Alva jerked her head around to stare at the goddess. “What do you mean?”
“This may sound cryptic—”
Alva’s eyebrow rose. “Usually does,” she muttered. When Lilyann giggled behind her, she pressed her twitching lips together to keep from smiling, knowing Freyja wouldn’t appreciate their laughter.
The beautiful strawberry-blond woman gave them both a droll glare. “I don’t think Anders was who he seemed to be, although I have no proof either way. Instinct tells me he has everything to do with all of this, yet he doesn’t.”
“Still cryptic and totally vague,” Lilyann said as she stepped up to stand beside Alva. Suddenly, she pointed to the Glass. “Look!”
Alva’s gaze jerked to the unfolding scene and watched as her aunts pulled several arrows from the quivers the Huldra elite, or enforcement squad, normally wore strapped to their backs, and nocked arrow after arrow. Each tip erupted in flames as they loosed them from their longbows, striking their targets with deadly accuracy.
The fire spread rapidly as the Huldra ran from their homes to gather at the fountain and played right in with whatever her aunts had planned. Huldra elite burst from the surrounding forest and, as they watched from the safety of Freyja’s quarters, the innocent women and children were all brutally murdered until only a handful remained. Gytha and her family.
Before she could witness their murders, Freyja stopped the Glass, and the scene froze. Alva would never forget the look of fury on her aunts’ once stunning faces. Now, they resembled the legendary hags told in the stories passed down from generation to generation about beautiful women trapping men into marriage, so they could lose their back bark and tails. The moment the male said, ‘I do,’ he would be murdered and his life energy stolen. Instead of freedom, the Huldra would turn into a hag and remain forever ugly.
Sometimes, it seemed, fiction really could become fact.
“Alva?”
She turned to face the goddess. From the corner of her eye, she caught Lilyann’s motion as she, too, turned.
“This, along with what’s happening on Midgard, is too much of a coincidence,” Freyja continued. “I’m afraid these events are all connected somehow. We have got to figure out who and what caused the shift in the war. If we fail...”
“What will happen if we fail?” Lilyann asked.
“Ragnarok—the end of the Nine Worlds. At least, as we know them, anyway.” Freyja let out a loud sigh and sat on the edge of the chair, the knuckles turning white from her hands’ tight clasp.
Alva didn’t want to believe what her gut was screaming at her, but she hadn’t been able to forget Bernard’s unusual behavior after helping to rescue her. Something hadn’t seemed right and with everything else spiraling out of control...
“What exactly has changed, my lady?”
The goddess momentarily closed her eyes, then opened them as she directed the Glass to go to a new event with a single flip of her wrist. The scene she’d watched earlier showing Hitler and his inner circle outside the Berghof reappeared. This time, though, Eva Braun now stood beside Hitler. Alva stared at the woman’s left hand, where a large diamond ring encircled her finger. It was where her hand rested—on top of her rounded belly—that made Alva’s blood turn cold. Eva Braun was very pregnant.
“This meeting takes place in 1946—well after the original end of the war.” Several more scenes sped by, showing empty towns and, no matter what country the Glass showed, Nazi soldiers were everywhere. Finally, three massive complexes appeared. When the last one came into view, Lilyann gasped.
“I barely recognized...” she said in a shaky voice, her hand covering her mouth. “Dear God, what has happened? The first complex was Treblinka. I’ve only seen the second one in pictures, but I know it was Auschwitz-Berkenau.” Her finger trembled as she pointed to the last complex in the Glass. “Charles and I were there. That place is Dora-Mittelbau.” She turned her tear-streaked face to them. “What in God’s name has happened, Freyja?”