Grendel's Curse

by Alex Archer

  What, not who.

  “You’re in trouble. Karl? Can you hear me, Karl? You must fight this. Focus on me. Look at me,” Annja commanded, knowing it was useless even as she said the words.

  He lifted the sword, touching it to his lips. “I have been found worthy. Nægling is mine. It always was.”

  “You think you are Beowulf?” Annja blurted, realizing the man before her had had a psychotic breakdown. Whatever affliction had poisoned his skin had undone his mind to the extent he believed he was some long-dead hero. That didn’t make him any less dangerous, only more tragic.

  But tragic men can still kill you if you’re not careful, Annja thought.

  “Beowulf?” Thorssen spat, mocking the name. “The War Wolf? Do I look like a dog? I am not Beowulf! He is dead and gone, dust and dreams, long since any use, even as food for the worms. Gone like all mere men.”

  Annja was already reaching into the otherwhere as he spoke, feeling the imminent threat of violence shimmer in the air between them. This could not end well. She wasn’t afraid for her own life; once her hand closed around the hilt of Joan’s sword she couldn’t be any safer. And she had Garin at her side, a man born to fight, one who had never let her down since he’d first pulled her out of that café in France, guns blazing.

  Thorssen screamed again. She couldn’t tell if he was fighting whatever was inside his body, or if he was screaming his rage at her, at his mother, Garin and the world.

  The animalistic howl tore through the modern architecture, shaking the house to its foundations.

  He scratched at the scraps of skin flaking from his face, his arms and torso to display the extent of the damage.

  The fragments of his skin seemed to smolder and turn black, falling away like the ash of burned paper and drifting down to the carpet.

  Annja stood transfixed by the transformation, her hand still reaching out to draw her own sword into existence.

  “Get her out of here,” Annja told Garin, not looking away from Thorssen.

  “I can’t leave you.”

  “You can. Don’t try and be chivalrous, it doesn’t suit you. Get his mother out of here. This thing has to be stopped.”

  No matter what happened next, this wasn’t for the old woman’s eyes. She didn’t need to see her son die.

  Garin ushered the elderly lady toward the kitchen.

  Annja wrapped her fingers around the hilt of her sword. It was there in her hand, sharing the same moonlit luster as Nægling.

  The thing that had been Thorssen gave a twisted smile of confusion as Annja faced him.

  “Do you really think you can stand against me? I smell the blood on you. You are a feeble woman. I am hungry. Feed me.”

  “Feeble woman?” she said. “You’ve missed a hundred years of suffrage. There’s nothing feeble about us these days.” Calling him Beowulf seemed to have been the one thing that had finally pushed his buttons. Annja liked pushing buttons. That was just the kind of feeble woman she was. “So, if you aren’t Beowulf what are you doing with his sword? Did you steal it from his grave?”

  “I am no thief,” the thing before her raged, all semblance of humanity lost. There was no coming back now, not for Karl Thorssen. His body had been taken from him by the kind of parasite he railed so vocally against, only the immigrant in his skin was no innocent asylum seeker. “Nægling is mine. Not his. She was never his. Her strength is my strength. Where do you think that thief found her? In my lair. In my cave. He stole into my home and, while I lay dying, took her. But Nægling is mine and I will be avenged.”

  “Who are you?”

  It did not answer her.

  Annja rephrased the question. “What are you?”

  “I am Grendel.”

  40

  Grendel.

  Not the hero. Not the shining one who broke his sword in the dragon’s belly. Not the man who embodied the spirit of a lost nation. Not the man Karl Thorssen dreamed would change his world, now, slaying the beasts of his generation.

  Grendel.

  The monster.

  That was who he identified with in his disease-riddled mind. He gripped the great blade, Nægling, in a single oversize hand. Any mere mortal would have needed two to wield it.

  He swung the sword and roared.

  Annja heard the air part as the deadly edge sliced toward her.

  She danced out of reach as the gleaming blade hewed close enough for the backdraft to ruffle her hair. She rocked on her heels, then quickly stepped inside his attack, but Thorssen anticipated the move. He lunged in and Annja barely had enough time to bring her sword around to counter his incredible speed.

  And again he struck.

  And again.

  She was on the back foot, being pressed toward the huge sheet of glass that separated them from sanity.

  In a curiously detached way she noticed that the storm had worsened, lightning flashing bright and close even as the thunder clapped, booming.

  The charge rippled through her sword, the metal as ever in tune with the elements around it.

  Thorssen threw back his head and cried out, his voice raw, climbing above the storm to join in the cacophony.

  Annja swung again. Her blade drew blood and howls from him. He had misjudged the feeble woman and knew now he faced a warrior whose gender was irrelevant.

  “Still hungry?” Annja goaded.

  Thorssen rose up onto his toes, stretching his neck and arching his back, presenting his heart to the warrior, taunting her to strike. Annja seized her opportunity, launching herself over the white leather couch at him, only for Thorssen to move quicker than the eye could follow, turning on her and slamming her into the wall.

  Annja’s face smashed into the plaster, leaving her stunned and dizzy. The world reeled around her as she tried to recover before Thorssen fell upon her again. Though even as she turned, tasting ash in her throat, Thorssen catapulted her across the room.

  She came down on the coffee table, sending the bone-china teacups crashing.

  Annja rolled away onto her side as Nægling scythed into the wood where her head had been a heartbeat before. She scrambled away on all fours as Thorssen stalked after her.

  He launched another blistering attack, preventing Annja from rising.

  She slumped to her knees as he hammered a blow into the base of her spine with a booted foot, driving her down onto the hardwood floor amid the shards of broken china.

  Annja brought her sword up as Thorssen came for her, cutting deep into Thorssen’s his new skin.

  He screamed in pain and clutched at his guts to stem the flow of blood.

  Annja took no satisfaction in wounding him; he seemed hardly human now, beyond reason. It came down to instinct: fight or flight. It was a miracle there was enough of Thorssen left in there to even feel the cut. He looked hellish, sores weeping, blood running from the two cuts.

  “Don’t do this,” she gasped, pushing herself back to her feet, but there was no communicating with the man.

  Thorssen hurled one of the two couches aside, leaving bloody tracks across the hardwood as he closed the gap again, shepherding Annja toward the huge plate-glass window.

  She slipped beneath his next swing, dropping her shoulder and lunging, the tip of her blade piercing the muscle of Thorssen’s chest. He swatted her attack away as though the bite of Joan’s sword was nothing and crashed a fist into the side of Annja’s head.

  As she spat blood, Annja only grew more determined.

  Thorssen threw himself at Annja again, grappling with her toward the window.

  Annja was slammed back into the glass relentlessly, until the huge plate cracked, then spiderwebbed, then finally shattered. Together, they went sprawling through the broken window, stumbling and falling as the storm and shards of glass rained down around them.

  A fork of lightning streaked down from the sky, spearing the night.

  Thorssen rose, blood and rain dripping from his face.

  He brandished Nægling.

&n
bsp; Annja stood slowly.

  “Karl? Can you hear me, Karl? Whatever it is that’s wrong, we can help you. We need to get you to the hospital. You’re sick.”

  Another fork of lightning lit his sneering face.

  “You think you know me? You think you can help me? You think I need to be fixed, that I am sick? I’m not sick. I am becoming Grendel. I can feel the fire inside me. I am becoming whole, finally. This is what my life has always been about. This moment.” And as though to punctuate it, a huge rumble of thunder rolled out above them. Annja felt it deep inside her chest. “Feed me. I am hungry. So very, very hungry.”

  He came at her again, Nægling glistening in the rain, the ancient metal slick.

  Swords clashed as they skirted the edge of the huge pool. The expensive cultivated foliage that blocked the rooftop pool from casual view wilted under the battering of the storm. The damage to her wrists from where Thorssen’s assassin had bound them in the church made every impact from the swords coming together agony.

  “Annja!”

  The shout came from inside the house.

  Annja didn’t look toward it, but Thorssen did, allowing his guard to drop long enough for her to deliver a stinging cut to his left cheek, drawing more blood.

  He backed up. The deck around the pool was slick with rain.

  As they worked their way around the pool, metal sparked on metal as the two blades met. Every muscle in Annja’s body cried out from the beating she’d taken, but she couldn’t allow weakness to steal in. She launched another blistering attack, gouging a deep slice down Thorssen’s right cheek this time. Joan’s sword cleaved all the way down into the meat of his shoulder, opening a sickening wound.

  She didn’t even have enough breath left to waste any calling out to Garin.

  Despite his wounds, Thorssen showed no sign of weakening. He was relentless and seemed blind to all pain.

  He hit her hard, driving the air out of her lungs.

  The deck beneath Annja betrayed her; she lost her footing on the slick surface and started to fall, arms pinwheeling desperately as she tried to catch her balance, but it was hopeless. Thorssen lashed out with the hilt of Nægling, a savage backhanded blow that slammed into her temple and sent Annja into the freezing pool below.

  41

  Garin saw Annja fall.

  He knew he had to get to her. She was out cold, Thorssen on the edge of the pool watching her drown.

  He raced flat out around the side of the pool, coming up on Thorssen’s blind side. Garin’s wild attack caught Thorssen by surprise.

  Thorssen tried to turn but couldn’t do it quickly enough. Garin slashed at him with a carving knife he’d grabbed from the kitchen. It was more than enough to punch a few holes in the politician. He pulled back his arm and slashed again, opening a wide gash across Thorssen’s belly, which had the man staggering back. But that was no more than a temporary reprieve.

  Thorssen lumbered around, bleeding, eyes glazed, skin flaking away on his hideously misshapen musculature, and with one clubbing swing batted Garin aside. He tangled with the deck furniture, ending up spread across two sun loungers. For one sickening second, he couldn’t feel his legs or anything below the vertebrae midway down his spine, and thought he’d broken his back. It could have been worse.

  He was only inches from going over the side of the house.

  42

  Annja Creed was drowning.

  It made a change from burning, was all she could think as she fought toward consciousness even as her lungs filled with pool water.

  She coughed, breaking the surface of the water, and reached out for the closest wall, clawing at it and pulling herself up.

  The sword was gone.

  When it had fallen out of her hand it had returned to the otherwhere.

  She was on her knees, soaked, deafening rain drumming down all around. Thorssen swung the ancient artifact once more.

  She threw up an arm, knowing Nægling would sheer clean through the bone as her hand closed around Joan’s sword in the otherwhere and brought it back just in time to deflect the lethal blow.

  Metal struck metal and a shower of sparks stung her face.

  The force of the blow shuddered through her arm.

  She couldn’t hold off her own cry of pain, but something snapped in the attack. Joan’s sword had held true. Nægling had failed for a second time, shattered by its wielder.

  Lightning, drawn to Annja by the sword in her hand, shimmered down the length of Joan’s sword, then spread out in a sheet of electricity across the surface of the pool. Deadly and beautiful at the same time.

  Karl Thorssen howled.

  It was the most heartbreaking sound she’d ever heard.

  He held the hilt of the broken sword uselessly in his hand.

  Annja seized the moment. She couldn’t afford sentimentality; there was no saving Karl Thorssen. Sometimes that was life. Death. She twisted the blade so it pointed skyward and drove it with both hands deep into Karl Thorssen’s stomach.

  His baleful cry was enough to make her want to clasp her hands over her ears, but she couldn’t relinquish her hold on the sword. Not until he was dead. Annja maintained the upward pressure, ramming the blade home.

  His life ran out. Karl Thorssen lacked the will to stand upright, and fell, impaling himself on the sword, collapsing on top of Annja.

  There was nothing in his eyes.

  No light.

  No life.

  No sign of Karl Thorssen the man, the politician, or Karl Thorssen the beast, Grendel.

  She squirmed out from beneath him, still holding the blood-and gore-smeared blade out in front of her in case Thorssen should somehow rise again, but he was beyond that. All that remained was the slowly growing stain on the poolside decking that was already being washed away by the rain.

  Annja doubled over, breathing too fast, her heart beating far too quickly, aware of how close she had come to death.

  And then she saw Garin sprawled between two sun loungers, not moving.

  “Garin!”

  43

  He was still breathing.

  He didn’t move. He had his eyes closed.

  “I’ll live,” he said, slowly cracking a smile. “Don’t I always?”

  They sat side by side for a moment in the rain. Another arc of lightning illuminated the sea beyond the house, fading so only the moon was left on the water. It was a beautiful sight, doubly so given how close they’d come to not seeing it, or anything else, ever again.

  “Where do you think Una is?” Garin said, eyes still closed.

  “Back in the city. Harassing his staff, I hope, or plotting a raid on his rally tomorrow morning. Anywhere but here.”

  “Just because Thorssen didn’t see her doesn’t mean she wasn’t here,” Garin said, giving voice to the nagging doubt in Annja’s mind that refused to go away.

  “But if she was here, surely mommy dearest would have seen her, even if only to send her packing.”

  “Maybe she did.”

  “Then why would she lie about something like that? Why would she say she hadn’t seen her?”

  The scream was earsplitting.

  Nightsplitting.

  Almost forgotten, Thorssen’s mother came lunging out of the darkness on the rooftop.

  “You killed my son,” she shrieked, her voice shrill and piercing. “You killed my son!”

  Annja looked from her to Thorssen’s ruined body and back again.

  The mother ran to her boy’s side and stroked his head, mumbling over and over as she did. Annja backed away to give them what little privacy she could, given the circumstances.

  Viveka Thorssen rewarded her by snatching up the broken blade from where it lay beside her son and pointing it toward Annja.

  “Please, think about what you’re doing,” Annja said, both hands held out as though to pacify the woman. “It doesn’t have to end like this.”

  “You killed my son!”

  “I had no choice,” Annja s
aid, desperate for her to understand. “There’s been enough death today. Please don’t do this.”

  Thorssen’s mother held the broken sword out and slashed with it wildly, hacking at the air between them with no skill or control.

  Annja intended to wrest the broken sword away from her and stop anyone else getting hurt here tonight.

  Even as the thought crossed her mind, a wild swing of Nægling whistled by.

  Thorssen’s mother swung again and again, but Annja kept out of the sword’s reach, allowing Viveka to push her toward the shattered windows into the main house.

  The woman was tiring.

  The pauses between those huge unwieldy swings of the sword grew longer, the sword weighing on her as much as the death of her son.

  Still, Annja bided her time.

  The rain continued mercilessly, driving into Annja’s eyes. Rather than break her spirit, the breather seemed to reinvigorate Thorssen’s mother, who came at Annja with sword raised. Her cry, the same as before. “This is for my son!”

  Annja had tried to hold the woman off, but it was no longer possible now.

  Just as she was about to summon her sword, Thorssen’s mother sank to the ground in front of her, crumpling like a rag doll.

  It took a moment for Annja to realize that a kitchen knife—the one Garin had lost during his fight with her son—was protruding from the woman’s back.

  “For my son,” a female voice said.

  Annja could barely focus through the darkness and the rain, but slowly she saw who it was.

  It was Una Mortensen, and another son had been avenged.

  44

  She left Garin to clean up, which in this case meant dragging the bodies inside the house.

  Una shivered while they waited in the car. The effects of shock had started to take over from grief. She needed rest. They all did.

  “What happened?” Annja asked.

  “It was for Lars. And I did it because she laughed at me.”

  “Thorssen’s mother? Why would she laugh at you?”

  “Because I told her that I was sure her son was responsible for the death of mine. She just laughed, then she hit me. She was a lot stronger than she looked. The next thing I knew I was in the dark with my hands tied. I could hear voices somewhere in the house but I couldn’t move. Not at first...” She rubbed at her wrists, the red welts swollen. She didn’t say anything else and Annja did not press her.