“They’re already dead, Kera,” Vig explained. “You kill them today . . . they come back tomorrow. They’ll rise with the sun and do the same thing over again.”

“Okay.”

“But you have to remember the most important thing about what I just said.”

“Which is?”

“They’re already dead, Kera. You can’t kill them for good. But,” he said, moving close to her, “if you die here . . . you stay here. Until Ragnarok comes.”

“Wait . . . what?”

“They have nothing left to lose, Kera. But you do.” He turned, the ax still in his hand, and walked away, toward the heat of battle.

“Vig? Where the fuck are you going?”

“Oh, the other thing you need to know,” he casually tossed over his shoulder, “they all know what you are. And they’ll be coming for you.”

That’s when a small group of men, dressed in furs and random pieces of armor, suddenly pointed at her. “Crow!” one of them yelled, and they all charged her.

Kera stumbled back, lifting her right leg to grab the blades out of the sheath tied to her ankle. But she ended up hopping on one leg as she struggled to get her weapons, tripping over something and landing flat on her back.

The men stopped and stared down at her. But when one of them grinned . . . she knew nothing good could come of that.

Especially when they began to circle her, the grinning one dropping his shield as he moved toward her.

Desperate now, Kera ripped her blades from the sheath, but before she could use them, an ax whizzed past her head and slammed into the grinning man’s shoulder. Screaming, he fell backward. Then they were all around her, protecting her, their wings appearing black and purple in the cold morning light.

One of them looked down at her and Kera recognized the woman immediately. She was the First Crow. The one who’d begun it all.

She studied Kera a moment before she grabbed a long-handled ax from the back of one Crow and tossed it to another. That Crow marched through the small crowd and over to the no-longer grinning man. Glaring down at him, she snarled in a thick Scottish accent, “Thought you knew, Odd-marr. The Crows never fight alone.”

Then she lifted the ax over her head and brought it down on the man again and again until he was chopped into pieces. Small pieces.

Laughing, several Crows grabbed those pieces of him, and took to the air.

Kera scrambled to her feet and watched as the Crows dropped pieces of the grinning man off in different places over the land.

“It’ll take him days to find all of himself,” one of the Crows joked, and the group laughed.

The First Crow faced Kera. “You’re not dead.”

Kera knew the woman wasn’t speaking English, but somehow, Kera understood her perfectly.

“No.”

“Then why areyou here?”

“Because all I seem to know are assholes.”

“Any specific asshole?” the Scottish Crow asked.

Kera pointed at Vig, who fought against several Vikings in the middle of the battlefield.

“A Raven? You came here with a Raven?” the First Crow asked.

“His sister’s a Valkyrie. She brought us here.”

“I know him. Jarl Rundstöm’s descendant.” The Scottish Crow attempted to wipe blood off her cheek but she only managed to swirl it around a bit. After all that chopping, she was covered in the stuff. “He’s good stock. Good fighter. But most Ravens are.”

“Whatever he is . . . I’m not talking to him at the moment.”

The Crows laughed at her. “Do not be baby,” a Crow with a Russian accent said. “He brought you here for reason.”

“Then he left me. He could have fucking warned me! I came to him for help and he dropped me off in hell!”

“This is not hell, little girl. This is Asgard. And the Raven wants you to fight. To kill. That is what we do. For we are the harbingers of death. Never forget that.”

“I don’t know if I can,” Kera admitted. “I don’t know if I can kill.”

The Russian hissed at Kera between her teeth. “You would not last five minutes in my Red Army. When I fought Nazis, I flew in plane. I shot them down from skies and left their corpses decaying in the dirt. I felt no remorse. Nor should you. And when I died—that first time—I did not go into ground. I became Crow. For next fifty years, I fought. I killed. We all do. We are good at it. You are good at it. You should not be afraid.”

“But she is afraid,” the First Crow said. “She is afraid that once she starts, she won’t be able to stop. That she’ll kill, even when she doesn’t have to.”

“Oh honey,” another Crow said as she put her arms around Kera’s shoulders. She had a short bob haircut that had Kera guessing she’d lived during the 1920s. “That shouldn’t worry you none. Let me tell you, I’m no angel. I did things in my first life that I wasn’t proud of. I used to run rum from Florida straight up to New York City. And things on the road can get pretty nasty. I did what I had to do. Then I got killed. And Skuld made me this offer. But do you think I ran around just killing everybody during my Second Life? Of course not! Now it’s true, I did make a little extra money on the side, ya know . . . bootlegging, but that stopped once they repealed Prohibition. But my loyalty to Skuld and the Crows? That’s lasted long past my final breath. You do your job. That’s all ya gotta do. The rest of the time is your own. And back then? We had such a good time. The parties. The men. Whew! I get sweaty just thinking about those days.”