by Nick Harrow
Things got really fuzzy. Hilda remembered being irritated that whatshisname had come down with a bad case of coke dick that had made him as useless as tits on a boar. She and the chick had done some stuff, but that only frustrated Hilda more. Until—
“You changed,” a woman’s voice emerged from the shower, soft and deadly. “They couldn’t keep up with you. Stupid, weak humans, afraid to join the new age. You deserve so much better.”
Two days ago, a stranger’s voice leaking out of the steamy shower would have freaked Hilda out. She’d been a business analyst then, a woman who made her money through careful examination and insightful critique of her clients’ weaknesses. Everything about her world had been black and white, neat little rows between straight lines. Black and white. Right and wrong. Rich and poor.
Living and dead.
But old Hilda was gone.
And new Hilda wasn’t scared of a single thing.
“How the hell did you get in my shower?” Hilda asked. “Come on out where I can see you before I come in there and rip your head off.”
The woman in the shower laughed, and the scent of burning wood and old ash filled the air. The fogged-up shower door gusted open, filling the bathroom with swirling ribbons of white steam and acrid black smoke. A figure moved through the turbulent clouds, long and sleek as a tiger. Before Hilda could move, fingers closed around her throat and an arm curled around her waist. The tall figure who held her emerged from the steam and smoke, her beautiful face wild and cruel beneath the twisted crown of antlers that jutted from her head. “Here I am, precious girl,” the woman said. When she spoke, flakes of ash drifted from her cheeks, revealing seams of living flame. “You’re a pretty little thing, aren’t you?”
Hilda felt a brush of panic. The gorgeous, terrifying woman held her in an iron grip, helpless as a kitten. She couldn’t free herself, no matter how hard she tried. “Who are you?”
“I am Hyrrokkin,” the woman said with a smoky laugh. She lowered her face to Hilda’s, brushing their lips together, tracing the edges of Hilda’s front teeth with a tongue that tasted like smoke. “Your mother. Your mistress. Your goddess.”
And as the words fell into Hilda’s mouth, she knew the woman was right. This amazing creature had paved the way for Hilda’s change. She’d given her the gift of monstrousness, and she wanted to give her so much more. A life lived wild and free, no lines or bars, just the rule of tooth and claw. The weak would die, and the strong, like Hilda, would devour them.
Hilda’s body reacted to that dream. She bit the woman’s lip, sucked on her scorched flesh, and raked at her flesh with black claws. She wanted to consume Hyrrokkin; she wanted to be consumed by her. The need fluttered inside her, frantic as a bat trapped in a sunlit cage of glass. The jötunn tried to buck against Hyrrokkin, desperate to grind her groin against the woman, to feel Hyrrokkin’s burnt meat pressed up against the swollen, sensitive folds at her core. The need was sickening in its power, and Hilda was helpless to deny it.
“Not yet,” Hyrrokkin whispered, her tongue tracing the edges of Hilda’s left ear. “Hold on to your desire, let its fires burn the weakness from your body. There is a higher purpose for you, Hilda, than to be my plaything. Now listen and become my völva.”
Sticky-sweet words poured into Hilda’s ears, filling her with shuddering awe. The world peeled away, one layer at a time, to reveal the dark, glistening heart of chaos beneath. Threads of black light emerged from that primal maw, screaming beams of power that unraveled the skein of reality wherever they touched it. They sang a song of despair and madness to Hilda, and she felt the words burn themselves into her core. She gasped, then screamed, as understanding of what she’d become, of what she could do, flooded her mind and scorched away the last remaining tinges of weak humanity from her.
The release was volcanic, and her body sent a gushing stream pouring down the insides of her thighs. Hyrrokkin laughed as racking gasps shook Hilda’s body from head to toe, transporting her beyond realms of pleasure and pain that any mortal had ever experienced. Hilda’s mind expanded, stretched out across time and space to show her the object of Hyrrokkin’s desire: a golden ring, pure and plain, its surface so smooth it seemed liquid, nestled between the teeth of an enormous skull staring up at the desert sky.
“Find it,” Hyrrokkin whispered in Hilda’s ear. “Hold it. Until the time is right, and the way is made clear to you. You are my völva; my gift to you is smoke and shadow. Use it to claim what is rightfully ours.”
The mother of monsters stroked Hilda’s sex with the tip of one index finger as she spoke, sealing the words in Hilda’s soul with the heat of her desire. The jötunn sobbed, her mind undone by the exhausting, alien, sensation. She screamed, stretched wide between heaven and hell. The world turned black, then red, and Hilda fell.
THE WATER POURING FROM the shower head was ice cold when Hilda woke. The head had somehow gotten pointed through the open shower door and had soaked the jötunn to the bone. She shivered and sat up, pulling the pieces of her mind back together again. She remembered Hyrrokkin with a jolt and scrambled to her feet, eager to touch the smoking woman again. She banged her head against the underside of the counter, yelped, and spun around so quickly her tail shattered the shower door. The crash of falling safety glass was like wind chimes to Hilda’s ears, and she threw back her head and howled with exultation. She grabbed hold of the counter and tore it free of the wall, laughing as water from the wrecked plumbing washed over her body. The cold didn’t bother her.
Nothing did. She had a job to do.
Hyrrokkin’s plan was clear to her now. If Hilda could secure the ring, they’d use it to open a new path into this world. And Hilda would be rewarded. She’d be a goddess.
If she got the ring.
And she wasn’t the only one out there looking for the thing. Hyrrokkin had gifted others with the change. The burning lady had also sent a few of her homeboys here to help the invasion, at great personal cost. If any of those assholes beat Hilda to the prize, they’d get the reward. Not her.
“Fuck that,” Hilda said, shivering as she let the splashing water wipe the remnants of sex and violence off her body.
She left the hotel room behind, glass crunching beneath her hooves, flies buzzing on the dead bodies scattered about. The sounds of carnage disturbed the early morning quiet, reminding Hilda she was far from alone. And that was just fine with her. Because those monsters out there were her monsters. They just didn’t know it yet.
Hilda didn’t bother with the elevator. The way the lights flickered, she doubted they’d work for long, and she did not want to be stuck in a dead car when that happened. Besides, she loved the way her new body felt. She’d always been a bit of a gym rat, but that had been more for looks than strength. Now, though, she jumped down flights of stairs and landed like a cat. She tossed corpses around like paper airplanes and kicked doors off their hinges.
Plus, she had magic.
She played with it as she descended to the casino’s ground floor. With a thought, she could hide herself, but it drained her hamingja. Fortunately, she could replenish that by killing humans.
The image of the ring and the skull came back to her thoughts. She knew exactly where it was. It’d be a bit of a hike to get there, but that was all right. Hilda could run like the wind now.
“Ready or not,” she sang at the top of her lungs, “here I come, motherfuckers.”
Chapter 10
GUNNAR FELT EVERY BUMP in the road on the way back to the underground house. The bones of his face seemed to slide around when Mimi bounced over a pothole, and the clots that formed in his mashed nostrils made it hard to breathe without sucking in dry desert air through his aching mouth. As he’d predicted, being a hero kinda sucked.
Then again, it had been a rush when the rune had blown those jötnar straight back to hell. And he didn’t feel as messed up as he had before the energy had poured into him following the massacre at the Villas.
Odin had told
the truth. The hamingja Gunnar had stolen from the monsters was stitching him back together, one wound at a time.
“Hang in there,” Mimi said and gave Gunnar’s good hand a squeeze. “I’ll have you back in a flash.”
“Tell me you’ve got whiskey socked away,” Gunnar muttered. “A lot of it.”
Mimi laughed and whipped the Charger around a burning truck with a half-melted strip club billboard jutting up from its cockeyed bed. The motion jostled Gunnar’s head from side to side, and he squinted his eyes against the pain. He was glad Cal was dead but was less happy about the damage he’d suffered to finish a job he should have taken care of the minute he’d found those girls on that boat. At least he’d retrieved the Valknut. Hopefully the old man would show up in another dream to explain what he should do with it.
“Here we are,” Mimi said a few minutes later. She fished her cell phone out of the cup holder, unlocked it with a swipe, and glanced at the screen. “No alarms, so that’s good.”
She pressed a button on the phone’s glowing face to open the gate. The heavy barrier slid open on tracks set into the driveway, and the instant the Charger passed through the opening, the door reversed direction. By the time Mimi’s Charger was safely inside the garage, the property was sealed up tight as a drum once again.
“Thanks,” Gunnar said. “How bad do I look?”
Mimi pursed her lips into a tight frown. “Not great, honestly. If I thought there were any ERs open, we’d get your eye looked at. Your nose is laid over pretty hard. I’d try to straighten it for you, but I don’t know if that’s a good idea. I’ll let you look in the mirror and decide what you want to do about it.”
Gunnar nodded, open the door, and levered his aching body out of the car’s low-slung bucket seat. He felt like shit, but he didn’t want Ray and Bridget freaking out over the dog’s breakfast he’d made of his face. They didn’t deserve to live through this horror show, and Gunnar hoped to keep them calm and cool through as much of the dark road ahead of them as possible. “Okay, I’ll hole up in the guesthouse. Convince them it looks worse than it really is.”
“Such a gentleman,” Mimi said with a wistful look. “You should have listened to me when we first met. You’d be chilling on the coast, teaching tourists how to ride scooters or something.”
Gunnar laughed, winced, and held one hand to his broken nose. Mimi’s exact words to him when he’d shown up at her bar asking for a job were still fresh in his mind. “I don’t need the Jolly Green Giant scaring off all my customers. You want to be a bouncer, go down the road to that biker shithole with the rest of the sasquatches.”
And he had. From that job bouncing drunk idiots, he’d found his way into the bodyguard business, bopping from one client to another, until he wound up back at Mimi’s place a year later with a list of references as long as his arm. She’d promised to hook him up with clients who paid well but were awfully shady. First, though, she wanted him to be sure that was what he wanted. “Maybe you should go legit,” she’d said to him. “Head to San Diego, teach college kids how to ride hogs so they can play Easy Rider. Pay sucks, but it’s cleaner than the river of shit you’re about to dive into.”
If he’d played that game, though, there was no doubt Gunnar would have gone soft and shacked up with a cute little surf bunny, smoking weed on the beach and watching the sun go down.
The end of that road didn’t lead to Vegas to rescue Ray from a mob scene or hunting down jötnar to save the world from chaos. Gunnar pushed aside the would-haves, could-haves, and might-have-beens and focused on the mission he’d accepted. He had the Valknut. That was a good start.
The rest he’d figure out.
When the elevator door slid open, Gunnar realized his plan to hide from the women he’d rescued was dead on arrival. They were both waiting just outside the lift with anxious expressions on their faces. When they caught sight of his injuries, Bridget made a surprised little gasp and covered her mouth with the tips of her fingers.
Ray scowled at him.
“What happened?” she asked Mimi. “I thought you went to talk.”
“It went a little sideways,” Mimi explained with a shrug. “His face looks worse than it is. He’ll be fine, but he needs rest.”
Gunnar was thankful for Mimi running interference with the other women, but the looks on their faces told him they didn’t buy her story. He couldn’t blame them. Ray had cleaned him up after more than one bar fight. “It’s okay, Mimi,” the bodyguard said. “I’ll take a shower, then we’ll figure out what to do with the Valknut.”
He held it together long enough to reach the guesthouse, though it was hard to walk with the world shifting around him with every other step he took. One moment he was in the pastel-lit bunker. The next he ducked his head to get through the low door of a wooden lodge wreathed in smoke from the massive cooking fire burning in its hearth.
“Watch your step,” Ray said. She’d stepped in front of him to keep Gunnar from walking into a wall. The other women followed along with him, offering kind hands of support and putting their bodies between Gunnar and the side of the house. If he fell, at least he’d land on something soft rather than the hard edge of a brick wall.
The bodyguard finally ran out of gas when he reached the guesthouse’s bathroom. He sat down on the toilet, flung his feet out in front of him to unlace his boots, and found he couldn’t bear to bend over to reach the bloodied cords.
“Little help,” he said to the trio who watched him from the bathroom door. “If I bend over, my brains’ll slosh out.”
To Gunnar’s surprise, Bridget beat Ray to the floor. She knelt in front of him and deftly unknotted and loosened the laces. “Don’t talk like that,” she gently chided Gunnar as she slipped his left boot off his foot. “You’ll be fine.”
Bridget’s last three words comforted the bodyguard to a surprising degree. He knew his eye socket was fractured and was sure his skull was cracked in a few places. But Bridget seemed so sure he’d recover from this mess that Gunnar couldn’t help but believe her. He reached out with one big hand and gently stroked her platinum ponytail. “Thanks,” he said. “Sorry we dragged you into this mess. I was trying to help.”
At least, that’s what Gunnar tried to say. His words sounded strange, even to himself. Maybe he’d gotten his bell rung harder than he’d thought. He decided talking wasn’t worth the effort anymore. His head felt like it was stuffed with gauze and broken glass, and it hurt like hell to open and close his jaw. He’d try again after a shower.
Bridget shucked his other boot off. She reached out a hand to steady Gunnar as he stood. When he teetered toward the shower’s glass door, Bridget put herself in the way and righted the big man. She was strong and didn’t even grunt when Gunnar put his full weight on her to unbuckle his belt and shove his pants down around his ankles. Her eyes flicked down, lingered, then lifted to meet Gunnar’s. “No wonder you’re off-balance with that swinging around,” Bridget said, sparks of mischief dancing in her eyes. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to make you laugh. Let me help you into the shower.”
Gunnar chuckled, then winced again. The thought of cleaning himself up seemed like more trouble than he could manage on his own. “You’ve already seen the goods,” Gunnar said. “I wouldn’t mind some help getting cleaned up.”
“I’ll get some food going,” Mimi said. “Get him cleaned up and put him to bed. Don’t let that big idiot fall down. You’ll never get him back on his feet.”
“We’ll make sure he doesn’t keel over,” Ray said with a mischievous glint. “Here, let me get the water started while you hold him up, Bridget.”
It was a tight squeeze in the bathroom, but the trio made it work. Bridget kept Gunnar propped up against the sink, her hands on his naked chest to support his weight when he tipped forward. Ray fussed with the shower, testing the water with her fingertips until she finally hit on the right temperature. Then she gathered the boots, jeans, dirty shirt, and jacket off the floor and carried them out of the bat
hroom. “I’ll get these in the wash,” she called over her shoulder. “If they can be saved. Some big lug bled all over them.”
“Wait,” Gunnar said. “Jacket pocket. Inside.”
Ray stopped and juggled the clothes to reach her hand into the pocket Gunnar had mentioned. She found the Valknut and held it up. “This is what you want?”
“Yes,” Gunnar replied. “Counter.”
“Me, Jane,” Ray teased. “You, head injury Tarzan. I’ll leave it on the soap dish.”
“Thanks,” Gunnar said.
“Let’s get you in the water, big guy,” Bridget whispered.
Maneuvering his big frame into the shower was a challenge. She finally lifted Gunnar’s left leg at the knee, swung it over the shower’s lip, and planted it firmly on the floor. “Lean against the wall for a second,” she told him, guiding his hands to the tiled surface. “Okay, right leg up and over. There you go.”
“No wonder Mimi calls you Jolly,” Bridget said when Gunnar was safely standing in the shower. “You’re a damned giant.”
Something about that word stuck in Gunnar’s craw. He cracked open his left eye and glared at Bridget. “No giant,” he croaked.
Only he didn’t say giant. He said jötunn, and the word tasted foul in his mouth. He closed his eyes and tilted his head slightly forward, backing into the hot spray. He stayed like that for long seconds, letting the shower work the tension out of his shoulders and sluice the blood and sweat from his body. Gunnar kept his eyes closed even when Bridget entered the shower and closed the door behind her. She rubbed a soft bar of soap across his chest and stomach, down his legs all the way to his feet, then back up to his shoulders. She washed his arms next, her strong fingers massaging his biceps, then forearms, then down to his fingertips.
“Better?” Bridget’s voice was low, almost solemn as she gently kneaded Gunnar’s good hand, working down the length of each finger with just the right amount of pressure.
