Truth: A Valkyrie Saga Book 3

A/N: I was asked by one of my readers to put together a summary of what has happened in the first three books of the Valkyrie Saga books so that they could make sure they remembered the gist of the story before reading the fourth book. I think this is a great idea and put this together for you. Please note that there is only so much detail that I can add in a 5,000-word summary about over 350,000-word book series. I am also a very emotional writer and aim to explore and illustrate many of the emotions that my characters feel and that part is absent in this summary. Here I just describe the main events. To really relive Ray’s complete story, I encourage you to reread books 1-3 as I will be only posting updates once a week. So you have time.

The Valkyrie Saga is a coming-of-age story of a young female Valkyrie named Ray. Her full name is Delia Ray Olsen but only people that don’t know her very well call her Delia. Ray was raised by her father, also a Valkyrie, away from Valkyrie society. In fact, he had gone out of his way to ensure that he and Ray never came across any other Valkyries during her childhood, so Ray has no idea how Valkyrie society works. And even though her father died four years ago, Ray continued to hide away from the supernatural community. She did this because her father was not a good person and had been an even worse father. Valkyries are all born with special Gifts that make them unique. The most common Gift that almost every Valkyrie has is called Weapons and is the ability to conjure a specific set and number of weapons that all bear that Valkyrie’s unique markings. Another common Gift is the ability to create a personal impenetrable Shield that will surround the Valkyrie. An interesting quirk about the Shield is that it will shock any other Valkyrie that tries to touch it, feeding power from the person touching it to the Valkyrie wielding the Shield. Most Valkyries of this day and age only have two Gifts. But the more elite and royal Valkyries have three. Because of this, there is a strong class system in place within the Valkyrie society.

Well long story short, Ray’s father was a man named Samuel Olsen who had three Gifts, Weapons, Compulsion, and Telepathy. Ray’s father was also a sadistic criminal that never viewed Ray as a living breathing person with her own set of feelings and needs. Instead, he ubiquitously used his Compulsion Gift to force Ray to his bidding, which included fighting to the death in supernatural child underground fight clubs. So when Samuel was murdered when Ray was thirteen and she was placed in the human foster system in California, Ray decided she had had enough of the supernatural world and did her best to integrate into the human one. She was particularly good at this because one of Ray’s Gifts is called Cloaking and gives her the ability to turn herself invisible. More than that, she can even step into a different plane of existence that she calls the void, where she can see and hear everything that happens in the real world, but cannot interact with it. Yup, that’s right, she will just ghost through anything or anyone within the physical plane of existence when she is sealed in the void.

So for years, Ray used the void to remain unnoticed by both humans and the supernatural. However, her protective streak meant that she got into some fights to defend her foster brothers and sisters. This led to her bouncing from foster home to foster home and leaving Ray with one relatively simple goal in life; age out of the foster system, get good grades, and get a scholarship to a community college. By the time Ray turned seventeen she knew that actually living with the foster families wasn’t working for her so she struck a deal with her current foster mom. The woman could keep all of the government checks intended for her upkeep as long as she continued to tell the state that Ray was a model foster daughter. Meanwhile, Ray set up camp in an abandoned old bus within a trailer park not too far away from the school. She made this bus her home and eventually even came out of her shell enough to make friends with siblings who lived in the trailer park, Jack and Amy.

Jack is also seventeen and was the underfed, scrawny, boy who showed up to school in dirty clothes and got bullied daily. Ray is a protector at heart and stepped in to make sure no one touched Jack at school. Over time they became friends and would look out for each other in a way that no one else was doing in their lives. The more that Ray hung out with both Jack and Amy the more she started to believe that she would do anything to keep them safe. Eventually, her Valkyrie powers surged and claimed both of them as one of her protected. Meaning that Ray would always feel an instinctual need to keep them protected and could even sense when they were in serious danger.

This is actually where the first book starts. With Ray living on her abandoned bus and only interacting with Jack and Amy throughout the day. When she wasn’t with them she kept herself heavily Cloaked so she was practically invisible to the rest of the world. This seemed to be working just fine for Ray and she was relatively happy because she had her freedom and no one could force her to do anything against her will as her father had. However, Ray’s carefully crafted world came crashing down when the three most popular boys at the school interrupted her regular lunch with Jack, demanding to know why she hadn’t registered with them before entering their territory. To Ray’s complete surprise and horror she soon discovered that all three boys were Valkyries.

Remember that Ray’s only contact with another Valkyrie was her sadistic father. She had a logical and deep-rooted fear of her own people and immediately closed herself off in the void where they could not reach her. As she disappeared the three boys, Connor, Blake, and Max, started to freak out and seemed to think that her existence was not possible. This sparked her interest and Ray spent the rest of the day following them around and learning more about them. She discovered that they were not the only Valkyries in the area, there were two more named Elijah and Derik. Together the five of them made up the Oakland Clan and they had the responsibility of supervising and even policing the entire supernatural community in the town of Oakland. You see, Valkyries are some of the most powerful supernatural beings and a long time ago had declared themselves the top of the supernatural food chain. Meaning that they made the rules and had the job of making sure the humans never found out about the existence of the supernatural community. And, as I mentioned before, there is a profound class system within the Valkyrie society.

The Oakland Clan is a newly formed and relatively powerless clan meaning that they currently occupy the bottom of the Valkyrie totem pole. Their job was to keep an eye on the relatively large shifter pack in Oakland and make sure that the witches don’t call too much attention to themselves. Connor, Blake, and Max do this by going to the largest school in the district because all of the underaged shifters also attend this school. Meanwhile, Derik and Elijah work on the human police force, keeping an eye out for any trouble that was caused by supernatural means. They knew their job and none of them had any real ambitions of being or doing anything else. That is one reason why they were so shocked to find that a female Valkyrie had been living in their territory right under their noses.

Why were they so taken aback to find Ray? Well, the biggest reason was that she was a girl. Unbeknownst to Ray, it turned out that female Valkyries are incredibly rare. Like two-hundred to one kind of rare. The only way to have a baby Valkyrie that is a girl is if both the mother and the father are also Valkyries and even then it is like a one in four chance of having a girl. Meaning that females are in high demand and only the most powerful and influential Valkyries end up with one of the few females. Powerful like the top rung of the class system, the royals. Big picture, over the last several generations all of the females were integrated into the royal lines and now if you are a female Valkyrie you are either a princess or a queen. And even though there are only a few females, the Valkyrie society is governed by Queens and unless there isn’t a female to inherit, the crown is passed down from mother to daughter.

All of this means that the Oakland Clan thought that Ray was some sort of lost princess and were expecting her to demand that they take her to the line of Royals that rule the American West Kingdom, The Collins. But Ray would prove to surprise them at almost every turn. While she did start to like and even trust the Oakland Clan, she didn’t want anything to do with the elite Hunter Clans or the Royals.

Several events throughout the first book proved to Ray that she could trust the Oakland Clan to have her back as she slowly learned how different and powerful she was compared to the rest of people of her race. When Ray rushed to save Amy from the perverted hands of a teacher, they were there to back her up. When Ray spontaneously claimed a little girl as a protected during an active shooting at her work, they stepped in to make sure that both her and her protected were well taken care of. And when she inevitably got found out by the more powerful Valkyries, the Oakland Clan stayed by her side and offered counsel about what she should do in each situation.

One of the biggest concerns that became evident the longer she associated with other Valkyries was how different Ray was from them. As I said before, most Valkyries only have two Gifts with the powerful ones having three. The most influential Valkyrie King alive has four, but he lives in Japan. Ray, on the other hand, has five Gifts. Weapons, Shield, Cloaking, Truth, and Tracking (AKA - the titles of the books). Not only does she have more Gifts than any other known Valkyrie, but the Gifts that she does have are a lot stronger. She can call more Weapons, Shield people other than herself, and turn anyone or anything she wants invisible as she moves them to the void. Meaning that her desirability to the royals went through the roof when this fact was discovered.

Through the background of the first book is this mysterious drug called Moondust that is making humans as strong as supernaturals and have uncommonly violent urges. There is also a trend of missing Shifters. Ray ends up stepping between two factions of teenage werewolves to keep them from exposing their supernatural natures to the entire school. This leads to a tribunal where she learns how cruel and selfish the upper-class Valkyries can be. As the elite Valkyries vye for her attention, Ray uses her influence to get them to actually put some effort into finding one of the lost shifters, Logan. Blake and Connor’s father (yes they are twins, I don’t think I have mentioned that yet) gets assigned the job of trying to find the lost shifter and ends up going missing. Ray uses her newly discovered Tracking Gift to find where he has disappeared and she and the guys end up rescuing the group of elite Valkyries and Logan. However in the melee, Connor ends up getting shot and Max, who has the Gift of Healing, doesn’t have enough power to save him. In a self-sacrificing move, Ray places her hands on Max’s Shield, thus feeding him some of her life force and giving him a power boost even though it is excruciatingly painful. During all of this, Ray ends up revealing to the elite and royal Valkyries that she has the unique Cloaking Gift and hears for the first time about a society of people that keep themselves invisible called The Hidden. (End of book 1 - Shielded)

After learning about Ray’s Cloaking Gift, Hernan Collins who is the queen’s brother and in charge of information and security within the American West Kingdom becomes very interested in Ray. He brings his nephew, Prince Kaiden Collins, with him to interrogate the Oakland Clan because he also has the Truth Gift. Kaiden believes that he is the only Valkyrie in the kingdom with this Gift and when he discovers that Ray also has it, he goes a little ballistic. He tries to stab Ray, who deflects his strike and uses his attack to further distance herself from the Royals.

Meanwhile, Ray’s long-lost family, or rather her father’s long-forgotten family, hears rumors of her existence and travels from Boston to California to find her. Their first meeting does not go well as her uncle, Sean Olsen, Compels Ray to drop her Weapons, and subsequently, she goes on full attack. When she learns who they are she stops fighting them long enough to get some answers. Turns out that her father had disappeared along with his entire clan nearly twenty years ago. No one had seen him since and they were desperate for news about his whereabouts. Ray explains who her father was and how he lived his life, shocking Sean and Mathis (her grandfather) because the man she was describing was not the son and brother that they remember. Mathis then tries to demand that Ray come back to Boston with them but she refuses and uses the void to turn to the Oakland Clan for advice.

As Ray agrees to spend some time trying to get to know her newly discovered relatives, she starts dating a Valkyrie named Jonas who is a member of the Blade Clan (the elite Hunter Clan that the twin’s father is also a part of) and is formally introduced to the three different sets of royals that govern the United States, Queen Florence Collins of the Americas West, her brother King Eli Norwood of the Americas South, and Queen Anne Deveroe of the Americas East (where her uncle and grandfather live). She also learns about a long-ago war that created a huge divide between two different factions of Valkyries. The war was not going well for either side and a powerful oracle foresaw that if they didn’t stop fighting the humans would discover the supernatural world and hunt all those with supernatural origins to near extinction. To avoid that end, one of the factions who had a leader with the ability to turn invisible Cloaked his entire group and they have been living a life separate ever since. The Valkyries call that lost faction of people The Hidden.

Prince Hernan Collins believes that Ray is key to them finding and hopefully integrating The Hidden people back into their society, something they desperately need because of the dwindling numbers of females and their overall lessening power levels. Upon hearing this information Ray is more interested in the possibility that her mother might be one of The Hidden and they might be the people that caused her father’s clan to disappear all those years ago.

Meanwhile, the sole princess of the Americas West Kingdom, Regina Collins, is turning eighteen, an event that is celebrated by the global royal Valkyrie community. A huge event called The Matching takes place and contingents from nearly every royal line in the world attend, making it a hugely politically drought event. News of Ray’s sudden appearance and never heard of before power levels elevate this Matching from a run-of-the-mill event to a real competition for Ray’s attention. And one thing that almost all of the Royals can agree with is that they are not happy that Ray has integrated herself amongst a low-level clan without showing any signs of interest in raising her status and joining a royal line.

One particularly evil royal, King Eli Norwood of the Americas Southwest, who likes to keep a menagerie of supernatural creatures to torture, decided to try to drive a wedge between Ray and the Oakland Clan. He did this by hiring a Valkyrie with a strong Compulsion Gift and no moral code to Compel Derik to beat up and humiliate Ray within the Oakland clan house. This plan was successful and by the time the other guys showed up to stop Derik, Ray had been beaten to a bloody pulp, and Derik was so lost to guilt that he was suicidal. However, Ray was in the unique situation of understanding what it was like to have someone Compel you to hurt another and surprised Derik by forgiving him. She knew that it wasn’t really his fault but the person that Compelled him. Thus the entire Oakland Clan started looking for answers while eagerly craving revenge.

However, their search for answers is derailed by several events. First, while they were in the city attending the Matching Ball, Ray felt that something was terribly wrong with Amy through her link because Amy was one of her protected. As Ray and the guys rushed back to Oakland, Ray called on the local shifters to help. They found that Amy had overdosed at a party and were able to get her to medical attention in time, but no one could contact Jack. With her own recent attack fresh in her mind, Ray used her Tracking Gift to find Jack only to walk in on him having sex with Jonas, the boy that she had started dating. Ray was shocked and completely overwhelmed with feelings of betrayal but knew that making sure Amy was okay had to come first. Once they knew that Amy was okay and resting for the night, Ray and the guys went back to the clan house to get changed out of the formal wear and get a few hours of sleep before returning.

But they never made it back to the house. Instead, they were shot with tranquilizer darts and kidnapped. When Ray finally came to, she was handcuffed and on an airplane with Max, Elijah, and a lot of men that she didn’t know. She quickly found out that she had been kidnapped by the Russian Royals because they wanted a queen. Ray was obviously not okay with that scenario and used her Cloaking Gift to shift one of her kidnappers to the void, meaning that he ghosted through the physical plane and dropped to his death. This was enough of a show of power for the Russian King to turn the plane around and return all three of them safely to California. However, when they returned, the Collins royal line wanted to make a political statement and declared they were going to take the Russian royals into custody and sentence them to death. The Russians fought back and a huge fight erupted at the airfield where a Valkyrie named Tobias whom Ray was starting to get to know and like was killed. Ray reacted and took control of the situation, shifting the Russians to the void and demanding that the Russian King returns to his home without any further fighting. The Russian King refused, claiming that she belonged with him and they ended up in a sword fight. Ray bested the older King but the Russian refused to admit defeat, continuing to fight until Ray beheaded him.

Traumatized by what she had done compounded with everything else that had happened in a short amount of time, Ray had a panic attack. Jack, of all people, is the only one she will let console her, and afterward the guys are all quick to tell Ray just how much she means to them. They also give Ray unwavering support about what she did and make sure that she understands that she doesn’t have to do everything alone anymore. This is when Ray really starts to understand that she belongs with the Oakland Clan and how deeply she feels for each and every one of them. (End of book 2 - Tracked)

Book 3 starts out with Ray being forcefully encouraged to attend Regina’s Matching as the Queen of the Americas West tries to exert power over Ray and convince the world’s royals that she will soon be integrated into their royal line. But the other royals are not buying it and go out of their way to prove their worthiness to Ray. Arguably the most powerful and respected royal valkyries, King Eito Tanaka and Prince Goro Tanaka work to befriend Ray and Ekon Mostafa, the crown prince from Africa declares that Ray is his last hope to have a wife and family. Ray shys away from the attention but is quick to step in to help a sky nymph and siren that got into some trouble with the vampires. However, while engaged in assisting in that situation, Max reports that Elijah has had a run-in with a female Valkyrie within the void. As far as they know the only people that have access to the void is Ray herself and The Hidden, thus they come to the conclusion that The Hidden are spying on the Matching just as Ray and the guys were.

Craving information, the next day they return to the Matching and actively look for The Hidden within the void. They are successful and come face-to-face with a woman and a man that seem to be very angry with their presence within the void. In the next moment, they disappear again, taking Elijah with them. Only Ray, with her supercharged Tracking Gift, can tell that Elijah is still alive just very far away. They end up Tracking Elijah and the mysterious Hidden to the outskirts of Las Vegas but are still unable to find them either in the physical plane of existence or within the void. It takes some time for Ray to figure it out, but she eventually discovers that there is yet another plan of existence on the other side of the void. She steps into the new and unknown realm to find Elijah unharmed and in the company of the hostile Valkyrie man from before. The man, Nahuel, quickly takes away Ray’s Cloaking Gift thus trapping her in the plane of existence known as the Doba.

Ray is stuck within the Doba for twenty-four hours and learns a lot about where she came from within that time. She learns that her mother was indeed one of The Hidden and that she had her father’s clan kidnapped for the sole purpose of using them to get pregnant. When Ray was around two her father’s clan escaped the harsh treatment and attacked the very thing that The Hidden desired the most, the children that had been fathered by them. Most of the children died that day, but at the last moment, Ray’s father couldn’t go through with it and escaped with Ray. However, Ray’s father had been elementally changed by his years of imprisonment and torture, turning him into the cruel man that caused Ray so much pain growing up.

Nahuel also explained why Ray is so much more powerful than a normal Valkyrie because she is one of the four Gatekeepers who were spelled long ago to be stronger so that they could look after and keep the passageway between realms open. Nahuel saw himself as a protector of a peaceful and content village of peoples but the other two Gatekeepers who lived in the Northern City wanted revenge for the nearly forgotten war that caused the divide between the human-bound Valkyries and The Hidden. Ray learned that the reason why her Gifts were surging and becoming harder to control is that she was nearing her eighteenth birthday when the full Gatekeeper power would drain from the previous generation and transition to her.

Weighed down and overwhelmed by the onslaught of information, Ray and Elijah return to the human plane of existence. As the Matching comes to a close, the constant vying for Ray’s attention only increases, as does the demand for answers about The Hidden. Queen Florence and her evil brother, King Eli Norwood, work together to organize a tribunal to question Ray about her encounter with The Hidden. The whole fiasco blows up in their faces as the other royal lines come to Ray’s rescue, humiliating and infuriating both Florence and Eli. So when The Hidden from the Northern City come to meet Ray, the two belittled royals react in a rather dramatic way. Ray’s grandfather wants revenge for what they did to his son but Ray doesn’t want anything to do with her mother or The Hidden from the Northern City. Things spin out of control and Florence and Eli end up interrogating The Hidden from the Northern City under compulsion, thus causing a new war to nearly ignite. Ray is warned that if she does not stop the interrogation and release their leaders, The Hidden will come in force to fight.

Ray makes the decision to protect everyone involved from the threat of a bloody war and returns the Hidden to their plane of existence. This does not go over well with Queen Florence who declares that Ray must be whipped for her disobedience. Eli shows his obvious excitement over watching Ray getting publicly whipped and she reacts by sending the sadistic king to the Doba where the bloodthirsty Hidden are still waiting. Before the full whipping can occur, a group of royals from other kingdoms come to Ray’s rescue and the guys escape with Ray. At the safehouse, Ray is reunited with Nahuel who reveals that Eli is not only the person who ordered Derik to be Compelled to hurt Ray but is also behind the manufacture of Moondust, a drug that is produced from the blood of other supernatural creatures. Eli had been selling Moondust in the Americas West Kingdom to destabilize his sister’s rule and planned on invading with shifters and vampires that were hopped up on the supernatural drug. His goal was to overtake his sister’s throne and combine the Americas West and Southern Kingdoms under his rule.

By this point Ray’s power surges were getting more and more uncontrollable, indicating that her transition was close. Nahuel offered to allow the entire Oakland Clan to shelter in his village, Awenasa, while Ray transitioned and they were preparing for that when Blake and Connor’s ex-girlfriend knocked on their door to reveal that she was pregnant and one of them was the father. This was rather shocking and heartbreaking to Ray because throughout the time that she met the Oakland Clan she began to develop feelings for each and every one of them. During the first three books, she builds individualized but equally important relationships with all five guys and by the end of the third book they had decided as a group to try to pursue this unique relationship that seemed to fit them all. So Ray was in love with the twins and she had begun to think of them as hers. Hearing that they were going to have a baby with a girl she despised pushed Ray over the emotional edge and initiated her transition.

During a Gatekeepers transition, whatever Git they use is magnified one-hundredfold and completely drains the gatekeeper of all of their power for several days. In another self-sacrificing move, Ray used her Cloaking Gift in an attempt to protect the men that she loved and the twins’ unborn child as she felt her power imploding within her. However, instead of just traveling to the void, Ray opened up a crack in the fabric of reality that separated the infant number of realms from each other. She ended up completely drained of power and in an unknown and frozen world. Not only did Ray no longer have the power to return home, she also was wholly ill-equipped to survive in this icy, barren, realm. Nahuel had Traveled with her, but he was a weaker Gatekeeper than Ray was and therefore unable to bring Ray even to the neighboring plane of existence.

At the end of the third book (Truth), we leave Ray in a world that she can’t possibly survive with no way to return to the men that have been rendered heartbroken by her disappearance.

A/N: I am currently writing Traveled and will start posting it soon. As always, I am energized and so look forward to reading any and all comments that you have about my writing. So here I will ask a specific question. Is there any areas of personal growth that you would like to see from either Ray or the guys?