouth. As he’d predicted, being a hero kinda sucked.

Then again, it had been a rush when the rune had blown those jötnar straight back to hell. And he didn’t feel as messed up as he had before the energy had poured into him following the massacre at the Villas.

Odin had told the truth. The hamingja Gunnar had stolen from the monsters was stitching him back together, one wound at a time.

“Hang in there,” Mimi said and gave Gunnar’s good hand a squeeze. “I’ll have you back in a flash.”

“Tell me you’ve got whiskey socked away,” Gunnar muttered. “A lot of it.”

Mimi laughed and whipped the Charger around a burning truck with a half-melted strip club billboard jutting up from its cockeyed bed. The motion jostled Gunnar’s head from side to side, and he squinted his eyes against the pain. He was glad Cal was dead but was less happy about the damage he’d suffered to finish a job he should have taken care of the minute he’d found those girls on that boat. At least he’d retrieved the Valknut. Hopefully the old man would show up in another dream to explain what he should do with it.

“Here we are,” Mimi said a few minutes later. She fished her cell phone out of the cup holder, unlocked it with a swipe, and glanced at the screen. “No alarms, so that’s good.”

She pressed a button on the phone’s glowing face to open the gate. The heavy barrier slid open on tracks set into the driveway, and the instant the Charger passed through the opening, the door reversed direction. By the time Mimi’s Charger was safely inside the garage, the property was sealed up tight as a drum once again.

“Thanks,” Gunnar said. “How bad do I look?”

Mimi pursed her lips into a tight frown. “Not great, honestly. If I thought there were any ERs open, we’d get your eye looked at. Your nose is laid over pretty hard. I’d try to straighten it for you, but I don’t know if that’s a good idea. I’ll let you look in the mirror and decide what you want to do about it.”

Gunnar nodded, open the door, and levered his aching body out of the car’s low-slung bucket seat. He felt like shit, but he didn’t want Ray and Bridget freaking out over the dog’s breakfast he’d made of his face. They didn’t deserve to live through this horror show, and Gunnar hoped to keep them calm and cool through as much of the dark road ahead of them as possible. “Okay, I’ll hole up in the guesthouse. Convince them it looks worse than it really is.”

“Such a gentleman,” Mimi said with a wistful look. “You should have listened to me when we first met. You’d be chilling on the coast, teaching tourists how to ride scooters or something.”

Gunnar laughed, winced, and held one hand to his broken nose. Mimi’s exact words to him when he’d shown up at her bar asking for a job were still fresh in his mind. “I don’t need the Jolly Green Giant scaring off all my customers. You want to be a bouncer, go down the road to that biker shithole with the rest of the sasquatches.”

And he had. From that job bouncing drunk idiots, he’d found his way into the bodyguard business, bopping from one client to another, until he wound up back at Mimi’s place a year later with a list of references as long as his arm. She’d promised to hook him