“No. Kids won’t be happening.” She heard her own voice sounding more serious that she had intended.
Tamara hesitated, and she said, “Is there something wrong? You always wanted kids before.”
“Well… I can’t have any. And neither can Erik.”
Her friend looked at her in silence for a moment, then said, “Well, you must save a lot of money on birth control.”
Nika laughed. “That is so you. Always finding the bright side!”
“I do my best.” She flopped down in one of the wooden lawn chairs. “So… tell me about him. I remember what he looked like in his suit and stuff, but give me the dirt.”
Nika sat in the other chair and smiled. “He’s funny, and smart. He’s also really brave and strong. He’s got a really good heart and a sense of honor, and he’s loyal to his traditions and his people. He’s… everything.”
Tamara rolled her eyes. “Oh my God, but you have it bad.”
“I’m supposed to be in love with him,” Nika defended herself. “I’m going to marry him, after all.”
“Well, that’s great and all, but tell me the dirt. Does he have a bad temper? Is he bad at paying the bills? Is he good in bed?”
“No, no, and very.”
“‘Very?’ That’s all I get?”
She smirked. “I don’t kiss and tell.”
“Since when?” Tamara chortled. “You practically gave me a blow-by-blow with… what was his name?”
Spencer, she thought, but aloud she said, “I don’t remember.”
“Bullshit.”
Nika only smiled and shrugged. “Once you go Viking, you don’t go back.”
“I’ll bet. Got any spare Vikings laying around?”
“Well… there are a lot of men in Sweden, but I’ll let you pick out the ones you want,” she teased. “I was never good at setting up blind dates for you.”
Her friend shuddered. “Jeez Louise, do you remember that loser you set me up with in senior year? Harvey?”
“He was sweet.”
“He was a mama’s boy who gave Norman Bates a run for his money.”
“Oh, come on. He wasn’t that bad.”
Tamara snorted. “Says you. You didn’t have to kiss him.”
Nika’s cell rang, and she nearly jumped out of her skin. She grabbed it quickly. “Hello?”
Erik’s voice came to her. “Did Tamara’s flight come in on schedule?”
“Yes, she’s sitting here in the garden with me.” She hesitated. “Are you all right?”
“Fine.” He sounded like nothing untoward had happened. She wondered what he was thinking. “I’m driving back down from Ingrid’s and won’t be home for another hour or so. Have fun if you take her out on the town, but be careful.”
“I will.” She hesitated. “I love you. You know that.”
“I know. And I love you, too.”
The call ended, and she turned back to her friend. Tamara asked, “Was that the man of the hour?”
“Yes. He was up at his mother’s house and won’t be back for a while.”
“Cool. More time for us to visit without boys interrupting.”
Nika chuckled. “Oh, believe me. He is no boy.”
“So I gather.” She turned to face her. “So, what’s with the super strength? Did you get bitten by a radioactive spider or something?”
Her palms suddenly felt clammy. “Well… I was bitten by something. Or someone, I should say. Do you remember all of those movie marathons we’d have around Halloween?”
Tamara frowned, confused. “You mean all of those Christopher Lee vampire movies? The Hammer flicks?”
“Yes.”
“Yeah, I remember. What about them?”
“Remember when we said we thought it would be cool but scary if vampires were real?”
Her friend’s face was a mask of confusion with fear creeping in at the edges. “I’m starting to pick up what you’re laying down here, and I don’t know if I like it.”
Nika looked away and called forth her Draugr self. Her eyes glowed red, and her teeth lowered in her mouth, sharp and gleaming. She looked back at Tamara and smiled.
“It’s actually pretty cool.”
“Jesus Christ!” Tamara leaped up and backed away. “What the - how the - Jesus!”
To add to the shock, and to get it all out of the way at once, Nika summoned her runic magic and let glowing Futhark figures dance in the air between her hands. She looked up at Tamara and said, “I’ve been through a lot of changes since I left St. Louis.”
Tamara began to speak, but her voice came out as a helpless squeak before she fainted dead away.
Chapter Thirteen
When Erik got home, Nika was sitting alone on the living room couch, her knees drawn up to her chest. She was chewing on her thumbnail and fretting so hard that he could practically hear it.
He put his keys on the console table near the door and walked into the room. As soon as she saw him, she leaped up and rushed to him, wrapping her arms around him in a tight embrace. He hugged her just as tightly.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“I’m sorry,” she said, her eyes filling with tears. “I was stupid to test you. I didn’t mean to upset you.”
Erik sighed and kissed her forehead tenderly. “I want you to be comfortable with us,” he said. “If that means that you need to test me until you believe in me, then you can test me.”
“But I do believe in you,” she said softly. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“You were thinking that I’ve done horrible things in the past, and that I did horrible things under Mia’s enchantment. You were wondering if I’d go back to my old ways. I understand.” He stepped back. “Where is Tamara?”
Nika put a hand to her forehead. “I screwed up.”
He frowned, confused. “How so…?”
“I showed her my Draugr side, and my magic.” She smiled awkwardly. “I didn’t know how else to tell her, but I wanted her to know.”
Erik shook his head and chuckled. “Dramatic, but effective, I guess. How did she take it?”
“She fainted.”
“Oh. Whoops.”
She sat down again. “I put her in the guest room, and after she woke up, she locked the door. She hasn’t come out since.”
He sat beside her on the couch and put his arm around her. She snuggled into his chest, a look of relief on her face. He kissed her hair. “Well, she can’t stay in there forever. Eventually she’ll have to use the restroom, or she’ll need to eat.”
“She hates me,” she moaned.
“She doesn’t hate you. She’s probably just processing the information. It was probably a lot to take all at once.” He chuckled. “That’s my Chosen - dramatic to the end.”
They sat together for several long, quiet minutes. Finally, she said, “Were you at Ingrid’s the whole night?”
“No. I was working a little, too. There’s going to be a fight soon, and I need to get our people prepared for it.”
She straightened and looked into his eyes, concerned. “A fight? What kind of fight?”
Their conversation was interrupted by his cell phone. A new text message had arrived, and he opened it up immediately. The sender was Derek Dupin, and it contained only a URL. He glanced at Nika, then tapped the link.
His smart phone took him to the internet. The website in question was a blank black screen with an embedded video. Nika leaned closer so she could see, too, as he activated the video. The recording was a little shaky, obviously having been taken on someone’s handheld device, but he knew was he was seeing. It was his daughter marrying Dupin.
Erik let out a huff of breath, somewhere between a snort and a laugh. “Well, that’s interesting.”
“Who is that man?”
“His name is Derek Dupin. At least that’s what he goes by these days. He was in charge of the Draugr in the eastern half of Paris.” He turned the video off and scrolled through the web page. There w
as nothing else to see. “He took control of the western half while his rival was here attending the moot in Uppsala.”
“Why is she marrying him?”
He turned off the phone and tossed it onto the coffee table. “He’s marrying her, not the other way around, and he’s probably doing it to consolidate his position. He’s got a magic user at his side now, which makes it that much harder for the western Paris leader to take her territory back.”
Nika sat back. “That’s the fight you were talking about.”
“Yes.”
“Well, if you’re going into a fight with a magic user, you need one of your own. I’m going with you.” She suddenly went pale. “Erik, my dream…”
He nodded. “Perhaps it was a premonition.”
“But… you died in my dream.”
He touched her face, wishing he could caress away her horror. “It was a warning. We will take precautions, now that we know what might happen.”
A fat tear slipped down her cheek. “I’m not losing you,” she whispered. “I refuse.”
Erik pulled her into his arms, and she buried her face in his shoulder, crying. He stroked her back to comfort her because he had no words that could ease her fears. The truth was that if it was his time, there was nothing he could do to stop it. The Norns decided when a man’s time ran out. The only power he had was to make the most of the time he was allotted, and he had been given more time than almost anyone else. He was content.
There was a creak at the top of the stairs, and Tamara descended a few steps, her face ashen. She stopped and said, “Did you do this to her?”
“Do what?” he asked. “You’ll have to be more specific. Welcome to Stockholm, by the way.”
She took another step down. “Why is she crying?”
“Because I will be going to war and she is afraid.” He kissed Nika’s hair, and she sat up, trying to compose herself. She wiped at her face, and he told their guest, “But I don’t think that’s what you meant at first.”
She set her jaw and saw, “Did you make her into a vampire?”
“Ah. There it is. Yes, I did, but with her full agreement and consent.”
“So you’re a vampire, too.”
“I am.”
Tamara gripped the banister, her knuckles white. “Are you going to kill me?”
“Absolutely not. I haven’t killed a human in hundreds of years.”
Nika said, “Tam, he’s not a monster. Neither am I. I’m still the same person you’ve always known...just different.”
She came down the stairs the rest of the way and came to stand in front of the couch, just outside of arm’s reach. She peered at Erik, then at Nika. “You look human.”
He nodded. “We can conceal our Draugr nature.”
Tamara frowned. “Draugr? What is that?”
“That’s the Old Norse word for vampire.”
“Old Norse,” she said. “So you’re, like, a real Viking.”
Erik smiled. She was warming up to them, and the more she expressed her curiosity, the less she feared him. “I was. I don’t go a-viking so much anymore.”
The human looked from Erik to Nika and back again. “Dude, you are totally robbing the cradle here.”
Nika laughed and stood up, opening her arms to her friend. “Do you forgive me for scaring you?”
Tamara hesitated, then hugged Nika, and the last of the ice shattered. “Yeah, I suppose. Now I have a whole new set of questions I need you to answer.”
He rose from the couch, and their guest eyed him warily. “I’m going to go to bed,” he told them. “I need to get some rest. You two have fun catching up.”
Nika held out her hand to him, and he took it, pressing a light kiss to the knuckles. “Do you want me to come up?” she asked.
He looked from his fiancée to the woman who had convinced her to test him, then smiled. “No, that’s fine. I’ve been up since yesterday morning, so I’d really like to get some sleep. Take your time.”
She smiled at him gratefully, and he went up the stairs to their bedroom.
***
The room was silent.
Mia slid from her husband’s bed after making certain that he was completely under the control of her enchantment. He would not be waking any time soon.
She pulled a piece of chalk out of her bag and knelt on the floor, drawing a circle and a series of intricately interconnected runes. She chanted while she drew, words of Old Norse falling from her lips in a breathy hiss. Power began to shimmer over the white lines, making them dance and sway like figures behind a wall of heat distortion. When she had surrounded herself with the magic of summoning, she bit into her hand until it bled and let the blood drop into the middle of her circle.
The scarlet drops sizzled as if they’d hit a frying pan, and smoke rose in the shaking air. A cold breeze blew across her cheek, and it carried the smell of death and the grave. She squeezed more blood out onto the floor, then spoke in a louder voice.
“Oh Hel, great goddess of the dead and of revenge, I call on you now. My enemy sleeps. Show me his weakness that I might exploit it.”
In front of her, hovering in midair like the screen from a dismantled television, an image of Nika appeared. She was sitting on a couch, speaking with a blonde woman Mia didn’t recognize. She frowned. This was not her intended target, but sometimes Hel spoke in secret ways. Perhaps her goddess was telling her that Nika was her true enemy.
“Goddess, Hel, Dark One… guide me.”
Nika’s image was surrounded by a thin gold light, and from that light came another, like a tenuous and gossamer thread, that extended up through the ceiling above her head. Mia pushed the power of the spying image forward, following the thread through the ceiling and the floor above it, finding her way into the bedroom where her father was lying in his bed.
Erik was covered to the waist with bedclothes, but where he was exposed, he was naked. The owl tattoo on his chest shimmered with magic, and she wondered what was suppressed inside those black lines. He had his eyes closed, but he was not yet asleep.
She whispered words of hate and magic, and a glowing dart made of red energy appeared in her hand. She focused it, aiming it at her father’s heart, and with a final command word she let it fly.
***
Nika hesitated in her conversation with Tamara. “Did you feel that?”
“Feel what?”
“Like someone is watching us.” She shuddered and rubbed her hands over her arms, chafing her skin against the cold she felt in her soul. The runes on her forearms buzzed and glowed, and she was filled with the need to go to Erik.
She rose like shot, moving with as much speed as her Draugr nature could provide. Tamara shrieked in surprise and jumped back.
“Wait here,” Nika commanded, and she took the stairs two at a time.
She felt shaky inside, full of adrenaline, convinced something was very, very wrong. She burst into the bedroom, startling Erik out of his drowsiness, and saw a circular blur over the end of the bed. Something red was pushing through, and she was filled with anger when she saw it.
“Svik!” she hissed in Old Norse, the word rolling up out of the goddess who rode along inside her soul. Ithunn spat the word for treason through Nika’s lips, and she pointed her finger at the blur. A blast of golden energy shot out and struck the red object, and the whole assemblage – blur, red dart and feeling of being watched – vanished into thin air.
Erik sat up in bed, confused. “What the hell was that?”
“Someone is trying to kill you,” she said, “using magic. And there’s only one person with the ability and the motive to do that.”
He set his jaw. “Mia.”
“Apparently, that was her wedding gift to you.” She turned to him, her face flushed with the residual rush of the magic she had wielded. “Are you unhurt?”
“I’m fine. How did you – “
“I felt it from downstairs.” She sat on the edge of the bed and stroked his face. “She has
to be dealt with, Erik. I know you want to show her leniency because she’s your daughter, but…”
He took her hand and held it to his chest, just above his heart. “I know.” His face was grim. “It’s time.”
***
In Paris, the dart was turned back by Nika’s blast. It reversed course and flew like a bullet toward Mia. She dodged out of the way just in time to avoid being skewered in the chest, but her own weapon still lodged in her shoulder. She gasped in agony as the prepared assassin’s dart burned its poison into her own flesh.
“Impossible,” she whispered, trying and failing to dispel the dart. It refused to obey her.
She closed her eyes and tried to still the rapid beating of her heart. If her pulse stayed fast, it would speed the poison through her system that much more quickly. She racked her brain for someone who could help her.
“Ingrid,” she said aloud, calling on the grandmother who had helped to raise her when she was just a tiny girl. “Ingrid, help.”
There was no response, but she could feel her the ancient vala turning away from her. She burned in fury at the betrayal.
Her head was swimming, and it took all of her strength to crawl toward the bed. Mia clutched the bedspread and used it to drag herself up until she was face to face with Derek, who still slumbered under the effects of her spell. She banished the enchantment and watched as his eyes flew open.
“Mia,” he said, his voice husky. “What happened?”
“Rune Master,” she said, her lips and tongue thick. “Attacked me.”
He grabbed the red dart, ignoring the way it burned his hands. He pulled it free and threw it against the wall, where it became embedded. He put his hands on Mia’s wound, trying to stop the blood.
“I’ll kill her,” he said angrily. “That bitch!”
Mia was rapidly succumbing to a fever that burned painfully from her shoulder through to her head. Her stomach flopped in nausea, and she started to sweat. “Derek,” she breathed.
He looked down at her, and she could feel the weight of his gaze. He shifted to lie down beside her, curling close to her almost protectively. She was drifting off into oblivion when his fangs thrust into her neck.
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