Valhalla Virus by Nick Harrow (best management books of all time TXT) 📕

touching, and a pair of sideways Vs jutting from their outer edges. It called to him, and he knew what he had to do.

Time slowed to a crawl as he went to work on the sigil. Gunnar dragged the fingers of his left hand across his face, then began drawing the rune on the inside of his right forearm with his bloody fingertip. Each stroke hissed and steamed like the touch of a branding iron against his flesh. Gunnar gritted his teeth against the pain. A little more suffering was nothing compared to the torture Corso’s goons would give him if they caught up to him.

But more worrying than that was the smoking woman who stalked toward him, her body covered in veins of red fire. Smoke rose from her footsteps, and a veil of black smoke covered her face. She was beautiful, and terrifying.

Only she and Gunnar were moving. Time had frozen for the rest of the world.

“Don’t do it, lover,” the burning woman said. “You can still turn back.”

“Fucking trolls,” Gunnar groaned and drew the rune’s final line. The world lurched into motion and the monstrous woman howled in rage.

A shock wave exploded away from the steaming symbol on his arm, shattering the security wall. The jötnar screamed as burning stones slammed into them and a tidal wave ripped across the pool. The blast ripped fruit trees out of the ground, upended the pool furniture, and shredded the bushes. Meaty explosions erupted behind Gunnar as the power blasted the smoking woman off her feet and dispersed her to the screaming winds.

Chunks of jötunn rained from the sky, along with a storm of blood and viscera. Hamingja flooded into Gunnar in a scorching storm. Soaked with blood, looking like an extra from The Walking Dead, the bodyguard stood and walked through a blast hole in the security wall and down the street. The energy he’d stolen from the dead monsters struggled to heal him, and Gunnar realized how close he’d been to death. If Mimi hadn’t picked up the gun and started shooting...

Gunnar pushed the thought away. It was pointless to worry about what might have been. If death wanted him, it would find him. Worrying about it wouldn’t change that. He walked down the road, head humming with the dull roar of a concussion, the broken bones of his hand aching like he was squeezing a bag of broken razor blades.

“You look like hell,” Mimi said when she pulled the Charger up alongside him.

“Better than Corso,” Gunnar grunted and pulled the door open. He flopped down in the car’s passenger seat. Blood from his wounds splashed across the dash and windshield. “Let’s go home.”

Chapter 9

HILDA DRAGGED HER ASS out of bed, tripped over her new tail, and thrust a blue-skinned hand out to catch herself before her horned head could bash into the half-demolished dresser next to the bed. Unfortunately, her black claws landed on the innards of last night’s amusement and razored through a tangled mess of guts and kidneys. The jötunn’s outstretched hand slipped on the gore and offal, and she fell to her knees. Filth burst out of the ruptured intestines, filling the hotel room with a pungent odor.

“Shit,” she grunted.

The smell, though the jötunn knew it had to be objectively horrible, didn’t bother her much. In fact, her stomach grumbled at the powerful scent. Not because she wanted to eat it, Hilda realized, but because it smelled like death.

And where there was death, there was meat.

Food.

Hilda stood up and kicked the dead body out of her way. It had belonged to a guy she’d met at Caesar’s last night, while she was out trolling for some coke. Brian? Byron? She shook her head. No, that wasn’t right. Not that it mattered anymore. The dude was really, truly, super dead. Someone had ripped his dick off and shoved it down his neck, taken out one of his eyes and stuffed it up his nose, and then torn him open from asshole to sternum.

That wasn’t right. Someone hadn’t done that.

She had.

“Shoulda got out when I told you to go,” Hilda said to the corpse. “You, too, bitch.”

There was another body sprawled on the couch. This one had most of its body parts where they belonged but was covered in vicious bite marks. Hilda licked her lips at the sight. That girl...Gillian? Judy? She couldn’t remember anything about her except for the way she’d tasted. Like fear and lust, blood and cum.

Fucking delicious.

Hilda paused in front of the floor-to-ceiling mirror attached to the closet door. She stretched her arms overhead, delighted in the way the muscles rippled under her new blue-black skin. She swished her tail from side to side and giggled when its spade-shaped tip picked up sticky blood from the floor and flung streaks of it across the face of the big-screen television mounted on the wall. Hilda even liked her new hooves.

She headed into the bathroom for a quick shower. The blood crusted on the insides of her thighs and smeared across her chest and belly smelled amazing, but it was itching now that it had dried. She did not like that at all. Hilda cranked the water up as hot as it would go and leaned against the bathroom counter.

The past twenty-four hours were a bit of a blur, and she tried to make the fractured images in her head fit together. She’d come down with a fever, which was so fucking annoying when all she really wanted was some strange dick, enough coke to blow the heart out of an elephant, and some good, old-fashioned me time.

Had she really picked a fight with some out-of-towner in the casino? Yeah, that had definitely happened. The girl in the other room had helped her kill that dumb cow. The now-dickless dude had wandered up, and the three of them had gone a little apeshit murderizing anyone who got in their way. Until their bloodlust had turned into plain, old regular lust and