by A. J. Aalto
The first feral lost the remaining scrap of his self control and pitched into the ice cold water after us. I tried not to scream but I did point with alarm, and blurting, “Bah! Fuckafucka!”
The feral swam toward us, his speed incredible despite the temperature. I cursed and whipped my head around to see how close we were to the ship and that rope to safety.
Back on shore, the second feral lost it, but Declan appeared. He threw himself off the ridge, sailing through the air with arms wide and landing on it, both of them hitting the water with a giant splash. They disappeared under the tossing waves. We pulled up alongside the ship and the rower took the rope ladder in one hand and yelled something at me that was lost under the wind. I didn’t need a translation. I scrambled up, adjusted my gloves so they were good and tight, and started climbing. The sky opened up and began drilling rain just offshore, turning the dark ocean into a splash pool. I realized I had stopped to yell Declan’s name. He was lost under the churning waters. I saw an arm lash upward in the struggle, but I couldn't tell whose it was.
I climbed faster, hauling madly, frantic for the safety of Rask’s company. The rope ladder swung in the wind and knocked against the hull of the boat with my movement. Overheard, another deafening slam of thunder tore the sky open and lightning forked at the water. The waves began to rage under the downward force of Rask’s turbulent winds. Together, Batten and the rower attached the boat to the ship’s dangling pulleys. I felt the rope ladder slam against the ship as Batten jumped from the rowboat.
I mounted the gunwale's railing and flung myself over, Batten vaulting over moments behind me. Rain pounded from the angry clouds, drenching us, my knit cap more or less instantly going from “snuggly warm” to “heavily sodden.” Wind snatched at my scarf and slapped it wetly across my face like a particularly bitchy ghost I'd once met, and I shoved it down into the buttoned collar of Harry’s wool coat.
“Where is he?” I cried, bellowing for my ex-assistant. “Declan!”
A feral breached the icy water, knocking the rowboat and making it rock against the ship. One pale hand latched on to the rope ladder. Declan was piggy-backed on it, hanging off of its neck with one arm while pummeling away at the back of its head with his free fist. The feral writhed and jerked in an attempt to dislodge him, but the dhampir held tight.
Someone’s massive hand hooked me by the shoulder and shoved me out of the way. The Stormbringer growled and reached down to grab the rope ladder, hauling it up and up and up, apparently unhindered by the thrashing weight of the two beings that dangled from it. As the feral got pulled closer, it focused entirely on Batten’s bleeding arm, the blood mixing with the frigid rain and dripping off his fingertips and onto the planks on which we stood. Rask thrust one hand down and grabbed the feral by the throat, dragging him onto the deck as Declan tumbled off. Turning, his hands full of writhing, hissing, mad-with-bloodlust vampire, Rask pitched the feral unceremoniously over the rail as if it was a stale Pop Tart. Desultorily, lightning lit the horizon, and thunder rolled like an afterthought.
I tracked the feral’s trajectory and subsequent descent. “Good hang time, nice distance, but he didn't stick the landing and made a hell of a kersplash. The Canadian judge gives it a six point seven five.” The wind picked up as the rain slackened, filling the sails. Rask said something brief and guttural to his DaySitters, and they scrambled into further action.
Declan and I crawled to huddle in a pile on the planks and Batten collapsed close to us. We caught out breaths together, wet and shivering. The captain clomped over in his big boots, and I thought there may have been trouble written under all that facial hair.
I craned up at Rask. “Death Rejoices, glorious elder.” I choked on the rest, coughing. My pulse was loud in my ears.
“Death Rejoices, DaySitter. Centuries untold celebrate the gift of your submission.”
“Captain…” I gasped. “You’re my new favorite person. I owe you big time.”
Rask frowned; for the first time since I’d laid eyes on him, he looked dumbstruck. “Are you offering me your alliance?”
“Well, yeah!” I said enthusiastically, the duh heavily implied. “You saved our asses.”
Declan paused in the middle of horking seawater onto the deck. “Uh, Dr. B…”
Rask cantilevered himself slowly down to one knee at my side, his massive shoulders offering a safe shelter from the wind. His frozen, ratty blond beard shook under his chin, and his eyes went from ice blue to near black, which was not a color I’d seen in revenant eyes when they were, as Wes called it, vamping-out. They glittered, expanding into giant pools like the ocean itself. The Blue Sense prickled to life around me, and I probed him only as much as was polite, a mere brush. He allowed it. A tickle of psi danced between us and I Felt his abyssal loneliness and his desire to reconnect to the world outside his ship. He missed having a home, a family, a proud place in revenant society. He was sick of being relegated to the part of ferryman. House Rask had been so much more than that. He felt like an outcast, rejected, disrespected; he felt deeply responsible for not protecting his Younger and for the annihilation of his house.
He caught me in his gaze, but there was nothing threatening in it. Instead, I felt a little like I had just before Gregori Nazaire had fed on me in Ruby Valli’s cellar: like something official and important was happening, but I didn’t have a clue what it was. His power tested me, tasted me, explored in a shallow, polite way, not an invasion but a deliberate caress.
“Dude, I don’t know what you’re doing, but I’m not inviting you to feed.” I waved at his DaySitters. “You’ve got enough warm bodies to serve you. You don’t need me to bend the neck.”
“Your house,” Rask said, “and mine. We shall face the cold march through time together, hand in hand, as brothers.”
I cupped a wet glove to my chest to indicate a boob. “And sisters.”
Declan shot me a psssst and shook a hand in my peripheral vision. “Dr. B!” he said urgently.
Batten flopped onto his back on the deck and stared up into the fading storm.
Rask’s mesmerizing gaze would not release me, but that was fine by me. I felt a brand new kinship with the lonely master of House Rask. His voice was a deep, emotion-clogged rattle. “You welcome me, and make me want to smile for the first time in a thousand years, little Dreppenstedt.”
“Uh, Marnie. Baranuik. I have other names, but that’s the only one that really matters.” I stuck out a gloved hand. He took it and placed his bearded mouth to the back of it in a brief, well-mannered peck that would have pleased Harry. “You aren’t smiling, by the way.” I squinted at him, waiting for his lips to move. There was a ripple “Nope, almost had it. Try again?”
He did. His smile was a brilliant miracle, like the sun finally breaching the cloud bank after a dozen straight days of gloom.
“Hey!” I cheered. “You did it!”
A deep rumble shook him, and I realized, maybe with almost as much surprise as him, that he was laughing. It was like the last roll of thunder after a storm has cleared the skies. “House Rask greets House Dreppenstedt and the Raven of Night. Your kindness will not be forgotten, Marnie Baranuik.”
Declan groaned unhappily, but I ignored it. I recovered my hand and removed my soaking knit hat. “What do they call you, Captain Rask?”
“The Lindwyrm.”
My brain teased me with BugBelly’s words: the worm forge. “House Dreppenstedt and the Raven of Night greet the Lindwyrm and House Rask, and we rejoice,” I said, and it sounded troublingly formal again, even though I knew my words weren’t too far off the mark from perfect. I was driven to throw the heavy metal horns and shoot happy pair of finger-guns at the sky. He watched my strange, modern hand gestures with mild bafflement and showed me a long, unnecessary, undead knock-that-shit-off blink. I did. “What will happen to the ferals in the cold water?”
“They will be slow and weak, as long as they did not feed.” He made that a question directed at Declan,
who shook his head. Batten held up his arm and sniffed the blood that was leaking from his nose. His arm wound was barely a scratch, not much of a mouthful.
“They’ll escape the Olmdalur,” I said, worried.
“No,” Rask said. “They will be returned to their container to await the Undertaker.”
“Burial?”
He indicated the Arctic Ocean, where the glaciers and icebergs played footsie. I thought of those endless white tentacles reaching up from the deep, dark water and shuddered.
Rask picked up my discomfort. “It’s the safest place for them. They can do no harm, and no harm can come to them, for the protection of their Youngers.”
I shot Declan a look, but he avoided my gaze. Batten’s face was clearly unsurprised. He seemed to be thinking, “See, Marnie? Monsters.”
I asked, “Isn’t that… a horrible existence?”
“We tried keeping them in the Olmdalur, but as you can see, even that was not perfect. Imperfection is better than annihilation.”
I stared out at the dark ocean again as the wind roared under Rask’s command and he clomped away in his big, heavy boots. “If you say so, big guy.”
Chapter 23
The trip back from Svikheimslending seemed to take no time at all, and skirting through the jiekngasaldi was quick; the quirky land of everlasting sunshine and cheeky Fae were overshadowed by our tasks, and their deadline. Since Declan had been through the Bitter Pass many times, he never blinked, and Batten and I were in too much of a hobbling rush to care. I had all seven of Harry’s special coins ready in case we got stopped by the Lord High Treasurer, but he didn’t show. The River Warden waved us past with less ceremony, aiming her glowing staff at the river to guide our steps. The Russian and Norwegian soldiers at the guard station barely glanced at our passports and our laminated ID cards; their bored expressions unchanged since our first visit. Exiting the Bitter Pass, we were no big deal and merited no great fuss, despite my forehead bruise and Batten’s wounded knee.
Declan got to work trying to hail a taxi that could find the guard hut, a small complication I hadn’t anticipated; thankfully, he’d been paying more attention to his cold companion during their travels. While he made discrete inquiries, Batten and I reread Asmodeus’ note. Written in the demon’s gold script, it listed three quests.
Firstly, we were to find Undercroft, a village near Grimston in Northern Ireland, and retrieve an item from Gareth Granger’s pub, the Stout Ginger Prince. I thought that was just a silly name, but given what I'd named my own business, I was hardly in a position to cast aspersions.
Secondly, we were to head to Giza in Egypt and collect a “misfit” canopic jar from the tomb of a mummy known as Huxtahotep; I wasn’t sure how I’d know that jar from the regular ones, contemplating what warranted calling something a misfit Asmodeus' mind gave me a minor case of the creeping dread-willies, like finding a human eyeball in a jar that was supposed to be Eye of Newt. I figured that the Blue Sense would probably tip me off. Or, you know, the jar would be walking around and telling lascivious jokes instead of sitting quietly on a shelf, collecting dust, or whatever they usually do. Plus, there was the question of how I was going to get into the tomb, but the Overlord did love his games, and he had ways of knowing things that we mere mortals did not.
Lastly, but certainly not leastly (which should totally be a word), we would need to get to Kathmandu, where we would need to meet a yeti and collect a nail. Were yetis carpenters? Were we going to have to find a Sasquatch with hoarding tendencies, who just happened to have a jar of toenail trimmings? Reading the list made me want to throw in the towel and tromp home to Colorado, letting the immortals sort their own damn troll issues. None of this was fabulous, least of all, my part in it. Fat lips aren't fabulous. Failing and flailing wasn't fabulous. Then again, flouncing and fleeing weren't fabulous, either. And there was the small matter of getting my soul fed to the Overlord by a raving bitch in a too-sexy fetish outfit, which didn't sound all that fabulous, either.
BugBelly’s warning about the mummy’s tomb smelling like ass returned to me, and I sighed, “Prophecy of doom. I knew it.”
Batten rubbed his face vigorously with both hands, as if washing away the stress. “So we fly from Hammerfest to Ireland.”
“The note says Undercroft, collect one (1) pod o’ gold. Huh.” I smirked. “Ol’ Three-Head made a spelling error. Demon kings make mistakes. Who’d’a thunk it?”
“Guessing English isn’t his mother tongue,” Batten said.
“How come you don’t mock Him to His faces like you mock me? Huh?”
“When you can eat my face,” he promised, “I’ll stop mocking you.”
I bared my teeth menacingly, and when Batten failed to be suitably terrified, I scowled and fired up the GPS widget on my phone. “Undercroft is listed in the wiki as a town near Grimston. The note says the caretaker is a being named Gareth Granger.”
Declan groaned and rested his head against the tree. “Fucking great.”
Batten asked, “Problem?”
“Well,” I explained patiently, “if he was a guy, a dude, a human, the word ‘being’ wouldn’t be here. There are two types of solitary faeries who protect pots of gold. Leprechauns were one; they went extinct in the fifteenth century. The other is the nasty cousin of the leprechaun, the clurichaun. They’re commonly found in wine cellars guarding casks and kegs and such.”
“Okay,” Batten said, clearly not seeing the problem. He squared his shoulders. “How do we get him to give us a pot of gold?”
Declan shook his head. “You don’t, Agent Batten. He will die before releasing his treasure.”
I nodded in agreement. “And I seriously doubt the three of us could kill a clurichaun.”
“Why not? We’ve got Declan. He’s half-vamp, right?”
Declan didn’t seem to take offense. “Even if we had Harry— even if we had the help of all the revenants—we couldn’t kill a clurichaun. That’s why they’re still around. They can regenerate lost tissue in seconds, and if the fight isn’t going their way, they toss back some fairy wine and fade into their relative fae-reality where humans can’t follow.”
“Phasing is some sketchy Fourth-edition bullshit,” I muttered darkly. I'd stopped playing Magic: The Gathering with Wes when he'd started using new tricks like that on me.
“So what’s our game plan?” Batten wanted to know.
Declan and I exchanged helpless looks. “Step one,” I said, “we cruise on down into Grimston and ask for directions to Undercroft.”
“Solid start. And then?”
“That’s all I’ve got so far, but we’ll figure something out,” I said.
Declan turned away to talk into his phone some more. Batten adjusted his go-bag on his shoulder. “So, two votes for Harry, three votes for Remy. All hail Dreppenstedt?”
“And three votes for Sarokhanian,” I reminded him.
“What happens if you don’t get this stuff for Remy?”
I grimaced, kicking at hard-packed snow. “I will.”
“But if you don’t?” He diagnosed the look on my face.
“Sarokhanian will rule and the trolls will be allowed to cull the human herd. That means exactly what you think it means,” I said. “Lots of dead people.”
“The Overlord said if you beat Sayomi in the Olmdalur, Sarokhanian gets bumped from the running?”
I took a deep, soothing breath and let it stream out my nostrils without answering.
Batten finished the thought. “You’ll be playing suck pillow in the Arctic for the rest of your life.”
I glared at him through my lashes. “Suck pillow? You’re hilarious.” But the general idea was pretty clear: Now that I’d opened my big mouth and stirred up the revenant court about Remy, I had to make sure I put her on the throne. The other two options were painful to consider.
Declan hung up the phone. “Taxi will be here shortly. So, everything good? We cool?” It was clear that we were not. He rocked back on
his heels, looking for something to talk about while we waited. “Oh! Right. So, um, how goes the research, Dr. B?”
Batten snorted derisively and clomped over to one of the chairs against the wall of the waiting room.
“I do research,” I retorted. Okay, sometimes it was which-café-makes-the-best-Danish? research, but I was super serious about my work.
Batten grunted. “Must take a lot of touching and feeling to figure out how to better fondle things.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I demanded. “You wanna Grope and Feel sometime, tough guy?”
Declan cleared his throat and shifted the bag on his back. “I meant your study of spriggans in the Rocky Mountain range.”
I asked Batten the dumbest question ever. “You don’t respect my work at all, do you?”
Batten rolled his eyes. “Drop it.”
“Not gonna drop the subject, or my work. No.” I put my body directly in front of him. “You never wanted my help, until you did, and then you didn’t, and then you mocked me, and then you told me not to work with the FBI, and then you goaded me into doing just that, and even now, you can never pass up an opportunity to make a dig.”
Declan said, “Uh, I thought the preliminary work looked intriguing…”
“It is,” I said. “My work is very intriguing. Thank you, Dr. Edgar.”
Batten’s jaw rippled. “Yes, thank you, Dr. Edgar. You’ve been a big help here.”
“Don’t blame Declan for exposing your shitty attitude,” I said.
There were headlights in the distance. Declan said, “Getting back to the subject at hand, is it your contention that the females don’t bite, but may invade the skull via mind-controlling spores that react similarly to the way toxoplasmosis affects the brains of rats to cause risky, predator-seeking behavior?”
I stepped outside, took a deep breath of frigid air, and said goodbye to the quiet guard house, hoping I’d live to see it on the flip side before marching to the taxi. I opened one of the back doors. “That is my contention, Dr. Edgar, based on my mission to clear a female spriggan out the honeysuckle bush of an ungrateful FBI agent. And who might, completely unrelatedly, have flown his ass to Scandinavia and walked into the middle of a meeting among most of the houses of the undead. Bet he thinks getting eaten means he won't have to pay his invoice.”