“That answer requires rational thinking. I’ve been beyond rationality for a long time.”

“If this has been your lifelong motivation, what will you do with yourself when it’s done?”

Val chuckled. “Damned if I know. Maybe I’ll ask Hela to kill me. Feed me to her snake or something.”

I inhaled, preparing to ask about the truth of that possibility, but the crunch of rocks beneath a heavy footstep silenced me. The smell of storms and lightning filled the room, and a weighty groan exhaled behind me. Electricity, one searing pulse, shot through every nerve in my body.

“Sunshine.” Thorin said my nickname as though it were a curse. “Why am I not surprised?”

I kept my attention focused on Val. If he opened his mouth to speak, to put his will into the runes infecting Thorin, I would have to act fast. “My vision was wrong. Well, not wrong, just incomplete. Your brother isn’t the wolf.”

“Huh. I can see that.” Thorin moved behind me, close enough for his body heat to warm me, for his breath to tickle my cheek and ear—close enough for me to see, in the periphery of my vision, Mjölnir raised and ready in his fist. “But if it wasn’t Grim you saw, I have to presume it was someone else. I’m guessing it was me. I am the wolf. This was the endgame all along.”

“He simply has to speak the runes.” I focused my darkest stare on Val. “But I won’t give him that chance.”

Val licked his lips and opened his mouth. I cut him off before he could speak. “No!” I raised a handful of fire overhead. “You don’t get to say another word. I told you I wouldn’t let you do this. Open your mouth again, and I’ll show you where you can stuff your potential.”

He snapped his mouth shut and narrowed his eyes at me. His nostrils flared. A muscle worked in his jaw. Not for a second did I think we had reached an impasse. This was a duel, a showdown between three gunslingers at high noon with their hands poised over pistol grips. Who was the fastest in town? Me and my fire? Thorin and his hammer? Val and his mouth?

“Last chance, Val,” I said. “It’s two against one. You could give this up. I promise to let you go if you turn right now and walk away.”

Val sneered but held his tongue.

“No,” Thorin said. “He doesn’t get to walk away. This ends now.”

He drew back the hammer, but before he released it, Val’s voice ripped from his throat like a lion’s roar. “Hagalaz!”

Thorin grunted and stumbled, and the concussion of Mjölnir hitting the floor shook the cavern. In response to his distress, my fire exploded from within me, coating me in heat and flame. He fell to his knees and clawed at his chest as if trying to free something trapped beneath his sternum, but he maintained his human shape.

It must be more than one rune. Val’s not finished yet.

“Please!” I begged. “What do you want? I’ll give you anything. Anything.”

“Give me my brother back.”

I’d demanded the same thing from Nate, knowing it was impossible. I had nothing Val wanted. We both knew it, but panic made me ask like a magician saying the magic words to reveal something that hadn’t been there before. But real magic didn’t work that way, and no matter how badly I wished otherwise, Val’s brother was no rabbit in a hat.

“Take away my guilt.” Bitterness ravaged his voice.

I stepped toward him, hand outstretched as if reaching for a man who had fallen overboard and was drowning. If Val hadn’t found his own forgiveness by now, he certainly wasn’t going to accept my lame absolutions. But still I tried. “I don’t blame you. No one blames you. It wasn’t your fault.”

“No. It was his,” Val hissed through clenched teeth, pointing at Thorin. “Inguz!”

Thorin bowed over, panting and grunting as his shoulders shook. Val turned and met my stare, daring me. He inhaled, preparing to speak another word—the final rune, judging by the satisfied sneer on his face. I closed my eyes and something inside me—Innocence? Hope? Virtue?—withered and died. As the first syllable escaped Val’s lips, I threw myself on him and sent my walls crashing down.

The goddess inside me leapt free, and she rejoiced.

“Do it,” Val snarled as we fell to the cave floor together. “Do it fast.”

“What about all your plans? What about your revenge?”

“If you can make it stop, then do it. End my pain, Solina. You may be the only one who can.”

“Get out, Thorin!” I yelled. “Get Grim and get out now.”

My fire flared, rising hundreds of degrees in an instant. Instead of recoiling, Val cried out and pulled me closer. We both screamed, him begging for it to end, me signaling a fiery release.

Star light,

Star bright,

Supernova,

Goodnight.

Chapter 17

I bolted upright, turned my face into the crook of my elbow, and sneezed hard, twice. I blinked and rubbed my eyes until my vision cleared, not that there was much to see in the gloom. Hazy starlight and a moon half concealed by clouds shone through a pair of glass doors across from me, and the perspective suggested I sat somewhere high up. The Aerie?

I sniffed, rubbed my nose on my T-shirt sleeve, and balled my hands in my lap—a lap filled with... fur? I stroked the heavy covers drawn over my bare legs. The softness beneath my fingertips was, in fact, some sort of animal pelt—something warm, velvety, and dead. “Ugh.” I sneezed again. I kicked off the covers, and chilly air skimmed my legs.

I heard the soft rustle of someone moving nearby. “Sunshine?” Thorin asked, his voice low, quiet, and uncertain. He rose from a chair beside the bed and settled on the mattress beside me. Soft light from a fireplace flickered on his face.

I sat up straighter. “Where are we?”

“I call it Lopteldr. It’s my home.”

My heart stilled. So did my breathing. Bruce Wayne might as well have told me he had brought me to his Bat Cave. “You-Your home?”

“That a problem?”

I cleared my throat. “No. I’m surprised you didn’t take us to New Breidablick.” I was surprised to be anywhere at all, actually. I’d let Sol free and given the fire complete rein. Last time I did that, I’d spent four weeks in some alternate state in which I wasn’t aware of myself.

He found my hand in my lap and twined his fingers between mine. “We can go to New Breidablick if you prefer, but I thought you might like to have a little less company. Fewer people asking questions and demanding answers from you.”

Sharp memories pressed against the thin fabric of my mind, threatening to make me remember, but I pushed against them. I’m not ready to remember. Not yet. “How did we get here? I was sure...” I stopped and swallowed. “I was sure I’d be a star by now.”

Thorin’s silhouette ducked its head. “The geologists will probably say there was an earthquake—something volcanic, maybe. Anyway, there’s a river in Alaska flowing on a different path now. It used to run above the cavern, but there was a cave-in and the river, um, sank, I guess you could say. There’s no more waterfall either, which is a shame. It was a lovely waterfall.”

“Earthquake?” I gasped. “Is that a euphemism for the God of Thunder and his hammer?”

“Someone had to put you out, Sunshine.”

“So you doused me? With a river?”

He ducked his head. “There was a moment when I wasn’t sure it would be enough.”

“You’re not a wolf.”