He blinked. By the time his eyes were open again, the effect had faded, and the map was just a map. No blood, no runes, no glowing lines, no inexorable spiral. Travis sighed, settling back on his haunches and tapping his goatee with one long finger.
“No good?”
“I don’t know.” Travis sounded distracted. “There’s something going on, but it’s not happening here. It almost feels like…bah!” He lashed out a hand and the map burst into sharp white-blue flames. When they cleared, there was nothing left, not even ash. Wiping his hands on his pants, Travis stood. “What’s up?”
Sigmund tried not to stare too hard at the decidedly un-burnt spot on the floor. “Uh. Dad wants to know if you want to come to dinner tonight? At sevenish?”
“Who wants to come?” Travis had a sly sort of look, and Sigmund felt his face burning at the innuendo, even if that wasn’t actually what Travis was asking. Especially because that wasn’t actually what he was asking.
“Lain. I haven’t told Dad about…” Sigmund made a gesture in Travis’s direction. “He’s such a salaryman, he’d freak out.”
That earned him the edge of white fangs and a wiggle of dark eyebrows. “All right, I’ll be there.”
“Cool,” said Sigmund, just as Travis’s computer, phone, and tablet all simultaneously made chiming noises. “What…?”
Travis rolled his eyes—
(toward Ásgarðr)
—heavenward. “Con call to our Chinese manufacturer,” he said.
“Oh.” Because, duh. Travis was like a super-important billionaire CEO, standing there in a three-piece suit and tie probably worth more than Sigmund’s salary. And here was Sigmund, just barging into his office and inviting him to dinner and, Jesus, he was such a dork. “I should go then. Let you…do that.”
Except, moving was apparently not high on the agenda. Sigmund’s feet shuffled a few inches but didn’t manage to get any closer to the door. Waiting for…something. For—
For Travis to close the few steps between them, to cup his hand on Sigmund’s cheek, to exhale against Sigmund’s lips as he said, “That wasn’t a hint, you know. I don’t want you to go, either.”
“Oh.” The fabric of Travis’s suit was soft and warm under Sigmund’s fingers. “Good.” When his mouth parted, one long finger stroked his bottom lip.
“Yeah,” said Travis, eyes bright enough to glow. “Good.”
Like this, Travis didn’t feel much different from Lain. Same too-warm, solid body, same loam-and-charcoal smell, same huge, vaguely terrifying presence just behind Sigmund’s eyelids. He was still an amazing kisser, too. Hot hands cupping Sigmund’s face, holding him still while Travis’s mouth and tongue went to work in ways they hadn’t the last few times they’d done this.
Travis had a beard. That was new. Sort of…ticklish.
“Hnngh!” said Sigmund. One of his own hands had slipped underneath Travis’s jacket, the other was threading through long, soft, dark hair.
When Travis pulled back, it was with one last sharp-toothed bite. Not hard enough to hurt, just hard enough to send strange little cinders burning somewhere beneath Sigmund’s heart.
He felt…light. Blown apart and wrecked. But not nearly as wrecked as Travis looked, eyes closed and tongue still dancing over his bottom lip, forehead pressed to Sigmund’s.
“Oh, the things I’d do to you.” Travis’s words were barely audible, just gusts of breath ghosting across Sigmund’s skin. “And I’m trying to be so good…”
“Why?” It was much easier to ask Travis’s tie than his face. Cowardly, maybe, and Sigmund could feel the not-quite-fear churning in his gut.
Travis gave a dark sort of chuckle. “I don’t really know.” He sounded a bit perplexed himself. “The fun of it, perhaps. Maybe I’m worried I’ll screw it up if it’s too easy.”
“I have no idea what I’m doing.” It was true. Sigmund’s last girlfriend had been a fling in high school that had lasted all of a month. They’d spent a couple of bleary afternoons locked in his room, fumbling and kissing, but nothing beyond that. He’d certainly never…done the ellipsis with anyone. Certainly not another man and really certainly not a god. He didn’t know if he was ready for that. He didn’t know if anyone could be ready.
He was pretty keen on finding out.
“I know,” said Travis. Whether in response to Sigmund’s words or his thoughts, Sigmund wasn’t sure. “But it isn’t rocket surgery. Just a dance.”
“I’m a terrible dancer.”
Lips caressed Sigmund’s again, just briefly, just enough for Sigmund to miss them when they left. “Keep a pocketful of dollars and jump in time to the scrolling arrows,” Travis said. “As long as you’re having fun, you’re doing it right.”
“And you?”
Travis pulled closer, hand sliding down Sigmund’s back, below his back, onto the soft curve of his ass. “Oh,” Travis said, all wicked grin. “I’m always having fun.” He winked.
It wasn’t the truth, not quite. But it was true enough here, now, in this moment, and it would do.
The third kiss was easier. Not as many teeth as the first, not as chaste as the second. Just a kiss, lips and tongues and maybe a few teeth, too.
Only a few. Not enough to bleed.
FOURTEEN
The con call is long and difficult and not at all like the feel of Sigmund’s lips or the taste of his self-conscious lust, meaning that my mind’s not so much on the work as it is on him. On the coarse feel of his hair and sharp scent of his soap, on the softness of his flesh and the hesitance of his embrace.
He’s not a great kisser. Unpracticed. But that can be fixed, with time, and I’d be lying if I said the thought of plucking open his awkward virginity wasn’t something I was looking forward to, the very best kind of déjà vu.
By modern standards, Sigyn had been young when we’d married. Young and mortal, caught in the firestorm of the most capricious of the gods. But she’d devoured the apple and taken to her place in Ásgarðr with a ferocity unmatched across the heavens, and the whole Nine Realms had been the rubes and patsies for our mayhem.
Funny how none of those stories made it down the ages. Wicked Loki and loyal Sigyn, victorious and terrible, filled with such rage and compassion as to unmake the Wyrd itself.
Sigmund isn’t Sigyn, but he could’ve been, in a different time and different skin. Now his seed cracks open in the wake of a new inferno, and I revel in the opportunity to watch his leaves unfurl and his branches reach up to grasp the heavens. A new consort for a new era, a new god for a new land. And a new me, standing by his side.
It will be glorious.
So will sucking Sigmund until he screams, which is another thing I’m looking forward to doing at some point in the future. On top of Travis’s desk, perhaps, looking out over the city—our city—driving Sigmund’s ecstasy down into the very bones of Pandemonium. Imprinting it into concrete and steel and glass.
I make a note on my To-Do list, scheduling it somewhere down the line. Not today, though. We’re not quite at the mind-blowing-city-altering sex phase of our relationship just yet. More like the awkward-hand-holding lunch-date phase, and so I arrange to meet Sigmund in the bookstore in the mall at one o’clock for exactly that. There’s a pho place just downstairs that I think he’d like, or, failing that, we can have our pick of one of the million other cafés that have sprung up along Torr Row like hipster cancer. It’s lunchtime, but reservations are things that happen to other people.
When I get there, the mall is covered in yellow tape and security barricades, and it takes me a moment to realize all the blocked-off entrances lead down to the parking garage. The one I set on fire the other week. Oops.
People don’t seem too perturbed, though. Whatever spin story the mall’s owners put out for the fire evidently didn’t contain the word terrorism, and thus does commerce march blithely on.
The bookstore, an Angus & Robertson, is wedged at the end of one of Torr Mall’s newer wings, in between a Pyr
e Computers store and a movie theater. The shop’s not small—two floors sprawling back into the building—and I can feel Sigmund upstairs, trying to calm his nerves by browsing the hyperbolic covers of the sci-fi/fantasy section. I lope my way past the front of the store, past the magazines and the stationery, and up to the escalators at the back.
I’m halfway between floors when the shift happens.
I don’t feel it, at first, though I certainly feel the way the escalators shudder to a halt and the overhead lights flicker off.
“What the…?”
In the space between breaths, the store is plunged into blackness. And I’m not talking like, oh-the-lights-are-off blackness. I’m talking really, serious, cannot-see-a-fucking-thing blackness. And, y’know, technically I’ve been blind since the cave—I don’t use my eyes to see, that is, all the working parts having long since burnt away—but this blackness gets even me. A total void of senses for a second, maybe less, and when the world reboots…
Oh. Oh, this is bad. This is what the map meant this morning. Fuck.
We’ve been hit by a Helbleed.
Bleeds aren’t all that uncommon. There are two around Pandemonium alone, which is the reason I moved here in the first place. It’s the rubber sheet analogy again: A Bleed is when that sheet gets stretched a bit too thin, and tiny holes start appearing. Tiny holes that let parts of the Outyards, the Útgarðar, bleed through into Mannheim.
And like I said, Pandemonium has two. One at Woolridge Reserve, leading to Jötunheimr, and a second on Golgotha Hill, leading to Niflhel.
When the lights come back—sickly, pale, and flickering—it becomes apparent that the latter is my current problem.
The mall is dead silent. Literally. And that’s worrying, because malls are never silent. But mortals walk right over the top of Bleeds, and the things that are native to Niflhel don’t, as a general rule, make a lot of noise.
At first.
And all this would be fine—annoying, but fine—if it weren’t for the fact that I’m not currently the only Wyrdborn thing in the store.
I’m vaulting up the broken escalators before I’ve even finished the narration. The metal ridges have turned sharp and rusted, and they rip through Lain’s thin-soled hipster shoes like talons. That’s okay, though, because my wards are burning and it’s becoming very difficult to hold on to Lain’s human form.
So I don’t. I let it go, feeling the horns erupt from my skull and the claws from the tips of my fingers. By the time I’ve hit the top of the escalators, my legs have changed, and my only concessions to modesty are my own feathers and a single leather wrist-cuff that, for some reason, survived the transformation.
The top floor is deeper into the Bleed, and the nihilism of the void carpets everything in ash and mold. Books are stacked haphazardly all over the floor, and when my tail brushes against a pile, it disintegrates into pulp and scurrying things it’s probably best to think of as cockroaches.
There’s something here. I can hear it, shuffling and gurgling, and I leap up onto the tops of the tall shelves in the reference section to get a better view.
Perched like a garish, fiery (and book-loving) gargoyle, I can see Sigmund, nose deep in a paperback and oblivious to the change in the world around him. That doesn’t make the draugr in the next row over any less threatening.
I vault across the tops of the shelves and drop down in the space between Naomi Novik and Terry Pratchett. Sigmund stifles a scream when he sees me, then another when he sees the Bleed, then a third when he sees the shambling, unformed mass behind me.
“Lain, behin—”
But I’ve already turned, and by the time he’s finished his sentence my claw is sticking through the back of the draugr’s skull. Or what probably used to be a skull, at some point.
The draugr—dead now twice over—gives a gurgling moan and falls to the floor. Then begins oozing into an amorphous pile on the carpet. I feel Sigmund’s fingers close around my biceps, and he chokes back bile as he peers around my side. “Oh…oh, Jesus.” He covers his mouth with his free hand, eyes closed as he wills himself not to hurl.
Not that it would make much of a difference to the decor, and what’s a little upchuck on the feathers when I’ve already got mushed draugr brain up to my elbow. I set fire to my filth-covered arm, the flames green and putrid as they burn the gunk from my skin. It’s unpleasant, but over quickly, and when it clears I’m clean once more.
Handy.
Sigmund is pressed up against me, looking around the ruins of the bookstore, oozing his own oil slick of terror. “Wh-what the hell was that?” he stammers. “What the h-hell happened to the sh-shop?” His heart and breath race, his emotions an unpleasant metallic tang in the back of my throat.
“That,” I say, “was a draugr.”
He knows the word, sort of. “A z-zombie?”
I shrug, shifting my arms to pull Sigmund closer. His comparison is not completely inaccurate. Draugar are memories who’ve lost themselves. Who haven’t managed to form enough of an identity to wind up as einherjar or one of the denizens of Helheimr. They’re shambling piles of neuroses and fears, hatreds and obsessions. The vermin scurrying between the roots of the Tree.
I sum this up for Sigmund, more or less, then say, “We’re stuck in a Helbleed. A thin spot between Miðgarðr and Niflhel.”
“The mall was full of people!”
“Who are fine.” Probably. “Bleeds are only dangerous to things touched by the Wyrd. Or born in it.”
Sigmund blinks behind his glasses, looking around the tattered shelves, atavistic revulsion sending a tremble through his limbs.
“Try not to read the titles of the books,” I suggest, and he shudders. “It looks worse than it really is.”
“Except for the horrible monsters trying to kill me!”
“It probably wasn’t trying to kill you, exactly. Draugar are more like rats than tigers.” Honestly, it’s hard to say what your average draugr wants, other than to follow some loathsome instinct to seek out the living. When they find one, usually all they do is stand around and moan. Problem is, like rats, draugar carry disease. Not physical diseases, but a kind of seeping malaise of the soul. And they do bite. Sometimes.
“J-Jesus,” Sigmund says. It occurs to me, as I feel him force stillness back into his breath, that Sigmund is mortal, and for a second I see flashes behind my milky eyes. Of teeth and blades and spikes and chains. Of soft dark flesh, pulped and split beneath the onslaught.
The stitches pull as my lips curl back, exposing a bright and jagged maw to any who would dare.
“We need to get out of here,” I say, snarl lurking beneath the words. I scan around the shop lest any other draugar wander near. If they do, we’ll see just how well they burn.
“Y-yes, please.”
“C’mon, we need to find a path.” I press my hand against the small of Sigmund’s back, urging him forward.
“Oh.” He stumbles when he tries to move, legs stiff and shaking. His disappointment is a cloying yellow fog, thick and reeking in the unreality of the Outyards. He was hoping I’d just be able to magic us out of here at will.
I start walking toward the shop entrance. Sigmund follows me, hand sliding down to grasp my own.
“So,” he says, “d-does this sort of thing h-happen to you often?” The humor is thin, but, in this place, even thin armor is better than going naked.
“Surprisingly no,” I say. I avoid the Bleeds. Avoid the eyes that might be watching, away from the safety of my self-made prison. “It’s been pretty dull since I got out.” And for the thousand-odd years before that, too. Even the screaming agony became routine, eventually.
“This…this is Baldr, then?”
“Bingo.” Bleeds are natural, and Sigmund’s been in one before, even if he didn’t realize at the time. We didn’t get lost in the forest the other week because the map was wrong; it just wasn’t the map of where we were.
The Helbleed touches Pandemonium on Golgotha Hill,
the huge, barren monstrosity everyone in town assumes is a slag heap left over from the town’s mining days. They’re not wrong, but that’s not the reason nothing grows up in the shale, not the reason the suburb around it is the poster child for urban decay. Golgotha Hill is the natural Bleed. Its single feature, a lone, dead ash tree, is an extension of the roots of the world tree, Yggdrasill.
But that Bleed doesn’t extend much farther than the Hill itself, and it’s not this deep or this unstable.
This, what we’re in right now? This is a Wound, a forced Bleed, and it’s spread out over the entire city in the space of roughly half a day. That’s not good. There’s only one thing I can think of that would cause such a chronic breakdown of the boundaries between realms, and the next time I see Baldr?
He’s a dead man. Again.
When we get to the broken escalators, I stop. “I’ll need to carry you down,” I tell Sigmund. My feet still hurt from running up in the first place.
Sigmund doesn’t protest, but makes a squeaking noise as I pick him up in a bridal carry.
“This is not very manly,” he says, pushing his glasses up his nose and trying on a laugh.
“Sigmund,” I say, “you are looking at the queen of unmanly. Believe me, this doesn’t even register.” The word is ergi, and it’s a kind of Níð. A kind I specialized in.
Sigmund worries about his own masculinity, or supposed lack thereof. About his soft belly and lack of interest in manly things, like cars and protein shakes. About his friends, the feminist and the misandrist, who see him as One of the Girls.
About the fact that he used to be a goddess.
Goddess or not, I don’t want Sigmund’s feet ripped to shreds on the rusted stairs, and I’m not enthused about it happening to mine, either. So I run us down the handrails in the middle. The rubber has liquefied, and it oozes between my toes in thick and sticky strands.
I put Sigmund down when we reach the bottom, and he goes back to lacing his fingers through my claws. He stands close against my side, eyes darting from shadow to shadow, afraid of every monster in this place but one.
Liesmith Page 14