The Ledberg Runestone

by Patrick Donovan

  I could smell something ticky, metallic, and heavy before I even crossed the threshold.

  Blood. Lots of it.

  I saw Gus after I made it a few steps into the living room. He was on his knees in a puddle of blood roughly as wide across as I was tall. He was trussed up, bound at the wrists. I couldn’t see his face, but his back had been laid open to the point that his ribs had been severed, separated from his spine. In the gloom, the bones were almost glowing.

  “Oh, Christ Gus,” I said quietly, closing my eyes and leaning against one of the exposed studs.

  It took everything I had to look at the room again, to open my eyes and once more take in the scene of my friend’s death. I wanted to run out of there, to turn tail and bolt. I wanted to scream. I wanted to blink and for all of this to be gone.

  It wasn’t.

  I took a slow step towards Gus, careful to keep my cane out of the pooling blood.

  When he took a long, wheezing gasp, I let out something between a squeak and a full-blown shriek.

  I rushed to him, caught in a rush of adrenaline. I knelt in front of him.

  His eyes were glazed, but focused. His face drawn and pale. It took him a moment, but he lifted his head and met my eyes.

  “Jonah,” he wheezed.

  “Don’t talk, Gus. Let me get you down,” I said.

  I looked towards his wrists, with the intention of cutting his binds. The problem with that plan, though, was there was nothing binding him. His arms were stretched out, to the point it looked like they were about to be pulled out of their sockets, but there was nothing holding him.

  A spell. He was being held by a spell.

  I could work with this. As long as I could figure out what the spell was, I could get him down. I just needed to think. After Lysone, and especially after Cash, I needed a win and this was my chance to put one on the boards.

  “Hang in there, brother. Let me get you down.”

  I stood up and took a step back from Gus, and began to let the mental walls in my mind slip away. The spirit world slowly slipped into focus.

  The interior of Gus’s house didn’t look any different, physically speaking. There were still the same exposed beams and walls, the same strings of photos all tied up in a big conspiracy-tracing web. Slowly, however, other things came into view.

  A green glow began to emanate from everything, seeping through the beams, the floor, the ceilings, a psychic echo of my friend’s special blend of insanity. Fear spirits, shadows that shifted and morphed from screaming faces to all varying manner of insects, scuttled over the floors, the ceiling, crawling over each other and every exposed surface in the room.

  There were chains around Gus’s wrists, binding him to two of the beams in his living room. It was a simple spell, a binding, the chains made solely out of energy and intent. I could negate them with next to no effort. Someone like Gus, on the other hand, with no magical talent whatsoever, would be held for as long as the spell remained present.

  Then I saw the woman, standing at the far side of the room. She was tall. Her hair was blonde, worked into elaborate braids, which, aside from looking cool, kept her long tresses out of her face. She wore a blue tunic-style shirt, which hung almost to her knees and pants made out of some form of skin, tucked into knee-high, fur boots. A gray cloak was wrapped around her shoulders. She was leaning on a spear, the handle made of some dark, polished wood, the head made of what looked like iron.

  I knew instantly what she was and what she was here for. I’d met her ilk before, once. They appeared right at that moment of a person’s death. They were amongst the most powerful spirits in the spiritual pecking order, just below angels and demons and a step or two away from gods. They were known to everyone, at least once in their life, and in most cases feared simply because of what they were. Everyone believed in, and was, on some level, scared of Death. Though, in their defense, death spirits were mind-numbingly neutral, single-minded, and mostly didn’t give a rat’s ass about us outside of their work.

  I fought back tears. I couldn’t do anything to help my friend. That time had come and gone, everything from here on out, for Gus, was inevitable.

  The woman and I stared at each other for a long moment. I didn’t move.

  Finally, she looked from me, to the chains. Her eyes fell back on me again and she nodded, just once.

  I got a stick of sage and a pocketknife out of my bag. I stuck the sage under my arm and used the knife to cut a small line across my palm. In the spirit world, my blood, with its inherent magic properties, was a vibrant red. I smeared the blood across the sage, pocketed the knife, and withdrew a lighter. The blood, once mixed with the energies held in the sage, cause the whole smudge stick to light up like a torch in the spirit world. I lit the sage, and the blood, and let the smoke drift over the chains, focusing my intent. It took less than a second for the magic to take hold and the smoke, where it hit the chains, dissolved them as quickly as if I’d doused them in acid.

  I caught Gus and lowered him to the floor, which, given his size, was damn near hernia inducing.

  “I didn’t scream, brother,” Gus said, barely able to choke out a whisper. “She didn’t make me scream.”

  “I know, Gus, you did good.”

  “Bitch,” he muttered.

  “Who was it?” I asked.

  Gus nodded towards his computers.

  “Cameras, I got her on camera. They finally got me, Jonah. I told you they would. I knew too much.”

  “You just rest, Gustonian. Relax. I’m gonna call for some help. They’ll get you fixed up,” I said. I knew it was lie. So did he.

  Gus coughed, his head lolling around. What little strength he had left was rapidly fading.

  “Top drawer, my desk,” he said.

  “What?”

  Gus shook his head.

  “Be easy, brother,” Gus said.

  In the span of a blink, Gus was standing behind his body. The Valkyrie stood behind him. Gus looked at me, then his body, and smiled. There was none of the jittery, paranoid sort of energy that seemed to constantly radiate around him in life. Instead, he seemed calm. The Valkyrie put a hand on his shoulder and they both faded away, leaving me on the floor, holding the rapidly cooling body of one of my best friends in a pool of his own blood.

  Chapter 29

  I sat like that for a long time, saying my silent goodbyes to my friend. Finally, I lay him as gently as I could on the floor and stood, walking over to his computer. I had absolutely no idea how to do much of anything with it, let alone track down the footage of whoever it was that had killed him.

  So I did what any rational, technologically challenged spell-slinger would do in just such a situation. I started pushing buttons at random.

  Apparently, that was only a half bad idea. Screens started flashing. Somewhere in the distance, Phil Collins starting belting out “Sussudio,” a few lights flickered, and something that sounded like a large machine started up in the basement. A small window popped up on one of the screens, the picture grainy, jittering back and forth for a second with interference, but gradually becoming clear enough that I could see who was standing at Gus’s gate.

  Lysone. Judging from the time stamp, she had been here at roughly the same time I’d been sitting in my truck outside of Jack of the Wood.

  It was the exact same time Gus had been calling me and I hadn’t bothered to pick up the phone.

  I hit the spacebar and the video clip started playing. There was no sound, and the picture quality wasn’t up to snuff, but it was clear enough.

  Lysone held one hand out, and the camera went to static for only an instant. When the picture resumed, she was stepping over the fallen gate, the camera starting to lean and fall. Then, it went dark.

  I wasn’t sure how I should feel. On the one hand, I was nearly consumed with anger and grief. My friend had been murdered in cold blood, I could only assume because he had been trying to help me decipher the stone, which I didn’t even have anymore.
<
br />   On the other hand, I was terrified. I’d seen, at least in part, Lysone for what she truly was, and it wasn’t even close to human. She was so far above my pay grade that it wouldn’t take much for her to squash me like a bug if I went after her for revenge. Not to mention I felt like about ten miles of bad road. I was nauseous and pouring sweat, my hands were shaking, and I quite possibly had a fever of some sort.

  Last, but not least, I was lost. I’d tried playing the hero before, and I’d failed. All I got was this lousy cane and a month in intensive care. I didn’t know what Lysone truly was. I didn’t know what the stone could really do. I didn’t know if it even mattered. Lysone claimed she wanted to retrieve it because it had belonged to her husband. Having felt the power that radiated out of it and seen how badly she needed it, I didn’t buy that for a second. Though, even with that in mind, I had no idea what she could or would do with it if she chose to tap into its power.

  The longer I stood there, slack-jawed and staring at the monitors, the less sure I became of anything.

  I reached down and opened the top drawer of Gus’s desk, almost without thinking. There were two bags filled with gold jewelry. Judging from the heft of the sacks, it was way more than I’d needed. He’d known I was in a situation.

  Gus had come through once again.

  “So how does this story play out now?” a voice asked from behind me.

  I turned, all but jumping out of my skin in the process.

  The girl from the parking lot, the girl who’d killed Mama Duvalier’s daughter, stood a few feet away. She had a man with her, if you can technically call someone as large as the individual behind her, a man. He was well over seven feet tall, standing hunched over in Gus’s living room. I was pretty sure that his shoulders were wide enough to equal roughly two of me, and not a single bit of his physique looked like it was composed of fat. His clothing was simple: jeans and a white t-shirt. He wore his hair long, almost to the middle of his back, accentuated here and there with braids. His beard, which hung almost to the middle of his chest, was decorated the same way, only the braids were covered with tiny silver beads. He had two black eyes.

  I was a little slow on the uptake, but I finally recognized him. It was the same guy that had attacked me at Abandon and had played defensive lineman with my truck.

  “Damn it,” I muttered, taking a step back and bumping into Gus’s desk.

  “You look frightened,” the girl said.

  “Well, you’re nuts and he tried to kill me,” I said. “Actually, you’re both killers.”

  “And you aren’t?” the girl asked me. I glared.

  “Did you try to kill him, Canute?”

  The girl looked at her companion, quirking one thin brow. Canute didn’t say anything.

  “Well, Canute, is this true?”

  “Of course not.”

  “You threw me across a parking lot, tried to stomp on my head, and then almost crashed my car,” I said.

  “I was trying to stop you, not kill you.”

  “By breaking my freaking neck?”

  “You’d have stopped, wouldn’t you?”

  I stared at him for a long moment. I hated it when the, well, whoever the hell he was, had a point. He didn’t look away. I did.

  The girl watched this exchange, her head snapping back and forth like a tennis spectator. When we’d finished talking, she nodded her head once, obviously satisfied that whatever quarrel there was, was successfully at its end.

  “There’s a lot of illr around you.”

  “A lot of what?”

  She ignored me.

  “He’s a coward,” Canute said, finally. “I don’t understand your interest.”

  “That makes two of us,” I said.

  The girl turned towards me, tilting her head ever so slightly. She took two steps forward. I tried to take two steps back, and found myself sitting on Gus’s keyboard. “Sussudio” cued up again. Canute looked around, confused at the sudden sonic intrusion.

  The girl looked over at Gus’s body, then back towards me.

  “We should prepare the pyre for your friend,” she said, walking past me.

  • • •

  We stood there, for hours, watching the fire consume Gus. The girl, whatever her name was, and Canute stood on either side of me, watching the flames reach higher into the night sky. None of us said anything. We just watched him go. When the flames had finally dissipated, Canute took the body, vanishing into the woods around Gus’s home.

  A small glimmer caught my eye, laying at the foot of the pyre. I walked over, kicking around with my toe. A small piece of metal, cut into the shape of an ax head lie on the ground, its surface engraved with knot work. A leather cord ran through it. I reached down, scooping it off the grass and held it in my hand, then slid it into my pocket. It had been Gus’s. I’d never seen him wear it, but I could all but feel that twitchy sort of vibe of his radiating off it.

  “Do you have a name?” I asked the girl, finally.

  “I have a name.”

  “Care to share?”

  “You’re allowed to call me Kari.”

  “Kari, huh?” I nodded. “Tell me something, Kari.”

  “The average worth of a human body broken down into its chemical components is roughly one dollar and seventy-three cents.”

  “I,” I sighed. “Not what I meant.”

  Kari turned to look at me. She still had that same aura of power, almost on par with Lysone’s but wholly different. Whereas Lysone’s had felt predatory, Kari’s was sort of inevitable. It was something constant, but subtle, like the tides. It was surprising to see radiating off a girl who looked like a teenage groupie for Skid Row.

  “Oh,” she said. “What do you want me to tell you?”

  “The stone, what does it do?”

  “Horrible things. She has two of the pieces she needs. The stone and the blood of a godborn.”

  “So it’s a spell?”

  “Of sorts.”

  “Right, okay. How bad.”

  “Very.”

  “Can you be less vague?”

  “I could,” she said, putting a hand on my shoulder and turning me to face her. Her other hand rose to my temple, absently brushing away a few strands of hair. I felt the steady ebb of her power, her essence, radiating off of that touch. “You should know this, however. She considers you a threat. She’ll come for you, for your kin, for those with whom you share your hearth. You made a mistake giving her that stone. You need to get it back. You need to avenge your friend. You need to keep your people safe.”

  I turned away from her and stared at the pyre, lost in thought. I thought about my friend. I thought about something that happened a few years ago, when Sam and I had gone into a mine with the intentions of rescuing a girl from a mad Fae. I thought about Sam carrying me out of that hole in the dirt, a length of bone roughly as long as my pinky jutting out of the meat of my thigh, the girl dead on a stone slab behind us. I thought about the pictures that the Carvers had of my father. I thought about Melly. I thought about my sister and the demon that drove her to suicide. And finally, I thought about the way that every single time, despite having the ability to do things that most people deemed either miraculous or make-believe, I’d failed, and the darkness that killing Cash had birthed started to stir. I’d let myself be a victim for too god damned long.

  It was time to make someone else a victim.

  “What do I have to do?” I asked.

  “Take back the stone.”

  “Well, that shouldn’t be challenging at all. Anything else?”

  “Before the Hunter’s moon.”

  “Which is when? No. Wait. Let me guess. Tonight?”

  She nodded.

  I sighed.

  “Awesome.”

  Chapter 30

  I left Kari before Canute came back and went straight home.

  Once I got inside, I went straight for the room across the hall from my bedroom. The room was empty, the only window covered in
a heavy blanket, blocking out the morning sun.

  I left my bag in the hall, shut the door behind me, and sat down in the corner. I didn’t bother turning the light on. I needed the darkness. I also needed an ally. Someone, or rather, something that I could trust to give me straight answers. To get that, though, I would need to approach said ally on its turf. It made cutting a deal a bit easier.

  “Here goes nothing,” I muttered, opened the razor and drew it across my hand. I admit it, I’m not a badass. It hurt, but it was necessary. I held the fetish stone in my hand, letting my blood saturate it and let my thoughts drift, clearing my mind and focusing on breathing, on stillness, on just being. I took a lot longer than I had hoped. Every time I tried to clear my head a million different discomforts came creeping in, little aches and pains, nausea, a headache, the fact that I was pouring sweat from just about every square inch of my body, it all pulled my concentration away. Finally, though, I managed to fall into something resembling a rhythm.

  Each time I inhaled and exhaled it served as a symbolic renewal, a cleansing of the mind and body. Outside, the sounds of Asheville grew together until each individual noise became a distinct vibration against my ears, each one crystal clear and perfectly pitched in the rhythm of the city. I could feel every dust mote in the air as it settled against my skin, each one exploding with sensation like a tiny electrical charge. I focused on my heartbeat, using it as my own personal drum beat. Each beat, speaking its own note in an internal music, a music that connected me to the world. It was a song of life merging with spirit.

  Entering the spirit world leaves your body, essentially, an empty shell. The lights might be on, but there’s for sure no one home. As such, if something happens to you in the spirit world and you don’t find your way back to your body, then you end up leaving behind an unoccupied meat suit. Assuming someone finds you, chances are they assume you’re catatonic. No one finds you, you die. Simple as that. The flip side is also true. Something happens to your spirit—a bigger spirit eats it for instance—Well, you don’t have to worry too much about what happens to your body.