Valkyrie

by Raythe Reign

  “How I dreamed of having you here by my side,” Thor said. “I thought of all the things we would say to one another. How we would go hunting. How we would feast for hours. How we would tell each other wild tales and make them true. How we would be brothers. But I know that such happiness can only be ours once the Gash is imprisoned again.”

  “I want that, too. I wish I could bring Cameron here. He would love it,” Liam said.

  “Perhaps you will one day and we will have his sculptures and paintings gracing Asgard.”

  They passed through a gorgeous carved arch that soared two stories above their heads before entering onto a long crystalline walkway which had no railings. On either side was an incredible drop to the roiling waters below. Liam had a sense of vertigo and walked closer to Thor and the center of the walkway.

  Thor cleared his throat and said, “Since you intend on speaking to Loki on other matters, perhaps you could … no, I cannot ask —”

  “Ask me and if it is within my power I will do it,” Liam said.

  Thor’s jaw tightened for a moment. “Ask him … ask him why. Why did he walk away? Why did he leave?”

  “I will.” Liam had a feeling that the answer to those questions would likely be part of what Loki would want to assist them in the first place.

  Thor flashed him a grateful smile.

  In the distance, near the very end of the walkway, stood an island’s peak with a castle carved into height. The walkway appeared to just end as if whatever should have been attached there had simply sheared off and dropped away.

  “Those are the Sky Cliffs.” Thor pointed to the peak and then moved his finger so that it pointed at where the crystalline walkway ended. “And this is where the Bifrost should begin.”

  Liam shaded his eyes with a hand on his forehead and squinted. At first, he thought he saw nothing and then … then like a flicker of a prism there appeared to be a rainbow. But it was gone as fast as it appeared. It was only then that he spied a figure in gleaming silver armor standing on the walkway’s very edge and staring into the void. Only when they were directly beside him did he turn towards them. Liam gasped. The man’s eyes glowed silver.

  “Ah, Liam, it is good to see you awake,” the man said.

  “Liam, this is Heimdall. He is the Guardian of Asgard,” Thor explained, a note of pride in his voice. “His hearing and vision are so acute that he can actually see and hear Midgard even from here.”

  “Can you see Cam?” Liam asked, anxious to hear if his brother is all right.

  “Yes, I can.” The giant man smiled at him. “He has quite the hangover, but he is all right.”

  “Well, he had a reason to drink last night.” Liam colored and a rush of shame went through him. He never should have left Cameron alone.

  “I think you will give him another one when you meet again though this time the drinking will be in celebration.” Thor clapped his shoulder.

  “The other Valkyries have opened a portal to Valhalla in the local camping area,” Heimdall said, his silver eyes narrowing as he stared into the void again. “You should be able to get to them.”

  “How? I don’t remember how I got here let alone — wait …” Liam had seen something glow at the very edge of where the crystalline walkway ended. It appeared not to end for a moment.

  “The Bifrost is here,” Heimdall said. “It is waiting for you.”

  Waiting for me to step into the void, he means.

  For Liam suddenly realized what he must do. He must step off the edge of the walkway. Either the Bifrost would be there or he would be plunge down into the water and be swept who knew where.

  I have wings. I can fly, he reminded himself.

  He turned towards Thor for one last time. “I will return, Thor. I will free you. We will fight the Gash together.”

  “I will be watching over you, Liam Blake,” Thor said with solemnity.

  Liam smiled, then he turned back to the end of the walkway and stepped into the void.

  CHAPTER EIGHT: HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF

  Heat beat down on Sheriff Mary Blake’s back as she crouched over the body of the dead child. A dead, violated child. The child was a boy about eleven years old. He had dark sandy hair and, though it was hard to tell with the cataracts of death clouding them, blue eyes. There was a smattering of freckles across the bridge of his nose and cheeks. There was a gap between his two front teeth. He would never get the braces that would have straightened them and brought them together.

  The boy’s naked body was displayed not simply dumped. Arms and legs were spread wide apart rather like the Vitruvian Man, only he was not a man, but a child. The boy’s skin was pale as milk, bloodless, and scored with hundreds of cuts. Mary was looking at those cuts and not at the boy’s parted lips or sightless eyes. She was letting her eyes go unfocused and seeing without focusing. She knew that there was a pattern there. She just didn’t know what it was yet. That was why she hadn’t allowed the medical examiner to take the body yet and why the rest of the crime scene unit was standing back. She needed to see the body in situ. Pictures – though there would likely be dozens taken at every angle and of every scrap of evidence – would not be as ideal as the actual body was. So there she sat on her haunches with the sun beating down on them both.

  Though she would never tell anyone this, if she let herself almost zone out, she would see things that would help her solve cases. This “seeing” often meant that important clues would sparkle in the corner of her eye. Sometimes she would see things not actually there. Like visions of tattoos or personal objects that would help to identify the killer. She let herself zone out now, hoping that something would become clear to her.

  She let the sounds of the investigation around her fade out. Instead, she focused on the hissing sound of the wind through the sand. She took in a deep breath. There was the sweet nauseating scent of decay mixed with the raw, earthy scent of feces that the boy had expelled after his throat had been slit. Blood pooled around his head in a dark halo. The blood had soaked into the sand, turning the golden particles black now. The copper scent of the blood was sharp.

  What are you trying to say? What message are you leaving me to read?

  Mary was certain that the killer had left a message and it was meant for her. This was a copycat murder. Someone was trying to take up the mantle of the Desert Killer. She had lost both her sons to him. Her brave and magnificent Liam had died fighting him. Her visionary and artistic Cameron had left her by pieces in the years afterward. Whoever would take this much time to learn the Desert Killer’s modus operandi would surely know his victims backwards and forwards, too. He would know that she would be there when this corpse was found. So she looked for what he had left her.

  The crisscrossing cuts suddenly seemed to form a word: Aesir. Startled by the unexpectedness of it, she was brought out of her near trance and blinked rapidly. The word was lost to her in smears of blood and cut flesh. But the word was burned in her mind. Aesir seemed to haunt both her and her husband’s families. The old Nordic gods seemed ever-present in their lives even though she didn’t believe in them.

  But did the killer know our families’ connections to them? Did he know about the madness and death that stalk us on Valkyrie’s wings?

  She licked her lips, tasting salt from sweat and feeling the grit of sand clinging to them. This message was personal, too personal. Not even Freddie, the original Desert Killer, had known the connection between the Aesir and her family’s history of madness. Centering herself, Mary settled down once more. She knew that there were other words to find. She fell back into the trance easily and another word appeared: Ragnarock.

  These first two words, Aesir and Ragnarock, were carved into the boy’s slender torso. They were nearly obscured with blood and the tearing of the skin. The killer had been angry when he had made the cuts. Her unfocused gaze found other words wound around the boy’s side: Thor, Loki, Odin. These names made sense as they connected with the first two. The killer was namin
g at least some of the Aesir. Perhaps when the body was turned over Baldur, Tyr, Heimdall, Frigg, Idun and Bragi’s names would be there. But when her gaze scanned down to the boy’s slender thighs and she was standing up, her hand going to her gun.

  Liam.

  Cameron.

  No …

  She rested her hand on the butt of her weapon. Her breathing was unsteady. Her fingers played with the button on the holster that would release the weapon, but she did not undo it. She was touching it to calm herself, to remind herself that she had a gun and would use it if anyone came for her family. She had lost her husband. She had lost her oldest son. She had only Cameron left. The rest of her family was mad or gone or both.

  The back of her neck prickled and she jerked her head towards the vast and seemingly endless desert behind her. The boy had been placed at the edge of the highway so that he would be found, but Mary was certain that he had been tortured and raped somewhere out in the desert and brought here for the final slash across his throat. She sensed the killer out there. Watching her. She took off her mirrored sunglasses and scanned the horizon. Nothing. No one. But she knew he was there somewhere.

  “Sheriff?” Deputy Juan Munoz’s voice was quiet, but he knew that she would hear him. She always did no matter how softly he spoke, which was a joke around the office, her and her super-hearing. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. Everything,” she amended and turned to face the man that had worked by her side for over a decade.

  His skin was the color of bronze. He had dark brown eyes and rather delicate arched eyebrows. It made him almost pretty despite him having a strong jaw and crooked nose from having it broken when he was a teenager and not getting it properly set. He stood only five-foot six, but was all muscle.

  “Well?” he asked.

  “The Vitruvian Man. Doesn’t it look like that to you?”

  “Yep. And the cuts. The first one had cuts, too,” Munoz pointed out.

  Jack Welliger had been the Desert Killer’s first victim. Munoz was right that he had been scored with hash marks almost as if he were a piece of meat about to be roasted over the fire. Her stomach did a nauseating flip.

  “I’m sure we’ll find that he was raped,” she said, her voice calm though that was not how she felt.

  Munoz nodded and said nothing for a time. Then he shifted his weight from foot to foot and said, “I was always expecting this.”

  “I thought it would be sooner,” she agreed.

  Both of them believed that there would be a copycat eventually. The Desert Killer got a ton of press and some sick individual was bound to take it into their head to try and follow in his footsteps. The media had created the hype, making the serial killer cool with all their breathless coverage.

  If they had known the real Freddie that would have killed their plans. No one could be less cool than he was.

  She had never guessed that Freddie could be the Desert Killer. He was a strange loner, but he had always seemed too scared of his own shadow to even go after boys older than ten. She had been wrong. Even beyond Cameron’s testimony about what Freddie had said and tried to do, they also found plenty of evidence at the abandoned ranch that confirmed his identity as the Desert Killer.

  I misjudged him. Who am I misjudging this time? Who appears innocent, but isn’t?

  Murders like these should leave a mark on the person. A large bloody red X that nothing should be able to wipe away. But the only ones that were marked were the victims.

  She looked down at the bloody body. She knew that the Medical Examiner, Dr. Eva Green, would only see the words carved into the skin once she had washed the body down. She turned her head and saw the dark-haired doctor making her way towards them from the large van. Should she tell Green now about the words or wait to speak until the good doctor had discovered them herself? While she told no one about the “seeing” both Green and Munoz seemed to know something about it though they never directly said anything. It didn’t pay to be “imaginative” as a sheriff.

  “Do you see anything, Sheriff?” Munoz asked, knowing she had.

  She made a determination. She would say something now. It was too dangerous to hold anything back. “Yes. My sons’ names are carved into the boy’s thighs.”

  Munoz let out a few whispered curse words some in English and others in Spanish as he leaned over and studied the torn flesh. He grunted and she knew he saw them. When he straightened up, he said, “Fucking bastard.”

  He didn’t question how she could make out the words through the dried blood. He accepted that what she was telling him was the truth. She needed that faith right now as her mind was racing back to times when she had failed. She had not been able to protect her own children from the Desert Killer. She had only vaguely considered that they would be at risk, if at all. She had done this because Cameron was always with Liam and Liam would die – had died – before anyone could get to Cameron.

  She thought of Cameron now. How could she not with her son’s name cut into a dead boy’s flesh? She took in deep steadying breaths even as her hand stayed on the butt of her gun. Her son was no longer ten. He was a grown man. He could protect himself unlike this slip of a boy.

  Liam was a grown man, too. Twice Cameron’s size. That did him no good at all.

  She had to tell Cameron about this and she hated that fact. She hated that this ugliness was going to touch him again unless she kept him safe. She wondered if she could convince him to actually move back in with her until they caught this killer. The bar was so isolated, out on the highway. But she already knew that Cameron would say no.

  I’ve got to get him a gun.

  She had tried that before as well, but Cameron refused to carry a pistol. He claimed that there was no need. And, from what she knew of Cameron, he was able to defuse the most tension-filled situations with guys who were drunk or on drugs. A gun, he had explained to her, would more likely be grabbed by someone other than him and used by them to harm someone. But a killer like this – a serial killer who had written her son’s name in another boy’s flesh – was different. He couldn’t be reasoned with, couldn’t be talked down. No, her son needed to shoot first and ask questions later.

  “Are you going to bring Cameron in? For protection?” Munoz asked.

  He had a soft spot for Cameron stretching back to when Cameron was only three. He would think of Cameron’s safety.

  “I don’t think he would come,” she answered honestly.

  “Maybe we have a unit sit out at Fenrir,” he offered.

  She let out a mirthless laugh. “I’m sure that Sigurd would just love that. We’d be chasing all his disreputable customers away, which are his only customers.”

  Munoz snorted. “Well, some things are more important than bar flies. Cameron is worth way more.”

  He was. He was worth so much. Could she keep him safe? She hadn’t managed to protect him before.

  “We have to shut this down, Munoz,” she said after long silent moments. She would protect her last remaining son and all the other children of Holten. The Desert Killer had been killing kids at a rate of one every two weeks at the end. She wouldn’t have that happen in her town again.

  He nodded. “Are you done looking at the scene, Sheriff? Or do you need some more time?”

  Mary swept her gaze, unfocused, over the surrounding desert. Nothing sparkled. The killer had left no clues behind except the words this time and whatever hair, fiber, fingerprint or DNA evidence was on the body. She doubted that the killer would be so “generous” as to leave them such obvious clues as to his identity, but she could hope. Other than crimes of passion, killers of this kind often started off meticulously. They planned obsessively. They took few chances. But then they got sloppier with each kill as if they wanted to be caught before they spiraled ever further away from their humanity.

  “No, tell Dr. Green that the scene is hers,” Mary said.

  Munoz nodded and walked towards the medical examiner. Mary stared out at the desert
with her hands on her hips.

  You won’t hurt my son. You won’t do this to my town. Not again. I will find you. I will bring you to justice. I swear it, she promised the unknown killer.

  Then she, too, left the scene and headed back to town in her squad car. She would call Cameron when she reached the station. She couldn’t talk to him about this while driving. Ideally, this should be done face to face, but Cameron always seemed to be too busy to see her and Sigurd, Fenrir’s owner, always covered for him.

  When she pulled into the parking lot, her heart rate sped up for a moment as a familiar figure appeared on the street. Cameron. He was here. Could he know about the murder? Had news of a copycat of the Desert Killer already reached her son’s ears?

  Her eyes scanned her son’s lithe form to see how healthy he was. He was wearing dark sunglasses, but the telltale signs of a headache were present in his furrowed brow.

  Hungover, she thought dryly.

  She hated the fact that he worked at Fenrir and was – in her very strong opinion – wasting his talent and life playing bartender. She had looked into the bar owner’s background with a fine tooth comb, but had found nothing untoward. Yet whenever she was in Sigurd’s presence all her cop instincts flared to life. He was not who he seemed. He was dangerous. But she had nothing factual to show Cameron in order to convince him to leave there. She told herself that the negativity that she felt against Sigurd was not because he had taken Cameron physically away from her, giving him a job and a place to stay outside of his home with her.

  Is he here to see me for some other purpose than the death?

  She doubted that. They hardly spoke these days and he never sought her out voluntarily yet there he was. He actually perked up when he saw her vehicle and started striding over. He was wearing faded blue jeans and a ripped pale yellow t-shirt, but there wasn’t a woman – and quite a few men – who didn’t turn their heads to watch him walk by. Cameron was beautiful and radiated an energy that, unless he reined it in, drew people to him like moths to a flame.