“My mentor? Sadly, I think it’s the redhead.” Kera lifted up the blade. “Do I really have to use this in a fight?”

“You don’t like it?”

“It’s gorgeous. And should be on a wall . . . for decoration.”

“It’s lethal.” He took hold of the second blade, tapped the tip against his own throat. “Attack from behind, cut here and here. Or”—he pointed the blade at spots under his arms and his inner thighs—“here and here. But if you want them to suffer for some reason, you can cut them here,” he said, dragging the blade across his lower abdomen.

“What . . . what are you telling me?” Kera asked. “Why are you showing me how to gut somebody?”

“Why do you think?”

A cold sweat broke out over Kera’s body and she suddenly felt light-headed, like when she was about to get a migraine.

Kera closed her eyes, tried hard to control the panic suddenly rampaging through her. Well, actually, panic had begun to rage as soon as Vig started talking about being the “hammers of the gods,” but now the panic was full-blown and about to take her down.

“What are you saying to me, Vig?” Kera finally demanded. “That I’ve been brought back to be some kind of murderer for Viking gods?”

“Not a murderer. A god-sanctioned killer. There’s a difference.”

“How is there a difference?”

“Kera—”

“Look, I’m a Marine. I go in, I maintain order, I do damage if necessary.”

“It’ll be necessary.”

“What does that even mean?”

He stepped closer, maybe too close. “You need to understand . . . they don’t call on the Crows to maintain order. They have other Clans for that. They have the Ravens. They only call on the Crows for one thing, Kera. To kill everyone in the room.”

“I’m sorry . . . what?”

“For they are the Crows,” he intoned solemnly, “and they are the harbingers of death.”

Erin sat in the tree outside Rundstöm’s workshop. Beneath her hanging legs was Engstrom, whom she kept kicking in the head with the ball of her bare foot. She’d been doing it for a while but so far he hadn’t said anything. It clearly bothered him, which was why she was doing it. But she was fascinated by how long she could keep it up before he snapped.

Rolf Landvik, sitting in a branch above her, lightly punched her shoulder.

Stop, he mouthed at her.

No, she mouthed back. Then added, Make me.

He’d just turned away from her, annoyed, when Engstrom reached back, grabbed her bare leg, and flipped her.

Erin had been gripping the branch with her hands, and she treated it like one of the uneven bars she’d trained on until she was about eight.Flipping under the branch until she brought her legs under and up, she switched hands. She faced Engstrom and brought her legs back down so that she could ram them into his big chest.

Even though he took a step back, it still felt like she’d hit a brick wall. But Erin still managed to flip around again to put her ass back on the branch simply so she could grin down at the big Viking. Much to his annoyance.

His eyes narrowed and he took a step toward her, probably to drag her to the ground—or at least try—but the workshop door was yanked open and Kera ran out, Rundstöm right behind her.

“Kera, wait!”

The new girl made it to the trees, where she proceeded to bend over and vomit up whatever she had in her stomach.

Erin jumped down from the tree and stalked over to Rundstöm. “What did you do?” she growled, worried he’d scared her to death with his vicious Viking ways.

“I told her the truth,” he replied. “I told her what would be expected of her. What’s expected of all of us.”

“What did you do that for?” Annalisa demanded.

“She had to know eventually.”

“Not yet.”

“We’re not you,” Erin patiently explained. “We’re not born into this shit. We’re dragged here from death. And some people, you’ve gotta ease into it. She needs to be eased. She still thinks she’s a Marine.”

“I am a Marine!” Watson barked around all that heaving.

“That was in your first life, precious. Now you’re a Crow. Fucking deal with it.”

“She wanted guns,” Rundstöm told Erin.

“Of course she wanted guns. I wanted guns when I first got here. Maeve over there wanted a rocket launcher.”

Maeve nodded at that. “I’m not comfortable being too close to people . . . with all their diseases.”

“But eventually we learned that we are contract killers for gods who prefer that we use edge weapons rather than more advanced technology. It’s not an easy thing to accept, especially for some Goody Two-shoes. But she’ll get it . . . eventually.”

“A Goody Two-shoes?” Watson asked as she took a tissue that Maeve stretched her arm out to hand her so that they didn’t have to touch—since Kera’s current illness could be anything, not just panic.

” How did you die?” Annalisa asked.

Watson wiped her mouth, her eyes darting at everyone staring at her before finally admitting, “This guy behind the coffee shop was beating up his girlfriend whom he’d been pimping out. She wasn’t even sixteen and he was trying to take her money. I tried to tell him to stop . . . but he stabbed me in the chest with a butcher knife before I had the chance.”