The Fire Duke

by Joel Rosenberg

  The taller boy took a moment before answering. “Sure. I mean, I guess so. If I wouldn’t be in the way, sir.”

  “You understand we’ll be violating the law? I doubt there’s danger of arrest or embarrassment, but there will be no shame in declining.”

  The girl frowned, as though she had expected to be invited. That was hardly her place, although one couldn’t expect a Twentieth Century American Woman to understand that.

  But it was not Thorian’s place to explain it to her. Leave that to his son.

  Ian smiled. “I haven’t noticed a lot of people being picky about details about the law, not around here. I guess, uh, getting along is more important than the technicalities.”

  Well, it hardly surprised Thorian that Torrie would choose smart friends. He was a good son, and would choose wisely—this Ian had a good wrist, and a good head on his shoulders, it appeared.

  “We’ll go get the gear and the pickup ready; meet us outside in ten minutes,” Thorian said.

  He walked downstairs to the loading bench, and took two boxes of ammunition from the locked cabinet above it. He pulled open the boxes and looked at the long, slim rounds: .30-06 rifle rounds.

  Strange: by local standards, the age made the cartridge a venerable weapon. Thorian had once had practice with swords older than that.

  Hand loading of ammunition had become a hobby of his; it had been one of many things that he had learned from old Tom Roelke.

  He wouldn’t have admitted it, not even to Orfindel, but Thorian missed them, almost as much as he missed his homeland. But Tom and Eva were living well down in a retirement village near San Diego now, courtesy of the Thorsen gold. Thorian didn’t begrudge one penny of it, not to the man and woman who had taken in him and Orfindel, knowing nothing about them save that they needed help. By Odin’s Eye, back then Thorian couldn’t speak the language, not any of them; Orfindel’s Gift of Tongues wasn’t bestowable here.

  He eyed the silver tips. Yes, it was almost certain that they were faced with wolves, not Sons. But a wolf could fall to a silver bullet every bit as easily.

  He thought for a moment about leaving Karin a note, but he had never gotten terribly good at writing, and, besides, she knew him well enough to know that he would be back. This was hardly the first time he had slipped off into the night; it would not be the last.

  The others were waiting upstairs.

  “We’ll be late,” Torrie said to the girl. “You’d best not wait up.”

  Maggie Christensen heard the quiet padding of feet behind her as she was pouring herself another cup of coffee. And fuming, albeit quietly.

  Not wait up, eh? Well, if that was the way he was going to be, she would be waiting up.

  It had always been that way, going as far back as she could remember.

  She had Daddy to thank for it, probably. It was a family legend that back when she was about four—back when they still called her Maryanne—she had been riding in a car with her Aunt Maggie, Mom’s sister, who was living with them at the time, and had announced, “I want to be an Aunt Maggie when I grow up.”

  Aunt Maggie had laughed and explained that first she would have to persuade her mother and father to have another kid, and then persuade the kid to grow up and have children, but even then she would be an Aunt Maryanne, not an Aunt Maggie.

  “My Daddy,” she had said, with a decided sniff, “says that when I grow up, I can be whatever I want,” and from that day on, she insisted that everybody call her Maggie.

  Scores of teachers had forgotten, only to be repeatedly reminded until they gave it up; and occasionally, on the playgrounds, boys would call out her other name, but she pretended never to hear it. Of course, that all had changed in ninth grade, when overnight—at least so she remembered—her braces came off, her skin cleared up, and her breasts and hips spunged out into woman-shape instead of girl-shape, and jeers had turned into stutters and leers.

  All that was fine with her.

  Maggie didn’t want much. All she ever wanted was to have everything her way, but her way didn’t mean “without effort.” She didn’t mind putting in work, and it didn’t much matter to her what was the cost of getting what she wanted, even if that meant dating that geeky English professor who hated giving out As, because another B would bring her average down to 3.5; or going to half a dozen stores to find exactly the right shade of red to bring out the highlights in her hair without making it look dyed; or spending a few dozen hours in the gym with the other fencing club novices when it was clear that was the way to get between Torrie and his then-girlfriend; or spending hundreds more hours in the gym not because of Torrie, or even because she found that she was good at it, but because—to her surprise—she found that she liked it.

  “Hel-lo,” she heard from behind her. “I see you’re up late.”

  She turned, completely unsurprised that Karin Thorsen was dressed in a shorty robe that clearly came from Victoria‘s Secret, with a lacy black teddy peeking through underneath. Granted, she was in good shape for a woman her age, but really.

  “I hope I didn’t wake you,” Maggie said.

  Karin shook her head, clearing a fringe of golden hair—it was golden, dammit, and not just blonde—from her eyes. “No,” she said with a smile, “it’s a family joke that I wake up when I want to.” Her smile grew distant and perhaps a bit pensive. “Thorian used to have to wake me when I was breastfeeding Torrie,” she said. “Even a crying baby didn’t.” She looked at Maggie for a moment, then shook her head, dismissing whatever private thought had run through her brain. “But sometimes I wake on my own. It seems that Thorian and Hosea are gone, and Torrie isn’t in his—and Torrie’s with them.”

  And maybe Torrie’s bed hasn’t been messed up at all. And maybe you were wondering if your baby boy was warming mine, eh? she thought.

  “Ian’s with them, too. Down at the bar—”

  “The Dine-a-mite?”

  “Yes. Jeff Burke—”

  “Bjerke.”

  “Yes, he said something about a wolf killing some chickens or something, and about how convenient it would be if something were to happen to it. ‘Who will rid me of this turbulent wolf?’ ” she said, more to see if Karin would recognize the quotation than anything else.

  “Jeff would make a good king.” Karin grinned. “And Torrie came home and woke Hosea, who woke Thorian, who immediately had to hare off to see what he could do, middle of the night or not, eh?”

  Maggie couldn’t help grinning along with her. “Something like that.” She lifted the coffeepot. “Can I offer you a cup of your own coffee?”

  Karin thought about it for a moment. “Please. But if we’re going to wait up for the men, I’m going to go up and change into something a bit more suitable for sitting around and talking.”

  And which doesn’t leave you feeling half-naked in front of another woman, eh?

  Karin turned and left, less of a sway to her behind than usual.

  Maggie smiled.

  It didn’t take Maggie long to find the cream—well, a half-used pint of half-and-half, which passed the sniff test that she wouldn’t have used in front of Karin—but the sugar was harder to locate. The crystal sugar bowl with the glasses was empty, and by the time she found the right cabinet, unsealed the large plastic container, and—dipping a fingertip in it and to her tongue to be sure that it wasn’t some huge quantity of salt—poured it in the sugar bowl and was going for a spoon, Karin was back, now wearing a loose set of black and yellow silk pajamas that would have looked unisex or sexless if they weren’t belted tightly at the waist with a silken cord that didn’t quite match the yellow.

  She accepted the cup from Maggie, and sat down at the table, idly doodling on the table with a short-bitten fingernail. “Torrie doesn’t talk much about school when he’s home.”

  “Or about home when he’s at school.” Maggie sat down across from her. “He just drops a few hints every now and then.”

  “He’s like that.” Karin grinned. �
�Part of being the stoic Norski, I guess. I was wondering how long the two of you—”

  Glass shattered in the living room, and the floor pounded to what sounded like dozens of footsteps, accompanied by a horrid chorus of snarls.

  Maggie was frozen in surprise and fear, but Karin Thorsen had already leaped up from the table. Moving like a dancer, like she had practiced every step not just for efficiency but for grace, she took two quick steps toward the sink, then she reached up with her left hand and pulled a large butcher knife down from the rack over the counter, while with her right hand she seemed to fondle and then slap the cupboard over the sink. The side of the cupboard swung out on concealed hinges, revealing a stainless steel revolver suspended on a trio of pegs; Karin immediately snatched down the revolver.

  She started her turn, but an obscene hairy shape leaped through the kitchen doorway and knocked her back.

  She brought the gun down and fired.

  The distant pistol shot brought Arnie Selmo out of the first sound sleep he’d had in a week.

  After forty-two years married to the same woman, sleeping in the same bed, it was taking more than one year, six months, and two days to get used to sleeping alone, to doing everything alone.

  Going to the grocery store was hard. When Ephie was alive, it hadn’t bothered Arnie to shop; he had always liked going into Grand Forks with her every couple of weeks to stock up. But now shopping for one was no fun at all.

  Nobody to banter with about the silly new products they kept introducing, as though somebody really needed some pill to turn the water in the toilet blue, or aloe—whatever that was—put into cloths to clean a baby’s bottom. Nobody to sigh over how much a rib roast cost and to settle for a chuck, or, every once in a while, to say, “Ah, you only live once” and go for the rib.

  Shopping was bad, and cleaning was bad—every dust bunny a reminder of Ephie—but sleeping was the worst. It would be so easy to help it along with a few pulls on the bottle of Four Roses he had always kept by his bed, but no: Arnie Selmo would take one nightcap, as he always had, but by God he would not drink himself drunk in Ephie’s bed.

  His dreams were the worst. It was the same dream every night: Ephie lay sleeping next to him, resting comfortably, not wracked in the pain that had turned her last days into the hell on earth that Arnie and Doc Sherve had finally helped her end. Each morning, Arnie would wake, still half in dream, and look at the open bathroom door and watch the sunlight splash onto the ancient six-sided tiles, and wait for Ephie to step out in that ancient, fuzzy blue bathrobe of hers—only to realize that it was the dream, again, and that he had survived to yet another morning without her.

  So it was with something almost like glee that he came awake in the dark.

  Another shot echoed through the night, accompanied by a scream.

  There was a city-folk thing that Arnie had heard about. He wasn’t really sure he believed it, but he’d heard that there some mugger stabbed a woman to death on a public street, with hundreds of folk hearing her screams, and that none of them did nothing about it. He’d heard that it had taken the killer more than ten minutes to do it, and nobody had done nothing. Had to be bullshit, but that was the story.

  Half-awake, Arnie was already on his way to the gun case in the living room; he pulled his shotgun down with one hand while the other reached for a box of shells. Guns do not go off in the middle of the night, not without a reason. Screams do not echo in the night, not without a reason.

  It was good to have a reason to do something.

  He shoved his feet into his boots, not bothering with socks, and quickly set the shotgun and shells down so that he could tie the laces—he would do nobody any good tripping in the dark—then grabbed up the gun and shells, shrugged into a long coat.

  He dashed out into the night, not bothering to close his door behind him.

  Another shot—sounded like it was coming from the Thorsen place, and while they were certainly a strange enough family, they weren’t the sort to be firing off guns in the middle of the night.

  Across the street, the lights were on in Davy Hansen’s place, and his door was swinging open. Davy’s skinny chest was bare in the cold night air; he was wearing only jeans and work boots, as though this all had caught him on his way to bed.

  Davy limped toward Arnie—he had left his right foot and most of that leg below the knee in a rice paddy in Vietnam—his rifle held muzzle-high in his hands, and it took Arnie a moment to realize why it made him envious. Davy was carrying an AR15, the civilian version of the rifle Davy had taken to war. Arnie’s hands itched for the stock of his old Garand, and the shotgun couldn’t cure the itch.

  “Where?” Davy shouted.

  “Thorsen’s,” Arnie said, breaking into a staggered trot that wouldn’t keep him far ahead of the younger man, not for long, but which did let him stuff shells into the shotgun’s tube.

  The Thorsen place had been built on the very edge of town, into a thick windbreak; that left it screened on three sides, including the town side. A dirt path led behind the Bjornsens’, through the woods, breaking on the chest-high rough grasses that fringed the mowed lawn.

  The grasses whipped at his hands and eyes, but Arnie pushed through—there were shouts and screams ahead.

  And snarls.

  He broke through the grass and stopped dead in his tracks.

  In the doorway, Karin Thorsen, dressed in badly torn yellow and black pajamas, a long, bloody knife in her hand, was struggling with the largest wolf Arnie had ever seen, while three or four almost as large were crowding around, leaping and snarling and biting at her. A pistol lay on the porch; Arnie only noticed it when a skittering wolf’s foot kicked at it, sending it tumbling to the lawn.

  The big bay window on the porch had been smashed, and two more wolves were dragging a half-naked girl out through it, unmindful of the way the rough glass slashed at her legs. So was the girl—she had a knife in her hands, as well, and was flailing about with it, not having any more effect than Karin was.

  Arnie couldn’t fire in the direction of the women—not with a shotgun; with his old Garand he would have put a round within a palm’s breadth of where he wanted it—but there were two wolves on the left side of the porch, waiting to get into the action. He pumped a round into the chamber, raised his shotgun to his shoulder, and fired.

  It kicked hard, knocking him back, almost knocking him down.

  It took him a moment to decide that it wasn’t that he was old, but that he must have grabbed shells from the mixed box, the one where he kept odd shells from birdshot to deer slugs—this definitely was the kick of a deer slug.

  He hadn’t been aiming as closely as he would have if he’d thought he was shooting slugs, but still, the impact had bowled a wolf over. Another shot rang out, and then another, the high-pitched crack of Davy’s rifle a tenor counterpoint to the boom of Arnie’s shotgun.

  None of it made sense. Karin was under attack by three wolves, but all that was happening was that she was being forced down the porch and onto the lawn—any one of them could have bit her in half in less time than it would take to sneeze. And while her knife kept rising and falling, and while even over the shouts and shots he could hear the meaty thunk of the blade hitting flesh, and while the blood gleamed satiny black in the moonlight, none of the wolves fell back, or even whimpered out in pain.

  Arnie worked the pump and settled his sights on another wolf on the edge of the pack, and pulled, this time braced for the recoil of the deer slug.

  It slammed hard into his arthritic shoulder; he winced as he pumped it again.

  I’m getting too old for this, he thought. Jesus, let me be young again for five minutes.

  That was all he needed, then the good Lord could take him—just five minutes with the strength and eye of youth.

  Two bunches of wolves were carrying the two women away, and there was nothing he could do about it. But at least he could kill some of the wolves and make it easier for somebody else to do what was
important. Arnie wasn’t too proud for that.

  But—but he had fired twice, and Davy had fired at least another half dozen shots, but where were the dead wolves?

  Arnie knew he’d hit the first one square in the chest, but it wasn’t lying on the ground. It had gotten up, and was stalking toward him, legs stiff, jaws wide to reveal ugly teeth.

  Smoothly, he pumped the gun again and settled the sights on its chest, then squeezed the trigger gently, tenderly enough that in the back of his mind he could almost see his old drill sergeant smiling, although that had to be a false memory, because Sergeant Homer Abernathy wouldn’t have smiled at his own mother, even if the bastard had had one.

  The recoil knocked him back, harder than before, and the slug knocked the wolf down. A fifty-caliber deer slug should have broken enough bone and torn enough flesh to keep it down, but the animal slowly rose to its feet, and broke into a trot toward him.

  Somewhere over to his right another high-pitched crack told Arnie that somebody else was shooting, and there was a twin boom over to his left that said that the Larson brothers had joined the game, and that was good. Maybe they’d have better luck than he was having.

  The wolf wiggled its haunches almost comically, then, its rear feet firmly set into the ground, pushed, launching itself into the air toward Arnie, its jaws wide, ready to bite, to tear, to kill.

  There was no time to pump the shotgun again, and, besides, it wasn’t doing any good.

  To hell with it, then. Arnie dropped the shotgun to one side. One hand fumbled for a moment at where, almost half a century before, his bayonet would have hung in its scabbard, but all his fingers clutched was air.

  To hell with that, too, then. To hell with all of it.

  Corporal Arnold J. Selmo, Dog Troop, 7th Regiment, First Cavalry, drew himself up straight. A corporal in Dog Troop, 7th Regiment, First Cavalry, didn’t need a horse; the First Cavalry had gone to Korea as infantry. A corporal in Dog Troop didn’t need a rifle. A corporal in Dog Troop didn’t need a knife. All he needed was his hands, and an enemy’s throat, and by God he had hands.