Death Kissed

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  And then this wealthy couple who spent most of their days crunching numbers for one of the big banks in St. Paul would be so charmed they would never again spend tourism dollars somewhere not elf-approved.

  And thus was the way of Alfheim, and in particular, the way of the local elven aspect of the Norse god Freyr.

  Ed waved again as Bill, his truck, and the drive-train-addled Audi pulled away.

  There’d be more ice on the roads overnight. Probably another accident or two. He rubbed at his head again. Minnesotans like to talk up how good they were on ice—and they were, mostly—but come the first real storm of the season and half the state ended up with busted taillights, smashed bumpers, and whiplash.

  Ed squeezed his hands and shook out his fingers. His gloves did their job—they’d been charmed by the local Elf Queen herself—and he would never suffer frostbite or even a chilly tingle. The elves always charmed his family’s winter gear. Said it was one of the perks of being one of the handful of mundanes in town who understood magic. But mostly it seemed a bit paternalistic.

  Still, none of his kids ever got cold toes.

  They were all home today, with school called, after last night’s ordeal.

  He dialed home.

  Gabriel, his soon-to-be thirteen-year-old, answered. “Papa!” he said.

  “Just pulled the last tourist out of a ditch,” Ed said.

  Rustling echoed through the connection as Gabe grabbed his tablet. “Ready,” he said.

  “Audi A8L,” Ed said.

  “Ohhhhh….” Gabe responded. “Not bad.”

  Ed chuckled. Gabe had a friend in Grand Marais he’d met in 4-H and they were collecting data about tourist spending in Alfheim versus what they spent up on the North Shore.

  Ed didn’t know how “cars driven by tourists who get into accidents” fit into the whole giant science-fair-board of a presentation, but Gabe seemed to be enjoying collecting the data. “Brand-new, too. Less than five hundred miles on it.”

  “That’s a shame,” Gabe said. “Mr. Freyrsson’s people will fix it right up.” He paused. “Brandon says Cook County had only three accidents.”

  Brandon was his friend in Grand Marais who was funneling Gabe North Shore stats.

  “Do you think the… locals… have something to do with the higher accident rate here during storms?” Gabe asked.

  They did not use terms like “magical” or “elf” or “werewolf” when communicating in any way other than face-to-face. Even a hint getting out about anything out of the ordinary would cause repercussions.

  What those repercussions might be, Ed didn’t know, mostly because no one had ever leaked the existence of elves to the wider world.

  It was all very circular, the control the elves had on Alfheim County.

  “Hmm…” Ed said.

  “They might not realize,” Gabe said. “It might not be intended.” Excitement peppered his voice. “Wouldn’t it be cool if I found something they didn’t know about?” He shuffled something around. “I’m going to put together a presentation for Mayor Tyrsdottir.”

  No asking permission. No running it by the elf at school who ran the 4-H program. Just an “I’m gonna point this out to the Elf Queen of Alfheim,” as if they would hold young Gabriel Martinez in high enough esteem to listen.

  Dagrun Tyrsdottir would listen. Then she’d tell Ed to get real stats, and that would be the end of it because they probably did know, and the knowing part was way above Ed’s pay grade, much less his son’s.

  Gabe presenting the data in a coherent form, even if it never led to a decrease in traffic accidents in Alfheim County, would at least look good for future college applications. “Call her office once it’s ready,” Ed said.

  “I will,” Gabe said. “Can I get official accident reports? Legally, I mean?”

  Ed rubbed at the logo on his hat again. “Let’s talk about that later.” They had a lot to talk about, his family. About last night. About what was happening with Gabe’s sister, Sophia. About the new baby and the very real chance that Ed might be dealing with the tourists from The Cities on their home turf sometime soon.

  But he and Isabella hadn’t talked to the kids yet about the possibility of leaving Alfheim for the Greater Minneapolis-St. Paul Metropolitan Statistical Area.

  “Okay,” Gabe said. “Are you going to be home for dinner? Jax and his mom brought over digaag duban, rice, and cardamom cookies so Mom wouldn’t have to cook.”

  “Axlam’s up?” Ed asked. That woman should still be sleeping off last night’s run. But then again, there was a reason Axlam Geroux was an alpha werewolf.

  “They stopped by to make sure Sophia was okay.”

  Of course they did. He wouldn’t hear a damned thing about the whole episode from the elves until Samhain was fully in their rearview mirror, but the wolves? Axlam was injured, for goodness sake, and yet she and her boy showed up to check on his family.

  Though after seeing Frank Victorsson and his mysterious girlfriend at Magnus Freyrsson’s place, Ed suspected the elves had one of their elf things going on.

  Ed knew enough about Norse mythology to have a not-so-good feeling about the number and level of “elf things” happening lately.

  Yet another good reason to pack up his family and move down to the suburbs.

  Or maybe back to Texas. Houston had good schools, apart from the Texas need to edit history to their white advantage. The University of Minnesota was a damned fine school though, and resident tuition was a lot cheaper, and they only had five years before that whole expense clicked on. And the elves had promised to help pay for all five of his kids.

  He’d also have to talk to the elves about that number, too.

  He rubbed the hamburger-like scar on his neck. He needed to remember that this place was safer for him and safer for his family than any place in Texas, Houston included.

  Ed looked out over the trees and snow. Ten years in Alfheim County, Minnesota, nine-and-a-half of those as Sheriff, and he still found the elves as annoying as he found the tourists.

  His radio clicked. “Sheriff Martinez?” Tracy at dispatch said.

  “Got a call,” Ed said to Gabe.

  “All right, Papa. Bye.” His son hung up.

  Ed pressed the button on his mic and leaned his head toward his shoulder. “Go ahead,” he said.

  “So,” she said in her thick Northern Minnesota accent no one here admitted to having, “looks like the State Patrol’s needing backup up in the Paul Bunyan State Forest. They’re tied up with that last accident on 34 and are about half-an-hour out.”

  Ed settled into his cruiser. Why were they calling him? Alfheim County only contained the southern tip of the park. “No one from Hubbard available?” Hubbard County contained the rest of the territory.

  “Well, yes, but…” She paused. “State Patrol’s responding but you’re closer and it’s a guy in a… kilt… and a woman dressed all in black, sir.” Tracy’s husband was a werewolf, so she was keyed into the local magic.

  Kilt? The pauses meant she suspected they were dealing with a Scottish magical. Most likely a fae, and probably not a nice one, either.

  “The woman’s got a sword.” Tracy paused again. “It’s, ah, large, sir.”

  And here he thought he would be able to go home and have himself a nice meal of tasty homemade Somali baked chicken.

  Guess not, he thought.

  “I’m on my way,” he said as he turned his cruiser north toward the Paul Bunyan State Forest.

  Chapter 11

  Paul Bunyan State Forest…

  Movement across the veil into the mundane world hurt. The Heartway, because it was scaled-up and homogenized and she was a witch, demanded a token.

  Sometimes the Heartway demanded more than the value of the token she paid for in coin. Sometimes it demanded user fees rendered in distilled pain.

  Some fees came as a sharp stabbing pain in her lower back. Sometimes the process wanted actual blood. Once, when she hadn’t had enough
for a full fare, the Heartway had ripped open her flashbacks as payment. She’d ended up sitting on the steps of a small church outside Dublin weeping quietly under a midnight Irish moon.

  All because she was not fae. All because witchdom was an affront to the natural order of things and all those who carried magic in a resisting mundane body had to spark and overheat and lose their minds.

  Because if you sparked, you had to pay in extra pain.

  But this time her movement wasn’t via the Heartway. This time Robin had flung her through a portal of his own making.

  So her one and only token would not be accepted. All pain must be handed over on demand.

  And all her pain came back to Victor Frankenstein in one way or another.

  The moments inside a veil between realms were as endless as they were instant. Entire lifetimes happened in a crossing, birthing into the veil, running their course to your last breath as you pushed on through to the other side. Lives felt as cold shivers up a spine in the middle of the night, or the ghostly touches felt when breathing spring air, or the savory roasting of fall meats.

  They happened, yet they didn’t, and every single one of Wrenn’s crossings grazed the life of Victor Frankenstein.

  There’d been goodness there, once. A love for a mother who doted and who served as the needed scaffolding to hold together Victor’s distracted and consumed mind. A scaffolding he genuinely required because his was not a mind that held itself holistically to any project, no matter how he waxed poetic about the sublime, or nature, or his supposedly deep understanding of life and death. Victor would find himself consumed with a task, focused only on it, to the detriment of his health and the health of all those around him. And when his mother died, that compassionate structure crumbled, so he turned to the only other structure available to him at that time: his titles and wealth.

  A great person once said that with great power came great responsibility, and Victor Frankenstein was not a man who did well with any responsibility, great or small.

  By the time he’d kidnapped Wrenn—and she was sure he’d kidnapped her, no matter how he claimed he’d been saving her from worse circumstances—he’d sunk so low into his own misery that he thought it perfectly acceptable to destroy her memories of her previous life. He’d resuscitated her, he’d said, because there was a fiend out there who demanded nothing less than a perfect bride. A terrifying fiend, one so horrid and horrible that Victor couldn’t—no, wouldn’t—allow him anywhere near Wrenn.

  But it was her job to remember that she’d drowned. He’d brought her back from the edge of death, and she should be grateful.

  He’d left evidence about the fiend—detailed journals of the monster’s stalkings. About little William’s death, and Justine, and his friend Henry. About the Orkney Islands and the death of a wife named Elizabeth.

  So there were truths inside Victor’s misery. But they weren’t the most important truth for Wrenn.

  Victor had resuscitated her because he thought he could mold a woman without memories into a figure who doted on him and would serve as his missing scaffolding. A woman who loved him. A woman all his own.

  The Victor she’d known had fallen down a well of sin and had decided that splashing around in the dark, cold wetness of his soul was all that was left to him, no matter what ropes were thrown to pull him out.

  He only wanted to pull her in with him.

  And then he built a demon.

  Wrenn Goodfellow gasped awake as she dropped out of the veil between Oberon’s realms and into the frigid winter air of the mundane world. All air.

  Just air.

  She was a good one hundred feet above the ground and dropping fast into a vast stand of fifty- to sixty-foot trees.

  The portal had opened over a forest. High up over a forest.

  Enough light spread from the setting sun to throw dark shadows, making the forest look thicker than it was and making it difficult to tell if the cedar directly below her was strong enough to usefully break her fall. If she grabbed a limb, or swung the sword…

  The emerald magic wrapped around the hilt and her hand pulsed once, and she was sure the sword woke up.

  Her legs hit the top of a cedar. She flipped over, now dropping headfirst, and rolled toward the trunk.

  Her back hit a bigger branch. A loud crack shook the tree, though thankfully not her bones, even if it did knock her breath from her body. She flipped over again and swung the sword at the next branch.

  The blade cut clean through the wood.

  The branch snapped downward faster than she fell, slamming against the tree before bouncing down to the ground.

  She fell again, but this time she jabbed the sword into the trunk. It sliced all the way through, the tip of the blade visible on the other side, and cut downward for a good five feet before it, and Wrenn, stopped descending.

  She was still about seven feet up and hanging from the hilt of a magical Norse sword.

  “Thank you,” she whispered to the blade she somehow knew was also a she.

  A she named Red.

  “What?” Wrenn muttered. “Are you talking to me?” she asked the blade.

  No answer. Nothing at all, as if Red had decided to go back to being a simple magical sword. Which she clearly wasn’t. Not with the layer upon layer of magic wrapping her hilt and blade.

  What did I steal from the Gallery? Wrenn thought.

  No answer.

  The golden glow of a northern sunset sparkled off icy rocks and snow. The temperature was most definitely below freezing. And the trees looked North American.

  Had Robin tossed her into the Paul Bunyan State Forest near the North American elven enclave? What about Ranger?

  Where was that damned kelpie?

  Two trees over, hanging over the stout branch of a pine with his well-shaped butt fully exposed to the wind, was the unconscious Ranger.

  “Kilts aren’t built for dropping into the north country, now are they?” she snickered.

  Now to get herself down before he woke up.

  She wrapped her legs around the closest branch. It wasn’t all that sturdy, but if she stayed next to the trunk, she could use it for stabilization until she figured out how to maneuver down to the ground.

  The branch creaked but held. Wrenn left Red where she was for the moment, and pulled out her phone.

  She held it up.

  The phone’s enchanted circuitry folded in on itself as she watched. All her fae-fueled apps vanished from her screens and were now sequestered inside a passcode-protected “game” app. To a mundane person, her phone would look like everyone else’s, and it would take a true magical to sense that it was fae-built.

  She held the phone up higher.

  And there, a very weak signal from a mundane carrier.

  She tapped at the real-world mapping app.

  Robin had in fact dropped her into the Paul Bunyan State Forest, but from the looks of it, she was a good three kilometers from a place called Manny’s Backwoods Lodge, the building that housed the actual spy-used local access gate.

  She tucked away her phone. She’d have to drag a cold-assed kelpie three kilometers to take him back to Oberon’s Castle.

  A roaring buzz bounced through the trees. Three beams of light followed.

  Snowmobiles coming in from the east.

  Ranger stirred.

  Wrenn yanked Red out of the tree. “All right, hon, let’s do this,” she said, and leaned down far enough so she could jab the sword back into the trunk no more than five feet off the ground.

  She swung down, one hand on the hilt and the other on the pommel, until she dropped her boots onto the cold ground.

  Wrenn pulled Red out and trudged her way through the crispy snow toward Ranger’s tree.

  He looked up and shaded his eyes as he peered at the approaching snowmobiles. “No lasses,” he said. “Shame.”

  “I’ll cut off your bits if you harm mundanes.” Wrenn swung the sword around.

  Ranger laughed.
He pressed up on the branch and dismounted as beautifully as an Olympic gymnast. “There’s lakes here, luv.” He sniffed the air. “Sooo mannnyyy lakes.” He shaded his eyes again as he watched the beams of light grow brighter. “If I were ye, I’d be more worried about walkin’ intae elf territory wi’ a stolen blade.” He waved his hand at Red.

  If anything, the elves would likely be happy to have it back.

  Or not.

  Or she might have accidently gotten herself wrapped up in some fae or elf prophecy about swords named Red and inland hurricanes or snownadoes or whatever the local winter hell-weather was.

  And she didn’t even have a scabbard.

  Ranger ran toward the incoming mundanes. “I’m gonnae kill th’ three of ‘em an’ leave ye here wi’ th’ corpses, sweetheart.” He saluted once and ducked under a bush.

  The snowmobile in front stopped. The driver dropped his feet and flipped up the visor on his helmet. “You two alright? You drop out of a plane or some—”

  Ranger’s boot hit the front of the snowmobile. He twisted his hip, swung his other leg, and wrapped it around the man’s head.

  They smacked into the ground hard enough that a bulging semi-puff of slushy snow welled up around them.

  The kelpie was on the snowmobile before she could get close enough to pull him away. “Ranger!” she yelled.

  The kelpie saluted again. He looked at one side of the bright yellow overly-decaled vehicle, then the other. Then he turned the snowmobile south.

  The second snowmobiler stopped next to his friend still lying in the snow. “Who the hell are you—”

  This man’s garishly red vehicle carried a cargo box behind the seat. In one twisting movement, Wrenn pulled him off his snowmobile and slammed the sword perpendicularly into the box. Red stuck out of the box like Excalibur from the stone.

  “Da hell, lady!” the owner of the red vehicle yelled.

  The emerald magic around the hilt wove itself down the blade, crisscrossing and braiding until it made its own sheath, and then around the cargo box.

  At least she wouldn’t fall off.

  “Stay out of his way.” She pointed at the departing Ranger. “He’s dangerous.”