* * *

How long had she been staring at these stones? Nїx thought perhaps she'd been enjoying the pretty things for far too long.

But when she looked around, she didn't see anything threatening her. The realm's star had been hanging overhead when they'd first arrived. Now it had begun setting.

She must have been out of it for a couple hours. Some small part of her considered leaving. The rest discarded the idea immediately.

She'd made a promise, and if nothing else, she'd keep that.

The river was placid, and most of the gnats seemed to have figured out she was a swift bug-splatterer. So many of the little things had died off, they were now keeping a distance. There was that, and the smoke from the fire appeared to keep them under a sort of sedation. An aroma from the tree bark, perhaps?

She shook herself.

Where the hells was the reaper?

She cast her senses out. Most Valkyries relied on their five senses, but ever since she had felt the jolts the last couple months, she'd begun to realize she could sense beings with more clarity through their vibrations.

Within less than a second she found him. He was over by those cliffs. What was he doing? Valkyries being engineered for curiosity and investigating, she was off in an instant.

After all, hadn't Regin's favorite phrase been, 'Fuck it.'? Sating one's curiosity wasn't a sin.

But it had been so long since she had dwelt completely in the present. Since she'd let her skin soak in the sunlight through the tree canopies without being haunted by her mate's vision.

Following the vibration of the reaper was simple. Without his cloak, it was effortless to discern. His was unique out of most immortals.

She went over it, slowly coming to understand him. Soothing, lulling, but with a brimming edge underneath. What others perceived as spooky or creepy, she recognized deeply suppressed desires.

There was that, and wrath. He hated evil and arrogance.

The sound of the waterfall thundering grew, the foliage more spread out.

A clearing ahead opened out to a vast pool, five football fields wide. The waterfall fed the massive river to her left.

If the star in this realm rotated the same as Earth, then the river flowed east to west.

The waterfalls from the cliffs were cascading, some in hard sheets, others in sprinkles.

Nїx's jaw dropped.

Byron stood on one boulder in the center.

That particular sheet of water was pounding. Hard enough to sting even an immortal. For his young age, with that kind of hypersensitivity, it had to hurt like hells. Like ice knives striking every inch of his torso.

Yet he remained still.

It was one thing to take a shower, but his skin was turning a tint of red.

She drank the sight of him in. Now she could get to peep a little and enjoy. When her conscience reminded her of what she'd said about him stalking Valkyries, she pushed Jiminy off.

This wasn't the same! Not entirely.

Maybe just a little... ooooo, whatever! She was going to enjoy it, damn it.

He'd stripped himself of everything. She could see those legs and that ass perfectly. Those muscles weren't rock hard but toned enough to show he had strength there. More than just strength, he was flexible.

His thighs were solid muscle. He'd spent time overseas, he said. Considering the body armor the mortals carried in recent years, he'd had to develop those over time.

When he turned around, Nїx choked down a heavy moan. Whether from an operation or his transition, his chest was bare. Yet he had a perfect treasure trail, and those abs were worthy of worship.

Her breath slipped when her eyes went lower. He grew hair, but he kept himself trimmed, as fastidious as most Loreans were. As suspected of a modern mortal in the U.S., he was circumcised.

She frowned. She was an ancient girl; she wasn't a fan of that practice.

Seeing him as he was, though, she thought she could definitely deal.

A grower, not a show-er. But she wasn't certain exactly how big a grower. She'd felt him fleetingly through his pants, but it felt as though he hadn't stiffened entirely. The promise was tantalizing.

Mother, if you saw this male in my future... oooooo... you should've told me a number!

He was rolling his shoulders again, spreading his arms. Phenїx finally comprehended what he was doing.

"And a cold-ass shower..."

Byron was pelting himself with cold to quench his lusts?

You idiot male! That's not the righteous way to do it! There's a demigoddess right here who'd take care of that problem, happily!

There were ways to take care of him without him having to break these reaper's laws... she'd foreseen tens of thousands of scenarios that could help the tension out between them. And all of them would be glorious. Her breath hitched on the idea.

Something snapped. Byron tensed, head whipping to the other side of the clearing.

Phenїx watched that massive demon cat appear. Larger than a sabretooth, it had muscled legs and paws wider than most any grizzly bear. Colored in brown-and-cream spots that would have perfectly blended with this jungle. Four emerald eyes settled on its face.

Before Phenїx could react, he leapt down on the beach.

He was going to fight it barehanded? Sure, he could take down a colossus with his scythe, but...

She quirked her head when the reaper put his hands on his hips, staring the creature down with no fear. Commanding, arrogant, confident male all over.

Even with the thunder of the waterfalls, she could hear his huff. "Hey. Thought I already got you what you needed."

Nїx held her breath, a hand going over her heart spontaneously. Oh, gods above! The reaper was a cat guy?!

Be still, my heart. He can't be. Too sexy if he is!!!

The puma chuffed submissively, its ears lowered, then padded forward softly before it glanced over its shoulder. A smaller version of itself appeared, a two hundred-pound baby flicking a bushy tail and giving the big cat's version of a hungry yowl.

Phenїx choked back a squeal.

Oh, blessed powers, you are so fucking cyuuuute!!!

Byron sighed, shaking his head with resignation. Then his face crinkled with a smile. He lifted a hand and held up three of those dexterous fingers. Grumbled, "Three more. That's all. It's not like there's dozens of'em down there. Alright, mama puss?"

She wanted to faint hearing that growled 'puss' slip over his throat. Ooooo. When he said it that way, no anger or snide arrogance?

That sent tingles to all her best places, blood pooling her nipples and nethers. One of her fangs touched her bottom lip.

I can really get to him if I purr or mew... and I've always loved making that noise with a male.

The reaper called over his scythe, then leapt straight up. Staring intently at the pool, he hung for scarcely a second at the apex, eyes aiming. He slung out the scythe, cracking it under the surface.

Ten seconds later he recalled it, a massive fish dangling from the scythe's blade. He repeated the maneuver a second time.

Then something - a centipede that could easily have weighed ten tons - careened in off the waterfall into the pond. Its collision with the surface blew out water over the beach.

He covered himself when the spray hit him. The big kitties backed up, tails twitching at the prospect of such massive prey.

"Uh-oh," Byron intoned. "Ya dumb thing, why'd you try crossing the rapids up there?" he sighed.

His gaze shifted down, then his eyes widened. "Oh! Well, never mind, puss. Way, way more than dozens."

A multitude of fish started eating apart the centipede. A mixture of what looked like a cross between a piranha and a catfish, and an array of alien-looking creatures one might find in the depths of an Earth ocean.

Byron tossed his scythe out a few more times, snagging five more. He laid them out on the shore.

The baby was already consuming the first, yowling happiness and contentment. Nїx wanted to pet the crap out of it, it was so blessedly fuzzy!

The mother leaned against him, reverberated a heavy purr and gave a lick on his shoulder. Byron gave its whiskers a few soft strokes. The sight of the hardened reaper like this made her lightheaded.

Rrrrrrrawr all over that. Rrrrr! Want one like that! Why aren't you mine?!

She sniffed again. The male did smell delicious. But he wasn't her mate. Disappointment curled inside her at that. Then she caught Byron's voice on a purr she'd only heard when he was kissing her earlier.

"You're welcome," he was mumbling. "Just be careful around here, okay, I think I saw a really massive one there at the bottom."

He leapt up on the boulder and peered into the pool, eyes focusing. "Damn. Deeper than I guessed. Four hundred... five hundred meters. Holy shit. Jar Jar Binks would shit his pants with that big one there! And that water down there is brackish, headed... yep. Ocean."

He peered off to Nїx's left, lips curled in a wistful smile. She sipped air. He was the kind of male that loved to explore. Nїx hadn't been able to without her foresight for millennia.

Sure, it offered her some advantages. All she had to do was visit a place, sit, and soak it up. After that, she could take a few jaunts in her mind's memory.

But it wasn't the same. To do it in the present without the foreknowledge was tantalizing. Nїx felt the reaper tense. For a moment he was peering up, unfocused.

Does he have a extrasensory aura!?

She cast out her magicks, covering herself to mirror the foliage and bark she'd been peeking round.

He traced.

Wait, she wore his robe, that meant he could trace...! She shed the cloak she was wearing and began running, giggling.

Get away, get away Nїxie girl! Don't let him-

Sandalwood filled her nose.

"Lil peeping Valkyrie," he growled.

"AIII!!!"

She cut out a high squeal, pumped her legs and dodged under several logs towards the river shoreline.

"Hide and seek again?"

That shivery voice was echoing around her. Now, this was what it felt like to have fun! She pounded over another log. Branches overhead snapped. Her ears flicked, giggling hard. Juke left, girl, get around that tree!

She hollered, "Yes! But my way, not yours, reaper!"

His voice echoed closer, "Just how long were you watching me?"

She threw her voice off to one side. "You're a cat guy?"

His voice drifted away, following her voice, "That long, huh?"

Phenїx purred. "More than long."

She broke out and made it to the river shoreline. Leaping clear of a couple debris strewn logs, her legs pumped more. He echoed from further off.

"You see enough?"

Gonna get away!

She let out a giggle in another direction. "Wanted to see how big you can grow, reaper."

A hard tackle from the side sent her falling over onto the beach, screaming. She started flailing, thinking the cat had gotten an idea that she was a meal. Then burst out laughing when she saw Byron's cloak fall off.

The reaper had her in his arms. He wagged his eyebrows at her. "Found you, demigoddess."

"How, reaper!?"

"The magick vibrations you were using. You left a trail, vixen."

"Godsdammit," she mumbled.

Water still dripped over his face. A wily thought occurred to her. She scooted her hips down enough to press against his own and lifted. He was already hard. She gasped. His nostrils flared a moment.

Byron's eyes turned, and her breath hitched. It wasn't just smoke anymore. Fire. Flames were licking over the jade in his eyes.

Her core quivered. That's what his eyes turn to... so freaking hot!

Then he shook his head and blinked. The fire went out. "Thought you'd want to enjoy your sparkles more."

She ignored the pang of seeing his eyes go cold. She shifted, but he backed up away. A pang hit her.

Damn it, why was he going away from her?

"How did you know I wasn't?" she asked.

"My aura works to deplete an opponent, but also as a sixth sense."

That confirmed her earlier suspicion, but if he had this extrasensory capability... "Well, why didn't you feel me approaching?"

"I didn't want to intrude too much, so I'd only check in every half hour or so."

"I could have left in that amount of time," she whispered softly.

"But you made a promise. I wanted to show respect for that. No reason to intrude if you needed to wander and enjoy the present. In any case, you can handle your own shit."

Something bloomed in her. This male, an assassin without measure... he valued others' privacy greatly. Her eyes settled on his chest. One finger lifted and pointed out a thin scar.

"What's that?"

His smile evaporated. Now it became gloomy, matter-of-fact.

"Shrapnel. Caught it my second tour."

Her breath hitched. It was right over his lung. He'd been wounded as a mortal.

"Is it in you?"

"No. Armor stopped it halfway. Glanced off my ribs. Cracked one of them. Nothing serious."

The way he said that... how many of his own friends and fellow soldiers had been wounded worse? And as mortals they would never recover from those horrendous injuries.

She'd seen what the mortals had been doing with their science of late. It was passable. Far more comprehensive than anything they'd ever conceived in the past. Yet it still lacked in many ways.

She rubbed over the keloid tenderly, "How many times were you in a battle as a mortal?"

"Can't hardly count ambushes or skirmishes or snipers as a battle. We call'em firefights. Me? Three or four, nothing serious. Well, one firefight was.

"I dispatched one or two of the bastards that time. Snipers, couple took potshots at us, maybe a dozen times. IEDs... I don't know. Maybe about twenty. They'd mortar us every chance they got. Couldn't count how many."

Nothing serious... She shook her head. No, that was serious. She'd used C4 and Semtex plenty, she'd seen first-hand what those detonations did to immortals.

To a fragile mortal, that was more than serious.

Yet Byron's voice was deadened. He hadn't gone home to a camp with a warm willing woman or female to relax with. He'd gone back to a cot and slept alone.

Except for a handful of men who he'd never known before. Until they were put together to fight as brothers. The memories of all her years with her sisters fighting the Horde swamped her, reminding her how they'd done much the same.

But then, the Lore had plenty of willing participants, and lovers weren't difficult to find. The more she uncovered of the male, the more her heart twisted for him.

I was going to kill him earlier today without even a single thought.

The reaper stood and offered his hand. "You wanna check out the cats?"

She brightened. "Yes!"

A short while later, they finished meeting with the kitties, and she had made a decision. She would be finding a way of bringing these beauties home with her.

Cat-napping wasn't a crime in the Lore. Well, not totally.

Byron had spent the time snagging up another fish for himself. After cleaning it out, he'd hauled the catch back to their campsite.

She found the smells tantalizing. It reminded her of when she had been in the Northlands. Nїx enjoyed watching the fishermen bring in their hauls to prepare feasts for their villages.

A time of revelry and bounty.

In between the constant warring with the vampires and then seeking to change the fates, those precious few moments of peace had been soothing.

Watching Byron slowly consume pounds of the meat, she tilted her head thoughtfully. "How much do you consume for a meal?"

"Depends on the day," Byron answered, "But since I just burnt a lot of energy up getting us through three realms, I'm kind of starving," he smacked his lips and rubbed a greasy finger over them. "Don't know whose hell this is, but it sure beats plenty of the others."

Nїx paused and considered him. "I thought you had information on every deity in the realms."

"Sure, doesn't mean I can keep track of all of them instinctively," Byron took another nibble. "Though I can kind of figure that this one's a goddess who prefers climates like South America. So it's plausible she's from that region."

"This goddess hasn't been reaped?"

He shook that brown hair a bit. "Not yet," he answered. "And I wager she's not done very much in the way of atrocities. This land is fertile. Ripe and lush. She's a lifegiver and a lifetaker."

"Would she be put into a hell torment then?"

"This is technically her hell. But, it could also become a heaven. Probably why she doesn't inhabit it. She prefers to leave it as it is, not tilt balances much one way or another. She's happy to be a hunter."

"Perhaps one of Skathi's friends?"

"No, I've seen Skathi's, and her friends'," he answered. "Compared to their Disneyland, this one's a freakin' waterpark. No offense."

That made her consider the ancient hunting goddess. Even with the likes of Isis insisting that Phenїx was up to the task, Skathi had found her lacking.

After Phenїx went into foresight, she didn't exactly wear a filter on how she felt about Skathi's treatment of her baby sister Lucia. Today, Skathi was less of a bitch and more circumspect. What Nїx had planned was enough to make Skathi regard the oracle with greater respect.

She mentioned, "I've seen Thrymheim. Doesn't really strike me as a Disneyland."

"You saw Godsbellow Mountain. That's a pocket dimension that connects Earth with Thrymheim."

How in the realms-?! "How do you know I've been there?"

He glanced over at her. "You put in a petition to become a goddess over two centuries ago. Prior to that, two centuries earlier. The meeting where you requested a specific specialty was planned for the last three decades. It was in Godsbellow Mountain."

"Yes. But how do you know that?!"

"Told you, records. Limina Mortis is a historical archive of sorts."

That was fascinating to her. That kind of knowledge she had to pull on from people. But the deities were in a class all their own. Their mental blocks weren't easily bypassed.

She quirked her head, "Okay. Then tell me. What's Thrymheim like?"

"It's a mountain range," he settled back. "Lots of conifer trees. Like the hunting grounds of the Vikings themselves, or those in the Northern Rockies in Canada.

"Skathi releases big game there for her followers to trail, track, and capture. Sometimes she'll order a kill of a particular beast that wanders in and sets up shop for too long."

Phenїx sipped air softly. "It sounds like Valhalla."

Byron gave a slow nod. "Valhalla is more fertile. There's no proper crops in Thrymheim. Anything you want to consume, you have to hunt down and kill for yourself." Then he mentioned, "From what I've read, she needs to find a mate."

Phenїx chuckled. "Skathi???"

"Wouldn't be easy, but yes. She does. And frankly, I don't blame her. Her last lover was a scumbag."

Phenїx paused and considered him. "You know about that?!"

"The blighted romance between Crom Cruach and Skathi? Yes."

When she stared at him this time, the reaper shrugged. "Can't really blame her for taking a vow of chastity after that bastard tried what he did all those years ago. But not all males are like him."

"Good luck convincing her of that," she murmured.

"She is your distant aunt, there, demigoddess, why haven't you been working on her?"

Nїx sighed, "Above my paygrade, at the moment. And she's worse off than even Lucia was."

"Remembering a time when Cruach was that damn good-looking. Yeah, I figure so. Still."

She cast her eyes over him, "What about the rest of the pantheons?"

Byron tossed another twig in the fire. "What about them?"

"Have they made any real attempts to contact you?"

"Gods don't exactly have the greatest relationship with reapers," he took another bite of the fish and washed it down with something in a gold flask he carried with him. "More particularly, many would prefer if we never existed again."

She was still considering the gold flask. He noticed her gaze, offered it to her. When she sniffed it, her eyebrows shot up. "Soda?"

"It's called pop." Byron grunted. "I swear..."

"Oh, so you're a Midwestern boy." She giggled, and took a teensy sip. Okay, a little more than a sip. She hadn't had a taste of it in years. "And it's still soda."

"Raised in the heartland, damn straight. And it is pronounced soda pop. Pop comes first."

Gods, she was starting to like his grousing. She took another swig of the sugar water. "Soda, Byron. You know this isn't good for you."

"Neither is ten fifths of Jack Daniel's, but from what I see those damned wolves and demons can't ever seem to learn that." He smirked over at her. "And your witch and Valkyrie friends are just as bad! And it's pop!"

She stuck out her tongue at him and he crossed his eyes back at her. Nїx giggled and leaned back, "Do you really think the gods could hate you, goofy male?"

He sobered instantly while staring at the crackling flames. "That implies doubt. I have none." Byron tossed another small twig in. "I know they hate me."

Her heart clenched. "How can you? Have their cadres been hunting you?"

"No. But it seems most every time I meet a demigoddess, they want to try and pull a seduction siphon on me."

The thought of the other demigoddesses making a move on this male set her teeth on edge. Then she remembered she was trying to get him a mate. She forced down the jealousy.

"Are you sure?" She asked. "You don't think they couldn't just want you because you're cute, strong, and young?"

His face was pensive. "Maybe. But why pull knowledge siphon attempts at the same time?"

She pursed her lips. Okay, that was a different story. A seduction pull was favorable. Both seduction and knowledge? That left questions. "What exactly do you know, Byron?"

"How to enter most every heaven realm."

Phenїx stared. Did that include...?

"Have you seen Valhalla?"

When his eyes connected with hers this time, she could read the affirmation without him even speaking. Her breath caught. "You can go to my home?"

He gave a slow nod. "I get special dispensation," he stated simply. "That makes me a threat. And someone they'd love to use for intel. Last time I turned down Yoh, she tried invoking some of her goddess' wrath on me."

"Wait." Phenїx felt a very sharp spike of anger rile through her. "She did what?"

Yoh wasn't exactly a friend, but she was better than that. At least Nїx thought she was. A dutiful female energy, she had been around for nearly three eons. Nїx quirked her head, "Byron, that makes no sense. It's not like her!" When he shrugged, she pressed, "Did you say anything?"

"I just said no when she tried pulling a knowledge siphon on me."

She peered strangely at him. Truth. He'd said no. "Anything else?"

Byron seemed to be thinking back. "I don't know, Valkyrie, it's all I said. That and I asked her to send my best wishes to Xiwangmu."

Phenїx settled back, going over it. Were the demigoddesses really that irate with this male? Were the other goddesses?

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