Death And Darkness

by E. A. Copen

  Even in my heyday, I didn’t think I could drink a dead Viking warrior under the table, especially not on mead. I found the drink way too sweet. If that was the name of the game, though, I was down for it. I might need someone to walk me to the door afterward but there were far worse things the Norse goddess of death could ask of me than to get piss drunk. There was just one thing I had to make sure of first.

  While the other Vikings shifted to fill in Hjungvar’s seat so he could join me at the end of the table, I focused on Hel. “I have your word that should I win, I’ll be able to leave your realm without consequence? I hear eating and drinking in the underworld can be bad for your health, especially if you like living twelve months out of the year.”

  She rolled her eyes so hard I was surprised they didn’t roll right out of her head. “You speak of Persephone’s deal. That’s a Greek thing. No, I wouldn’t offer you their swill wine. Here, we drink proper drinks. Mead, ale, and beer. Should you not fail to entertain, you will be free to leave.”

  Hjungvar, the big bear Viking, pulled up a chair and plopped into it. “I choose mead.”

  Figures he’d pick the one thing on that very short list that I couldn’t stand.

  The veiled women came forward with new cups and filled each to the brim with a deep amber liquid. Hjungvar chugged his first cup like a champ and slammed the cup down on the table against the cheering of his brothers.

  I picked up my cup while they were still cheering and peered down into it. “Bottoms up,” I mused and drank the stinging sweet liquid down.

  The Vikings at the table shouted and cheered me on while the veiled ladies refilled our drinks for round two.

  I was chugging the third cup when the buzz hit like a numbing warm blanket. That made me a lot more amicable to the idea of drinking more. After that, the mead wasn’t so bad and the company was even better. Between drinks, Hjungvar and I took to striking up broken bits of conversation, the kind a guy only has in bars where he drinks with friends.

  “Your girl is worth this?” Hjungvar asked as they refilled our cups the fourth time. “Walking through seven hells? Even the Allfather himself only bothered with one.”

  “It’s probably stupid, isn’t it? I mean, when Emma hears about all the shit I’ll have done to get her back by then, she’ll be pissed.”

  “And she’ll still complain about the blood and mud you track in on her clean floor. Never mind she’s the one who sent you out to do the killing in the first place.” Hjungvar snorted and lifted his cup. “Women.”

  “Amen.” I raised mine and tapped it against his.

  By the sixth drink, getting the cup to my mouth got a lot more difficult while Hjungvar didn’t seem to have much trouble at all. He’d just finished telling a crude joke and roared, red-faced, with laughter while his buddies patted him on the back.

  I felt like I was sucking down honey that had been set on fire and my stomach hated it. The joke had seemed funny for a minute, but I forgot all about it as soon as it was told, and all the laughing left me pissed for some reason.

  I supposed it was too late to mention that I was a surly drunk once I got past the buzzed stage. Unlike my father, I didn’t veer toward violence, but I irritated easily and tended to retreat into a sort of brooding internal guilt fest. With every drink, the guilt would build as I saw myself becoming more and more like the man I hated. That feeling, combined with the waning urge to be sentimental, left me wondering where he was. Did he ever care about me? Did he ever think about me while he rotted in his cell at Angola? When he found out Lydia was dead, did he cry for her? I couldn’t imagine the big, imposing man I knew as my father sitting on the edge of his bunk, bawling like a broken man.

  That’s what I wanted, though, for him to be as lost and broken as me. His blood was in my veins. Why couldn’t he feel one iota of the hell he’d put me, Mom, and Lydia through?

  By the end of the seventh drink, I’d let slip that I wanted to kill him.

  Hjungvar threw a big elbow onto the corner of the table, bracing himself against it to keep from swaying. The big guy was finally a little tipsy. “How would you do it? Kill your father? A knife in the back?”

  “Fuck that. I want the bastard to see…To look me in the eye.” I pointed at my eye. “I want to pull up Lydia’s fucking shade, and Mom’s too, and tie him to a chair and…Where was I going with that?”

  “Your father,” Hjungvar reminded me. “How you would kill him.”

  I shook my head. It felt like I was under miles of water and the pressure was slowly squeezing my brain into a golf ball-sized pile of mush. “Truth is, I don’t want him dead. Not really. I just want him to give a damn.”

  The Viking nodded as if he understood.

  Hel pushed her drinking horn away. “You’re spoiling the taste with your pity party, you two.”

  “You’re spoiling it with your face.” I snickered. I couldn’t help it. Too late, I realized the rest of the room had gone deathly quiet.

  Hel’s chair scraped against the floor as she stood, pushing it out behind her.

  It finally dawned on my slow brain that I’d insulted the queen of Hell, even though I hadn’t meant to. It was just one of those automatic drunk responses like “your mama”. Had she been any other goddess, she might not have been so offended. Hel was half rotten and vain, a bad combination to take a jab like that.

  I started to stumble through a slurred apology but my stomach chose that moment to rebel. It was all I could do to turn my head and spew a stomach full of mead where it wouldn’t hit anybody. Let me tell you if it’s bad going down, it’s twice as bad coming up. My sinuses were on fire.

  “Well?” Hel snapped. “Aren’t any of you drunken degenerates going to defend me?”

  Hjungvar and I stared at each other.

  He found his feet and nearly toppled over before two of his buddies pushed him back up. He came up swinging, his first punch just barely passing over my head. I tried to get up before he knocked me over in the chair and wound up half-falling, half-throwing myself into his gut, taking us to the floor.

  Normally, I’d have put my money on the big guy in a fistfight. Contrary to what most movies would have you believe, being fast and nimble doesn’t account for much when you get to the ground. On my feet, maybe I could’ve worked him until he got tired and gone in for a precise strike—but only if I was sober. Drunk fights were a lot messier than sober fights. Drunks didn’t bother with arm bars or sleeper holds because that took too much coordination. Instead, we relied on sloppy punches to the gut and face and grabbing whatever weapons happened to come our way.

  On his back, with my weight on top of him, Hjungvar was like an overturned turtle. He wasn’t sober enough to figure out how to shift his weight to get me off him and I wasn’t clearheaded enough to do anything but keep punching him in the nose every time he tried. With the third strike, his nose shifted to the side with a resounding crunch. Blood spurted and his head tipped back but he wasn’t out. I drew a fist back to hit him again but got blindsided by something hard smashing into my skull. The momentum from the strike made me fall to the side, dazed.

  Hjungvar stood and tossed the cup he’d used to nearly knock my lights out to the table. Blood had painted his blonde beard crimson along with the top of his green shirt. He spat a mouthful of red on the ground to the side, grunted and pushed his nose back into place without so much as a whimper.

  I was so screwed.

  No choice but to pull myself up, so I did. Hjungvar introduced the right side of my face to his fist and knocked me flat to my ass again. “Stay down, Horseman.”

  It was a tempting offer. If I stayed down, he’d stop beating on me and I could sleep off the pounding headache. The alcohol buzz had mostly worn off thanks to the adrenaline of the fight, though it still clouded my head and made my reflexes slow. There was no way to win.

  Yet if I stayed on the floor, covered in his blood, my vomit, and a bunch of table scraps, I’d never get the key. I needed that key to
save Emma.

  I pushed myself up on shaky arms.

  “That’s right, Lazarus!” Jean cheered. “You can take him!”

  Hjungvar drove a fist into my gut. I folded, vomited again, and wheezed but I didn’t go back down.

  “Quit fighting.” He delivered a textbook uppercut that left me staggering back several feet. “Give up. Go home and we’ll forget about this.”

  “I…can't.”

  I didn’t even see the next strike coming but I felt my rib crack when it landed. My breath escaped in a gasp made of flame. I blinked away tears and stumbled to one knee.

  “You keep it up, you’re a dead man. Don’t make me kill you. She’s just a woman. Go back. Find someone else. This one isn’t worth dying over. No woman is.”

  I grunted and pulled myself to my feet once more. “Emma is.”

  “Why?” he ground out. “She’s that good a lay?”

  I finally managed to raise my head. A jackhammer went to work in both temples and darkness danced at the edge of my doubled vision but I didn’t throw up. There was nothing left to come up.

  Jean cast a nervous look at the door. He’d cut his losses and run if I went down again.

  I tried to shake the darkness from my vision. “It’s not about that. It’s about human decency. About having a good heart and doing the right damn thing. I’m gutter trash, just an ex-con necromancer who occasionally jacks a car or breaks into morgues. But Emma’s not like that. She’s a good person and she deserves to have a chance at being happy, even if she decides, in the end, her happiness doesn’t include me. I might be a drunk piece of shit but she’s…she’s everything good about the world, and I need her to be in it.”

  The room was silent.

  Hjungvar didn’t move. At some point, he’d grabbed a knife from the table. It clattered to the ground next to his foot. He turned to Hel. “I yield.”

  Now I knew I had a concussion. There was no reason for him to give in when he was winning. One good swing, and it’d be all over for me. I’d insulted his queen and ruined their dinner. Giving up now didn’t make any sense.

  Hel nodded once and gestured to me. “Take note, you dishonored dead. This human has more courage, truth, honor, and loyalty than all of you put together.”

  She stepped around the table and started toward me. The fabric of her dress whispered as it slid over the floor. I flinched when she lifted one gloved hand and tugged the glove free. Her hand felt like hot needles against the bruised side of my face. Magic rolled over me in a scorching wave that singed the air in my lungs. It was a good thing, too, because if I could’ve breathed, I would’ve screamed as she boiled me from the inside out.

  It lasted a second, maybe two, before she withdrew her hand and left me swaying. The headache that had been pounding behind my eyes retreated, and nausea faded. Both were still there but much more bearable. She’d healed me.

  Hel lifted the heavy chain around her neck, sliding free a bronze key as big as my fist, from where it had been tucked against her heart. She lowered it over my head. The added weight of it nearly made me fall over. “A reward for an afternoon’s entertainment.”

  A veiled woman stepped from the shadows and held out something small, about the size of a brick, and wrapped in a white cloth.

  Hel took it and offered it to me. “If you see LaCroix, give him this. A peace offering.”

  I fumbled with the cloth wrapped item, pulling the cloth back to reveal a spongy yellow cake with no frills. “Pound cake?”

  She shrugged. “It’s his favorite. You will need one more thing, Horseman, something I cannot assist with.”

  Of course, I would, because having the key and a gift for the baron waiting for me on the other side couldn’t possibly be enough. I sighed and wrapped the pound cake up again. “Why do I get the feeling I’m not going to like it?”

  Hel smirked. “To open the door, you need the blood of a Titan. As it happens, I know exactly where you can get some.”

  Chapter Four

  Lightning flashed through the dark sky above, illuminating the pit before us. It stretched four stories into the ground, carved into the black rock. At the bottom of the rocky chasm, chained to the stone floor via the thickest metal links I had ever seen, was an emaciated wolf with snow-white fur. An iron muzzle kept his mouth tightly closed while a silver collar pinched his neck, the exposed skin around it red and raw. He glared up at us, ice blue eyes full of rage.

  “Fenrir,” Hel announced. “Bound by the gods out of fear of what might come to pass.”

  I frowned at the imprisoned wolf and stifled the knee-jerk reaction to jump into the pit and free him. He didn’t look like the monstrous demonic wolf of old Norse legend. In fact, he was no bigger than a German Shepherd. Still, I knew better.

  “The Norse gods imprisoned him when a prophecy foretold he and Loki’s other children would be no end of trouble.” I glanced at Hel, watching for her reaction.

  She grimaced. “Above all, gods fear one thing, Horseman. We fear we will fade and lose power. Fenrir was a symbol of that loss of power. They could neither contain his growth nor his wild nature. He was placed here for being nothing more than himself, the son of Loki, a wolf, a free spirit. And now, you will set him free.” She turned to face me.

  “No, I won’t.” I shook my head.

  “Your role is to bring justice to the gods. Look at my brother trapped in his pit and tell me that’s justice. Tell me it’s fair that we rot in this wasteland, forgotten, while Odin sits in his halls reciting poetry.” She sliced a decisive hand through the air. “Fenrir has harmed no one.”

  “Except Tyr,” Jean muttered next to me. “He bit off his hand.”

  “No one who didn’t deserve it,” Hel qualified. “Tyr is a self-righteous prick, just like the rest of them.”

  I shifted my grip on the staff. “I don’t need to free him to collect his blood and go through the door, do I?”

  Behind Hel, her skeleton guards inched forward. She waved them back. “This is my price. Free him, and we will willingly give you what you seek. Refuse, and you may attempt to fight your way out. It’s unlikely that you will get far.”

  I focused on the boneheads. They weren’t the real threat, but they were the more immediate one. If she’d wanted, Hel could’ve crushed me. Standing that close to her, I could feel the magic rolling off her skin in waves. Standing in her home turf, she was way out of my league. “Why can’t you just free him if you want him loose so bad?”

  Hel shook her head. “Because it’s forbidden. Even if it weren’t, I can’t. Those chains are made to bind those of Loki’s blood, and I would simply be trading myself for his release, which is something I cannot allow. This realm cannot be without a queen. The other gods would crush him if they knew he was free. But if a mortal frees him, it is prophecy.”

  “And not outright disobedience.” I grunted. Freeing Fenrir would have long-lasting consequences. Somehow, I didn’t think he’d hang out in Helheim with his sister. By the look in his eyes, he’d be out for vengeance against those who’d chained him. I would be too if I’d spent over a thousand years chained to a pit in Hell.

  Even if he deserved his revenge, it wasn’t something I could allow, but I didn’t see a way forward without doing as Hel asked. Either I set the murderous Titan free or I abandoned my quest to save Emma’s soul. There were no good choices left.

  “I’d like to talk to him.” I turned back to the pit.

  “I doubt he recalls human speech after being stuck in that form for so long,” Hel said.

  Jean leaned in to whisper in my ear. “Climbing into the deep, dark pit with a half-starved wolf doesn’t seem like a good idea to me.”

  I waved him off. “Just the same, I think everyone deserves a chance to tell their side of the story. If I’m going to unleash him on the world, I’m going to need some assurances. I have a little girl at home. I’d like for the world not to end before I get to watch her grow up.”

  Hel inclined her head and ges
tured forward with both hands. Her boneheads marched forward double time, stopping at the edge of the pit to strike the stone twice with their spears. The ground trembled and left me swaying. It split and crumbled, sending huge boulders tumbling into the pit. Jean gripped my arm, his eyes bulging in fear. When the earthquake ended, a set of stairs wound down into the pit as if carved by magic.

  The boneheads stepped back and turned, each one taking up a position on either side of the entrance to the stairs to stand guard. I blew out a nervous breath and went to talk to the monster wolf. Jean followed, despite his earlier objections, floating along behind me as I carefully made my way down the stairs.

  The further down we went, the hotter the air became. It pressed down on me, threatening to steam me from the inside out. With all that fur, Fenrir must’ve been miserable. If I hadn’t had an audience, I would’ve stripped down to nothing. I almost did it anyway. About three-quarters of the way down, my shoes stuck to the stone, the rubber soles melting into thick strings as I tried to lift them away. I bent down and removed my shoes before continuing, leaving them where they were. The stone burned underfoot, each step reminding me that I’d have blisters when I was done.

  It was still worth it if it freed Emma.

  Chains clinked. Fenrir stirred at my approach, rising on skeletal legs. From above, he’d seemed no bigger than a normal dog, but once I was in the pit with him, it was clear he was much too large to pass as a shepherd mix. On all fours, he stood at least as tall as me, and I was a little over six feet tall. For all that height, the once-proud wolf now appeared frail. Patchy fur left him had bald in most places and allowed blisters and boils to show through. Several of them looked fresh and infected.

  “Whatever he did or didn’t do, this seems excessive,” I muttered.

  My sins are many, declared a voice in my mind. It was so loud I threw my hands up to cover my ears, though the voice spoke as a whisper. My indulgences are few. For what purpose do you come?