The Tower

by L. A. McGinnis

  “So says you.”

  “So says me.” That had been a week ago. And no other attempt had been made since. Which meant that had been the last try. Looking up into the sky flecked with stars, Balder murmured, “What if those stones stand there until the end of time? It’d be something, wouldn’t it, to know we’d placed them there? The means to our own doom.”

  “You’re a gloomy bastard tonight, aren’t you?” Freyr slid down beside him. “I’d think you’d be in a better mood, with such a sweet chica warming your bed.” Balder didn’t feel inclined to mention that’s all they did. Share a bed. Because the insurmountable space between him and Gabbie was beyond frustrating.

  “If we leave now, it’ll be dark by the time we reach street level.”

  Balder considered it. “I’d rather head south. Test the feed on the surveillance system. Tweak it, if need be. Confirm how many guards Domenic’s got on-site tonight.”

  “We’ve tested it twice already. Maybe we should look for Ava.”

  Balder looked again across the darkness that shimmered with starlight. Some nights, he mused, seemed more touched by magic than others. And yes, they could scour the city for one woman. But long ago, he’d learned to trust his gut.

  “Ava will come home when she’s ready, just like always. Tonight, my brother, you and I are meant to test the feeds on the cameras. I want to make sure we have eyes on those portals.”

  Freyr sighed, pulling his coat tighter. “Fine. Fucking colder than a witch’s left tit out here, and you’ve got us up high, facing the wind. You suck, my brother.”

  Balder chuckled. “I left the Hummer idling below, it’ll be warm when we get down there.” He was still laughing when he headed down the dark stairwell, grateful for his brother’s presence right behind him.

  By the time they reached the bottom, they were frozen. “I would give anything to have our old world back, you know,” Freyr complained as Balder stomped his feet, driving the blood back into them. “Heat, do you remember what that was like? And hot showers all the time, and lots of food, parties, woman… Well, now that I’ve got Lilly, I don’t miss that, of course, but still, it’s the little things in life. Even you’ve got to admit, this new world-order shit sucks on multiple levels.”

  One thing about working with Freyr, you had a constant stream of background noise. But the chatter settled him, sort of like white noise. Sinking into heated seats of the Hummer, Balder pulled up the remote feed on the laptop, and the stone circle flickered into view. “They’ve increased the number of guards.”

  Freyr’s eyes flickered over the scene distractedly. “Yeah, I can count, too. Looks like double from a week ago. So?”

  “So, why double the guard on something that can’t be harmed? If the Orobus can’t destroy them, then it stands to reason we can’t either. Which means he shouldn’t be bothering with them at all, except…” Except if he still needed them for something. “He’s using them to move between worlds.”

  “He’d need the stones to open them up, wouldn’t he?”

  “Maybe not. Maybe he can just use them like doorways. What if they’re just doorways, now?” Balder mulled this over for a moment. Meeting Freyr’s eyes, he saw he was considering the same.

  “What if he’s moving between worlds, and he’s not even here?”

  “We go in and destroy everything he has on this world.” Balder calculated the odds. “We’ve scouted out eight, maybe nine ammo caches, and then there are his men. We need to get Mir down here. If he agrees, then we get this done tonight, and once we take everything that bastard has on this world?”

  Freyr’s grin was beautifully evil. “Then we use the portals to destroy everything he’s got on the others.”

  Mir agreed. As did Fen, Tyr, Hunter, and Loki. Morgane simply nodded toward the truck loaded down with explosives, so it appeared they were all in. Splitting off into pairs, they went to work, moving from one weapons cache to the next, planting charges, setting relays, running wires. In all, they took out seven sites that night, and five the next. For two nights, the city burned, fire devouring the supply chain that fueled the Orobus’s earthly empire. Balder watched every one of them disappear until the last ember blew away in the winter winds.

  After that, he’d set up camp on the edge of the ruined city and waited. The guards on the circle tripled, then quadrupled. “Where is he getting all these bodies? I mean, the city’s practically empty. Where are they coming from?”

  Tyr, who had drawn the short stick today, shrugged. “Some realm we missed? Some place he’s got so well hidden we can’t find it? You want to backtrack them tonight?” The God of War nodded toward the guards below, moving in military formation.

  There had to be over two hundred, and they changed four times a night. That made for at least eight hundred for the night shift, maybe sixteen hundred a day.

  “Yeah,” Balder answered, thinking it through. “We pick out a couple and track them to where ever they go every night. The question is…” His eyes flickered over the distinct groups of twos and threes before settling on a duo stopping to send a group out to scout the perimeter. “There. Those two. Mid-grade soldiers, not high enough to be missed right away, but high enough to know what’s going on.”

  “They’ll do.” Tyr grunted. “Hope it’s not far—it’s fucking cold out here tonight.”

  “It’s cold out here every night, Tyr.” Balder couldn’t help grinning. “It’s Chicago.”

  “Not anymore.” Tyr’s voice softened as he looked out over the city that stretched to the horizon, littered with hulking, ruined monoliths that would stand until they were either taken back by this world…or burned to ash by the Orobus.

  “Have faith, my friend.” Balder rose and stood next to him, looking over the ruined landscape. It was gloriously empty, a monstrous landscape, as he looked out over the dark city with its windows glittering against the sheet of unbroken ice. “Perhaps it won’t stay dark forever. This world has always had a way of coming back. We’ve seen it before,” he added quietly.

  “Nothing like this.”

  “No,” Balder agreed, “nothing like this. But none of them were ever the same, were they?” He straightened, his shoulders feeling the strain this time. Even knowing the odds were against them, even knowing it might be the end, there had always been a strange sense of anticipation, a hunger he’d always felt in facing a battle. Every battle, no matter the odds, no matter the outcome. Tonight, he felt none of those things.

  Somewhere along the line, the pendulum had swung, and he’d be damned if he could put his finger on when and where that had happened.

  “How much of this did we bring on ourselves, Tyr? We arranged the stones that are down there, we created the circle. We assembled the women together. Everything leads back to us.” His voice grew more hushed the longer he spoke, as if the city below were listening. As if it could listen. “How much of this is on our heads?” he asked again.

  “Now who’s being paranoid?” Tyr nudged him. “Freyr said you were full of doom and gloom. Get your head out of whatever dark place it’s in, and let’s follow those two assholes and figure out where all these bodies are coming from.” He studied Balder’s face. “It’s not like you to talk like that, Balder. What’s gotten into you?”

  Time. Gabriella. Odin’s blindness. Ava’s darkness. This black, hulking, city had gotten into him. And the thought that none of them would ever see light again.

  For the first time in his long, immortal life, Balder felt a glimmer of fear at the possibility.

  19

  As it turned out, the men were not men after all.

  They had been, once. Now there was no telling what they were. Demons clothed in human skin? Black magic wearing flesh and blood, capable of simple thoughts and ordered movements, maybe—but men? Balder sniffed. Not for a month or more, by the smell of things.

  “We can do this the easy way, or the hard way.” While it was obvious Tyr had been watching way too many old action movies, there wa
s no denying his hard-line approach worked.

  This was the second creature they’d questioned. The first one lay still on the pavement, and the skittering, frantic eyes of the second, younger one strayed often to the body, confirming that was where his fate lay.

  “Your buddy here told us the basic process. After the Orobus gets the human body, he puts you into it. What I want to know is where the bodies come from in the first place? Who were you?”

  The thing’s mouth moved like a trout gasping for air. “I… I cannot remember…”

  “So, we’re doing this the hard way, then?” Balder rolled his eyes.

  “No…no…I can’t… I just…”

  Balder stopped Tyr with a hand across his chest. “Why don’t you let me try?”

  Crouching down, he stared into the thing’s eyes. The man had once been handsome and young, perhaps twenty or so, but the past month had taken its toll on the mortal shell. “You understand what’s happening, don’t you?” The thing’s blue eyes filled with tears. And the head gave the barest of nods, as if it took great effort. “You truly are in there, somewhere?” Again, a slight nod. “All right. This is what we’re going to do. I will ask you a question, you’re going to answer.”

  The face peered at him intently, as if all its hopes became pinned on this query.

  Balder peeled back the boy’s jacket, stripping him to the waist. The tattoos that marked his arms and chest would be considered primitive by today’s standards, but from where this boy came from… They were works of great artistry. From behind him, he heard Tyr’s explosive breath of disbelief.

  “You are from Scotia?” A nod. “And have lingered in the Otherworld?” Another affirmation. Balder rocked back on his heels, considering. “Hel released you onto this plane, and the Orobus, he breathed life anew into your shell.” Not bothering for an answer, since the tears shining in the boy’s eyes were confirmation enough, Balder continued, “You are slaves, for all intents and purposes. Doing his bidding. And Hel’s bidding…” The slightest slice of his head. A negative response. Balder recalculated. “Not Hel, then. Just the Orobus.”

  “Is the creature here?” Another short slice of his head, then the boy’s body began panting, as if fighting against itself.

  “How long?” Balder gave him a moment. Slowly, so very slowly, he spread his right hand, and pushed out a finger. Then another. “Two weeks.” Balder looked up at Tyr. “Since we blew up the Tower and escaped. Since Ava. He’s been off world since Ava went over to him.”

  The boy’s mouth moved, desperation forcing a single word from those grayish lips. “Please….” He drew a trembling finger across his throat, hope shining in his eyes. “Please….”

  His eyes bright with tears he looked up at Balder. Whatever dark magic the Orobus had shoved into the boy twisted beneath that rotting, tattooed skin, as if fighting for survival.

  Leaning in, Balder met his blue eyes steadily. “You understand, if I do this, death could send you back to the very hell you came from?”

  When the boy nodded firmly, one final time, Balder pulled out a knife and sent him on his way.

  They tracked the next two for several hours. To a nicer neighborhood, empty now. Where there were most likely Land Rovers and Lexuses in the garages, and a wall safe behind the painting in the living room. Tyr monitored the tree-lined street. “We should wait out the night. See how many others return.”

  Balder agreed. Yet the unsettled, raw feeling in his stomach as he thought of the boy who had died far too young—twice now—left him feeling like he’d failed.

  “He wasn’t alive, Balder.” Tyr’s voice was hard, as it needed to be to remind him. “The Orobus turned him into a slave.” Yes, perhaps he needed reminding of that, too.

  “Still, he was too young, Tyr.”

  “They’re all too young, by our standards. You ended his misery. He asked you to. Better you than the Orobus. Better this than be forced to serve a master. Better this than be forced to kill innocents, staining his soul with actions that cannot be undone.” Tyr’s voice was unrelenting. “He asked you to do it, Balder.”

  “The Orobus has a new queen at his side.” Balder turned instead to the subject they’d been avoiding, ever since they’d begun this feckless quest. Find Ava. Please Balder, see if she’s still alive, Morgane had pleaded.

  “If Ava’s gone over, then Hel’s been replaced. Whether or not she’s really switched sides remains to be seen, of course, but it’s clear there has been a power shift.”

  Balder glanced at Tyr. “If she’s gone over?”

  Tyr kept his tone neutral. “If she’s gone over, the loss will take a toll on Morgane. We’re holding together by a thread, it won’t take much to break us.”

  But Balder was not thinking only of Ava’s sister. “And Odin?”

  “Odin will have no choice but to face what she’s done.”

  “And what she is.” Because there it was. The crux of their problem. “The two of them together, all of that power, Tyr.” If Domenic had Ava, really had her, then he wouldn’t need Hel’s armies, he’d have enough raw, primitive power to eat away at this world, destroy the portals, vaporize the other realms, and reduce them all to primordial matter.

  “Here they come.” A horde of animated bodies, risen from the dead, now answering to the Orobus, marched toward them. From the narrow space between two of the houses, they watched them file past, then into the houses, filling them up.

  “Now we know.”

  “Yup.”

  An army. He had built an army to walk in the sunlight, since the Grim were confined to the dark. Balder thought of Gabriella, of all the things in this world he’d wanted to show her. Share with her. And how time was slipping away.

  Like the others, he supposed, he’d always thought he’d have more of it. He would have loved to show her the other worlds. Now he’d just settle for a kiss. But with this insurmountable space between them—a space, he realized, was due to her and not him—even a kiss might never happen.

  A means of shutting him out, because even though they shared a bed, every meal, time and conversation, there was this invisible wall he could not breach because she would not allow it. No matter what he did. But still, their time together was glorious. And if this was all he had, if their time was only to be a chaste bed and meals and a rare, stolen unguarded moment, then that was what he’d settle for. And if he had to fight the Orobus on this world, or the others, just to steal back another moment, then steal it he would.

  The next night they spent eradicating Domenic’s undead army.

  And the next.

  And three days later, when the Orobus returned to the Earth, a chattering Ava hanging on his arm, it was to a shell of the world he had spent a lifetime building.

  20

  Balder was there to see it.

  Or at least, most of it. The portal flashed to life, and the two figures stepped through—Domenic, the returning king and Ava, the shining prize on his arm. Balder savored, just for a moment, the shocked look on the bastard’s face. The small smattering of guards, the ones they’d missed in the purge, rushing in to surround them before herding them into a waiting SUV. He watched them flee. He watched them run. But not before he saw Domenic’s face as he turned to scan the circle one last time, as his eyes flaring in what looked like rage, but could very well have been fear.

  Fear rattled through Balder as well. For when they came through, the world darkened around the edges, as if the two of them sucked the life from it. As if together, they became something so great that simply by existing, they’d destroy it all, without so much as a thought.

  “Damn, damn, damn.” Freyr was his partner today, and he was glad of it. “Ava was with the bastard. Did you see her? She was hanging on his arm. And the way she looked at him? I know that look, I know… What in the bloody hell are we going to tell Morgane? And Odin?”

  “We’re not telling anyone anything. We’re following them.”

  Their vehicle still idling belo
w, Domenic was getting a rundown, and not a very good one, from his remaining men. Hoofing it down the steps, Balder and Freyr buckled themselves into the Hummer. “You put trackers on all the vehicles?”

  Freyr rolled his eyes. “Duh. Of course I did, I’m totally not an idiot. Every single one of them. Starting with the one they’re in.” Freyr shrugged. “What? It was the nicest, figured it was Domenic’s. Now we just have to…” He grinned as he flicked on the console and the little beacon lit up green. “There you are, you bastard. Let’s see where you’re going.”

  Somewhere very, very nice, which shouldn’t have surprised anyone.

  A huge estate on the northern edge of the city, a veritable mansion of the old money kind, heavily linteled and Doric-columned, lined in what had once been hedges and fine gardens, but now were drifted over with mounds of snow and dripping with long, evil looking icicles. Domenic got out and paused, turned, and offered a hand to Ava. A small, pale hand slipped into his, and he pulled her from the car, laughing.

  Balder released a long-held breath. So that was it, then. It was true. They were together. Ava had turned, and they had lost her. All that power…

  “We took out his weapons. Most of his army,” Freyr reminded him from the passenger seat.

  Papercuts compared to what Ava brought to the table.

  They needed more than what they had at their disposal. They needed an army of their own to win this war, to make a stand on the battlefield. And even then, even if they managed to raise an army, against all that raw power? Staring at the two of them across the snow, the edges of reality shifted and bent, as if groaning under their combined weight. “Where is Hel?”

  “Well, he wouldn’t have killed her. Maybe he sent her back to the Underworld?”

  That didn’t feel right. No, Domenic might have a new, shiny toy, but he’d keep his old ones in his toy box, even if they were a bit dented and worn. “She’s in there somewhere. If she’s alive, and he hasn’t killed her.”