Beast of Burden Read Online Free Page B

enough to give pause.
    She had an assortment of scratches and bruises, but she’d severed the legs of the fauns and taken out the eyes of one centaur. The other one that she’d nearly gelded refused to re-engage. The asshole.
    “You fight well for a female,” the priest said, sounding surprised. “And especially well for a weak-willed Nordic peasant.”
    She’d been using her spear, but now she rolled closer to her bow and arrows. She ducked the centaur standing over them and rolled under him then sliced into his belly. He screamed and reared back, and she grabbed her weapons, now able to strike more enemies with speed. She let fly two arrows, piercing the priest in the throat and one of the wadjets through its opened mouth. Then the minotaurs teamed up and grabbed her in their big, fat, hairy hands.
    “Time to see how well you stand up to getting gored, little pretty.” One of them leered at her while the other dragged his sharp-ass horn across her chest. Hel’s bones, it hurt .
    But she’d been trained to handle worse, and she refused to cry out.
    She didn’t have to, apparently, because someone did it for her. Though it wasn’t so much a cry as a loud roar. The minotaurs dropped her like a hot coal and turned to confront something coming very, very fast. She heard the rush of heavy feet and the crackle of trees falling. Trees falling? Something big then.
    A minotaur went flying. Then the other landed hard into the lake.
    She blinked up to see a black battle-cat clawing through a mummy while the remaining centaur tried to creep up on him. A second battle-cat, also black, suddenly lost all its color. It disappeared and reappeared in an instant to tear into the centaur, scattering horse legs one way and a human torso another.
    She had no idea if the centaurs could regenerate or not, but she didn’t want to get on Freya’s shit list. She’d been maiming, not killing. These cats… She gaped, sensing a familiar energy about the pair. “Avarr? Hall?” One of them glanced down at her and snarled, and she hastily scooted back on the ground.
    It was Avarr, and he looked plenty enraged. No wonder everyone gave them such respect. He turned to confront the mummies and wadjet remaining, in addition to the shrieking priest trying to weave a spell while blood poured out his throat. She watched as what had to be eight hundred pounds of wild battle-cat crunched and batted through his enemies. Hall joined him, making short work of their opponents. They didn’t stop at those on their feet. The fauns and wounded centaurs also received no mercy.
    As the fight wound down, she crept back to her bow and arrows and notched one.
    From out of the ground in front of the priest, a dark hole appeared. She had no use for mages and let the arrow fly, notching it in his throat, hoping to stop his spell. He tried to pull it free, so she sent another next to it, lodging it in his neck. He toppled over, dark blood seeping from his wounds.
    But the dark hole remained until a giant scarab crawled out of it. Bright red with neon blue pinchers and a venomous bile it could project at will, the scarab had been used with real effectiveness during many an Egyptian encounter. It was the juggernaut of the Egyptian pantheon’s arsenal, and three times the size of one battle-cat.
    Not sure if she’d need to get help, because her arrows would do it no damage, she watched Hall and Avarr circle the thing, the great cats eyeing it like hapless prey.
    “Guys? This thing is lethal. We should probably get help.” Valkyries were mighty in battle. But more, they were smart . Unlike berserkers, who threw themselves into a fight with brute strength and little thought but plowing everything down, a valkyrie survived by her wits as much as her weapons. Tacticians of the highest order, she and her sisters had Odin’s grit and Freya’s love of battle ingrained into their bones.
    Hall turned to snort at her, and the anger in his face stunned her. How she could