Sword of Secrets

by S. M. Schmitz

  Hunter rolled his eyes at me again but moved his bottle. The frazzled blonde was reading from the teleprompter now, something about the myth of Ninurta, but I’d lost interest in this story. The explosion was over. Crazy people were gone. I just wanted the football game back on. But a knock at my door kept me from even complaining about the remarkably bad manners of the television news crew who were interrupting Saturday football.

  Instead, I complained about the television station and whoever thought knocking on my door during an LSU game was socially acceptable. Hunter told me to shut up and stop being such a whiney bitch. I was all prepared to be the exact opposite actually, but when I threw my door open, I found myself speechless instead. It wasn’t the old woman, who scared the shit out of me honestly, but the young woman standing next to her—the strikingly beautiful woman with light golden hair and smooth ivory skin and a body that—

  “Hey,” she snapped.

  I lifted my eyes and sheepishly grinned at her as a pseudo-apology and a don’t-you-think-I’m-cute? come on. I don’t think it worked. She kept glaring at me. The old woman sighed and muttered something in yet another language I didn’t understand. I had no idea what they were trying to sell, but I’m pretty sure I would have sold my soul to the hot blonde, even if she looked like she currently wanted to kick me in the crotch. God, she was amazingly beautiful.

  The old woman snapped her fingers in my face and I stepped back from the door and blinked at her. “Focus,” she scolded. I blinked a few more times.

  “Um, Hunter?” I called. I didn’t know who these women were, but whatever was going on, he really shouldn’t miss this. It was going down in my top five strangest moments ever book. If I’d had a book. But if I did, it would be filled with all the weird shit I’ve ever done or seen, and this would be up there.

  Hunter stood behind me and I heard him mumble, “Whoa,” as he took in the tall frame of the beautiful blonde standing by the short old woman, who sighed and mumbled something unintelligible again. The gorgeous blonde just smiled at whatever the woman said.

  “You.” The old woman pointed a bent finger at me and I backed up even farther. I suddenly had the horrible premonition they were related to Keira and I was about to find out if an old woman and a tall beautiful woman who looked to be in her mid-twenties could kick my ass. Judging by the way they were both staring at me, I was putting my money on yes.

  “Come with us,” the old woman demanded. She actually turned to walk back down the apartment sidewalk. The hot blonde stopped her when I didn’t follow. “Badb, he’s not coming. You may need to explain why he has to come with us.”

  The old woman threw her hands in the air and spun around, glowering at me with an exasperated expression, which I’m pretty sure I returned, because by now, I could hear the football game on and I was missing it for this. Granted, it would be worth it if I stood a shot with the blond goddess standing in my doorway, but judging by the way she was still scowling at me, I probably had a better shot of scoring with the old woman who expected me to follow her around like a lost puppy. Not that I wanted to score with an old woman. Especially this one.

  But she came back and put her bony hands on her hips and fixed me with her small, dark eyes. “You will not serve them. Far too dangerous. You will come with us and we will keep you safe for now. At least until you have to fight them.”

  I glanced over my shoulder at Hunter and arched an eyebrow at him. This had just shot up to the weirdest moment of my life. “Um, look, lady—”

  That thin bony finger wagged in my face again. “Don’t be disrespectful!”

  Golden-Goddess pressed her lips together trying not to laugh at me. I narrowed my eyes at her. “You could help here.”

  She lifted a shoulder at me. “Hey, she hasn’t hauled you off on her back yet. I think you’re growing on her.”

  I was torn between wanting to slam my door closed to catch the rest of the first quarter and desperately wanting to know who the hell these two women were. My curiosity won out. That was my first mistake. “Who are you?” I asked them both.

  The old woman smiled at me and I noticed she was missing a tooth. I think I preferred her scowling. “You heard her. I’m Badb. Now let’s go. No time.”

  I looked at Golden-Goddess, which I decided was a far better name than Badb so if her name turned out to be just as lame, I was going with it. And since Badb was already walking back to their car, I presumed Golden-Goddess was either going to have to do a lot of talking or I was catching the end of the first quarter after all.

  She looked me over quickly then sighed. “My name is Gunnr. And what Badb was supposed to tell you is that you’re one of the heroes Ninurta is after. You can’t stay here, because when the deadline passes, they will act and you will feel compelled to stop them.”

  I snorted and shook my head. “Gu… uh, whatever your name is, you’ve got the wrong apartment. I’m no hero. The most selfless thing I’ve ever done is let Hunter sleep when he passed out on my bed. Actually, that’s a lie. I tried to wake him up, but the bastard wouldn’t move. I don’t even watch movies with superheroes. Rest assured, I will not be getting involved.”

  I tried to close the door because I could hear the crowd screaming and really wanted to know what I was missing, but Gunnr stopped me. She was freakishly strong and almost as stubborn as Hunter.

  “You don’t know who you are because for hundreds of years now, we’ve been silent. Without the gods, there was no need for your kind either. But you belong to us, and we’re not letting the Sumerians get their hands on you. One way or another, you’re coming with me.”

  I folded my arms across my chest and tried to look intimidating, but I’m pretty sure Gunnr beat me at that, too. “I’m watching the end of the LSU game, and you and your… grandmother?... can ride on back to Valhalla, because I’m not going anywhere.”

  Gunnr rolled her eyes but didn’t take her hand off my door. “Do you even know what Valhalla is?”

  Obviously not.

  Admittedly, joining a fraternity in college had probably not been one of my better ideas. I’m still not sure how I graduated.

  Gunnr nodded toward Hunter who was still standing behind me. “Look, you want to take your friend, then take him. But we’re leaving. Now.”

  I didn’t want to take Hunter, because I wasn’t going anywhere. Or so I thought. I’d gotten through about half of my insistence that she was wasting my time when she reached into my apartment and grabbed my wrist and pulled me out onto the sidewalk. Did I mention she was freakishly strong? Hunter—he is my best friend and all—immediately followed me and tried to push Gunnr off me but she just grabbed him, too, and soon, we were both being pulled along toward the car where the creepy old woman sat behind the steering wheel, smiling her crooked smile with her dark little eyes, and revving the engine like she and the beautiful goddess-like-woman were about to take off from a bank heist.

  As it turns out, that wasn’t too far from the truth.

  Chapter Two

  Hunter and I were stuck in the backseat of the car while our abductors—yeah, we were abducted by a couple of women, one of whom had probably been around to witness the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby—while Badb and Gunnr sat up front conversing in that weird language the old woman seemed to prefer. By now, I was really pissed off that I was missing the game, we’d been pretty much emasculated by the whole kidnapping thing, and Badb was a remarkably bad driver. Her constant swerving was giving me motion sickness.

  I reached into my pocket to grab my phone then remembered it was on the coffee table. I groaned and looked at Hunter hopefully. He shook his head. He didn’t have his phone either. Gunnr looked in the backseat at us, and she seemed to focus a little less hostility toward Hunter, which just made me like her even less. “Your name is Hunter? What kind of name is that?”

  “Your name is Gunnr. What the hell kind of name is that?” he shot back.

  “Norse.”

  I waited to see if Hunter was go
ing to have a smartass comeback now. He apparently decided his mental prowess would be better used in trying to figure out how we were going to escape from these whackos. “It’s a nickname. You’d go by a nickname too if your given name was Julian.”

  Gunnr finally smiled, and my God she was radiant. It made it really hard to hate her. “You’re really going to compare bad names?”

  “So give yourself a nickname,” I suggested. I didn’t think we’d get Badb to go along with our trend of ditching bad names.

  “There’s nothing wrong with your name,” Badb muttered.

  I decided to give Badb one anyway. At least secretly, because she still scared the hell out of me. I leaned over and whispered to Hunter that we would call her Agnes from now on, in honor of the infamous English witch. Don’t ask me why I knew that.

  Hunter snickered and that old witch actually glanced in the backseat at us then flipped us off. Gunnr thought the whole thing was funny, and if she hadn’t just manhandled my best friend and me as she dragged us out of my apartment and into their car, I would have flipped her off. I was pretty sure my chances of sleeping with her were virtually non-existent anyway.

  Gunnr faced me again and almost smiled. “And what name would you give me, Gavyn?”

  I offered her a wide smile when I told her, “Mine.”

  At least Agnes thought I was funny.

  Gunnr mumbled something in an entirely different language—maybe it was Norse—and Agnes laughed again. I half expected her to cackle, but it was just a normal, old lady laugh. I glanced over at my best friend who was being entirely too quiet while I was trying to expedite my ass-kicking by the old woman and beautiful Nordic goddess. Hunter had a sly grin on his face and I had a feeling I was about to wish I had a way to expedite his ass-kicking.

  “What about Bridget? You know, like the goddess?” Hunter asked.

  I had no idea who that was. I’d already exhausted my knowledge of mythology by throwing Valhalla out earlier, and I still had no clue what that even meant. But Gunnr seemed to know exactly who Hunter was talking about. She turned around again, that perfectly smooth forehead wrinkled now in confusion. “She’s Celtic. Besides, I don’t want to take a goddess’s name.”

  Agnes thought that was funny, too.

  “I thought you were looking for something more easily pronounceable for us English speakers,” Hunter protested.

  Gunnr shrugged. “Sure, as long as it’s not a goddess.”

  “How about Keira then?” he asked.

  I didn’t give Gunnr a chance to respond. I punched Hunter on his shoulder and taught Agnes a few words she probably didn’t need to learn. She thought the whole thing was so comical I was convinced we were going to end up in a ditch or wrapped around a telephone pole.

  “Considering I gave Hunter his nickname, and now Agnes hers, it’s only fair I be the one to give you a new name. What do you do? Besides kidnap men from their homes.” There was no way I was letting the idea of adopting my ex-girlfriend’s name stick and I was going to be the one to commence Hunter’s ass-kicking as soon as we got out of that car.

  “I’m a Valkyrie. And why did you start calling him Hunter?” Gunnr called herself a Valkyrie like she was telling me she was a bank teller. Okay, I didn’t really know what a Valkyrie was but I’d heard the word before and I was pretty sure it was something made up. And supposedly badass.

  “Because he wouldn’t stop chasing after Mindy Talbot, like he was some pervy, obsessed hunter. And what do you mean you’re a Valkyrie?”

  Gunnr squinted at me like she was trying to see through so much stupid. “Badb, are you sure we got the right guy?”

  That led to another round of Agnes’s laughing and swerving all over the road. I held onto the door handle and tried not to throw up. “Look, I already told you I wasn’t the guy you were after, and you didn’t answer my question. It’s one thing to be kidnapped by a couple of crazy women, but this kicks up the level of crazy to standing-on-a-ziggurat-as-it-blows-up kind of crazy.”

  Even Hunter was beginning to look a little pale and seasick now. I wondered which of us would lose it first and christen the backseat of Badb’s car. It still had that new car smell.

  Gunnr sighed and straightened out Badb’s steering wheel then turned around to look at me again. “In the Edda, we’re described as choosing who will fall in battle and taking them back to the hall of the dead, which is what Valhalla is supposed to be. That’s not entirely accurate, but we didn’t write the damn poems. We’ve never chosen who will die in battle, but would bring our fallen soldiers to the afterlife. And I don’t want some underworld kind of nickname, or I may start making exceptions to what I’m supposed to do.”

  “Hey,” I snapped, “I’m some hero, remember? You can’t kill me.” Not that I believed her, but if it kept me alive…

  Gunnr turned around again and grumbled, “Well, it’ll keep you out of the hands of the Sumerians.”

  “Where are we going, Keira?” Hunter asked.

  I hit him again and he yelped like the pansy he was. Agnes swerved off the road again.

  “You know,” Gunnr said, smiling at Hunter again, “that’s a pretty name, actually. I think I’ll go by Keira from now on.”

  Then she turned around like the matter was settled. “You’re an asshole,” I told Hunter. And he just kept grinning at me. “You never answered his question, by the way,” I said to Agnes.

  “Airport,” Agnes answered.

  “Airport?” I think my voice raised an octave and I wanted to look at Hunter for confirmation but I was too embarrassed. But then I realized they couldn’t actually get us through an airport since we didn’t have any identification or passports or anything, so I concentrated on keeping my voice at its normal pitch. “Wait. Don’t Valkyries have winged horses or something? What do you need an airplane for, Gunnr?”

  She didn’t bother turning around this time. “You’re not a Valkyrie. And it’s Keira.”

  I was so kicking Hunter’s ass when we got out of this car.

  “How are you going to get us on a plane, Keira?” I hoped the sarcasm in my tone indicated how much I hated her new name. “We don’t have our passports. Hell, I don’t even have my wallet.”

  The only time I’d ever even used my passport was to go to England with Hunter, and I’m pretty sure neither one of us was welcome to go back.

  When Gunnr didn’t answer me, I decided to try my luck with Agnes. “So what’s the plan, Agnes? The way you drive, we’ll be in Kenner soon, and you’re going to have a hard time getting two abducted adults through security.”

  “No problems. You’ll see,” Agnes told me as she swerved around a pickup truck. Hunter was thrown into my side and I pushed him off me and scowled at him. “If this is the kind of help I can expect from you, I might as well have been abducted alone. Y’all should leave him at the airport.” Truthfully, I just wanted them to let him go. Whatever their real story was, they both screamed psychotic and if they were armed—and why wouldn’t two psychos traveling around the country kidnapping people be armed?—our situation could get even more dangerous as soon as they felt trapped.

  “I like him. He’s funny. He’s coming,” Agnes told me.

  “And he’s kind of cute,” Gunnr added.

  Hunter smiled like he’d just won some sort of competition, but the thing was, they kinda had made it into a competition. “Hey! I’m cute and funny! I’ve got a long list of ex-girlfriends that at one time would have backed me up on this.”

  I swear to God, Agnes actually was cackling now as she pulled off the interstate onto Veterans Boulevard to head toward the airport. We were only minutes away from it and I swallowed my pride and tried to figure out a way to let Hunter know we should outrun them as soon as the car doors opened. This car was like a police cruiser; there was no way to open the backdoors from inside. But if they wanted us on a plane, they were going to have to let us out, and surely, we could outrun an old woman and a super hot one who claimed to be a Valkyrie?
I was going to have to look that up, too, because I still wasn’t sure what that was supposed to make her. A goddess? A demi-goddess? An unbelievably hot chick capable of strong-arming two complete strangers who looked like they should be a hell of a lot stronger? God, my ego was never going to recover from this.

  Agnes pulled into the parking garage at the Louis Armstrong International Airport and found a parking spot by straddling the white dividing line. I thought about telling her she’d missed her mark, but I really just wanted out of this damn car. As soon as she cut the engine, Gunnr, whom I was still refusing to call Keira, immediately got out and opened my door but I never had a chance to try to run from her. She reached in and grabbed my arm again and the woman was seriously a freak: I couldn’t even twist my arm around in her grasp. She yanked me from the car and I stumbled into her, which may have been the best part of my kidnapping yet.

  I grinned at her again but she apparently still wasn’t buying my I’m-really-kinda-sexy vibe. She kicked the car door closed with one foot and dragged me through the parking garage. Behind me, I could hear Hunter struggling to free his own arm from the old woman who really must be a witch if she was able to restrain a grown man in his late 20s in surprisingly good shape considering all the beer he drank.

  Whatever hopes I’d had of escaping my ridiculously humiliating kidnapping were banished when Agnes and Gunnr were joined by two men who did not look like they spent their days watching football and drinking beer. Gunnr pushed me toward one of them. “Here, hold onto him for a minute. He’s playing dumb but don’t let him fool you.” The big blond guy who grabbed me looked me over while Gunnr stretched her hand and rubbed her palm. I thought about offering to massage it for her, but I really didn’t want this big blond guy to kick my ass.

  He was still studying me so as usual, my mouth started working before my brain had a chance to catch up. “I’m straight,” I warned him.

  Hunter snickered and I wanted to turn around to hit him again but this guy wasn’t letting me move. My new captor glanced at Agnes. “You sure you got the right guy?”