Sword of Secrets: Heroes of Asgard

By S. M. Schmitz

When mortals turn their backs on gods, those gods will return with a vengeance.

Gavyn's no hero. In fact, after a group of psychos claiming to be Sumerian gods resurface in a destructive display of power and demand the surrender of the world's heroes, Gavyn only thinks, "Wow. Sucks to be them." So when an old hag, who's quite likely an ancient witch, and a young, gorgeous woman, for whom he'd at least pretend to be a hero, show up at his door insisting he's one of the heroes the Sumerians are after, he's skeptical…and more than a little annoyed.

But the old witch and supermodel-in-training won't take no for an answer, and Gavyn finds himself being transported halfway across the world to an actual, honest-to-some-god training camp for men and women who embrace their destinies to safeguard Earth. And while he had every intention of continuing his stubborn refusal to become the hero the Norse gods need him to be, his own ancestor has different ideas. The dreams that connect him to a past no one can remember hint at an old deception, and the Sumerians aren't the only enemy the Norse will have to face.

In the first book of the Heroes of Asgard series, Gavyn must accept who—and what—he is, because the forgotten gods of ancient religions have returned. And they'll no longer be ignored.

• Language: English
• Publisher: S. M. Schmitz
• Release date: Dec 10, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386990369

Book preview

Chapter One

When I was a little boy, my mother would put her thin hands on my shoulders and look me in the eyes and tell me, Gavyn, one day you’re going to change the world. And I believed her because I was a child, and as children, we believe the lies our parents tell us. I believed her up until the day she died when I was twelve, and then I stopped believing in a lot of things. My father used to tell me I shouldn’t be angry at God for something cancer had caused, but if I couldn’t be mad at God, then what was the point of believing in one? By the time I was in junior high, I had no use for gods. But as I would learn, just because I had no use for them didn’t mean they had no use for me.

As an adult, I was even more convinced my mother must have been a little crazy. Maybe it had been the cancer. Because the only thing I’d changed in my twenty-eight years was my best friend’s attitude about football. He’s British so he’d stubbornly refused to accept football was any sport that wasn’t actually played with the athletes’ feet. It took almost six years, but I finally convinced him to pay attention to the game and got him hooked. And I always considered that my world-changing success. Or at least a start: I would get American football to catch on, one Brit at a time.

He’d just arrived to watch the LSU-Ole Miss game with me and I emerged from my kitchen to find him lounging on my sofa—my upholstered sofa. I put his beer on my counter and scowled at him. Hunter, get your shoes off my couch.

Hunter looked up at me and kicked off his shoes, but shook his head and scowled back at me. "For a straight guy, you’re entirely too neat."

That was Hunter’s response to everything. Apparently, I always failed to live up to his expectations of typical masculine behavior. I handed him his beer and he scowled at that, too. Gavyn, seriously?

I glanced down at the beer bottle like I didn’t know what I’d just bought for us to drink. It was on sale, I protested. Truthfully, I liked Coors Light, but Hunter already knew that.

I should have known to bring real beer, Hunter sighed. It wouldn’t stop him from drinking it anyway.

Hunter and I had known each other since we were teenagers. He and his parents had moved to Baton Rouge when he was thirteen as his dad was a philosophy professor and had accepted a teaching position at LSU. He was the cool new kid with an accent everyone liked, and I was the quiet loner who’d lost his mother and didn’t want to talk to anyone or even be noticed. I was good at being invisible until Hunter showed up. And for some reason, he decided this shy quiet kid who didn’t want to be his friend was the one guy he was going to keep sitting with at lunch and talking to at recess and the stubborn bastard just wouldn’t leave me alone. He always insisted he didn’t know why he got the idea in his head that we just had to be friends, but once Hunter got an idea in his head, it was impossible to get it out. That’s why I still consider getting him to appreciate football such a monumental success.

We betting on this one? he asked. We rarely bet money. Our wagers usually consisted of drunken dares that had miraculously not gotten either of us killed yet. At least we were both sober at the moment. How bad could our wagers be?

Sure. Win by seven, and you call Keira and ask her out. Keira was my ex-girlfriend, and she and Hunter hated each other. Yeah, it was totally assholey of me to make that wager, but I’d never claimed to be a saint.

Hunter sat up and glared at me because he knew it would be a humiliating loss for him. I could tell by the way he was eyeing me that he was trying to come up with something worse than asking out his arch-nemesis. His eyes had just lit up, and I knew I was screwed when the game was interrupted by one of those breaking news reports. We both groaned because the media’s idea of breaking news almost never actually warranted interrupting a football game.

A middle-aged woman with a blond bob who was actually kinda hot for being a middle-aged news reporter came on. I finished my beer and wondered how much of the game we were going to have to miss to learn that Congress had managed not to shut down the government. Again.

Another one? I asked Hunter. He glanced away from the television at his beer bottle and nodded but unlike me, he was actually trying to pay attention.

I had just opened the refrigerator when I heard Hunter exclaim, Holy shit! And I figured this news report might be slightly more interesting than a Congressional compromise. I handed him the beer bottle, and didn’t even shake it first—I mean, I thought about it, but I didn’t want to have to clean up that mess—and tried to make sense out of what the pretty blond reporter was saying but it didn’t make any sense.

What the hell? I murmured.

Sh, Hunter hissed. He was still focused on the reporter.

Part of me wanted to hit him for the shushing thing, but by now, I was too drawn into the television. This is a joke, I added. I was still holding my own unopened beer bottle, but I didn’t sit down. Because it had to be a joke, and soon, they would cut away from the kinda hot blonde to a kinda hot brunette who would be laughing at us and claiming, See? You stupid Americans really will believe anything as long as it’s on TV!

So I stood there in my living room and watched the kinda hot blonde as she kept talking about the sudden appearance of these people who weren’t really people in southern Iraq who were pissed off and demanding all sorts of shit to appease them or the entire world was going to blow up or something. And as they cut away to this ziggurat, there these people stood who just looked like people to me.

Hunter, this is bullshit, I started, but he cut me off again. I rolled my eyes. They might be terrorists, and yeah, this beat out Congressional hearings and patting themselves on the back for doing their damn jobs, but LSU was playing. I could catch this later on the six o’clock news.

Whatever language these people were speaking wasn’t English so Hunter finally looked away from the television. Did you catch all that? he asked me.

I shrugged. Sure. Bunch of crazy people in southern Iraq claiming to be Sumerian gods are threatening some kind of godly war if they don’t get what they want. Delusional terrorists are at least more interesting than the regular asshole terrorists.

Hunter snickered but an explosion on the screen shut us both up. The ziggurat the people had climbed onto crumbled into a massive cloud of reddish brown dust that filled the screen and turned the sky black. It was just past 8:00 p.m. in Iraq and the lights that had illuminated the ziggurat were shattered. Hunter and I stared at the TV in silence but the screen was dark.

They just blew themselves up, I mumbled stupidly. Hunter just nodded.

The cameras didn’t cut away though, and as we listened to the debris from the ancient tower settle back to the ground, light gradually filled the screen again. This time, we weren’t sure where it was coming from. And there, standing in the same spot, in a crater now instead of on a tower, were the people claiming to be gods who wanted appeasement and vengeance. Hunter dropped his beer bottle. Lucky for him, it was still sealed.

It’s a camera trick, I told him. Because people didn’t walk away from explosions unharmed. Hell, they weren’t even dirty.

One of the men motioned at the camera, and it zoomed in on him, and for the first time, I wondered who the hell was out there in the middle of a desert holding these cameras for a bunch of crazy people claiming to be gods no one had ever heard of. But now, the man spoke English—perfect, unaccented English, and when he stared into the lens of the camera, it made the hair on my arms stand up. I couldn’t help feeling like he was glaring at me.

My name is Ninurta. If you heroes wish to avoid catastrophic consequences for humans, then you will submit to us and will be enslaved for our pantheon. If you will not submit to us, then the humans you will want to protect will pay for your intransigence. You have seventy-two hours.

The screen turned completely black and after a few seconds, the kinda hot blonde, who didn’t seem that hot anymore, came back, looking as bewildered and confused as I felt. Hunter picked the beer bottle up from the floor and set it on the coffee table. Who the hell are these heroes? Think they know they’re heroes and are supposed to sacrifice themselves to be some asshole’s slave?

How the hell am I supposed to know? I shot back. And put that bottle on a coaster.

Hunter rolled his eyes at me again but moved his bottle. The frazzled blonde was reading from the teleprompter now, something about the myth of Ninurta, but I’d lost interest in this story. The explosion was over. Crazy people were gone. I just wanted the football game back on. But a knock at my door kept me from even complaining about the remarkably bad manners of the television news crew who were interrupting Saturday football.

Instead, I complained about the television station and whoever thought knocking on my door during an LSU game was socially acceptable. Hunter told me to shut up and stop being such a whiney bitch. I was all prepared to be the exact opposite actually, but when I threw my door open, I found myself speechless instead. It wasn’t the old woman, who scared the shit out of me honestly, but the young woman standing next to her—the strikingly beautiful woman with light golden hair and smooth ivory skin and a body that—

Hey, she snapped.

I lifted my eyes and sheepishly grinned at her as a pseudo-apology and a don’t-you-think-I’m-cute? come on. I don’t think it worked. She kept glaring at me. The old woman sighed and muttered something in yet another language I didn’t understand. I had no idea what they were trying to sell, but I’m pretty sure I would have sold my soul to the hot blonde, even if she looked like she currently wanted to kick me in the crotch. God, she was amazingly beautiful.

The old woman snapped her fingers in my face and I stepped back from the door and blinked at her. Focus, she scolded. I blinked a few more times.

Um, Hunter? I called. I didn’t know who these women were, but whatever was going on, he really shouldn’t miss this. It was going down in my top five strangest moments ever book. If I’d had a book. But if I did, it would be filled with all the weird shit I’ve ever done or seen, and this would be up there.

Hunter stood behind me and I heard him mumble, Whoa, as he took in the tall frame of the beautiful blonde standing by the short old woman, who sighed and mumbled something unintelligible again. The gorgeous blonde just smiled at whatever the woman said.

You. The old woman pointed a bent finger at me and I backed up even farther. I suddenly had the horrible premonition they were related to Keira and I was about to find out if an old woman and a tall beautiful woman who looked to be in her mid-twenties could kick my ass. Judging by the way they were both staring at me, I was putting my money on yes.

Come with us, the old woman demanded. She actually turned to walk back down the apartment sidewalk. The hot blonde stopped her when I didn’t follow. "Badb, he’s not coming. You may need to explain why he has to come with us."

The old woman threw her hands in the air and spun around, glowering at me with an exasperated expression, which I’m pretty sure I returned, because by now, I could hear the football game on and I was missing it for this. Granted, it would be worth it if I stood a shot with the blond goddess standing in my doorway, but judging by the way she was still scowling at me, I probably had a better shot of scoring with the old woman who expected me to follow her around like a lost puppy. Not that I wanted to score with an old woman. Especially this one.

But she came back and put her bony hands on her hips and fixed me with her small, dark eyes. "You will not serve them. Far too dangerous. You will come with us and we will keep you safe for now. At least until you have to fight them."

I glanced over my shoulder at Hunter and arched an eyebrow at him. This had just shot up to the weirdest moment of my life. Um, look, lady—

That thin bony finger wagged in my face again. Don’t be disrespectful!

Golden-Goddess pressed her lips together trying not to laugh at me. I narrowed my eyes at her. You could help here.

She lifted a shoulder at me. Hey, she hasn’t hauled you off on her back yet. I think you’re growing on her.

I was torn between wanting to slam my door closed to catch the rest of the first quarter and desperately wanting to know who the hell these two women were. My curiosity won out. That was my first mistake. "Who are you?" I asked them both.

The old woman smiled at me and I noticed she was missing a tooth. I think I preferred her scowling. You heard her. I’m Badb. Now let’s go. No time.

I looked at Golden-Goddess, which I decided was a far better name than Badb so if her name turned out to be just as lame, I was going with it. And since Badb was already walking back to their car, I presumed Golden-Goddess was either going to have to do a lot of talking or I was catching the end of the first quarter after all.

She looked me over quickly then sighed. "My name is Gunnr. And what Badb was supposed to tell you is that you’re one of the heroes Ninurta is after. You can’t stay here, because when the deadline passes, they will act and you will feel compelled to stop them."

I snorted and shook my head. Gu… uh, whatever your name is, you’ve got the wrong apartment. I’m no hero. The most selfless thing I’ve ever done is let Hunter sleep when he passed out on my bed. Actually, that’s a lie. I tried to wake him up, but the bastard wouldn’t move. I don’t even watch movies with superheroes. Rest assured, I will not be getting involved.

I tried to close the door because I could hear the crowd screaming and really wanted to know what I was missing, but Gunnr stopped me. She was freakishly strong and almost as stubborn as Hunter.

You don’t know who you are because for hundreds of years now, we’ve been silent. Without the gods, there was no need for your kind either. But you belong to us, and we’re not letting the Sumerians get their hands on you. One way or another, you’re coming with me.

I folded my arms across my chest and tried to look intimidating, but I’m pretty sure Gunnr beat me at that, too. I’m watching the end of the LSU game, and you and your… grandmother?... can ride on back to Valhalla, because I’m not going anywhere.

Gunnr rolled her eyes but didn’t take her hand off my door. Do you even know what Valhalla is?

Obviously not.

Admittedly, joining a fraternity in college had probably not been one of my better ideas. I’m still not sure how I graduated.

Gunnr nodded toward Hunter who was still standing behind me. Look, you want to take your friend, then take him. But we’re leaving. Now.

I didn’t want to take Hunter, because I wasn’t going anywhere. Or so I thought. I’d gotten through about half of my insistence that she was wasting my time when she reached into my apartment and grabbed my wrist and pulled me out onto the sidewalk. Did I mention she was freakishly strong? Hunter—he is my best friend and all—immediately followed me and tried to push Gunnr off me but she just grabbed him, too, and soon, we were both being pulled along toward the car where the creepy old woman sat behind the steering wheel, smiling her crooked smile with her dark little eyes, and revving the engine like she and the beautiful goddess-like-woman were about to take off from a bank heist.

As it turns out, that wasn’t too far from the truth.

Chapter Two

Hunter and I were stuck in the backseat of the car while our abductors—yeah, we were abducted by a couple of women, one of whom had probably been around to witness the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby—while Badb and Gunnr sat up front conversing in that weird language the old woman seemed to prefer. By now, I was really pissed off that I was missing the game, we’d been pretty much emasculated by the whole kidnapping thing, and Badb was a remarkably bad driver. Her constant swerving was giving me motion sickness.

I reached into my pocket to grab my phone then remembered it was on the coffee table. I groaned and looked at Hunter hopefully. He shook his head. He didn’t have his phone either. Gunnr looked in the backseat at us, and she seemed to focus a little less hostility toward Hunter, which just made me like her even less. "Your name is Hunter? What kind of name is that?"

"Your name is Gunnr. What the hell kind of name is that?" he shot back.

Norse.

I waited to see if Hunter was going to have a smartass comeback now. He apparently decided his mental prowess would be better used in trying to figure out how we were going to escape from these whackos. It’s a nickname. You’d go by a nickname too if your given name was Julian.

Gunnr finally smiled, and my God she was radiant. It made it really hard to hate her. You’re really going to compare bad names?

So give yourself a nickname, I suggested. I didn’t think we’d get Badb to go along with our trend of ditching bad names.

There’s nothing wrong with your name, Badb muttered.

I decided to give Badb one anyway. At least secretly, because she still scared the hell out of me. I leaned over and whispered to Hunter that we would call her Agnes from now on, in honor of the infamous English witch. Don’t ask me why I knew that.

Hunter snickered and that old witch actually glanced in the backseat at us then flipped us off. Gunnr thought the whole thing was funny, and if she hadn’t just manhandled my best friend and me as she dragged us out of my apartment and into their car, I would have flipped her off. I was pretty sure my chances of sleeping with her were virtually non-existent anyway.

Gunnr faced me again and almost smiled. And what name would you give me, Gavyn?

I offered her a wide smile when I told her, Mine.

At least Agnes thought I was funny.

Gunnr mumbled something in an entirely different language—maybe it was Norse—and Agnes laughed again. I half expected her to cackle, but it was just a normal, old lady laugh. I glanced over at my best friend who was being entirely too quiet while I was trying to expedite my ass-kicking by the old woman and beautiful Nordic goddess. Hunter had a sly grin on his