Free Truth's Heart (The Valkyrie's Passion Book 3): A Valkyrie/Shifter Romance by Renee Jordan Page B

California. For one thing, no looming counterpart to Mount Shasta or the southern Cascades rose behind us. There were no trees on fire or rolling hills. It looked flat as a tabletop. A red, dusty plain dotted with glowing pools of lava.
    “Looks like...Mars...” groaned Magnus. “All that...iron oxide...everywhere.”
    “The dust?” I asked. I wrinkled my nose. “It smells rusty.”
    “Iron...oxide.”
    “And is that sulfur?” A whiff of rotten eggs drifted on the wind.
    “Here, I'd call it...brimstone...” laughed Magnus, then he winced again. “Goddamn that hurts.”
    “Maybe we should take a break,” I said. “Give yourself a chance to heal. It's hot, but I don't think we'll die from it.”
    “Do you see any water?”
    I shook my head.
    “We can't stay here long. The dwarves aren't supposed to be far. We just have to find them.”
    “Well, Gerdie said we go east from the root until we find their cave.” I glanced at the root and frowned. “I think we go that way.”
    Magnus nodded. A sheen of sweat covered his face. The blood had stopped bubbling out as he breathed, but pain still tightened the muscles of his face. He groaned again as he forced himself to stand up. I sighed. Men did not know how to care for themselves. They were always ignoring things. I had a foster father that didn't want to go to the hospital when he had abdominal pains.
    He almost died from appendicitis.
    “Okay, but don't push yourself,” I warned Magnus. “I won't have you dying on me.”
    “Yes, ma'am,” grinned Magnus.
    We trudged forward through the landscape. It was flat, the ground only broken by the pools of lava, some the size of small lakes, that we kept having to circle. Magnus led the way. He seemed to know how to keep us going east without veering off our track.
    At least I hoped he did.
    “This isn't what I expected,” I told after about a quarter of an hour of walking.
    “What did you expect?”
    “Well, like Utgard, but all fiery instead of snowy. This place isn't a reflection of our world.”
    “Utgard is the outer world, the part that surrounds Midgard.” Magnus winced. “The worlds of Norse Mythology all lie on the Yggdrasil. Some are in the branches, some are in the roots, and Midgard is at the trunk right at the ground. Utgard is on the same level as Midgard. It's really an extension of it, a place to banish monsters from our world. But Muspellheim is completely unrelated. It's higher in the trunk, I think.”
    “How many worlds are there?”
    “Not sure,” he groaned. “I know Asgard's up at the top. That's where the gods live. And in the roots is Nifelheim, which is a terrible place, and at the bottom is Hel.”
    “Hell is part of the world of the fNorse? That's Christian.”
    “One L,” answered Magnus. “Hel is the daughter of Loki.”
    “That makes sense,” I muttered.
    “She's sister to Fenrir and Jormungandr. He's a big worm, they say as big long as Midgard, and he's trapped at the very bottom of the Yggdrasil, in its roots. So Hel set up shop down there. They call her realm Hel, too. It's where the worse people are tortured. When the Norse invaded England about a thousand years ago, the word stuck around and came to be synonymous with the Christian idea of the Abyss or Gehenna.”
    “Oh,” I said. “Sounds great. Loki created Hel. What a great guy.”
    Magnus's laugh was cut off by a wince.
    My mirth faded. “Do you think we can really beat Loki?”
    “We don't really have a choice,” Magnus shrugged. “It doesn't make sense to dwell on the possibility of failure when we don't have much a future without it. Focus on the fact that we will succeed. Believe that.”
    “You make it sound easy.”
    “It's the hardest thing in the world.” He glanced at me. “But I believe in you, Raven. I know you can do this. And I'll march by your side, hacking down anyone that tries to stop you.”
    “Shouldn't I believe in you though? You're the heroic one, Magnus. You ride a badass