by B. C. James
Her feet hit the ground running. She stumbled awkwardly for the first few steps as she regained her balance from the hard landing. Soon she was running fast, her bare feet pounding against the cement. Freya wasn’t running to anywhere in particular. She would sort out her destination as soon as she managed to put, what she hoped, was a safe distance between herself and whatever that thing was. She cursed Warren for booking a hotel in one of the seedier areas of the city. There didn’t seem to be anyone on the street besides homeless people, drug dealers and the type of urban entrepreneur who would see a beautiful woman running by in her underwear as a business opportunity.
After about two miles, Freya stopped to rest. She leaned over, hands on her knees and breathing heavily like a winded runner after a 100-yard dash. Her head hung low as she filled her lungs over and over again. Sweat poured from her face like a bucket of water had just been emptied over the back of her head. Her lacerated hand was firmly planted on her knee and the blood from the palm began to roll in beads down her shin and calf. Her green eyes searched the streets for telltale wisps of fog. There was no sign. The sewer grates spewed mist into the cold November air, but these lacked the blue shimmer that accompanied her hunter. For the moment, Freya seemingly had lost him.
Her eyes searched for some familiar landmark or street sign. She wasn’t even sure what direction she had been running, so it was important to get her bearings. She stood next to a chain-link fence, behind which there were a number of ramps and half-pipes. A weathered sign hung cockeyed on the fence that read Manhattan Welcomes the X Games. Freya knew this spot; it was the Riverside Skate Park. During the summer months, this place would be filled with skaters. There would be guys in their early twenties performing acrobatics on roller blades and skateboards from one end of the park to the other.
The season for extreme sports had passed over a month ago. At 10:30 pm on a cold November night this place was deserted. The goddess wrapped her arms around herself and began to walk. She hoped she wasn’t far from a main street where she could flag down a cab.
108th Street ended at the skate park and a little farther up the road would be a section of town that had a number of restaurants. The glow from the storefront lights a couple of miles away were visible in the distance. If she could get there it should be fairly easy for a well-built woman in nothing but green lace lingerie to flag down a cab. It was pretty obvious that she didn’t have a purse or a wallet on her. But Freya was certain she could work something out with the cabby that would get her home and still leave him feeling like he had been paid in full.
For a moment she hesitated, thinking maybe she should take a quick glance over her shoulder, but then, kept right on walking. There was someone behind her. Freya didn’t need to look.
She knew she was being followed. She could always feel when someone’s eyes were upon her. She stopped, picked some of the paint chips out of the gash in her hand and took a quick peek out of the corner of her eye. Someone was hiding in the shadow of a tree about thirty feet away. Thankfully, there was no fog. The faint outline she could see showed that he was of average height. The figure in shadow behind her was definitely human.
Freya turned and began to walk fast again. This time she walked as if she were on a runway, allowing her hips to sway and keeping the muscles under her skivvies held tightly. Her intention was to draw whatever guy it was skulking in the shadows close to her. Her movements were alluring and the effect was not lost on her pursuer. The goddess could feel him moving ever closer to her. At first his footsteps were stealthy, but now they were clumsy and loud. There was a faint scent of musk in the air. Her senses were far more acute then any mortal’s and she could smell the familiar aroma of male arousal. He was much closer to her now, maybe ten feet away.
Freya quickly turned toward him and assaulted the stranger with reckless abandon. Before he knew it, his back was against the pavement and Freya was straddling his prone body, her long nails digging into his throat. Just before ripping his larynx out, she was stopped in her tracks by the feeling of cold steel at her breast. She looked at the knife that was pressed against her chest and the dark, gloved hand that held it. Freya’s nails were at his throat; his knife was pointed at her heart. It was a standoff.
“I suggest you let go of my throat, dear sister, lest I ruin those perfect breasts of yours. Of course, if I do open you up, perhaps we will finally know whether or not a heart beats beneath your frigid exterior.”
There was sarcasm and bitterness in his tone. Although she had not heard this voice in ages, she knew immediately it was her brother, Frey.
Frey and Freya joined the Aesir several millenniums ago. They were goodwill ambassadors for their people, the Vanir, who had just ended a war with Odin and the Aesir. Back than the Aesir believed their matching names were cute, Frey and Freya. It seemed less adorable when they caught the siblings engaged in sexual intercourse with each other. The Aesir frowned on this. It wasn’t that they had any strong feelings about incest but rather because every male god among them wanted Freya for himself. They had no intention of competing with her brother for a place in her bed.
In truth, her incestuous act with Frey was the result of a morphine elixir he had slipped into her drink. He had always lusted after his sister and wanted her. Eventually his desire manifested itself as a drug-induced rape. Things had never been the same between them since that defilement.
Clumsily they got to their feet. Freya took a couple steps back to ensure she was out of slashing range of his knife. Frey stood up. His body was positioned over a sewer grate just below his feet. The steam that billowed up encircled him.
The sight of her brother in a long black trench coat shrouded by white fog was a bit too close to the image of the creature that had attacked her in the hotel room. A look of fear crossed over her face. The fright in her eyes was not lost on him.
Frey moved further into the steam and knew instinctively that he had intimidated her. This was an advantage he had no intention of losing.
Freya crossed her arms over her breasts and looked nervously at the ground in an obvious attempt to avoid looking directly at him.
“What do you want Frey? I’m sure you didn’t track me down just to poke at me with a knife. “
She was fairly certain he had gone looking for her so that he could poke her with something else besides a metal blade. It had been a long time since he drugged her drink and then raped her. She expected he would show up again someday.
Frey grinned smugly at her from behind the haze.
“I’m here to take you back to Odin. His servant, Simmons sent me after you. I understand you have been ignoring his letters and calls. You could have come in willingly, like just about everyone else the big man contacted, but nooooooooo, you had to do it the hard way. You and that cement-head, Thor, are the only holdouts. Odin and Simmons are both pretty upset with you. I won’t even tell you what I get as a reward for delivering you safely to him, but believe me, this isn’t the only time you are going to doing something the hard way tonight.”
“Yes Frey, I get it, very clever using the sexual double entendre. Your reward for bringing me to Odin is you get to rape me again. So what drug are you going to use this time? Cocaine? Fentanyl? Pez? Or are you just going to get me drunk and try to arouse me by talking about yourself for a few hours? That seems about your style. Ha, I’d sleep with you just to shut you up. The only thing worse than sex with you is listening to you drone on and on about yourself. Hey, here’s a story I’ll bet you don’t tell anyone. I wonder how Odin and the rest of the guys would feel if they knew that Frey, the God of Male Fertility actually had a penis the size of a Gummy Bear?”
Frey was annoyed and insulted but he kept his cool.
“Your words are weak, little goddess, but I can assure you that by morning you will be screaming my name in ecstasy.”
Frey kept right on talking as Freya continued to look at the ground. She was too mentally and physically exhausted to listen. She would si
mply go with him and figure a way out of this mess later. No matter what Frey said or thinks he was promised, there is no way Odin would allow him to have her. Odin had wanted her for as long as anyone could remember, and he was the one god who she never gave into. Odin would allow not Frey back into her bed until he himself had been there. Perhaps she could play one against the other, like in the old days.
As plans were formulating in her head a steady stream of grey fog rose from the sewer grate under Frey’s feet. It took a moment to register in her brain, but a bluish color was starting to mix in with the grey. The blue steam broke away from the grey and began to swirl in circles around her brother’s leg. Soon he was completely enveloped in the glowing blue fog. She could hear him laughing at her as the mist swirled around his body. She could feel the cold paralyzing fear taking over her body again. Frey was still laughing when she saw a long smooth blade burst out from his chest. The look on Frey’s face was one of utter shock and pain. A dark, towering figure formed in the fog behind her brother, but all Freya could see clearly was Frey and the blade that had skewered him.
The shadow lifted its hooded face to the sky and let go with a low moan. The blade that had impaled her brother was now raised high towards the sky with Frey still impaled to the hilt. He limply struggled, kicking the air around him in a desperate attempt to free himself from the sword. Frey’s body was high off the ground as he screamed in concert with the creature’s groan.
Then the shadow became still and quiet, like it was waiting for something. Frey shrieked and writhed in agony while Freya watched a claw like hand emerged from fog. The tattered sleeve of a heavy black cloak hung from the leathery arm. The long, thin, and pointed fingers gave the arm the gnarled appearance of a twisted branch from a dead tree. The fingers wrapped around Frey’s thigh while the other hand released its grip on the sword and let his torso fall into its grasp. With a high pitched shriek, it pulled its arms wide apart, ripping her brother in half at the waist.
The shadowy demon held the body just inches from Freya, taunting her. Frey’s skin was growing more and pale as the blood spilled from his torn torso to the ground, his dead eyes rolling back into his head.
She felt the agony of his death forced into her brain by this creature and experienced the horror of being torn in half without it actually happening to her. Freya had no idea what this thing was or why it was after her, but she could take no more. Her knees buckled and she collapsed into a puddle of her own brother’s blood. In her last conscious moments, she could hear the high-pitched wail of sirens and intense gunfire. She felt hands…warm human hands, gently lifting her on to a stretcher and covering her with a blanket. Then she passed out completely.
Chapter 12
John Keller dropped the clip out of his Sig Sauer P229. He reflexively looked into the empty container that once held a dozen forty-millimeter cartridges. Glancing back over the open door of his squad car, he could see the trail of his bullets through the fog. The paths stretched out like veins through the mist and led right into the head and chest of the dark form that stood surrounded by the dense mist.
“What the hell is it going to take?” John muttered to himself in frustration. He slumped back against the inside of the open door. Using his car door as cover was something done more out of habit then necessity. The thing he was firing at wasn’t firing back. That didn’t mean it still wasn’t dangerous.
As John pressed bullets into one of the empty clips, he could hear a deep hiss in the background followed by the high-pitched scream of one of his fellow officers. The fog must have enveloped a second police car. The terrified shriek was cut short by the sound of a damp snap. It was like the noise of a sapling being broken in two. John’s hands began to shake and fumble with the shells as he continued to load the clip. Silently he cursed himself for not having been more prepared but in his six years as an officer he never needed more than three loaded clips, and never in his wildest nightmares had he imagined he would be dealing with something like this.
When the call first came in he thought it was a hoax. The original reports ranged from rape, to murder, to alien abductions, to an assault on the city by Sasquatch. By the time he arrived on the scene an EMS unit was taking some girl away on a stretcher and at least seven cars were present.
Police, along with a few civilians, were firing into the fog trying to take down whatever it was that floated and bobbed inside the haze. John had joined the fray and quickly emptied every clip he had into the dark shape.
After long, nervous moments John’s thumb finally pushed the twelfth slug into place. He only took the time to load one clip. Considering how badly his hands were shaking, even that took him longer than usual. John took three or four fast, deep breaths as he psyched himself up. Fellow police officer and friend, Randy Curtis, was repeating the same “fire-reload-shoot” scenario of futility in the car next to him. It took all the strength he had not to drop his gun and yell, “Kill Randy, nobody will miss him!” as a diversion so he could run away and save his own skin. This level of fear was new to him. Even during his time in the military, he had never panicked in combat before. It felt as if the fog itself was messing with his mind and emotions.
A few good shakes of his head jump-started his courage and he turned to, once again, fire at the creature from behind the door of the police cruiser.
After two quick shots he noticed that the fog had covered his car. The nose of his Dodge Charger was barely visible from behind the door. A dark shape formed in front of him.
John didn’t waste any time and emptied the rest of the clip into the creature to no effect. Even after the ammunition had run out, he vainly squeezed the trigger again and again. He heard the sound of steel sliding against wood. After seeing movies such as Braveheart and Highlander, John was familiar with the sound. It was the hiss of a sword being drawn from its scabbard. He looked up and saw the glint of metal just before the blade pierced his chest.
There was a faint spark as the tip of the steel struck the police badge worn over his heart. The force of the downward thrust drove the weapon all the way through the policeman’s body. John shuddered uncontrollably. Even as he was dying his hands groped wildly for anything he could use as a weapon. On the ground, among the empty shell casings and clips were canisters of tear gas. Instinctively he grabbed the canister and with his last ounce of strength pulled the pin. John then slumped lifelessly to the ground.
The gas burst out of the container like a small bomb, spewing an acidic cloud of chlorobenzylidene malononitrile. The tear gas began to mingle with the fog around it. As it diffused and became part of the mist that surrounded the dark figure, the creature began to howl in pain.
Every window for an entire city block exploded as the deafening wail from the monster filled the air.
For a moment, light pulsated from inside the fog and then it was gone. Both the mist and being within it had disappeared. The remaining police officers slowly, cautiously converged on the spot where the black figure once stood. Now there was nothing. The lieutenant on the scene ordered that all witnesses and reporters be detained so that an official explanation could be dictated to them. The police felt that the less the general public knew about this, the better off everyone was.
Freya was taken to the hospital and treated for her injuries. Two police officers were placed outside her room for security reasons. For two days a steady stream of officers had come to see her and ask questions about what had happened. At first the detectives who were assigned to the case visited her. They asked her some questions, took a few pictures of her, and then handed her their cards…along with their home numbers, cell phone numbers and the hours she could call when their wives were not home. After these guys left and her picture started to circulate around the precincts, she was visited by detectives who were not assigned to her case, various street cops, three mechanics from the motor pool, and some guy named Norm who worked as a temp in the mailroom. Her hospital room was filled with flowers and littered with little
slips of paper that had the phone numbers of several officers and other law enforcement personnel written on them.
In the spirit of putting police back into community service and to pacify the hospital’s complaints about parking, the precinct Captain had to do something. He declared her room off limits and assigned female detective Leslie Wallace to the case.
Freya feigned ignorance about the whole incident. She claimed she was just an innocent bystander who was in the wrong place at the wrong time…in her underwear…when a supernatural event happened to take place.
Detective Wallace seemed placated by this explanation. After writing down the information, she then produced two Cirque du Soleil tickets and offered to give Freya a sponge bath.
Once she had the room to herself, Freya sat and wondered what she was going to do now. There was only one fact she was certain of: the creature was after her, specifically. This meant it would probably come back; therefore, going home was not an option. She was not really sure how it had found her in the first place, but the best assumption was that it had been following her. With this paranoid little possibility in mind, her departure from the hospital would have to be done quietly, and alone.
Freya grabbed a hairbrush from the nightstand and started to methodically pull it through her amber tresses. Thoughts seem to come more easily while she was brushing her hair. In the end, the only thing that made sense was to submit to Odin and place herself under his protection…among other things.
If someone had asked her three days ago about her feelings on joining Odin and participating in his obsession with the apocalypse, she would have happily told them she would rather die. Now that death seemed to be a viable option, Odin wasn’t looking too bad.