Valkyrie's Call Read online

  Valkyrie’s Call

  An Aspect Society Novel

  Michelle Manus

  Valkyrie’s Call Copyright © August 2021 by Michelle Manus

  ebook ISBN: 978-1-954400-06-1

  Paperback ISBN: 978-1-954400-05-4

  Publisher: Seclusion Publishing

  Interior Design: Seclusion Publishing

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  All rights reserved.

  * * *

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in critical articles or book reviews

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  This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  Contents

  Description

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Author’s Note

  Also by Michelle Manus

  In Aspect Society, magic is political power, secrets are as common as breath, and what you don’t know could easily get you killed…

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  Valkyrie Winters’ life is tied to a magical object that shouldn’t exist. Which is why she has one goal: steal said artifact and destroy it before it kills her. Simple, right? Not when the artifact in question belongs to the council that governs magical society, and not when the handsome, infuriating Random Tremayne is intent on sticking his nose in her business. All because she made the mistake of sleeping with him one time. A year ago.

  As a notorious playboy—and her brother’s best friend—Random was supposed to be safe. A one-night fling. He wasn’t supposed to tell her he loved her. She’s kept him at arms-length ever since, unable to shut him down completely, but also unable to give him anything more—because the people Valkyrie cares about have an unfortunate tendency to find their lives ruined. Still, the unpredictable nature of Random’s magic might be just the thing Valkyrie needs to pull off this heist—and keep her life. But saving hers might destroy his.

  Random has been in love with Valkyrie since approximately forever. But with the exception of one night together, she won’t give him the time of day. After a year spent chasing her—and having his feelings run through an emotional blender more times than he can count—he’s ready to throw in the towel. Then a chance encounter brings Valkyrie’s secrets tumbling into the light, and her actions finally start making sense. She needs his help, and he’s more than willing to give it.

  If they survive stealing from the Council itself, will Random finally get what he’s always wanted, or will Valkyrie break his heart forever?

  This one’s for you

  1

  The spiderweb splayed across the hedges a foot from Valkyrie Winters’ face seemed like a too-apt depiction of her life. The web was a beautiful, intricate trap, and she was the squirming bug caught in the sticky threads. The spider, very like the monster that existed in her own life, was nowhere to be seen. But she was certain it lingered, just out of sight, waiting for the perfect moment to reveal itself.

  She resisted the urge to tear the web down. The spider was simply existing as nature had designed it to. It wasn’t the spider’s fault that Valkyrie found a little too much to sympathize with where the trapped bug was concerned.

  She drew her focus from the intricate silk threads, turning her gaze to the small house beyond the hedges. Property wards hummed an inch from her nose, announcing to anyone with power that this land belonged to someone with Aspect, and that someone did not desire company.

  Property wards were a given for any home that belonged to a member of Aspect Society, so their presence, in and of itself, wasn’t unusual. What was unusual was that these particular wards were only two—maybe three—hours old and the shattered remnants of a much weaker ward lay beneath them.

  “We should call for backup,” the woman crouched next to Valkyrie whispered. A couple inches shy of Valkyrie’s own six feet, Meredith Townsend was pretty and slender, with long blonde hair that was currently hidden beneath a brown knit hat.

  Valkyrie barely spared a glance at the woman who had once been her friend and was now simply a useful resource. Meredith always said they should call for backup. Every damn time.

  She gave the reply that, by now, was as familiar as breathing. “I can’t call for backup because this isn’t a Council-sanctioned mission. Also, I don’t need backup.”

  “That attitude’s going to get you killed one day. And it could be a Council-sanctioned mission if you would just tell them where you’re getting your information.”

  True enough, but Valkyrie had no interest in telling The Aspect Society Council anything. Not when two six-year-old girls waited in the house beyond the hedges, both of whom were the unwilling recipients of illegal Aspect experimentation, and both of whom stood to pay the price if the Council handled the situation badly.

  Considering that the madman who had experimented on the girls was an Illusion Aspecter who had also impersonated one of the Council’s employees for months without their knowledge, Valkyrie wasn’t going to give them a shot at fucking this up. Not when they’d bungled their chance to bring him to justice so badly that, not only was he still on the loose, but they still didn’t even know his real name. She was forced to refer to him as Danvers, the name of the Council employee whose identity he’d taken on.

  After she’d liberated the girls, after they were in the custody of someone she trusted, then she would report this to the Council. Not before.

  “If you don’t want to be here,” Valkyrie told Meredith, “go home.” She had gotten what she needed out of Meredith for the night. Trackers weren’t rare, but Trackers of Meredith’s caliber were. There wasn’t another person in the state who could have led Valkyrie to this house.

  “You said if I helped you, you would let me explain. I have done nothing but help you for months,” Meredith said.

  “And you aren’t finished helping yet.” There were more houses like this one. Quiet, seemingly normal looking homes where the victims of Danvers’ experiments were kept under constant watch. If it weren’t for Lucille, the young Oracle who had been liberated from Danvers’ clutches six months ago, those victims would have remained unknown.

  They might have continued to remain unknown if not for the girl’s grandfather, his years of Oracular experience able to pull sense from Lucille’s ramblings and weave them into something Meredith could Track.

  “We may never be finished,” Meredith snapped. “Lucille hasn’t stopped talking since she came home.”

  “Then you may never get the chance to explain.” Which would suit Valkyrie just fine. Her brother, Jace, might be able to forgive what the woman had done to him, but Valkyrie had no interest in doing so. Jace was the forgiving sort and, being newly married, his head was fogged with marital bliss, besides.

  Valkyrie wasn’t the forgiving sort. And her head would never be fogged with marital bliss.

  “Va
l—”

  “I’m going in,” Valkyrie said. Slightly reckless, but while she had no doubt that whoever had erected the new property ward was inside, waiting for her, she also hadn’t seen any evidence that they would pose a true challenge. “Come with me or don’t. I don’t care.”

  She pulled two daggers, rose to her feet and drove the first dagger into the invisible wall of the property’s wards. They shuddered as the runes in her blade, inscribed from the well of her own Battle Aspect, hammered her power at the wards like a battering ram. The wall trembled, the manifestation of her will and anger thundering through it. Cracks splintered its surface, stretched and grew.

  The wards groaned. The last rune in the blade unleashed its Aspect and the wards shattered like untempered glass.

  Valkyrie dove through the maelstrom of falling pieces. A ward shard struck her, opening a slice of skin along her cheek, and she accepted the small pain as a reminder that she was alive. Few other things made her feel so, anymore.

  The power of her Aspect crackled along her body. It gave an edge to her strength and speed, a sharpness to her hearing and sight. The front door of the house opened and four people stepped out, three men and a woman. The woman and two of the men bore blades.

  Their own Aspect danced down those sharp steel edges, and Valkyrie recognized theirs as kindred to hers. It was hardly a surprise—most Aspecters who went into the mercenary fields bore a Battle affinity.

  Only the fourth man, standing out of the way by the door, his hands empty, remained an unknown to her. Until he actively called his Aspect, she wouldn’t know what affinity he bore.

  Valkyrie kept the potential of his threat in the back of her mind as she shifted the dagger to her left hand and pulled her short sword with her right. One of the men approached, his katana held in a low-level defensive posture.

  He closed the distance between them and swung the katana in an upward strike. Valkyrie parried with her short sword, gauging his skill, his strength in terms of Aspect potential. She deflected a second strike, dampening the amount of strength her Aspect funneled into her when she discovered that his was less than she’d expected. With three others to fight, there was no sense in wasting power on what skill would do as well or better.

  As she drove his blade up with her own she spun on a rush of Aspect-aided speed and slashed across the top of his thigh with her dagger. The blade sliced deep, which told her he either wasn’t good enough to hold Aspect armor over his skin, or he’d been arrogant enough to think he wouldn’t need it.

  She knew it was the former when, rather than use Aspect like a butterfly bandage to hold the leg wound closed, he pulled recklessly on his reserves, channeling power into a flurry of attacks.

  It was too little, too late. The fight had been over the moment her dagger tore through his leg. They both knew it. The others, waiting in a holding pattern around them, knew it. Valkyrie parried the man’s increasingly frantic blows until her dagger slashed the underside of both wrists and his nerveless fingers dropped the katana.

  Before his knees even hit the ground, the woman with the scimitars moved in, twin blades slashing for Valkyrie’s exposed back. Valkyrie tucked her shoulder and rolled, a deft twist of her Aspect making what would have been a risky evasion carry her far enough away from pursuit to gain her feet and parry the barrage of attacks that followed.

  The woman was good. Her Aspect was a thin, well-placed enhancement—it added a touch of strength and speed, but she relied more on her skill with her blades than on the power that ran in her veins.

  Fighting her was a simple pleasure, one Valkyrie let herself revel in until the woman lost one blade, then the other. Valkyrie knocked her out with a right hook that needed no Aspect enhancement to do its job.

  Dispatching the third swordsman took less effort than the second, but she had barely put him down when the ground lurched beneath her feet. A shaky tremor through the soles of her boots was the only warning sign she was given before the earth tore open. She dropped both blades and caught herself on the edge of the chasm that had seconds before been solid ground.

  Goddess-damned Elementals. So that’s what the fourth man was: Earth.

  The ground beneath her fingers crumbled. She scrambled for the earth behind it, only to have the new handhold dissolve into loose soil in her hands. She strove for solid purchase but it disappeared again and again, until her movements had far too much in common with swimming through quicksand.

  But the Elemental was tiring. Each time she took hold of the edge, it was slower to crumble, until finally she caught firm ground that held. A twist of Aspect zinged through her, delivering a burst of speed, and she swung her leg up over the lip. She gained her feet, ran as the Elemental renewed his efforts and the ground once more dissolved. She sprinted ahead of its collapse, and when the cave-ins finally stopped, she knew the Elemental was spent.

  She turned to face the fifteen foot wide chasm that now separated her from the house. She backed up several feet and took a running start. Her Aspect punched the ground when she pushed off the edge and carried her high into the air as she somersaulted across the gap.

  The Elemental pulled a gun as she landed. She barely saw it, barely had time to snap a shield of Aspect around her before she heard the bark of the pistol and a bullet slammed into her shield. It was followed by another, and another, eight bullets firing in rapid succession until the gun clicked empty.

  Most Aspecters did not traffic with guns. Battle Aspect, born for war in a time when guns were not even a glimmer of thought in man’s mind, was entirely incompatible with them. They simply failed to fire in the hands of Battle users. Other branches of Aspect—such as Elemental—were more compatible, but Aspect always added a factor of volatility. Given that volatility, few Aspecters bothered with guns, unwilling to risk the possibility of one exploding when they pulled the trigger. Especially when an Aspect shield could stop a bullet as easily as it could stop a blade.

  But every now and then you got an idiot like this one who was willing to risk it in the hopes the unexpectedness of the weapon would win the battle for them.

  Valkyrie turned a glare on the man that could clear a room in under ten seconds, but it wasn’t her look that had his already pale face blanching corpse white. No, that would be due to the Aspect that stretched from the other side of the chasm. From Meredith.

  Her eyes were unfocused, her hands held loosely at her sides, palms upturned as ribbons of her Aspect wound around the Elemental. Those ribbons of power slithered and writhed, gripping him tighter and tighter.

  Meredith might be a world-class Tracker, but that wasn’t all she was, wasn’t even the core of what she was. That core was lit up like a blaze in the dark of night, now, its truth shining out from her. Because her core was truth, and if most Truthfinders stuck to being human lie detectors, the darker side of their power was that they could wrap a person in the absolute veracity of their own darkest moments.

  It was called a Truthfinder’s Telling, and there were few people who failed to be affected by it, who had accepted the truth of what they were—of who they were—so completely that they didn’t crumple into a ball at a Telling’s touch.

  The Elemental was not among the few. A scream tore from his throat. He dropped the gun and fell to his knees, clutching his head and sobbing.

  Meredith wore a serene expression. She looked like a benevolent goddess dispensing mercy, not a woman who had a man screaming on his knees as if he’d just lost everything that had ever mattered to him.

  And people said Valkyrie was scary. At least everything Valkyrie did to a person, she did without rooting around inside their mind.

  The man’s eyes rolled back into his head and he slumped into unconsciousness. Meredith’s power spun back into her and she opened her eyes, catching Valkyrie’s.

  “You couldn’t have done that a little earlier?” Valkyrie asked. “Say, before he tried to drop me into the ground?”

  Meredith shrugged. “Didn’t know he’d try.
Besides, you get prickly when people interfere in your fights.”

  “Truthfinders,” Valkyrie muttered.

  “What’s that?” Meredith called sunnily.

  “Just get your ass over here.”

  While Meredith walked up the surprisingly intact driveway, Valkyrie tied up the three unconscious people and divested them of their remaining weapons. The only death had been the first man she’d fought. She hadn’t enjoyed the killing, but she’d long ago ceased to be bothered by it.

  Death was inevitable in her position contracting for the Council, a job she’d taken as soon as she’d passed her Academy finals, because that was what her father had expected of her. She had learned at a young age, and the hard way, that it was best to do what Elijah Winters expected.

  “Basking in the afterglow of victory?” Meredith asked.

  Valkyrie snapped out of thoughts of her father, ignoring the phantom ache his memory had brought to her wrists. The invisible chains of power that lurked there, just beneath her skin, had been dormant since her father’s disappearance a year before. Since he’d been captured by the same man who liked to experiment on the Aspect of young children.

  If she had anything to say about it, those chains would stay dormant. So she needed to handle this situation—find Danvers so she could find Elijah, and fix two problems at the same time.

  She picked up the female mercenary’s scimitars and slapped the woman awake with the flat of one. The blades did not, to Valkyrie’s mind, make up for the loss of her own short sword and dagger to the chasm’s depths, but they would do, for now.