At First Light(Dr. Evan Wilding #1)(111)

They were a howl of anguish.

Still, Evan knew he was now well into Sherlock Holmes’s territory of the imagination. Everything here was speculation. A mining company with a dragon logo. A lawsuit. A mysterious curse. The line from her poem, this hoarder caused my fall with his fall, his fall caused by the fallen.

All he could do was patch together the few facts he had from River and from Tommy and hope that the cloth held.

He said, “He is your son, who fell to his death in a disused mine shaft. Whose fall was caused by carelessness or greed—or both—on the part of the big bosses who stole the riches of the earth.”

She reeled back, half stumbling in the snow. Her hair tumbled from its tight coil and fell around her face. When she looked up, all he could see of her was the snarl of her mouth.

She shook back her hair. “And what is the name of the dragon that devoured my son?”

“Epic Mining.” He saw the truth in her mad eyes. “That’s three riddles. The children shall live.”

She tossed her head so that her hair flew about her face. Canniness slithered into her eyes. “You did well, little man. But if I were to offer a final riddle, it would be to ask you, who is the trickster god?”

Odin, Evan thought but didn’t say. He feared a trap.

But she sprang the trap herself. “Odin,” she said. “I serve Odin. And Odin is a trickster god.” She pulled the sword from the ground and held the pommel in both hands. She raised it high. “It is time.”

She came at him.

Evan cast Ginny into the air and fled as far as the chain would allow him. Osborn let loose a shriek that turned Evan’s skin cold. Even as he cast about again for a weapon, a detached, wry part of his brain thought, So this is what it’s like to have a Valkyrie come for you.

In the far distance, beyond the pond and surely as far as the road, blue and red flashing lights appeared.

Evan’s hand closed on a branch buried in the snow. He raised the branch awkwardly with his cold fingers, wondering how many seconds it might buy him. If any at all.

Then a loud crack broke across the night, Osborn’s feet seemed to tangle, and she was suddenly falling forward, the flesh of her throat opening even as the blade of an ax bit into her ribs and her sword arced forward, now free of her hands, sailing high and clean like death until it clattered into the trees. Osborn kept falling; she fell and fell and fell as if in slow motion, and then behind her there was Diana standing in the trees and next to her Addie, with her gun raised, her face filled with something that Evan thought was surely love.

Mortally wounded, not once but twice, struck down by bullet and by blade, Osborn hit the ground. Red poured into the snow.

And for a moment—the briefest, faintest moment—Evan imagined a ghostly form bent and lapping at her blood.

Then it was gone.





CHAPTER 38


An hour after Addie’s blue circus took over the scene, Evan allowed himself to be raised onto a gurney. He was too numb to insist he was perfectly fine and all he needed—now that he knew Tommy and Jo were safe—was a stiff drink or three and to sit by the fire in his library while Ginny drowsed nearby on her perch.

After the first drink, he might even stop shivering.

The gurney jolted over tree roots. An EMT, locs swaying around his face, leaned in as he and another man maneuvered the stretcher.

“Whatever you got going, man,” he said to Evan, “keep it up.”

Evan watched the overhanging boughs drift by above as the gurney rolled and jerked. His mind longed to drift with them.

“What was that?” he managed to say from a distant place.

They’d told him he had hypothermia. Nothing a good Old-Fashioned wouldn’t fix.

The EMT leaned in again and grinned, his teeth brilliant. “Those two fine ladies you got. Not one but two ladies drooling over you. Making sure you’re fine. Making sure you get the best treatment. They’re like those Viking warrior women. What do you call them?”

“Valkyrie,” Evan whispered.

“Exactly! Man, I’d like a couple Valkyries keeping me warm on a night like this. Shit, one of them has a hawk! You see that?” This last directed toward the other EMT.

“You see that sword?” the other man asked. “It’s like King fucking Arthur around here.”

The wheels slammed into a root, and metal squealed and groaned. The EMTs hoisted the gurney up and over as if it and Evan weighed nothing at all.

“Nah, it’s Vikings, man. Axes and swords and Valkyries. That is some seriously cool shit. I would love to have a Valkyrie looking out for my ass.”

Be very careful what you wish for, Evan thought.

He closed his eyes.



Addie stood at the edge of the crime scene and watched the lights of the ambulance strobe against the night. The siren gave a single whoop as the driver pulled away from the curb, and moments later, the vehicle rounded a bend and vanished from sight.

Evan, shivering so hard that his teeth chattered, had filled her in on what had happened and what he’d surmised since their last phone call—Sally Osborn as a mentally unwell child grieving for a mother who was wasting away from cancer just as the mummified remains of another tortured woman were found in the ground. She’d then grown up under the tutelage of a stepfather whose specialty had been Old English texts. No doubt Rhinehart had shared his enthusiasm for the old sagas with his stepdaughter, teaching her the runes, never realizing until it was too late that while he was trying to fashion a hero, the traumas of life had consigned her to becoming a monster.