The Devil's Banshee

by Donna Hosie

  “Ragnarök is coming, son of Hlif. You will need to make a choice.”

  “Ragnarök is not my quarry this day, fair warrior-maiden. I am on a quest to find The Devil’s Banshee.”

  The Valkyrie stretches out an arm, clad in protective maroon leather with golden stitching. Her slim fingers caress my face, but as she draws away, her long nails, filed to a point, scratch my face. My beard offers no protection, and my skin sears with a burning pain.

  “The peasant girl has already forsaken you,” says the Valkyrie. “You could stay here with me. I would teach you to be the greatest Viking warrior who ever existed. A birthright that was yours, Prince Alfarin, son of King Hlif, before the mutated ancestors of the Skin-Walkers ripped your throat out. I would love you like no other by night, and train you to destroy by day.”

  Her words are like honey down my throat. I feel the healing balm working from within, lighting a fire I have not felt since I—

  —immolated.

  Elinor, Mitchell, Medusa! My friends are alone in the Circles of Hell with a Minotaur bearing down on them and nothing more than a blind guide to see them to safety.

  “Noooooooooo!”

  I am hit by a wall of pain and heat. Screams echo through the Seventh Circle. The Minotaur has released its jaws from my neck, but we are struggling, joined as one chimera of bull and Viking. I am still supine on the ground; my boots are sliding on hot liquid. It burns my legs.

  The golden palace of Valhalla has been replaced by a cavern through which runs a river of boiling blood. Bodies, the heads and arms and torsos and legs of the Unspeakables, thrash about in the inferno, skin bubbling and shredding and dissolving.

  I am in the outer ring of the Seventh Circle.

  The Minotaur throws back a muscular arm and I see Mitchell hurled to the stone floor. Medusa has once more jumped onto the Minotaur and is again clinging to the beast’s back. I cannot see Elinor, and my fear is replaced by a thirst for violence. If the beast has harmed her, I will remove its limbs one by one and throw them into the bloody torrent—

  The Valkyrie has pulled me away from my friends again. An unnatural sense of peace floods my soul. I want to scratch it out with my fingers. My thirst for violence has not been sated.

  My beloved axe clatters to the ground. I do not know where it came from. The Valkyrie takes a step back and draws a long silver blade from behind her body.

  “I will not permit you to leave, Viking.”

  “I did not ask to be brought here!” I cry. “Take me back to my friends—now!”

  I have been dead for over one thousand years, yet my reflexes are as sharp as the blade of my axe. Centuries of battling Saxons in Hell will keep anyone in prime fighting form. The Valkyrie swings first, but my axe sweeps high to meet her sword. The faint outlines of Vikings past start to materialize in the hall of Valhalla. The Valkyrie and I battle amongst the spirits now watching us, and silver sparks rain down each time our weapons clash.

  “Your place is here!” cries the Valkyrie. She crouches low and brings her sword around in a curve. I have to jump to avoid it. “I have chosen you.”

  “My place is with Elinor, Mitchell and Medusa!” I bellow back. I can feel the anger rising inside my chest once more. I have no idea if time here is in sync with time for those left behind in the Minotaur’s path. Seconds could be hours. Minutes could be days. That bull-headed beast could be bearing down on Elinor right now.

  With a roar, I throw myself at the Valkyrie, wielding my axe in every direction as it clatters and sings against her blade. The ghosts of past Vikings are mocking and tormenting me. They say I am not worthy.

  “Send me back!” I cry. Fire and pain are rising in my throat. Pressure is building behind my eyes and in my skull. My entire soul is going to ignite with the violence of the anger within me, which is begging to be unleashed.

  Elinor is the first devil I see as I am returned to the Seventh Circle of Hell. She is flailing her arms at a grotesque, squawking feathered body that has the face of a haggard female. Blood is dripping from its chapped, flaking lips.

  “Alfarin!” cries Medusa. “Watch out!”

  I make it out of the way of the charging Minotaur just in time. The lumbering beast appears in my peripheral vision as Medusa screams. I roll to my left and land in a thorny bush that flinches away from me as if it has senses. The river of blood and fire has gone and has been replaced by decaying trees and fauna that is covered in spikes. The Minotaur clamps its jaws down on my arm, but I release myself from the pain by punching the monster repeatedly on the snout. Somehow, as I’ve been struggling and fighting in two realms, I’ve been progressing through the Seventh Circle. And Team DEVIL has been with me, battling, the whole time. They have not forsaken me and I have not forsaken them, although it is clear I am now existing in two conscious states.

  “Where is Virgil?” I cry.

  “Cowering!” cries Mitchell as a harpy dives at him. He snaps off a slim branch to defend himself, but he drops it as the branch starts to bleed over his hands.

  “Beatrice Morrigan! Do not forget to look for Beatrice Morrigan!” I yell, punching the Minotaur again.

  “Kinda busy, dude!” shouts Mitchell as the harpy sinks its claws into his shoulder.

  For a third time I am dragged back to Valhalla. How is she doing this? Is this a trick of my mind or devilry from the Circles? I can see my kin more clearly now, but one more so than the others. A woman. She has long blond hair and an angular face that looks cruel and harsh.

  “You bring dishonor on your brethren, Alfarin, son of Hlif, son of Dobin,” she says. Her back is straight. She is small, but her haughtiness adds height. “I made the right decision to leave you. I could not have borne it if I’d lived to see the disgrace you would have brought upon me.”

  “Mother?”

  “You are no son of mine,” replies the ghost. “I have no son. I chose a higher purpose.”

  “You abandoned me!” I cry.

  “A decision easily made.”

  “Choose now!” screams the Valkyrie, raising her blade again. “Your ancestry or your friends? Your blood or your soul? Choose . . . choose . . . choose . . .”

  Her beautiful face is twisting into something grotesque. The cloak of feathers is expanding outward, but her raven-black hair is growing and smothering the white. The Valkyrie now has wings. The long, lithe body that I admired is shrinking into deformity. Her fingernails are now talons.

  “I have chosen!” I cry, taking one last look at my mother. My words, my choice, come from the depth of my soul. “This is not my true Valhalla. You defile it with anger. None of you are what you claim to be. My Valhalla will have three others in its heart. My friends, my true brethren. And I will face the end of days with them.”

  The mesmerizing voice that wanted to love me has been replaced by a shrieking scream. It sounds like glass across stone, and my teeth vibrate with the searing pain of the pitch. I can taste dead blood, thick and salty, and I realize that the area on my face where the Valkyrie scratched her nails down my skin is bleeding.

  But the creature now flapping several feet off the ground is no longer a Valkyrie warrior. It is a harpy.

  “I will devour your treacherous eyes!” screams the creature. “And then I will wait for the Minotaur to finish his share of the peasant girl, and I’ll scavenge her skin!”

  “You will not touch Elinor!” I roar, and I run and jump toward the harpy. For once in my existence, I do not think of my axe. The bloodlust of the Seventh Circle has contaminated my soul with a toxicity that is both glorious and sickening. I grab hold of the throat of the she-beast and bite down hard. Her scream becomes a gurgle, and then becomes silence. I remove my mouth and spit the bitterness of the harpy’s blood onto the ground. Although she is well and truly gone, I snap what is left of her neck. The ghosts of my kin, my mother, start to swirl into smoke. The ground is dissolving, too, into minuscule particles that float up and sear my skin like burning sand. The golden shields that form
the roof of Valhalla are disintegrating into flaming flakes.

  Fiery flakes and flaming sand . . . just as Dante describes the third ring of the Seventh Circle. We are nearly through, even if I cannot actually see it. I want to tear down the walls of this terrible Valhalla with my bare hands. Everything has become a blur of fiery fragments in a twisted illusion. Anger courses through me. How dare the creatures of this circle mock me so! Threaten and hurt my friends!

  I had forgotten the pain of immolation. There is a sensation of muscle and tissue burning, and then tearing from bone. Yet in this instant, the pain is glorious, for I know, as the corrupted vision of Valhalla disappears behind a wall of orange flame, I will soon be reunited with the friends I would tear apart the eternal worlds to find. Immolation is caused by true, undiluted anger, but it will cleanse my soul of the filth that has corrupted it.

  “Yessssssss!”

  I cannot see. The fire has been quenched, but darkness, so heavy and suffocating, has replaced it. The sensation of being contained and buried overwhelms me.

  “Alfarin!” scream Elinor and Medusa. Mitchell is there, too, in the darkness. I can hear him yelling instructions, taking control of my death.

  My mouth is filled with thick liquid. It is anger and hate. It is acidic and vile-tasting. I remember where I was before I was pulled away into a dream state. The Seventh Circle. The last place of the violent.

  “We have to get the friggin’ Minotaur off him!” cries Mitchell. “Virgil, don’t just stand there. Help us!”

  “It’s all my fault,” sobs Elinor. “I made him angry. I didn’t mean to—I didn’t want to. I don’t know what’s happening to me.”

  “I think Alfarin being angry is what probably saved him, El,” replies Medusa. Even in the darkness, I know she is soothing Elinor with her words and a comforting embrace.

  I spit the liquid out of my mouth. Despite my efforts, some has trickled down my gullet. It burns. It is blood, but not mine.

  My friends are now coming into focus. Their forms are so distinctive to me at this point, I could find them in a crowd of thousands of silhouettes. Mitchell, tall and thin, with spiky hair; Medusa, tiny, topped with a mass of curly hair that has a life of its own; and Elinor, slim and delicate with long hair that falls down her back like a waterfall.

  They are pulling a large body by its two thick, muscular legs. The fallen Minotaur.

  “Did I kill the beast?” I ask, wiping my mouth with the sleeve of my tunic.

  “I’m not sure,” replies Mitchell. “But it stopped fighting once you took a chunk out of its throat and snapped its neck, Alfarin. You were in a frenzy, dude. It was all we could do to keep up with you both. The two of you were fighting like . . . like . . .”

  “Monsters?” I ask quietly.

  “I was going to say lions,” says Mitchell. “On steroids. With clamps attached to their balls.”

  I do not have the strength to commend Mitchell for his colorful simile. Instead, I look past my friends at the scene beyond. We are no longer surrounded by a river of blood, or flaming sand. The foul smell of the Seventh Circle has dissipated slightly, but the heat, oh, dear Odin, the heat is already baking me from the inside out. Medusa seems to read my mind.

  “You took us through the Seventh, Alfarin,” she says. “All the way through. You held off the Minotaur. Mitchell, Elinor and I took on the harpies in the middle circle—although those thorny bushes . . . they were the Unspeakables. Did you see them? They kept switching shapes. It was the most grotesque thing I’ve ever seen.”

  “You were freaking amazing, dude,” says Mitchell, patting me on the back; his face bears the scars of deep scratches. “It’s like you were in this different place. Totally in the zone.”

  Suddenly I am enveloped by the scent of Elinor: apples and mint. She rushes toward me and throws her arms around my neck.

  “I am so sorry, Alfarin!” she cries. “I was not myself in the Eighth Circle. I could see and hear The Devil’s dreams again. He is planning something awful. I could taste his hate and his desire for violence on my tongue.”

  “I went to Valhalla, Elinor,” I whisper. “Yet I returned for you, for all of you.”

  “Ye thought ye were in Valhalla?”

  “No, I was there.”

  “Ye just imagined it, Alfarin,” says Elinor. “Ye did not leave us for a second. Ye were so brave, and so strong.”

  “What of Beatrice Morrigan?” I ask. “Did you see any sign of her? Anything at all?”

  “Nothing,” replies Mitchell. “And considering we all had to fight like crazy just to keep standing in there, I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t have picked the Seventh Circle to hang out in for all eternity. Even if she is nuts.”

  My friends help me to my feet and the four of us collapse into one another. Medusa’s clothes are ripped, as are Mitchell’s. Both are covered in cuts that ooze thick, lumpy blood. Elinor has a large vertical gash down the center of her head where her hair parts. I am smothered in kisses. As much as I admire Mitchell, I hope his lips are not among those making rapid contact with my cheeks.

  But as we walk on toward the Sixth Circle of Hell, Virgil pulls me aside.

  “You might end up wishing you had stayed in Valhalla, Viking,” he says. “War is coming, and you don’t want to be in here when it arrives.”

  Fimtán

  Alfarin and Elinor

  Déjà vu is not a state of mind that often afflicts Vikings. We tend to exist in the here and now, and if we believe we are repeating an experience, or reliving a moment, that is probably because we are. For instance, if I sneak the dregs of ale from my cousin Thomason’s bar, and experience déjà vu in so doing, that is probably because I did the very same thing two minutes before, and, most likely, will do the very same thing two minutes hence. Also, Vikings try to avoid using French phrases. We do not like complications.

  Déjà vu was one of the many French phrases that was adopted far and wide by those in the land of the living, presumably to appear more intelligent. I did not pay it much heed until Elinor brought it up one day.

  Elinor was always a great believer in fate. She told me she suspected that déjà vu had other, deeper, meanings. That déjà vu was our subconscious telling us that the facts were not always correct, and that we should trust our gut instincts more.

  Blessed Elinor was always clinging to those traits that made us human. It was one of the many things I admired in her, as well as her ability to weave beads into my beard and still make me look more manly than Great-Aunt Dagmar—a truly miraculous feat.

  Yet as the end of the twentieth century approached, and Hell became more and more crowded, and the earthly population was expanding at a frightening pace, Elinor and I found ourselves in a strange situation that made me question whether déjà vu was indeed a memory jog from our subconscious.

  We were in the devil resources office. We now spent more time here than in our dormitories. As we researched, I had often suspected that someone was watching us. It was more than just the presence of shadows, of which there were many. This was a different sensation. A prickling on the neck. A tingle in my fingertips. Sometimes Elinor would quickly look up from a cabinet and cock her head like a quizzical dog.

  The same sensation of being watched was with me on the night Elinor was filing new admittance records for those with the surname of Pallister.

  Elinor was more nervous than usual. It seemed that she stopped filing to pull at the back of her neck, or whip her head around to stare at the shadows, every few seconds. The shadows had taken on a strange form this night. Instead of one moving mass, they had separated into four black figures. Only two appeared to match Elinor’s and my silhouettes. Of the other two, one was tall and thin; the other was small with what appeared to be snakes surrounding its head. It was unnerving. The shadowy outlines of Elinor’s and my bodies matched our movements, and then stretched up and out, as if we had mounted large beasts. Then they crept back into one large mass that inched into the darkness and left
us with no shadows at all.

  “Elinor, you should stop for food,” I said. “You will work yourself into the ground if you do not rest.”

  “I cannot leave now. Someone has been messing with the Ps,” she replied. “They are all out of order.”

  “Then I will procure a meal for you, my diligent friend,” I said. “What would you like?”

  Elinor looked up from a drawer crowded with files and raised a slim red eyebrow.

  “Ye will procure food?” she asked. “Is this the same kind of procurement as last night, when ye went to find potatoes baked in their jackets, and ye came back with a slice of wilted lettuce for me?”

  “The crush in the corridors was relentless,” I replied sheepishly. “If I had not eaten your food as well as my own, my strength would have faded before I reached the elevators.”

  “Why don’t ye call it quits for today, Alfarin?” said Elinor. “I will be fine here for a few more hours, and ye know it is yer shift at yer cousin’s bar tonight.”

  I considered this. I would rather be with my princess than dry glasses in Thomason’s, but perhaps I would break fewer of them if I took a brief rest.

  “If you are certain . . .”

  “Go. And anyway, I have to sort through this drawer again. I know I’ve seen this file before, several times now. Why do I keep finding it out of place? It doesn’t make sense.”

  I left Elinor muttering to herself. She mentioned déjà vu and pretty, curly hair. I made a mental note to have food delivered to her. Talking to oneself is an early sign of madness—and Hell was full of it.

  On the way out I passed Lord Septimus, The Devil’s accountant and right-hand man. We bowed to each other and exchanged other respectful formalities, but then Lord Septimus surprised me by asking where Elinor was.

  “She is filing the dead Pallisters,” I replied.

  “And how does she seem to you this evening, Prince Alfarin?” asked Lord Septimus.