It had been a long, long time since they’d hunted together as beasts. Too long.
They closed on the running man with ease and then slowed to stay behind him. Every once in a while, Luka sprinted away to one side or the other and snapped his jaws at Carson, herding him where they wanted him to go.
Carson’s chest was heaving, and he was making a whistling sound with each breath. Blood soaked his clothes and dripped from him like sweat.
As they crossed back over the road, Liz advanced with a burst of speed and swatted Carson to the ground with a mighty blow. The man hit the macadam and slid, like a kid on ice, face first into the back tire of his cruiser.
With a howl, Luka darted forward and clamped his fangs on Carson’s thigh, pinning him to the ground.
Liz walked forward at a slow pace, enjoying the anticipation of the kill. The man was screaming something over and over, but she couldn’t understand what he was saying. She raked her claws down Carson’s side, digging deep, delighted by the splatter of blood across the road’s surface. Luka shook his head back and forth like a dog worrying a chew toy. Carson’s flesh tore and popped under their onslaught. Liz sank her teeth into Carson’s upper arm and ground her jaws together, pulverizing the bone. Carson screamed, but his voice had broken, and what came out of his mouth sounded more like radio static than human speech.
Liz rolled him onto his back and butted his face with her snout, but when he continued the pathetic noise, she opened her mouth and closed her fangs on the man’s face. She pulled back, ripping skin from his cheeks and leaving long gouges across his forehead.
Luka growled and with a mighty heave, ripped a chunk out of the cop’s thigh muscle. He danced several paces away and began to eat his prize. He sounded more like a pack of wolves than a single creature. Liz grunted and took her own bite out of Carson’s flesh.
When they were finished with him, it was hard to tell by what remained of Ben Carson, if he was human.
“Mathur,” Liz grated and began to shrink and change.
Luka voiced a mournful howl and then uttered the same word.
When they were finished changing back, they shoved what was left of Ben Carson into the driver’s seat of his cruiser and turned their backs on him.
“That was fun,” said Liz.
“Yes, my Queen. We should do that more often.”
Liz smiled and took his hand in both of hers. “Where would I be without you, my Champion?” With a gleam in her eye, she led him across the road and up the hill toward home.
As they came through the row of trees that surrounded the house, someone gave a small scream.
They were both naked and covered in blood and gore.
A woman stood in the front yard—Virginia Gunsel. Her mouth hung open, forming a perfect O of astonishment. Behind her, in the drive, were two cars, Virginia’s little Toyota, and the racy luxury sedan of Marianne Markey.
Liz had forgotten it was Bridge night. She glanced at Luka, and he sprinted toward the car. She raised her hand to point at Virginia. “Predna,” she said.
Emerald green flame exploded across Virginia Gunsel’s face and torso. The woman shrieked and beat at the flames with her big purse, but the movement only spread the flames. She danced and screeched until she could no longer breathe.
Glass shattered, and Luka jerked Marianne Markey out of the car through the driver’s side window. With a savage twist, he broke her neck and then looked at Liz with a small smile on his lips.
He was magnificent, and a desperate lust for him blossomed through Liz like an early spring. She smiled back at him, but the smile turned into a rictus of horror as another set of headlights washed across the yard and the carnage they had just wrought.
“Luka!” she shouted, pointing at the car.
He turned and ran toward it, but it was too late. Tires screeching, the car tore off down the road. It was their fourth. It was Melanie Layne’s car.
Twenty
“The driver of the car was the fourth member of the Bridge game that night. Her name was Melanie Layne. She was a tough bird, I’ll tell you that. She took one look at what was going on in that yard and decided.” Hank snapped his fingers. “In an instant, she had the car going down the road. When she was sure she was safe, she called the police and reported what she’d seen.”
“The killings of the two other women,” said Sif.
“Yes. By the time the cops responded, the house and barns were on fire, and the bodies were gone, but they found Ben Carson down the hill, just like Liz wanted them to.”
Yowrnsaxa reached over and squeezed my hand. “I’m sorry about your friend.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“How do you know…” started Yowrnsaxa.
“How do I know about the beast parts? Forensic evidence. Blood splatter analysis. Huge, animal-like footprints.” I waved my hand in the air. “At the time, I didn’t know what it all meant. Not until after I saw Luka do the trick in person. No, at the time we just had a lot of confusing shit no one could explain. We thought Luka and Liz—the Dark Queen, that is—had tortured and murdered him and then set him back in the car. We thought they might have worn some kind of boot to make the tracks. As far as I know, that’s still the official story.”
Meuhlnir was looking at the ground between his feet. He didn’t move for a long moment and then shook his head. “She has fallen so far. Luka, too,” he said in mournful tones.
“Yes,” said Sif. “It’s hard to reconcile the memories of the queen and Luka with that story.”
“This other, the last one, she got away?”
“She did that night,” I said. “Ultimately, however, they got her. We had her in a safe house—”
“No,” said Meuhlnir. “No more for now.”
Sif put her hand on Meuhlnir’s cheek. “It’s not your burden, husband.”
“Yes, it is,” he snapped. “It’s all of ours.”
Sif looked down and sighed. “But what’s to be done?”
Meuhlnir shook his head. “Something. I don’t know what, yet, but I do know Hank and I need to go up to the lake. To see what’s become of the proo he traveled.” Meuhlnir shrugged into a huge coat made of black bear fur. “Going to be cold, so bundle up.”
I put on my coat, fingering the modern materials in its construction. It might be warmer than what Meuhlnir was wearing, but there was no question as to who looked cooler. I mean, a big white guy with light brown hair wearing a coat with a green, gray, and white pattern, or a giant of a man with red hair wearing a bulky bear skin full length coat? No contest.
Meuhlnir pushed through the door and beckoned me out. He led the way back to the path in silence, head down, hands loose at his sides.
“So…” I said to break the silence, “you didn’t go to Rome? I figured you for Jupiter and Zeus with the whole lightning fetish.”
“Hmm,” said Meuhlnir with a shrug. “They say imitation is the purest form of respect. Anyway, I never said I didn’t visit Greece,” he said with a sly little smile so I couldn’t tell if it was just a joke or a hint.
It was cold outside, a brisk wind blowing from the south. Even so, the sky was bright and blue, as if no cloud would dare set foot in its domain—as if no sterk task had covered it from horizon to horizon just a day or two before.
“What’s the plan, boss?” I asked.
“I keep a proo tethered near the lake. I want to see if it’s still there or whether my brother moved it, too. He always did like to prank me. Damn inconvenient prank, if he did.”
“I’ll say,” I said. “Meuhlnir…”
He glanced over his shoulder at me. “Spit it out, Hank.”
I shrugged and looked away into the woods. “It’s just that I have to find my family. I can’t spend time on anything else.”
“Yes, I know. That’s part of why I want to know where my proo went.”
“Another trip through time and space?”
Meuhlnir grunted. “The proo I keep at the lake leads to a j
uncture of many different preer at Trankastrantir—northeast of here. It was very convenient for traveling, believe me.”
“As long as no one moves the other side around on you and tries to drop you in a freezing lake.”
Meuhlnir nodded. “Could be he wanted to dunk you in the water, but meant no real danger to befall you. Luka was always fond of practical jokes.”
“Good intentions of evil men, eh?”
Meuhlnir grunted. “I suppose you could view it that way, but I’ve known my brother a lot longer than you have. A lot longer than you’ve been alive.”
“How will you know he hasn’t moved the other end of your old proo? As another joke.”
Meuhlnir shrugged and continued trudging down the path.
“You said your proo leads to a junction of others?
“In a way, yes. Veethar has designed a vault made of stone. Each stone in the walls is imbued with a rune. Each rune is tied to a proo. Invoke the rune and the proper proo is summoned forth.”
“That does sound convenient.” I took a deep breath of the cold, crisp air. “Sounds complicated, though. How does Veethar maintain the place?”
He fell back to walk beside me. “Veethar and I learned the secret of that when we were young men. Young, traveling men. We learned it in one of the strangest stathur I’ve ever visited.”
I looked him over in the day light. People from home would have guessed he and I were of an age. He didn’t look a day past fifty. “Young men? You don’t look much older than me. Still keeping your age a secret? Is how you look now how you really look?”
He looked at me sharply, but saw my grin and chuckled. “Might as well ask if dragons like jewels. But I guess I deserve your suspicions after last night.”
“Dragons?” My right hip popped—a kind of warning shot—and mild pain flared down my leg.
He laughed at the expression on my face and smiled a secretive and cryptic smile. “Want to meet one?”
“I’m not sure I do,” I said. “I guess it depends on what they really are.” I rubbed my hands together without thinking about it, trying to massage the blossoming pain in my knuckles back to sleep. No matter how many times it had failed to work in the previous seven years, something in my mind insisted that if I rubbed them enough, my hands wouldn’t hurt anymore.
“Wise words, Hank. But, in any event, we don’t see them much anymore. Most have gone north—closer to Fankelsi and the Dragon Queen.” Meuhlnir looked at me sideways, watching me rub my hands. “The pain comes back?”
“I’m okay,” I said. The thing about Norwegians—at least all of them that I knew—was that they’d rather admit they were monkeys than that they were suffering. “This Dragon Queen, that’s Suel?”
“The curse will return as we travel farther from my little cabin in the woods,” he said. “Yes, Suel was called the Dragon Queen in better times.”
I shrugged it off. “So, these dragons you’ve got, they are evil then?” I asked. A sharp twinge ran from my left shoulder up my neck, and I winced.
“Some, yes. You want absolutes? Nothing in life is so black and white, Hank. The Dark Queen may do evil, but is she really evil?”
“I think you want the philosophy professor named Hank Jensen. I’m just a cop from New York.”
“Being a cop means you don’t think about the greater nature of things?” He shook his head. “As far as being ‘just a cop’…you are selling yourself too cheaply.”
“I’ve seen a lot of evil in my day,” I said. “I can’t really grasp how evil deeds come from good men.”
“Can any one person be only evil or good? Aren’t we all just a mishmash of both states at any given moment of any day?”
“Can we ever really know what goes on inside a man?” I countered. “Aren’t the actions of a man the only measure of his character we have?” My knees were getting that sick, I’m-about-to-make-you-wish-for-a-chainsaw feeling that I’d come to know so well.
“Hmm,” said Meuhlnir. “Actions, not words, are a testament to any man’s mettle, eh? Well argued. But even so, are any man’s actions limited only to one of the two categories? Aren’t there actions that are only partly good and partly evil? Or neither one?”
We walked in silence for a while, our movement punctuated by the crunching of snow under our boots. “I don’t know the answer to that,” I said. I’d developed an obvious limp—my right foot had begun to feel like I’d stepped on a sixteen-penny nail and it was stuck right through the ball of my foot.
“What about the man that does something good but doesn’t do it for the sake of the work, or because it is right, but because he derives some benefit from it?” Meuhlnir was walking with his hands clasped in the small of his back, head bowed.
“You mean like someone who donates food to charity because he gets points he can use to get something for free?”
“I think that’s it exactly,” said Meuhlnir. “Is that a good or an evil act?”
“I guess that depends on whether being selfish is evil or neither one.”
“Ah, you see it. If a man’s actions can be defined ambiguously, or can’t be defined as good or evil at all, then is the man good or evil?”
“I think,” I said, “that a man can be judged by the sum of his actions. Maybe evil men do random acts of good, but if they commit more evil acts, how can you call them anything but evil? What about a killer of children who helps little old ladies cross the street? Isn’t random murder of a child more impactful than helping an old lady for thirty seconds.”
“Good questions,” muttered Meuhlnir. “And ones I don’t know the answers to, but given that I don’t, am I fit to be the judge of that man?”
I held up my hands in exasperation. “Someone has to be, or society becomes chaos.”
We listened to the sound of our boots packing snow beneath our feet once again.
Meuhlnir looked at me with an assessing gleam in his eye. “Shall we rest a moment? Would that help?”
I shook my head. “Walking is better than standing, and if I sit here in the cold, I’ll just get stiff, and you’ll have to carry me.”
He nodded and put his hand on my shoulder in sympathy. “Does a judge on your klith have to be more open minded than most? More willing to give the benefit of the doubt?”
I shrugged, the synthetic materials of my coat making an annoying, abrasive noise in my ear. “I don’t know. In our system, a man has to be proven guilty beyond the shadow of a doubt, but once he is, he can be judged with a clean conscience.”
“I think that even so, a good man might be improperly judged in that system. People are people, after all. People see what they want to see, no?” asked Meuhlnir.
I chuckled sourly. “Yeah, sometimes they see innocence where only guilt exists.”
Meuhlnir waved his hand. “The price of protecting the innocent, no?”
““I guess that might be right,” I said. “I get the feeling, though, that this conversation is less about the general case and more about the specific cases of Luka and the Black Queen.”
Meuhlnir put his chin on his chest. “It may be,” he said. “It may be.”
“Do you think, then, that family members should be the only judges?”
The redheaded man tugged his beard and grimaced. “Who better?” he grumped.
I scoffed and looked at the uncrunched snow in front of my feet. “Almost anyone? Don’t you think family members would be biased?”
Meuhlnir shook his head. “Who would know a man better than his own brother?”
“Let me tell you about the last time I saw your brother. You need to know this.”
Meuhlnir sighed and waved his hand for me to tell him.
“When I first got sick, when the curse first started in earnest, it was horrible. I’d just been dealing with the forensic evidence from Ben’s murder, and we found Melanie Layne and got her report from the previous night. Because of the nature of the murders and what she reported seeing happen to the other two women, we put
Ms. Layne into protective custody.
“My illness—my curse, whatever—was taking its toll by then. I’d been to the doctor, and I was heading back toward the safe house that afternoon. A retired trooper named Richie Duvall had the house across the street, and he picked up a few shifts here and there keeping watch from his front porch. Anyway, when I got to the safe house that afternoon, something felt off about the place. Wrong.”
Twenty-one
I got out of my cruiser and stood very still, hand on the butt of my gun, eyes bouncing from one lengthening shadow to the next. The house sat as quiet as a tomb. It was too quiet—like everyone inside was already dead.
The ground floor windows were dark, empty, and dead. Something was wrong. I glanced across the street, looking for Richie Duvall, but there were no lights on at his place. No movement.
I went inside, trying to be quiet. A slimy, coppery smell pervaded the air. It was a familiar smell. Blood. I could hear it dripping, dripping. I pulled my Glock out of its holster and held it ready. I stepped into the little mud room and froze, straining my ears to hear in the silence, my eyes to see into the gloom of the interior.
I slid into the cold darkness of the house and opened the door to the laundry room. A dark shape lay on the linoleum floor—Melanie Layne.
I switched on the lights, and soft yellow light washed over her, unconscious and handcuffed to the rusty radiator. There was a small trickle of blood at the corner of her mouth. Her eyes were pinched closed, but her breathing was regular. I got her uncuffed and scooped her up, cradling her like a newlywed. I backed out to the gravel drive.
The air outside was cool and sweet, not like the air inside. The air inside the safe house smelled like an animal’s den—a meat eater's den.
“That our witness, Jensen?”
I jumped, almost dropping Mrs. Layne, her shoulder-length gray hair dancing in the breeze. Richie Duvall stood at my elbow, peering at Mrs. Layne’s face.
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