He nodded and coughed, wincing in pain as he did so.

Soren looked at me. “Do you think we’re prepared for it? War?”

“We have to be,” I said. “Look on the bright side, it’s the Naglafar. Everyone will be undead, and how much can a ship made of nails hold, anyway?”

Lydian raised his eyebrows and gave the two of us a glance that could only be read as exasperated. “The world is doomed.”

“Right, onto burning your heart and ending both of our miseries,” Soren said with a matching expression.

THE FIRE BURNED low in the coals, barely lighting the brazier, but the heat danced on my skin like the warmest sun. I couldn’t take a proper breath, not with my chest this tight and my head this full of air. In truth, I could barely believe what was happening. That someone who’d tormented me for years, even after death, would finally be silent. Finally.

I wasn’t unaware the memories I had would still return at random. I wasn’t deluded into thinking that my nights would forever feel peaceful or that I would end up never again flinching at fast movements or that I’d ever love the feel of someone’s skin on my skin. But it was a step forward. Maybe tiny, but all steps were good steps.

My heart was high in my throat as I waited for Soren. I’d refused to actually carry the still-beating heart. A part of me couldn’t take it. It may have been the last of Lydian, but I still couldn’t touch it, didn’t want to be near it at all.

Whatever I had been through with him in the past few days, Lydian was still a demon who lurked in my nightmares. And at first seeing him in pain brought up a wicked feeling of vengeance, but it slowly wiled away down to nothing. This man was nothing to me. Alive, dead, half-dead. Now, with his entire physical form burned away from the world, he was truly, truly nothing.

The doors to the burial room creaked open; they were brass and heavy with carvings of runes all around them. I still couldn’t read most of them, but I had the sense they spoke of the afterlives. With Hel, Freya, and Odin. I didn’t need to vote on who I thought was taking Lydian away.

Soren carried the plate the heart had been placed on. In all my imaginings, it looked giant, but in reality it was slightly smaller than a fully grown, human male heart. That was interesting—for creatures who hovered above humans in every way, from ability, to speed, to fighting, to biological features, the small heart broke some illusion of their superiority.