War and Famine: An Urban Fantasy Novel (Revelations Book 2)

by J. A. Cipriano

  “I don’t have it,” Amy managed to say through chattering teeth. “I dropped it.” She raised one hand and pointed to the spot where Incinerator had fallen to the snow. The entire plain was covered in ice, making every square inch indistinguishable from the next. She might as well have pointed at space for all the good her directions did.

  “Normally, I could call Incinerator to my hand, but I can’t.” He stared at her, tears filling the corners of his eyes. “I can’t feel it at all.” He knelt down beside her. “Tell me what you’ve done with Incinerator.”

  “I haven’t done anything,” Amy replied just before he seized her by the throat with his left hand and hoisted her into the air like she weighed nothing. His muscles strained within his arm as he held her aloft. Fear rushed through her as she tried to call upon her power, only she couldn’t. It was as if her mantle was suddenly gone, leaving her nothing more than a tiny girl in the grip of a huge, angry male.

  “Remember, you made me do this,” he replied, pressing his right thumb against her forehead. Images flashed through her mind, disjointed and broken. Energy fled from her body as everything she ever had been was torn from her mind in the space of a heartbeat. He dropped her, and she struck the ground. Only she didn’t feel it. She didn’t feel anything except a gaping hole inside her where something had been stripped away. Amy wasn’t sure what he’d done to her, but she was reasonably sure it wasn’t good.

  “What did you do?” she wheezed as white light spread out across the horizon like an electric spider’s web, reminding her of how the sky in Muspelheim had looked when she had confronted Kim. Maybe that was a good sign.

  “I pulled the memory of when you lost my sword from your mind. Be thankful I did not do more.” He turned and walked off until he reached the spot and sank to his knees in the snow. He clawed at the ice, tearing frantically at it with his bare hands.

  “Amy!” Kim’s voice exploded across the horizon, booming within her ears. She turned toward it and was surprised to see Fenris bound in silver thread. Kim was on her knees, one hand outstretched toward the wolf. Blood ran down her face and arms, and her clothes were all but torn asunder. “You need to awaken Odin. He’s the only one who can help us now! Hurry, I can’t hold Fenris for much longer!”

  Amy didn’t know how, but she propelled herself to her feet and staggered toward the two unconscious Vikings. She wasn’t sure which one was Odin, but then again, once she got closer, she’d pick the one with one eye. If they were both cyclopes, well, there was always eenie meenie miny moe.

  An anguished shriek ripped from Kim, and Amy’s gaze instinctively shot toward her friend. Blood flowed from Kim’s nose as she struggled to keep the wolf bound with her magic. Even from here, Amy could see the fabric of Kim’s spell tearing apart like tissue paper. It wouldn’t be long until the wolf was free once again.

  She turned back toward the Vikings and sprinted across the snowcapped dunes as quickly as she could. Her numb feet sank deeper into the snow with every step, slowing her progress more than she’d have liked, but she pushed on anyway. Haijiku trailed along the behind her, its tip cutting through the ice like it was warm butter. She had half a thought to try to use it like a machete in a jungle, bushwhacking the snow in front of her to clear a path, but ever since she’d journeyed into Muspelheim, the blade had barely spoken. When she’d grabbed hold of Incinerator, the weapon had all but died in her hands, its power receding deep inside itself like a sullen child. She doubted it would help her now.

  This wasn’t the time to worry about Haijiku anyway. All she had to do was get to Odin, and even if he was the further of the two Vikings, that was only a couple hundred feet away. She could make it on her own. Her foot slipped in the ice, and she lost her balance. Her arms whipped outward for balance, and the katana flew from her numb fingers. She didn’t see where it landed as she careened forward and landed haphazardly in the snow next to the smaller of the two Vikings.

  She shook the dizziness from her head as best she could and crawled forward on her elbows, dragging her numb body behind her. She reached out and grabbed hold of the man. As she tried to pull him closer, she found her own body sliding toward him on the ice. He was too heavy for her to move, let alone drag across the snow.

  Amy took a deep breath, summoning an internal reservoir of strength she didn’t know she had and clambered closer. She gripped him by the scruff of his clothing and flipped him over. The first thing she noticed about him was the eyepatch. It was a simple strip of leather, but to her, it was a sign that they had a chance, albeit a small one.

  “Odin,” she cried, trying to shake the god awake. It didn’t seem to do anything which wasn’t that surprising. Now that she was looking at his face, she could tell something was horribly wrong with him. A strange translucence clung to his flesh, making him seem about as substantial as a ghost. The ground beneath the god was clearly visible as Amy stared at him, unsure of what to do.

  A staccato crack splintered the air and set her nerves ablaze. She fought the urge to look in its direction. No, she had to awaken Odin. She ignored whatever it was and grabbed hold of Odin’s shirt. With a surge of strength, she tore it open to reveal his chest. Scars crisscrossed his torso, covered over by dozens of runic tattoos.

  “This had better work,” she murmured, calling upon the power of her mantle. She reached for the fire within her and thrust it into Odin. Silver sparks leapt from her fingers but little else happened. They sizzled out in the cold wasteland of Jotunheim as the god continued to fade.

  “Amy, hurry!” Kim cried before the smack of flesh hitting flesh filled her ears.

  “I’m trying!” Amy tried to call back, but as the words formed in her mouth, Odin’s eye shot open, shocking her into stunned silence. There was nothing in that eye, no sense he even saw her.

  “Kill me,” he wheezed, his words barely a gasp. “With Gungnir destroyed, I will die anyway, but the sooner you finish me off, the sooner Fenris can be killed by my son.”

  “I can’t kill you,” Amy said in horror. “I’ve never killed anyone.”

  The god shook his head. “I am already dead. It’s just a matter of time now. If you do nothing, I will waste away over the next few hours until death comes for me at long last, but if you kill me now, you may have a chance to survive.” He reached up with one hand and clasped her wrist. Energy seeped into her, warming her numb limbs and fighting off the chill. The heavens above crackled with energy. The moon dimmed. The stars winked out one by one.

  “What are you doing?” Amy asked, but her voice was lost in the din of the winds swirling around them. A winter storm had come, obscuring the wolf, Kim, and everything from her vision.

  “Helping you,” Odin replied, and with those words, he faded completely into insubstantiality. She flopped forward, no longer supported by his body. Her hands hit the snow, and steam curled around her fingers. She felt better than she ever had before. Hope surged through her veins like a locomotive. Maybe they had a chance.

  “Thank you,” she whispered, getting to her feet. As she did, she realized she still had her ace in the hole. She reached into the sheath and pulled out the knife. The symbols etched within its blade burned with purple light as she stepped closer to the storm, thankful to have regained feeling in her extremities. Well, if this was it, she was going out swinging.

  The storm broke all at once. Kim lay on her back. Fenris was on top of her, straddling her hips with his legs. He swung again, driving his fist through Kim’s meager defenses. Blood spattered across the surrounding snow.

  Amy charged, her war cry ripping from her throat and drawing the wolf’s attention for a single moment. Kim decked him across the face. Fenris flew backward off of her like a white comet, hitting the snow in a blaze of white flame that melted the snow into steam and turned the bedrock beneath into a puddle of molten rock. He lay there for a moment, stunned.

  “I knew I could count on you, but did you really have to wait until he was right on top of me?” Kim snapped,
glancing at Amy. “Wait, where’s Odin?”

  “Dead,” Amy replied, and as she said the words, a horrific scream ripped the heavens asunder.

  Ian 02:05

  A scream shook Ian awake. He lay in the snow, half-covered by ice, but that didn’t bother him. What bothered him was the monsoon in his head. It hurt so much, he could barely breathe. His stomach sloshed inside him as he tried to shut his eyes away from the pain of it, but that only made the world start to spin.

  He rolled onto his side as everything inside him came rushing out. Bloody vomit splattered the snow in a rush that left him feeling weak and dizzy. He lay there, curled into a ball in the snow as another scream tore through the night sky. His eyes shot open as he looked around, trying to find the source of it, but it was like the sound was everywhere at once.

  The last thing he remembered was being knocked down by Fenris. He’d thought he’d had the wolf, had managed to find a way to break through the creature’s invisibility, but in the end, it hadn’t seemed to matter. It was like fighting the predator in hand to hand combat after knocking away the alien’s stealth, only he was way less prepared for the battle than either Arnold Schwarzenegger or Danny Glover had been.

  He tried to shake away the cobwebs, but that simple movement spun his world into a train wreck of agony. He collapsed back onto the snow and realized the hair on the back of his head felt wet. He gritted his teeth and reached backward to feel his head. His fingers came away crimson, and his eyes shifted from them to the spot where he’d been unconscious in the snow. There was pool of frozen blood where his head had been. That didn’t seem good. Not at all. He probably had a concussion. At least, he was pretty sure he did. If he didn’t, well, he was still dizzy and sick to his stomach, so it didn’t really matter in the end.

  Ian forced himself to his feet and staggered forward, but he couldn’t see anything through the combination of his hazy vision and the flurry of icy wind whipping across the plains. Well, that was no good either. He shut his eyes and sucked in a breath that tasted of wolf and Vikings and… Amy. His eyes shot open. She was out here somewhere. He had to find her. Vidar had told him she couldn’t survive a trip to Jotunheim. This place would sap her powers. Had she come to save him? He hoped not, but guilt gnawed at him anyway.

  He reached out for her with his mantle, calling upon its insatiable hunger to zero in on her heat. Instead, it latched onto something else, something familiar. Ian’s head snapped to the left. Haijiku lay upon the snow, gleaming like a black jewel. As soon as his eyes found the weapon, it pulled on everything inside him. He moved toward it as if in a trance. Ice coated its perfect edge as butterflies flitted across the dark metal blade.

  It was in his hand before he realized it. The touch of the Emissary in the back of his brain was like a field of crows looking up from their feast to stare at him with beady eyes. A jolt of power shot through him, rippling across the back of his broken skull and knitting the bone and flesh back together. His broken wrist healed itself. His shattered knuckles no more than a memory. Truthfully, he had no idea how he’d seized the weapon, but now that he had, he felt better than ever before.

  Pinpricks of heat came alive in the distance. They called to him, and his mantle begged him to take their heat for himself. He took a step forward as his eyes narrowed. The wolf was out there too. So was Vidar. He could feel the crush of their blows in the air, taste the stink of their blood on the wind.

  Even from here, Ian could tell Vidar was losing. There was far too much of the Viking’s blood in the air. He was losing, but that wasn’t supposed to happen. Unless it was. Sure, Ragnarok had been predicted. Sure, the gods knew their fates. But then again, it was all ghost whispers and prophecy. Maybe it was wrong, or even just a little off. It wouldn’t take much, just a word here or there interpreted the wrong way.

  It didn’t much matter to him. He would bring Haijiku’s power down upon Fenris. He would wipe the wolf from the face of Jotunheim, and he would feast upon its corpse. Ian’s lips broke into a smile as he strode forward through the icy wind. It whipped at his clothes and hair, but it no longer impeded him. No, it parted around him, clearing a path through the snowy wastes like a trumpet call heralding the coming of its greatest warrior.

  As soon as he caught sight of the battle, he understood the problem. Vidar was too hurt from earlier. Fenris, on the other hand, was practically unscathed. Despite all their efforts, the mythical beast wasn’t injured enough for it to matter. There was no way Vidar would be able to take down the wolf, especially since one of his arms had been torn off, and Fenris was beating the deity senseless with it.

  Haijiku pinged in the back of his brain, like a hawk spotting a mouse from far off. It urged him onward, urged him to take control of the situation. Hunger rose up inside him like a living thing of brambles and fire. His body moved of its own accord as he took another step forward. The smell of blood and power filled his lungs. He raised Haijiku and pointed it at the battlefield. It came alive.

  Butterflies lifted from the snow, their wings just faint slivers of ice in the shattered moonlight. The insects flitted through the air, gusting effortlessly along with the currents of the arctic winds. Ian’s lips curled into a smile as he raised his free hand and felt for the wind. It slipped along his senses and he reached out for it, grabbing onto it and crushing it beneath his will. It struggled, desperate to be set free. So he sent it flying toward the wolf. It caught hold of the icy butterflies and slammed them into the wolf’s back like a shotgun blast full of glass and diamond dust. The gale stripped the flesh from the monster’s bones in the space of a second, reducing Fenris to little more than a blood-smeared skeleton.

  Ian’s vision darkened around the edges as he fell to his knees gasping for breath. He felt empty, drained even past his limit. His chest heaved as his hunger roared up inside him, all electricity and barbed wire. It lit upon his nerves, forcing him to his feet and throwing him forward toward the wolf with the single-minded need to feed. His belly rumbling so loudly, it practically shook the whole of Jotunheim. He needed to eat. Now.

  He looked around, trying desperately to find something to focus on besides his gut full of razor blades, but all he saw were hazy shapes. Blood was on the air, sweet and delicious. He would have it. His body dragged him toward it. His mouth watered as he approached the bloody thing on the ground. He grabbed at it with his free hand as it struggled and writhed. He opened his mouth and bit down. Meat, blood, and power filled him in an instant, setting his senses ablaze and searing his nerves. Haijiku throbbed in his hand like a living, breathing thing.

  “More! Give us more!” it cried in a voice loud and overbearing even over the icy wind. He ignored the weapon, driving his face into the corpse. Blood ran down his cheeks as he swallowed. Shouts broke through at the edge of his hearing, but they sounded too far off for them to be close. Too far away for them to matter.

  The fallen god’s body snapped into focus. Fenris was down but still alive, still struggling to crawl away even though he was a broken mishmash of meat and sinew. Revulsion welled up inside him like a tidal wave. His stomach revolted as he fell forward onto his hands and knees. The contents of his stomach emptied onto the snow. The stink of it hung in the air, twisting up his insides as the wolf crawled and crawled, leaving a bloody smear behind it like some kind of demonic slug.

  “Eat him,” the Emissary whispered in his ear, voice all gumdrops and candy canes. “You know you want to.”

  “No,” he whispered, but the word was lost as something grabbed him by the shoulders and hurled him backward away from the bloody, broken thing still trying to escape. Anger flashed through him, and the Emissary seized upon it.

  “Will you let them take this kill from you?” it asked, voice high and mighty. Condescension filled its eyes as it stared down at him from a few feet away, nothing but a shadow of loathing and hunger.

  “That’s not what’s happening,” he tried to say, but the words came out of his lips in a snarl.

 
; “Yes, it is,” the sword cooed. “Don’t let them take this from us.”

  “Ian, listen to me.” A voice broke through the cotton in his ears, and he turned toward it. Amy stood there, her hand gripping a knife that blazed like the furnace of hell itself. Blazing runic symbols were etched across its length, and as he twisted his head to get a better look at it, Haijiku leapt from within his hand like a live serpent. The movement damn near dislocated his shoulder once again. He fell away from her, unable to stop himself.

  “Hel’s coming,” the Emissary shrieked. “You must escape her clutches before it’s too late. Even we cannot eat her.”

  “Who is Hel?” he asked, his words little more than a choked gasp as the wind between him and Amy picked up speed, blocking most of her figure from view.

  “She is death. She is the underworld. She is the cold from which no life, no nutrients can spring. She will take even your hunger, and it will die upon her altar. You must flee before she sees you, before she fills your world with the restless dead.” The Emissary appeared in front of him, one hand outstretched toward him. “Trust me on this. Hel is someone you, especially, can never meet. She will suck the power from your bones and swallow your mantle whole.”

  Ian was jolted to his feet in a surge of electricity as pictures and images of a thousand broken battlefields sprang to his mind. A woman in a hooded cloak shambled through the battlefield, kneeling beside warriors too unfortunate to have been killed in battle. She reached out, cupping their heads in her hands. He watched her inhale, sucking up the souls of the fallen, and leaving nothing behind but an empty shell too desiccated to feed even the soil.

  He staggered backward as Amy took a step closer, Hel’s marks burning across her knife. He couldn’t let her come near him, not with that thing in her hand. He didn’t know what exactly would happen if Hel’s hunger came in contact with him, but he sensed it would be the end of him. She could not come closer. She. Could. Not.