Page 41 of The Last Valkyrie (Vikingrune Academy #4)

Chapter 41

Magnus

THE DRAUG WERE UPON us. My fellow “kin,” if it was to be believed, though I shared no resemblance to these fetid, macabre excuses for life.

I dragged my bloodblade across a throat, spilling black goop down its front, and the thing kept coming. It wheezed and clawed at me with blackened nails, its face leathery and drooping with old, waxen skin.

Gritting my teeth, I glanced at my allies—all of us in desperate melee within the halls of Fort Woden.

Grim, Arne, and Corym felt bad for leaving Sven behind to fend against his father, yet I had no compunction. Feeling bad for the wolf shifter wasn’t in my purview. I knew he could handle his own.

Now we were being swarmed by the stinking monsters as they attacked us within the walls of Vikingrune Academy itself. Inside the very structure that had withstood the tests of time for a thousand years.

Arne barricaded two entrances to the wide room with sheets of ice. Flakes puffed out and cracks formed in the edifices of the barriers from draug attacking on the other side. Their numbers appeared vast, given the muffled sounds of moaning and hissing.

Corym eviscerated a wight next to me, nearly sliding on its hanging innards, and stabbed his sun-colored knife into its side. The bright energy of the dagger seared the creature’s flesh, illuminating its bruised skin and sending spider-webs of light through its body.

“More of that!” I urged him, seeing how harshly the knife affected the elf’s opponent.

With a grunt, Corym nodded, stepped beside me, and swung his two weapons at the next attacker.

One of the ice shields fell in a crash of crystal to my right, and three more draug limped into the fray.

Grim awaited them on his haunches, and the first poor bastard got a paw swipe across the face that sent it flying ten feet into a wall. When the creature stood on wobbly legs, its head was backwards, neck completely twisted.

The other two lunged at Grim and cut red marks across his white fur. The polar bear bellowed, shaking the walls around us and a metal chandelier above us.

“Grim!” Arne wailed, rushing over to pump a fireball into the enemy with a wave of quickly Shaped runes. The draug’s head ignited like a pumpkin, making him a hazard as he walked blindly around as a human torch. A second later, fire and smoke sizzled as Arne wrapped its head in a block of ice.

The thing collapsed from the weight of its overwrought, icy skull, and I slammed my foot down on it, crushing bone, ice shards, and brain in a mix of disgusting soup.

Unfathomably, the thing started to get back on its feet—headless, soundless—until Corym finished it with a well-placed strike to its lower spine. Seizing, the draug dropped and didn’t get back up. It twitched for a few seconds before dealth welcomed it back into its cool embrace.

We continued to fight in close quarters, trying not to hit each other, but the going was tough and we were getting sloppy and desperate. We’d already passed three dead cadets on the way here, their bodies half-eaten and dessicated by the treacherous undead monsters.

“Where to?!” Arne asked frantically, his eyes on me. When I gave him a confused look, he added, “You’ve been here before, Magnus. Think!”

He was right. I vaguely recognized this hall as one of the ones I ran down when I escaped my blood-leeching tests. I was the only one who had been here before, and memories started to crawl back to me.

“Think faster!” Corym urged, kicking away an oozing, wet-looking draug.

I chopped it up with my bloodblade, solidifying the red gore before cutting into its spine like my elven comrade had done.

At least we’d figured out a way to finally kill these things after our first encounter with them in Delaveer Forest. But that didn’t make it easier to get to their backs, with them crowding so close in the room.

Noticing one of the barricaded hallways was now vacant—the ice shield broken down, the three draug marching into combat—I flicked my shield in that direction. “There! Follow me!”

Pushing past an undead monster with half its face missing, I hurried to the dark, narrow hall. The thundering footsteps of Grim and my mates behind me bounced off the walls, with the plodding, slower steps of the draug not far behind.

We came to another fork—a bookcase at the end of the hall with two passages going left and right. I tried to recall anything I could from my frantic escape from the laboratory.

The men waited impatiently, guarding my six as the draug drew closer.

I chose a direction at random—right—and we streamed off. A short minute later, I was thankful for my decision, because I recognized the large room to my left that held a map of the Isle in excruciating detail.

In that room, Kelvar had shown his true colors by rescuing me, completing my escape after throwing a blanket of shadow over me that hid me from Tomekeeper Dahlia’s scrutinizing gaze a minute later.

Without any time to stop for a quick glimpse of the map, we kept on past the room. At least I vaguely knew where I was, and I yelled over my shoulder, “Two more halls then a staircase! Then a window!”

“A window?” Corym asked incredulously.

“Hope you know how to roll from height, elf.”

The laboratory room came up on our right, its door blown open. The white walls of the place were splattered with gore, and I grimaced when I noticed the slumped, dead corpses of four nurse acolytes.

One of them was probably the masked woman who had worked on me back then, sticking me with countless needles.

A figure emerged ahead of us on unsteady legs, hands raised like it wanted to eat our brains. Its skin was mottled with scars, puffed flesh, and worse than that, a dozen tubes stuck out from parts of its body—two out the shoulder, two out the neck, a few along the torso.

I came to a screeching halt, knowing we needed to get past the dead thing to move on. It was the thing’s face that made me gasp, and I went dizzy from the lurching of my mind.

“Oh. Fuck.” Arne pulled up short alongside me, with the polar bear and the elf behind us. “Magnus . . .”

“I know.” I gripped my weapon and shield harder, bending my knees as the draug shuffled closer, in no hurry to get to us. Its head was bent at an odd, broken angle, making her look all wrong. And hanging limply across her gaunt, dried-up cheeks, was a wet mop of yellow-green hair.

“Astrid,” I breathed.

The Tomekeeper’s dead daughter, risen. Apparently used as a test subject as well, if the pliable tubes hanging from her body was anything to go by. The young woman I had killed after she attacked Ravinica out of spite and jealousy.

“Gods save us,” Arne murmured. Grim let out a low mumble from his jaws, a sad sound.

The sounds of the draug horde behind snapped me out of it. They were drawing closer. Astrid limped at me, teeth bared in a gaping, mindless yawn.

I stepped forward and shoved my bloodblade through her open mouth, the red tip bursting out the back of her skull with a spray of black blood and brain fragments. It made a sickening cracking sound, yet Astrid kept coming.

Arne Shaped an icicle and pushed the crystal spear through her soft, leathery throat, pinning her to the wall behind her.

Then Corym spun with his sun-dagger and sawed at Astrid Dahlmyrr’s spine until she dropped, writhed, and stopped moving.

“Spirits save her soul,” Corym gasped as we all looked down at the poor creature. “Despite what she was like in life, no one in death deserves such a dishonorable fate.”

I grunted and nodded. Guilt hit me hard in the chest—the first I’d felt of such a thing in quite some time. Or was it regret? I always got those two feelings confused.

“She’s been tested on like you, Mag,” Arne pointed out.

Gulping, I didn’t trust my words. “Come on.” I ran past Astrid’s corpse before I could feel any worse about her.

I didn’t know where doors were located in this damned fort, other than at the front, but I did recall a window upstairs.

We climbed the nearest set of stairs, rushed past an eerily quiet hall, and I kicked the stained-glass window at the end in a splash of broken glass, just as growls and hisses of unseen draug wrapped around us like a deadly cloak.

“Better hurry,” I said, already starting to climb down—feeling like I had the first time I left Mimir Tomes’ third story window with Ravinica, to escape patrolling Huscarls.

A smile came to my lips. It was a much preferable memory than the one regarding Astrid Dahlmyrr.

Grim fucking ruined it by barreling out the window in his polar bear form—entirely too damn big to make it through without messing up the construction of the wall—and knocked me off my hand-hold.

I was lucky to land on his soft, matted fur twenty feet below, with little more than a thud .

Luckier still that we had made it out of Fort Woden alive.

We marched through campus toward the southern gate. That seemed to be where the majority of the cries and screams of battle were emanating from now.

Every few minutes, a draug would pop out of nowhere or burst out of the cobbles and attack us. Together, the four of us had no problem dealing with stragglers.

As Corym wiped the dark gore off his sun-dagger, he surveyed the twilit campus, the sky burning orange and red as it settled into nighttime.

“They’re everywhere,” the elf said. “First line of attack from the Dokkalfar, no doubt. They won’t be far behind.”

“Aye,” Grim said, transformed back into a huge naked human. “Must have come from the underground tunnels.”

I reeled at that, with the simplicity and obviousness of his tone. “Shit. Where we stayed during winter?”

His muscled shoulders rose and fell. “Where else? The tunnels are home to the school catacombs. This particular crop of draug must have been soldiers and students fallen over the years and buried on Academy Hill. Under Academy Hill, I should say.”

There was no other answer. It was a diabolically genius plan by the dark elves, or whoever was raising these bastards from the dead.

“Allows them to attack us from the inside, tear us apart from within before the Dokkalfar pounce on us once we’re weak and confused,” Grim said. “Smart.”

“I still think we should go back for Sven.” A frown was etched on Arne’s pretty face. “Much as the wolfie annoys me, he’s still one of us.”

“We’d do well to honor his wishes, iceshaper,” Corym said, rather callously. “Save the innocents.”

I scoffed. “Who the fuck is innocent at Vikingrune Academy?”

Arne raised a brow. “You sound like Sven when you say shit like that, you know.”

My head bobbed left and right in agreement. Fair play.

A commotion to our right—west side of the academy—stole our attention.

Corym snarled and drew his blades, peering out into the darkness. “The elf camp.”

We stopped walking. The south still sounded bloody and horrible, which meant it was where we needed to go. I understood Corym’s hesitation. The Ljosalfar were camped over there, near Gharvold Hall. If they were fighting the remnants of undead created from the garrison of the academy, it meant the fighting might’ve been fierce. Undead Huscarls were worse than undead students.

“Go,” I said starkly. “Make sure your people are safe, Corym.”

He eyed each of us with his piercing yellow eyes. “You’ll be—”

“Fine,” Grim answered for us. “We’ll be fine.”

He saluted with a fist to his chest, blood seeping through his fingers to the hilt of his elegant, silver sword. “Any news of Ravinica, you come find me, yes?”

I nodded firmly. “No one is getting abandoned tonight, elf. But we have to live, first.”

A dull explosion rumbled the ground.

Our heads whiplashed to the sound, coming from the south where we were headed, about half a mile away.

A great plume of gray smoke and dirt billowed into the sky, making visibility impossible. Something caused an eruption of stone and metal near the southern gate, and it couldn’t have been friendly.

This doesn’t look good.

Vikingrune Academy was falling apart at the hinges.

“Fuck,” I breathed.

The wide-eyed, shocked expressions on my comrades’ faces told me they were thinking the same thing.

“Go!” I commanded Corym, snapping the four of us out of our stupor. “Help your people, and then round them up to help us fight whatever the fuck is over at the gate!”