by Nick Harrow
Gunnar considered that question. The Valkyrie transformation had made her eternally young and buff, but an unearthly wisdom shown in her eyes. Despite all that, she still seemed unsure and skittish. He wasn’t sure what to tell her.
“What do you want it to be?” he asked.
“I—” She frowned and rested her hand on her sword’s hilt. “Odin told me to watch out for you.”
“So do that, I guess,” Gunnar said with a grin. “Is that a problem?”
Erin shook her head. Her dark hair had turned to spun gold since she’d become a Valkyrie, and sparks danced among its strands. Finally, she stopped and grabbed Gunnar’s hand. “There’s something else,” she said softly.
The jarl turned back to face her, only to find Erin hovering right in front of him, her wings sending swirls of cold air around them both. Before he could say or do anything, she kissed him, softly.
And then, without a word, Erin flew into the sky, twirled once, and sailed back toward the lodge.
Gunnar watched her go. “Deke’s gonna love that,” he muttered.
HOURS TURNED TO DAYS, which grew into weeks. Jötunn howls still echoed over the ruins of Vegas, but none of those blue-skinned freaks came anywhere near the lodge. Gunnar’s warriors patrolled the streets for blocks in every direction, and they’d put enough heads on spikes to make a nice fence around the land they’d claimed.
More refugees found their way to the lodge, and they built homes on the surface, expanding the palisade to protect them all. What had once been a cozy little bunker had become a village. In time, Gunnar hoped, it would be much more than that. He envisioned a new city where Vegas had once stood, a beacon of hope for the rest of the world.
Because the völva told him the virus was spreading. The idea of more jötnar moving across the globe kept him awake some nights.
“Hey there, grumpy puss,” Ray teased as she joined him on the bench. “Penny for your thoughts.”
“They’re worth a lot more than that,” Gunnar said. “I am the jarl.”
Ray sat down next to him and draped her hand over his thigh. “One handjob, final offer.”
“I can get a handjob from anybody,” he said. “Shit, Deke offered me one this morning.”
“Slut,” Ray whispered, her tongue flicking his earlobe. “I guess I could move in with his son if you’re sweet on the old man. He’s a few years younger than you. I could train him up right.”
Gunnar gave her ass a quick pinch and leaned back on the bench. “Did you come out here to bust my balls or what?”
Her fingers grazed the bulge in his pants. “I’ll do something to those balls. Later, though. I have some news I thought you’d want to hear.”
She pulled his arm over her shoulder and snuggled up against his chest. “We traced Hyrrokkin’s past for you, babe. It took forever, but we walked it all the way back to Jotunheim.”
“And that’s good news?” Gunnar asked.
“Definitely,” she chuckled. “She can’t come back, Gun. Not for a long, long time. She shot her wad, sending her agents through to gather the relics. She doesn’t have the strength to open another bridge. Maybe she never will.”
“That is very good news,” Gunnar said. “Thank you for bringing it to me.”
“Come to our room,” Ray whispered, her hand doing more than brushing his crotch. “You can pay me back for putting you in such a good mood.”
BOGIE HAD WALKED EAST, not resting until Vegas was a shadow on the horizon behind him. His skin was covered in blisters and he’d lost a horn, thanks to that fucker setting off Draupnir like a nuclear goddamned warhead. The wounds wouldn’t kill the jötunn, but they’d pissed him off.
Not as much as the fact that Hilda had survived, though. He’d caught a glimpse of that bitch running away while he was doing the same.
He couldn’t help but look over his shoulder when he thought of her.
“I’m not scared,” he told himself for the thousandth time. “Fuck that bitch.”
But he didn’t have to be afraid to know that staying in Vegas was a bad bet if you had blue skin. Fucking Arthur had eaten a dick, and that bitch Hyrrokkin was nowhere to be found. The smart money was on greener pastures, where crazy Viking motherfuckers didn’t hunt jötnar for kicks.
The farther Bogie got from the city, the clearer his thoughts became. He swore he could hear them now, clear as a movie soundtrack. It was mostly his voice, but there was another one that had piped up now and then. A woman offering him advice, telling him which roads to turn on, guiding him to shelter when he needed it, and food when he was hungry.
Finally, Bogie talked back. “Who are you?”
His only answer was the mournful whistle of the wind outside the log house he’d found earlier that day. He strained to hear her voice again and thought he caught one, small word.
“Hel,” the wind sighed.
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Construct your dungeon. Summon your monster girls. Slaughter your foes.
WHEN THE INKOLANA CARTEL's experimental computer network comes under attack, they give white-hat hacker Clay Knight two hours to fix the problem.
If he succeeds, he'll be rich beyond his wildest dreams.
If he fails, he's a dead man.
But when Clay hacks the hackers, he stumbles into an ancient ritual that summons him to the dusty, forgotten world of Soketra. In this strange new land, Clay finds dungeons, monsters, and a fierce pride of beautiful cat women who believe he is the reincarnation of the ancient Dungeon Lord Rathokhetra. With a band of bloodthirsty dungeon raiders on his doorstep, Clay must master his new abilities and gather guardians for his territory to save himself and his army of warrior women from a fate darker than death.
Chapter 1: Meltdown
SHE CROSSED THE BAR toward me with the lithe strides of a stalking tigress. Candlelight cast her face in shadow, but her eyes glowed with an emerald radiance that drew me to her like a barbed-wire lariat. Musical chimes tinkled against my ears with every step she took, and I wanted her the same way a man lost in the desert wanted water.
The good news was that she looked like she was just as thirsty for me as I was for her.
She didn’t say a word when she reached me. She tilted her head back and eased forward until our lips almost touched. Her breath smelled like honeysuckle and cinnamon, and the heat of it wrapped my brain in a warm, moist fog that made it all but impossible to think about anything but her.
I leaned forward to kiss her, and our lips met with an explosion of pain that dragged me out of the best damned dream I’d had in months. It took me a few seconds to realize why my lips hurt so bad.
It was the gun barrel a very unpleasant man had shoved into my mouth.
“You Knight?” the hulking shadow that loomed over my bed asked. He had to be close to seven feet tall and seemed almost as wide. A shaft of light
through my open window fell across his heavily tattooed gun hand. The pistol was still pressed up against my lips, and my eyes crossed when I tried to focus on it, but I didn’t need to see any details to know it was big enough to turn my head into extra-chunky salsa if I made a wrong move.
I considered trying to convince the shadow he had the wrong apartment, but that seemed like a bad plan. If he’d wanted me dead, he wouldn’t have woken me up to seal the deal.
“That’s me,” I said and did my best not to flinch as my lips scraped across the gun’s muzzle.
Neither of us moved for what must have been a thousand years. Finally, the gun moved a few feet away from my mouth, but its bore remained centered on my head. Still, I considered that progress.
“Gotta job for you,” he said. “Get dressed.”
“I don’t know—”
“This is a one-time offer, and it expires when I get pissed off.” The man’s gruff voice told me we were very close to that expiration. “You do this, you get a billion dollars. You fuck it up, or you lay there in bed like a slug for a few more minutes, and I’ll introduce you to one of Mr. Shooty’s bullet friends.”
He tipped the gun’s muzzle up so I could stare down the bottomless black well of its barrel.
I scrambled out of my warm, comfy bed and onto the cold hardwood floor like an electric eel had just tried to climb up my ass. The freezing shock of the wood against the soles of my feet filled me with the sudden urge to empty my bladder, but there was no time for that. I grabbed the black sweatpants and matching T-shirt that I’d dropped on the floor before climbing into bed a few hours ago and practically dove into them.
“I’ll need my laptop,” I said as I tried to reach past the big dude to collect my bag off the dresser behind him.
“No.” He blocked my arm with his massive body. “We’ve got everything you need at the job.”
I wanted to explain to him that there was no way he knew what I needed. That laptop was loaded with tools I’d built or modified over a decade of security work. Asking me to do my job without that laptop would be like asking a carpenter to build a house without his hands.
“You don’t understand,” I tried to explain, but the big boy was having none of it. He abandoned the shadows for the rectangle of milky moonlight that spilled through my bedroom window and shoved his pistol into my ribs hard enough to leave a bruise.
But the gun wasn’t what freaked me out.
The shadow man was a straight-up monster. His enormous head was as bald as a newborn’s ass, with a brow so heavy it looked like you could break bricks on it. His beady eyes perched above a spade-shaped nose lined with whorls and ridges of flesh, and a pair of cracked tusks jutted from the corners of a gruesome, lipless mouth.
To top it all off, the dude was a puke shade of green and smelled about the same.
“We were told you were the best, and that is why I came for you,” he said, his carefully enunciated words at odds with his bestial appearance. “But you have reached the limits of my patience, and I am about to move on to our second choice.”
“After I kill you.”
If I’d had any doubts about his willingness to put me in the ground, they vanished after one quick glance into his eyes. I didn’t know what had happened to this guy, but whatever nightmare accident had wrecked his face left him looking like a Lord-of-the-Rings-style orc straight out of central casting. He also looked like he might eat me after he shot me in the face.
“Lead on,” I said. I’d spent more than my fair share of time in the gym, because if you spend all day pecking at a keyboard, you have to do something or you’ll turn into a wad of sugar cookie dough. But I had no illusions that my sparring matches and weight lifting would stand a chance against this legit monster. I was sure he wasn’t actually an orc, but he still looked as big and mean as one of Tolkien’s bad boys.
“Don’t try anything stupid,” he said and waved the pistol’s muzzle toward the door.
I followed his directions and kept my hands well away from my sides as I left my bedroom. I didn’t have a weapon, but I didn’t want the orc lookalike behind me to think that I did and get antsy.
Besides, there was an upside to all this. If I pulled off the job they’d kidnapped me for, I’d be a billionaire.
I kept that thought locked firmly at the front of my mind as we left my apartment. The orc steered me toward the elevator and made his gun vanish as soon as we entered the car. He didn’t so much as glance in my direction for the rest of the trip.
“Can I at least know what corp wanted me so bad they sent you to shanghai me?” I asked between floors twelve and eleven. “I don’t usually go on a first date without knowing a name.”
He mulled the question over until we hit the eighth floor and then said something that scared me even more than his ugly mug.
“Inkolana Syndicate,” he said, as if deciding it didn’t matter whether I knew who’d hired me.
Well, that explained the guns and money. The Inkolana Syndicate had more of both than they knew what to do with, and they weren’t afraid to use either of them to get what they wanted. And what they wanted was usually a bigger slice of the drug business and for their enemies in various world governments to disappear into deep, dark holes.
But what the hell would the world’s scariest cartel need with a hacker?
I asked that question when we hit the ground floor, but the orc just grunted and clapped an oversized hand on my shoulder. He steered me through the lobby and out to the sidewalk where a black sedan waited for us. My kidnapper shoved me into the back seat, then slid in next to me without another word.
I scrambled to the other side of the car before he could smash me under his bulk. The dude didn’t have much respect for personal space.
The sedan’s suspension groaned in protest as the monster settled into position beside me, and the engine protested mightily as the driver slammed it into drive and punched the accelerator. We glided through the streets of downtown Dallas, and the lack of foot traffic and Uber drivers told me I’d been taken in the dead hours of the night between the time when the barflies buzzed away from their booze halls and when the early risers dragged their sorry asses off to their slavery in corporate hellholes.
“Put this on,” the cartel thug said. He slapped a burlap sack against my gut, and I grunted in surprise. My blood ran cold as I raised the hood to get a better look at it. The coarse brown cloth was exactly the sort of thing you’d put over someone’s head before you put a bullet through the back of their skull.
“I never touched an Inkolana system,” I argued in a desperate effort to save my life. Maybe they thought I’d hacked them and they were taking me somewhere to torture me for a few days before they shot me. A vivid image of my naked, mutilated corpse lying in a ditch with the bloody bag over my shattered head bullied its way into my thoughts.
“It’s for your safety,” the orc said. “You don’t need to know where we’re going to do your damned job.”
The argument made enough sense to put my paranoid dread at ease, and I yanked the bag down over my head. The loose weave of the burlap made it possible to see light and shadow, but I couldn’t make out any details.
We cruised along for a while longer but never hit highway speeds. That told me we’d never left downtown, but not much else. Dallas had exploded in size over the past couple of decades, and its downtown was littered with massive skyscrapers. There was no way for me to tell which underground parking garage we pulled into, and I hoped the cartel would feel the same way.
The car stopped, my kidnapper dragged me out of it, and a few seconds later we were inside an elevator. A few seconds after that we were zipping up so fast my stomach tried to convince me we were on a roller coaster. It was hard to smell anything but the rich, musty scent of the burlap in front of my nose, but I picked up a harsh antiseptic smell that only got stronger as the elevator went higher. It reminded me of a hospital or a doctor’s office. Something medicinal.
Why
would they bring me to a hospital? Did they want me to hack into its systems and assassinate someone during an operation? I’d seen a movie with that plot once, and the whole thing had seemed stupid to me. There was almost no reason for a hacker to come on site to do a job like that.
The elevator’s doors dinged open after several minutes, and the orc muscled me out of the elevator. He waited for a few seconds, then yanked the hood off my head and shoved it into one of his jacket’s pockets.
I blinked and struggled to adjust my eyes to the harsh light. Everything around me was polished white that gleamed with a sterile perfection. There were no pictures on the walls, no carpet on the floor, not even the thin black grid of tiles. It looked as if the whole place had been molded from a single block of white acrylic.
The orc snatched my right arm in his iron grip and almost yanked me off my feet as he hauled me forward. I took a deep, surprised breath, and my nose burned from the chemical reek of cleaning agents and raw alcohol in the air. A faint bubbling noise grew louder over the slap of my soles against the smooth floor. It reminded me of an aquarium’s oxygenating pump.
Where the fuck was I?
We rounded a corner and came into a square white room about thirty feet on a side. The only furniture was a simple black desk with a fancy office chair made of so much chrome and leather it looked like it belonged in the private room of a strip club. My babysitter hauled me over to the chair and tossed me into it. He spun my seat around to face the desk with a hearty shove and slapped his hands down on the chair’s back.
“This is your workstation,” he said. “We need you to stop an attack on our system.”
“What system?” I asked. The more information I had, the better equipped I’d be to deal with whatever enemy they’d put me up against. “And what kind of attack?”
“This is the system,” the big boy said, and the white wall in front of me vanished to reveal an enormous aquarium that looked like it was at least as big as the room that held my workstation.