Nordstrom Necromancer: A New Adult Dark Fantasy Inspired By Norse Mythology

by Amy B. Nixon

  Marked By Amyria

  I couldn’t fall asleep all night long.

  When Aurora lit up my door in emerald flames and entered uninvited, I was fully dressed and wandering around the room like a caged animal. Her short coat was unbuttoned and a large handbag hung from her shoulder. She took out something resembling a matchbox before approaching me. The box contained an ashy, powdery substance that gleamed like sunlit snow. Aurora grabbed a generous pinch of it and sprinkled it over my head.

  “What the fuuuck?” I shouted, shaking my head with the frantic motions of a flea-infested dog.

  “It’s fairy dust; don’t bother shaking it off,” she said, as if I was supposed to know better, and put the box back in her bag. “It will mask your true identity, but I don’t have much of it, so we can’t waste time. We’re going straight to Administration, then we’re getting off the island.”

  “Mask my identity?”

  “Yes. You’ll be posing as one of my friends, Clausine Rasmussen. We’re going to the SPA, and we’ll be gone for the rest of the day. Got it? Let’s go.”

  She grabbed my elbow. Next thing I knew, we were standing in the middle of Administration’s office.

  “Ah, Miss Nordstrøm, what can I do for you today?”

  “I’m going to the SPA with Clausine, Raisa. Can you tell the guards downstairs to expect us?”

  Her casual, calm speech completely contradicted the statement that we didn’t have time. I couldn’t stop myself from envying her self-control, like I envied everything else about her.

  “When are you expected to return?”

  “I would say by dusk?” Aurora drawled leisurely. “Hmm, could be later. Maybe by dinner?”

  Raisa wrote one of those blood messages, it disappeared, and she smiled, this time facing me.

  Please let this fairy dust crap still be in my hair! Please let her see Aurora’s friend, not the real me!

  The piece of paper reappeared to veer Raisa’s attention away. Phew! Saved by blood magic!

  “Mr. Larsen hasn’t returned from his trip yet. Who should I call in as your Head of Team?”

  Aurora shrugged. “Keitaro would be nice.”

  Raisa scribbled down something before lifting her eyes to us.

  “You’re all set. Mr. Keitaro will gather your guardians.”

  Instead of teleporting us, Aurora simply walked out of Administration’s office. I hurried after her, hoping the fairy dust would be just as efficient on everyone else.

  “Why doesn’t Administration use a phone instead of those blood messages?”

  “Phones can be tapped by humans or supernatural enforcement agencies. Blood messages provide safer communication.”

  “What did she mean by Larsen and Head of Team?”

  “How slow can you be?! You seriously don’t know? Even after Monika?”

  “Know what?”

  “Oh, for the love of Freya!” She turned, shot me a glower, then kept going. “Some of the Larsen guardians are guardians to necromancers. To families like mine and yours.”

  “She wasn’t talking about Maksim Larsen, right?”

  “Of course not! She meant Ragnar Larsen, one of Max’s older brothers. Ragnar stays on top of my security, Max will soon join Dann’s guardians, and the Council tried to poach Monika as part of your upcoming team, which was obviously a bombastic fiasco.”

  I also have a guardian, I actually have an entire team of guardians, and as such, I can tell you it’s not something you should be rebelling against. Dann had said it to me before promising the Council wasn’t going to use someone else after Monika, at least not right away. Because they thought I wouldn’t leave this island before I was probably fifty-fucking-years-old!

  “Where are we going?” I asked as we went through a door and descended down a spiraled staircase, similar to those leading to the dungeons.

  “Would you just shut up? How are you going to make anyone believe you’re Clausine if you keep asking me stupid questions?”

  I bit back a swear word and quietly followed her to the bottom of the stairs, which ended with another door. Once we were on the other end, I abruptly came to a halt.

  We were standing in a parking lot.

  An underground parking lot for cars, housed somewhere in the sublevels. It took me a while to remember Monika’s explanations that there was an underground tunnel connected to a building in midtown Stavanger. Then I remembered what Aurora had told me yesterday – the Council had made it impossible even for her to overpower the anti-Aperture wards. All because of an accident we’d had with a horde of monsters.

  The same monsters we were returning to now.

  “Good morning, Miss Nordstrøm. Your team is waiting for you outside.”

  A male voice yanked me out of my memories. Two men in black uniforms stood near the door we had come through. I caught up with my partner in crime, following her deeper into the parking lot.

  Aurora paused next to a white sports car, and my heart dropped in my stomach.

  Oh, no, no, no! Please let it be the Jeep next to us! Please let it be any other car! Please be anything but this! Please don’t let my stupidity and recklessness be contagious!

  Despite my prayers, she took a smart-key out of her pocket and unlocked the sports car. The extremely low, extremely luxurious, extremely shiny car with a golden bull etched on its emblem.

  “Aurora, have you lost your fucking mind?” I squealed in horror. “It’s January. In Norway. In fucking Norway! And you want to drive a Lamborghini?”

  “Do you think I haven’t driven a Lamborghini in snow before?”

  “It’s not meant to be driven in snow!” I squealed again. “It’s a million-dollar sports car that’s raised… like, a nanoinch off the ground!”

  “It’s less than half a million, and it’s raised more than enough to get us to where we’re going. Now shut up and get in.”

  Freezing chills licked my spine, even though we were still inside, and I obeyed silently. As I drew the seatbelt, my hands began shaking. Shit! This stupid plan was getting worse by the second!

  Aurora revved the engine to life, then navigated through the parking lot towards a double garage door. While we waited for someone to open it, I tried to think of something other than our current situation. My recklessness was quickly giving way to common sense, which told me to get out and forget this thing ever happened.

  The door rolled up. Aurora drove off so swiftly, I was glued to the seat, ass sinking into the leather, knees going up to my chin. We were indeed in an underground tunnel, and the car was going so fast, the flashing lights on both walls were merely twinkling blurs.

  Oh, fuck! If she intended to drive like this in snow, I was going to be a goner – again! Because of her – again!

  FML! Did I seriously get into a car driven by the homicidal bitch who had already killed me once? Especially when said car was a Lamborghini and we were in snow-covered Norway? Wow. I was barely twenty-one, but most of my brain cells were already dead.

  We slowed down when exiting the tunnel, which led to another underground parking lot.

  Two black SUVs pulled on both sides of the Lambo, one of them sliding up front, the other one tailing us from behind. If I had to guess, those were the guardians. In a matter of seconds, we drove out onto a snowy street in broad daylight. The shaking in my hands eased as I told myself Aurora couldn’t keep driving like this. Not only because it was over the speeding limit in a rural area, but also because the SUVs couldn’t keep up.

  Glancing around, I noticed we had exited a gigantic contemporary building with a sign that read Nordstrøm Industries.

  “What does your family do?” I asked out loud before I could stop myself.

  “Engineering, design and construction of high-end yachts.”

  It explained her impossibly expensive car, along with why her family didn’t go bankrupt by running the castle on personal expenses.

  “But before that, like in the Middle Ages? And how did you keep the tunn
el a secret for so many centuries?”

  She groaned with obvious irritation.

  “Nordstrøms have had the largest shipyards in Scandinavia since before Freya created the first necromancers. The tunnel has always been hidden under Stavanger. My family built it in the eleventh century. Stavanger’s rural status got upgraded from a market town to a city in the early twelfth century, so it wasn’t hard to maintain the secret. Now stop asking me stupid questions; you can read that in the library.”

  “Okay, but outside the mundane world? What can a Nordstrøm descendant do as a necromancer, not posing as a human?”

  She wasn’t the chatty person I’d go to for information, but then again, we shared something in common. Both of us were descendants of the first necromancers that ever existed. Both of us had to live with the burden of preserving our ancient lines’ greatness. Or at least I had, because my ancestors weren’t assholes. According to Dann and Brühl, hers had been.

  “It’s none of your business.”

  Rolling my eyes, I turned away.

  Stavanger was like any other big port city – commercial buildings, docking areas, rows of twin houses, lots of pedestrians, some cyclers… As we traded big boulevards for smaller streets with pavement, I wondered if I’d see San Francisco’s slopes and its tourist-packed trams ever again.

  The SUV in front swerved to the left and disappeared. A second later, some beeping noise blasted through the stereo system. Aurora pressed a button on the dashboard.

  “Miss Nordstrøm,” a male voice echoed through the car, “you missed our turn for the Scandic.”

  “We’re not going to the Scandic, Keitaro,” Aurora replied with a casual tone. “I want to go to the SPN Retreat. Tell the others to circle back on Pedersgata to meet us.”

  Aurora disconnected. I squinted in confusion when the SUV appeared, after cutting the line and sliding in front of us. Unsurprisingly, the driver’s nasty move was met by a few angered honks.

  I turned to my crazy driver. “What was that about?”

  “Unlike the Scandic, the SPN Retreat has a huge underground parking and more facilities.”

  “So?”

  “So, idiot,” she paused to shoot me a scowling glare, “we’ll have more than enough rooms and floors to lose them, as well as a second exit from the parking lot.”

  “I think you’ve watched too many spy movies.”

  “Oh, yeah? And I think you have no idea how things work in the real world. I get two cars and four guardians escorting me on a SPA trip. Imagine the convoy that would have accompanied us if they thought I’d be doing something other than lying on a massage table all day.”

  Dann’s words spun in my head once again. I imagined having half a dozen cars following me around all the time.

  “How many Nordstrøms are there?”

  “Eleven, excluding the ones who married and changed their names. Keep your mouth shut until I get them off our backs.”

  So, I’d probably have eleven times her escort. Un-fucking-believable!

  When we reached a building in the city’s outskirts, I realized the bitch wasn’t kidding. These guys really took their job seriously.

  They made sure we were properly booked for each type of procedure, and double-checked the numbers of the rooms we’d be visiting throughout the day. For a split of a second I imagined them checking in on us while we were supposedly in the middle of an aromatherapy session, and discovering we’d taken a French leave. Fortunately, my common sense kicked in on time, whispering how they wouldn’t dare to barge in on something like that.

  Aurora bribed the girls who should have been tending to us all day long and told them to keep it a secret from her bodyguards. I had to give it to her. She could flirt her way through life even without bribes. The way she talked and the way she walked… She was so fucking graceful and confident! I wished for the ground to open and swallow me before my envy could eat me from the inside out.

  She grabbed my elbow as soon as we were alone, and Apertured us back inside her car.

  “We’re driving?” I asked in confusion. “Why don’t you teleport us to where we’re going?”

  “Because I love my car, and I get to enjoy a nice drive without having someone tail me for the first time in months.”

  Her definition of a nice drive was as far away from mine as possible.

  She sped over numerous bridges and mountainous roads so fast, she made it impossible for me to take in the sunny views of every neighborhood. We never reached a highway, but Aurora apparently didn’t care about the speeding limit on the European long-distance roads we crossed. They were well-maintained, even and clean of snow, and Aurora was a skilled driver. She navigated between lanes and other vehicles with swift movements, took each turn smoothly, and never lost control of the car, not even for a second. It probably had winter tires and a manual four-by-four option, otherwise we would have crashed a million times, but I had to admit her driving skills were yet another enviable thing about her.

  Nevertheless, it wasn’t a nice drive. It was more like a high-speed chase.

  In the blink of an eye, she cut in line and swerved into a roundabout, taking the entire fucking turn by drifting in a circle. I slapped a hand on the dashboard to steady myself, mere seconds before we entered a tunnel.

  “This isn’t a Fast and Furious movie!” I protested out loud.

  “Oh, stop whining! If I follow the speed limit outside the tunnel, we’ll be driving for at least an hour, and then we have to trek on foot until we find a good spot!”

  “Will you at least tell me where we’re going?”

  “A secluded area in the Forsand municipality, close to where we were last time, but farther away from the ley lines.”

  “What’s your part of the plan?”

  “We’ll summon the spirit of one of the wisest Nøkken queens, Mayvareena, present her with an offering, and ask her about the truth. You’ll be the one doing the summoning, because the Nøkk are predisposed to you, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to see them, and I’ll be the one presenting the offering.”

  “Offering?” I shot her bag a suspicious look. “Please tell me you haven’t sacrificed a cute furry animal for a dead mermaid!”

  “No, I haven’t, and I’ve told you before – they aren’t mermaids!”

  She opened the flap with one hand, revealing a translucent jar filled with… I wasn’t sure what it was filled with, but it was some sort of frothy substance with a lathery layer on top. When she opened the bag a little bit more, I noticed there was a faint silvery glow coming off a tiny lump, no bigger than a fingernail, which laid on the bottom of the jar.

  “Dyrfinna,” Aurora said quietly, closing the bag. “She was a female Nøkken tricked into marrying my great-grandfather, and died on land a couple of weeks ago. I’ve been meaning to bring her back to the sea, but Monika’s been on probation and I can’t use Ragnar to take me to the other Nøkk.”

  Wooow. I never expected a selfless cell could even exist in Aurora. Bringing a dead Nøkken back to her family was… Wait a minute! That was a dead Nøkken!

  “Why don’t we just summon her instead of–”

  “Because Nøkk who have perished on land can’t be summoned,” she quickly cut off my excitement of having a somewhat safer day.

  “Okay, but what if your great-grandfather and the rest of your family discover her absence?”

  “That’s unlikely, unless they break down her crypt in the Nordstrøm mausoleum, which they won’t, because that’s blasphemy on our ancestors.”

  I was rendered utterly speechless. She had literally broken into her family crypts, which to my understanding were something sacred to her family. All of it, so she could free the remains of a dead creature and bring said remains to its real home. An extremely malicious dead creature, but still.

  “Can you teach me how to do the spell you were attempting last time?”

  She laughed. “I put a deflective spell over my shield. It’s an advanced form of defense, wh
ich cuts off the trajectory of anything that comes close to the shield and makes it go back to where it came from. You can’t learn that type of advanced casting even if you practice for months.”

  Bitch! That spell was either too powerful for her, or she hadn’t learned how to cast it properly, otherwise she wouldn’t have needed my Eitrhals.

  I kept my thoughts to myself and my eyes on the road. Judging by the dashboard’s clock, twenty minutes had passed since we had to slow down and keep steady with the other vehicles.

  As soon we exited the tunnel and my eyes got accustomed to the reflective snow, I gasped.

  We were on a two-lane mountain road, with high cliffs on Aurora’s side and the vast ocean on mine. I couldn’t pay attention to the signs, but we were in a village or a small town, and then we were in the wilderness.

  With each curve of our mountain road my eyes grew wider.

  The snow-covered narrow seashore cut into the water. As we kept going down the road, the shore became broader, taller, filled with evergreen trees and steep rocky cliffs breaking through the snowy landscapes.

  We passed two more rural areas before I fully grasped where we were. It wasn’t just some random shore that looked pretty as it jutted out into the sea. We weren’t simply surrounded by a mountain. We were actually driving deeper into a fjord!

  “How deep are we going? Can we see the fjord from other angles?”

  Her only response was a rattling growl.

  We entered another tunnel, this time significantly shorter.

  Its exit revealed more mountainous cliffs, more narrow inlets, and more snowy vistas. By the time we delved deeper into the fjord’s curvy formations and crossed over to a huge suspension bridge, I was positive we had entered a fantastical land located somewhere far, far away from Midgard. Both sides of the bridge held gorgeous valley-like sceneries, and I finally saw the true meaning of Winter Wonderland.

  The rocks were sprinkled with snow, with visible cracks and indents scattered here and there. They made the snowcaps appear like mosaics with jagged geometrical figures, almost as if they were puzzle pieces waiting to be glued together. Coniferous trees were nestled in some areas, bathing the grey rocks in splashes of deep green colors. The sea barely rippled, reflecting soft sunlight that broke from the clouds, and the water surface’s cold blues mirrored every protruding shore.