by Nick Harrow
“Is my temp elevated, doc?” he asked as Ray pulled back to catch her breath.
“You feel a little warm,” Ray admitted, her voice low and hoarse as she struggled to catch her breath. Faint specks of pink light glowed within the hole in her forehead. “I better check it orally.”
She slid down his body, her breasts gliding along either side of Gunnar’s engorged length. Her tongue swirled around his tip, leaving a wet trail in its path. The slick friction of Ray’s mouth engulfing Gunnar had his heart thundering in his ears. Every sensation stripped away another day they’d been apart, obliterating the distance that had separated them for what Gunnar once believed would be an eternity.
His thick fingers tangled in Ray’s hair, tugging at the raven strands, spurring her to swallow him in a long, slow motion. Her teeth just grazed his sensitive skin, raising goosebumps along his spine. Her hand slipped away from his cock, the nails grazing the underside of his balls, then clamped onto his thigh as she eased as much of his length as she could manage into her throat. The world disintegrated into a dripping kaleidoscope of heated sensation and desperate hunger.
Gunnar’s eyes drifted closed, and he let himself float on the waves of pleasure that radiated from the tight grip of Ray’s mouth. Her hands roamed over his body, everywhere at once, nails lightly scraping along the muscled ridges of his stomach, palms pressing flat as she massaged his chest and shoulders, her slender fingers clutching the backs of his thighs as she pulled him deeper into her mouth. Ray moaned, a low vibration that came from deep inside. A soft pink glow emanated from her forehead.
And then she carried Gunnar over the edge, draining him dry in greedy gulps that left them both gasping. They clung to one another for long, lazy moments, Ray’s head resting on Gunnar’s stomach, her arm draped across his hips. He toyed with her hair, gently combing the strands between his fingers. When Ray tried to slide out of bed at last, Gunnar hooked his hands around her hips, and pulled her back to him.
“Where do you think you’re going?” he asked.
“To eat.” She giggled as Gunnar effortlessly lifted her higher and nudged her legs apart with his elbows. “You need some calories, too, mister. I don’t know what—”
Ray’s breath caught in her throat as her skirt rucked up around her waist. Gunnar had raised her higher and tilted his head back against the pillow. His hot breath teased the sensitive skin at her center, and his prickly beard stubble lightly scratched the insides of her thighs.
“Just gonna check your temperature.” Gunnar traced the outline of her puffy lips with long, slow strokes. He caught a whiff of her perfume mingled with the richer scents of Ray’s body. “Hmm, can’t quite get a reading.”
“Try harder,” she said, her voice lower, more urgent.
“I wouldn’t want to rush things and get a bad reading,” Gunnar teased.
His tongue parted her gently, its pointed tip swirled around her swelling pearl until her back arched and her fingers tangled in his hair. He savored her faintly salty flavor and lifted her hips. He lapped at the folds around her opening, holding her steady, his hands wrapped around her hips.
Gunnar’s mouth stoked the flames of her desire. He sucked and nipped, his tongue working in tantalizing spirals that drew ragged sighs from Ray, guiding her toward the pinnacle of pleasure. Years had passed since they’d been together, but their hunger for one another obliterated the missing time.
The world blurred, and the temperature in the room seemed to drop even as the heat between Gunnar and Ray grew more intense. Her panting moans seemed to overlap, doubling, then tripling in Gunnar’s ears. His hands slipped over her hips, and the swell of her curves shifted under his fingers, as turbulent and fluid as the ocean’s waves. She’d become a force of nature, her body both intimately familiar and uncharted territory.
Ray’s thighs suddenly clutched Gunnar, and he let her ride him until she stiffened against his mouth, her muscles straining, head thrown back, a nearly silent, shuddering moan wracking her body as the waves of quivering pleasure crashed over her.
The world shifted around them in that moment, growing darker and wilder, and Gunnar felt a bond snap into place between him and Rayleigh. The connection blurred the lines between them until it was hard to tell where she stopped and he began. Their spirits fused as her pleasure spiked to new heights.
The world slowly crept back into the room with them, until Gunnar almost felt normal again.
Almost.
Ray eased back from Gunnar’s face and sat straddling his chest, strands of her thick hair dangling in her eyes, her mouth slightly open as she struggled to catch her breath. Her smoky gaze transfixed Gunnar. He never wanted her to move, never wanted to be away from her again.
“What’s the diagnosis,” she asked.
“You’re terminally hot,” Gunnar responded, then turned his head to nip at her knee beside his head.
“So I’ve heard.” Ray grinned down at him. She tossed her hair over one shoulder. “I wonder if Mimi was watching us on her cameras.”
“Showoff.” Gunnar sat up straight and hauled Ray into a tight embrace. He kissed the top of her head and smoothed her long, black hair down her back. “I just hope she’s got some food in this place.”
“Nothing fancy.” Ray slipped out of his arms to sit next to him on the bed. “But she’s promised sandwiches when you drag your sorry ass into the dining room. As nice an appetizer as that was, I’m still starving, so let’s get to getting.”
Ray hopped out of bed and headed for the door. She’d changed her outfit, and Gunnar had to admire the way the white skirt hugged the swaying curves of her ass as she walked away. He lay there after she’d gone and enjoyed the afterglow until he couldn’t ignore the grumbling demands of his hunger.
“Sandwiches,” he muttered and swung his long legs over the edge of the bed. He hoped there’d be something other than peanut butter and jelly. The memory of smoked meat from his dream made his stomach ache for something substantial.
As hungry as Gunnar was, though, he needed a shower to wash away the scabs of other people’s blood before he’d feel human again. While he sluiced away the previous twenty-four hours, jagged shards of his dream pushed their way into the waking world. Bit by bit, the jigsaw puzzle of the night before came together and snapped into focus. By the time Gunnar left the shower behind, he remembered all of it. The mountaintop and its goats. The jötnar fucking and feasting on the Vegas Strip. Odin, motherfucking Odin, offering him a choice and then spelling out what he had to do. None of it made any sense, but it all felt far too real to have been just a dream.
As he toweled off, Gunnar looked at his face in the steamy bathroom mirror. His stubble had grown out into a short beard, golden hair shot through with faint tinges of crimson. But what really caught his attention was his right eye. It looked red, irritated, and faintly swollen. Just like it would have if some old man had poked him with a long, bony finger.
“Fuck me,” he muttered and walked naked into the bedroom.
“Brought you some clothes,” Mimi said from the corner of the bed. Her gaze played over him, a teasing glint in her eye. Just like Rayleigh, she had a black spot the size of a pencil eraser on her forehead. “You look a little bigger than I remember. They might not fit.”
She patted the neatly folded T-shirt and pair of sweatpants on the bed next to her. Gunnar walked right over to her, pulled the shirt over his head, and smiled down at his old friend, his crotch inches from her face.
“I’ll show you bigger,” he said and reached down to pick up the sweatpants. He took his time hauling them up his legs, staying close to Mimi while he did so. If she thought she could embarrass him, she didn’t know him very well. “I heard you were making me a sandwich.”
She laughed at that and stood up, the soft edge of her Mötley Crüe tour shirt grazing the outside of his thigh. “Dream on. Now put that lady killer back in your pants and come eat. We’ve got a lot to talk about.”
Gunnar caught u
p to Mimi in the main underground house’s kitchen where Bridget and Ray were already halfway through their sandwiches. Ray had a triple-decker monstrosity layered with pastrami, ham, turkey, pickles, lettuce, tomatoes, and condiments dripping down the sides of thick slabs of rye toast. Bridget had settled for a simple turkey on white, the bread stained pink from the sriracha she’d slathered on the meat. Mimi gave Gunnar a lazy bow and gestured for him to get started building his own sandwich.
“The owners had weekly fresh food deliveries set up, just in case they ever actually needed to use this place. Can’t tell you how much I had to throw out, but they’ve got money to burn, apparently. Or did, anyway. There’s pastrami, ham, turkey, a little prosciutto, some pre-cooked bacon,” she said, “every spread known to man, lettuce, tomatoes, I think a little jar of those pepperoncinis you’re so fond of, and maybe some pickles if Bridget didn’t eat them all. There’s rye, white, and wheat bread.”
“I’m happy to chip in for groceries, but I didn’t eat all the pickles,” Bridget said around a mouthful of sandwich. A faint violet light sparked in the depths of the hole in her forehead. “I think you finished them, Mimi.”
“She’s a liar,” Mimi said and grabbed a couple slices of wheat bread from the loaf on the counter, picked up a fistful of ham, and called it good. She threw her tall, plain sandwich on one of the paper plates next to the fixings, then headed for the dining room door. “Hurry it up in there, Jolly. You’ve got some explaining to do.”
Gunnar groaned at the old nickname. The bodyguard knew if he made a big deal about how much he hated being called that, the rest of them would pick up on it and tease him mercilessly. Better to ignore it, he told himself. He grabbed glass seltzer water bottles, tucked them into the crook of his arm, and carried them into the dining room along with his sandwich. He slid a bottle of water across the table to each of them with the practiced ease of an experienced bartender.
“Thanks for the water. Between the bad dreams and being sick all night, I’m parched. Still not sure how I feel about this völva business. Don’t even think about making a joke, Jolly.”
“It doesn’t make any sense,” Bridget said. “Why us?”
A cold, crisp wind gusted around the table, stirring napkins and whipping the ladies’ hair around their faces. For a moment, Gunnar couldn’t see any of their faces, just masks of black, white, and red hair.
“The golden woman said we’d been chosen,” Ray said, her voice low and trembling, as if she was reliving the experience. “She told me—”
“—to follow you,” Bridget continued, her lower lip quivering. “She said we were your völva, and we could help you—”
“—build a lodge,” Mimi continued, her wide eyes staring past Gunnar at the vision that surfaced from her memories. “And we had to gather—”
“—three relics,” Ray said. “They were called—”
“The Valknut, Gungnir, and Draupnir,” Gunnar finished. “You all had the same dream?”
“Fuck,” Mimi grumbled. “Not gonna lie. I was really hoping that this was all just a fever hallucination and I’d wake up tomorrow without any of...”
Her words trailed off as she brushed the dot on her forehead with her index finger.
“It’s real,” Ray said. “This is exactly what Kyrolina wanted when she turned the Valhalla Virus loose.”
Ray cleared her throat and pushed her half-eaten sandwich toward the center of the table. She took a sip from her water bottle, wiped the moisture from her lips with the back of her hand, then started talking. No one interrupted her as she laid out the crazy story that had led them all to this moment.
Ray had run across some strange material about YmirRe’s research during a routine audit of the databases. They were supposed to encrypt all the test results before they hit storage, but somebody had messed up and committed a log update in plaintext. Before she could stop herself, Ray had read a synopsis that curled her toes.
She’d downloaded as much as she dared, then covered her tracks. The company she’d devoted her life to for the past seven years was running experiments with modified varieties of a coronavirus. The purpose, as near as Ray could tell, was to activate genetic memories of a past that was, as far as she knew, completely mythical. That was weird enough, but what really worried Ray was the plan to unleash this virus as part of a wide-ranging plan to bring about some purer, primal age where YmirRe could rule.
“I thought it was crazy,” Ray said. “But YmirRe works on a bunch of defense projects, so there’s no end to the crazy stuff they could do. I made a call to a contact I had in the DHS. I wanted to show them what I had, see what we could do to stop YmirRe from unleashing a plague. Then I called Gunnar and hightailed it to Vegas. I thought I’d gotten away clean. But then everyone got sick, and Arthur showed up...”
Ray ended her story with a sigh and buried her face in her hands. She didn’t need to fill in the rest of the blanks. It was obvious to all of them. YmirRe was onto her. They’d been afraid the DHS would shut them down, so they stepped up their operation and dumped the virus over the Strip. If Arthur captured Ray they could tie everything up with a neat little bow by disappearing her. Then Gunnar had showed up, everyone had gone crazy, and here they were.
“Why didn’t we freak out?” Gunnar asked Ray. “We got sick, but none of us went berserk.”
“I don’t know,” Ray admitted. “Some of what I read said almost everyone who got sick would go berserk, and then die. But my information was clearly out of date because it showed the onset time of the rage at seventy-two hours, and I’d only been gone from the lab for twelve hours when you showed up. Even if Kyrolina released the bug as soon as I left the lab, the virus shouldn’t have had time to kick in yet.”
“Mimi was sick last night,” Gunnar said. “If we exposed her, the bug tore through her in less than twelve hours. Seems awfully fast. How long ago did you swipe the data?”
Ray’s face paled. “Two days ago. That means—”
“They dropped a plague on Vegas to stop you from spilling the beans,” Bridget said. “We need to hit the highway before they do something even worse.”
Mimi leaned back in her chair and pinched the bridge of her nose. She let out a long, slow sigh, then looked Gunnar square in the eye. “That isn’t going to happen. There is, or at least was, a secure telecom line into my humble abode. My bosses used it to reach out last night. Theysay Vegas is already quarantined. Nobody in, nobody out. The National Guard is setting up a perimeter, but even they aren’t moving in until the eggheads can tell them more about what happened. I tried to call out on that line this morning, though, and it’s just dead air.”
Gunnar’s fists clenched under the table. They were trapped in the city with a bunch of monsters. While they were safe inside the bunker, the same wasn’t true for the poor bastards on the surface. Anyone the virus hadn’t killed would be easy prey for the monsters he’d seen in his dream. Someone had to do something.
And, according to the dream that he’d shared with Rayleigh, Bridget, and Mimi, that someone was him.
“I have to go after the relics,” he said. “That’s what the old man said in the dream. It’s up to me to stop this from spreading.”
“Up to us,” Mimi corrected him. “And Freya insisted that one of the three of us already knew where the first relic was.”
“Which one?” Gunnar asked.
“The Valknut,” Bridget said. “Not that I have any idea what that is.”
“Me, either,” Ray agreed. “Mimi?”
“No,” she said. “I really wish these magic powers came with a user manual.”
The remnants of the dream surfaced through Gunnar’s thoughts, showing him the old man’s glowing eye socket and the symbol that had filled it. Gunnar pushed back from the table and ran into the kitchen, coming back with the bottle of sriracha. He scooped his sandwich off his paper plate and drew the three interlocked triangles on it in spicy red sauce. Then he showed it to each of the women. They all
shrugged until he got to Mimi.
“Oh, shit,” she groaned. “I saw that. Not even two weeks ago. You’re not gonna be happy when I tell you who has it.”
“Spill it,” Gunnar said, his gut curling into a fist of worry.
“It was on a necklace, a stone pendant thing,” she said.
“Where’d you see it?” Gunnar demanded.
“I ran into Cal Corso at a party at the Aria.” Mimi lowered her eyes. “He was wearing it.”
“Oh,” Gunnar groaned. “Fuck me.”
Chapter 6
GUNNAR’S THOUGHTS RACED for a solution to this new problem. Cal had lost an enormous amount of money when Gunnar turned a cargo ship full of trafficking victims over to the law. And that was a drop in the bucket compared to the long-term losses from burning that kind of relationship.
The odds were good there’d be blood if Gunnar showed up on his old boss’s doorstep looking for the Valknut. Gunnar had accepted the inevitability of a fight, but he wanted to be sure the spilled blood didn’t belong to him or his allies. The bodyguard needed more information, and he needed it fast. “Where’s that asshole staying?” he asked Mimi.
“He’s over in the Villas at the Mirage,” Mimi said. “He set up shop there a few months back to work a deal with the Chinese. I may be mostly out of the game, but I keep an ear to the ground so I don’t lose sight of the big players.”
That, at least, was some good news for Gunnar. The Villas were fancy, but they were far from the most secure location Corso could’ve chosen. They were on the ground floor behind the Mirage, surrounded by walls. The location made them far easier for a determined team to enter than a penthouse suite at the Bellagio or the hotel within a hotel at the Venetian. Now all Gunnar needed was a team.
“Is there anybody left in the city that you can still reach out to these days?” he asked Mimi.
“Me,” Mimi laughed. “If you’re asking for trigger men, no, I don’t know anybody I would trust. Especially with everything that’s going on.”