Rune Master

by Amelia Wilson

  She looked over her shoulder at Ingrid, who was shaking her head furiously, a lighter in her hand preparing to set the Molotov cocktail ablaze. Within her, Ithunn had gone still. She faced him again.

  “All right.”

  He unleashed that smile again, and something inside of her went watery. She put the poker down and joined him in the front yard.

  As she faced him, she realized that her hands were shaking. She crossed her arms to hide them. “What’s the message?”

  “He would like to move up the date of your rendezvous from next week to tomorrow night. Snake Eyes, midnight. Will you come?” The look he gave her was very persuasive, and somehow very intimate. It as an unspoken promise of carnal delights on offer. “Please?”

  She took a deep breath. “Yes. I’ll be there.”

  His smile grew wider, and he looked delighted. “My master will be so pleased.” He bowed to her slightly, the motion making his manhood sway. She realized that she’d been staring at it. “Until tomorrow night, then.”

  Against all expectation, he simply turned and walked back to the sea, displaying two perfect little dimples in the small of his back. It was only when he reached the water that the hold he had on her snapped, and she felt herself released from the lustful feelings rushing through her.

  She backed up into the house and closed the door, sliding the bolt into place. Ingrid put the Molotov cocktail aside, unlit.

  “What. The fuck. Was that?” Nika asked her.

  “The Nøkken are very seductive. That’s how they lure their victims to the water.”

  She shook her head and put her hand to her cheek. It was hot. “I would have followed him anywhere.”

  We know, Ithunn replied. He knows. And he knows what your weakness is.

  Hot blond men?

  No. Your weakness is surprise. If you can be taken off guard, all of your defenses fall.

  “Well,” she whispered. “That’s not very good, is it?”

  No, Ithunn agreed. That’s not very good at all.

  Ingrid tossed the lighter onto the kitchen table. “If you’re meeting him at midnight, then we had better get to work.”

  ***

  Erik got a hotel room in Stockholm and paid in cash. He wasn’t stupid enough to use a credit card when the army was busy looking for him, eager to put a silver bullet into his brain. When he got into the room, he bolted the door and tossed his gear onto one bed before flopping down onto the other.

  He didn’t understand why his superiors had turned on him. He had always done an impeccable job for them, always did his duty – he had never had so much as one discipline in his entire time as an army officer. The Huntsman unit had always been highly prized, their special abilities making them good choices for many covert operations in many different lands.

  Clearly, something had changed.

  He buried his face in the pillow and clasped his hands behind his head. And where was Nika, and why was she not answering when he called? The dreyri cask had barely been tapped, and that was probably his answer. She wasn’t consuming the blood anymore, and without its enchantment, her nascent Draugr abilities were weakened or had disappeared completely. He hoped that she was all right.

  He had no idea where to find her, but he knew how to start looking. In the morning, he would go to the museum and pay a call to Rahim Amari. The man’s involvement with the Russian Draugr and with Nika was a double concern, and he intended to get to the bottom of it.

  For now, though, he needed sleep to stay sharp. Otherwise, the only thing he’d get to the bottom of would be a hole six feet deep.

  ***

  Ingrid sat with Nika at the kitchen table, the Book of Odin open between them. Nika put her hands onto the printed page, and she felt the burning of power deep within her body, as if a match had been lit just beneath her heart. She imagined opening a window in her chest and pulling in air to stoke the flame.

  The power flared, and on the page, the inscribed runes began to glow and dance. Ingrid spoke.

  “These runes were written by Odin’s own hand, and they contain all of the knowledge he gained while hanging from Yggdrassil, the Tree of Life. This is the knowledge for which the All-Father suffered, the things he saw with the vision he gained by sacrificing his eye. You are the heiress to all of this. You, seventh incarnation and seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, are destined to be the Rune Master.”

  Nika turned her hands over so that the palms were facing up. Runes danced in the air above them, golden and glowing, slowly rotating as she looked at them. They were the runes from the new tattoos on her inner arms, the ones that had appeared there after the sacred fire that had destroyed Hakon. Perthro and Sowilo.

  Nika looked at them and announced their meanings. “Female spiritual power. The sword of fire. Protection from evil.”

  As she spoke, the two runes spun faster, emitting light into the room that bathed them both in its golden glare. A shaft of light connected them, lengthening, forming a sword made of light and air and spiritual power. It pointed to the left, its hilt over her right hand. It rotated like a drill bit, spinning silently but with increasing speed. The blade burst into flame.

  She dismissed it. It vanished as if it had never been.

  She clenched her fists, then opened her hands again, palms upright as before. This time, the runes from Erik’s tattoo appeared, spinning as the ones before them, this time glowing the green of the Draugr lights that shone in his eyes. Uruz and Thurisaz.

  She announced these runes, too. “Masculine energy and male sexual potency. Regeneration.”

  Again the runes spun and glowed, and again a bar of energy connected them. Instead of forming a weapon, though, they formed flat plane of energy like a sheet of glass, or a mirror. Images raced along its surface, forming and changing and reforming too quickly for her to recognize anything they showed. Finally, she saw a darkened room and a figure lying on a bed.

  She saw Erik. Her heart surged, and the image shattered, the runes vanishing and all of the light they had created extinguished in a moment.

  Ingrid nodded. “You must learn control. Try again.”

  She summoned Uruz and Thurisaz out of the book and repeated the exercise. This time when the green sheet of light displayed her lover, she studied him carefully. He looked exhausted. He was lying face down on a hotel bed, sleeping. She could not see him breathing at first, but then, the Draugr did not breathe like mortal men. She watched him for a moment.

  “He is alive,” Ingrid told her. “And he looks unharmed. That should put your mind at ease.”

  She concentrated, and the image changed, widening out the view so that she could see the rest of the hotel room. His gear bag lay on the bed opposite the one where he was sleeping, and beside it was a double-headed axe, the blade gleaming in the light, honed and ready for a fight.

  He was alone. She was ashamed that a part of her was relieved by this, when she had been considering giving it up to the Nøkken. The image wavered, and she stilled her mind, pushing the guilty thought away. There would be time to think about that later.

  “Good,” Ingrid said with a smile. “Good. Now call another. Show me what you would use to counter Loki when he tries to beguile you.”

  She closed and opened her palms again. “I call Elhaz for protection and to connect me to the power of Asgard. I call Isa to know and maintain mastery over myself. I call Kenaz for truth.”

  The three runes appeared as the others had done, glowing on the page before traveling up to hover above her hands. They spun together and their shared light created a dagger. She grasped it in her hand, and it changed from air and fire to solid steel. The runes were etched into the blade, dancing in gold along the fuller, one part decoration, one part enchantment.

  Nika held up the dagger for Ingrid to see. Her teacher nodded in approval.

  “You are ready.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Erik rose in the morning, feeling stiff and tired. He shouldn’t have felt this unwe
ll, not after all of the damage he had done and all of the blood he had swallowed yesterday. Perhaps his hurts had been more severe than he had believed.

  In any case, there was no time to think about it now. He put his pistols in their holsters, one at the small of his back, one under his left arm and another on his ankle, and he strapped on the leather scabbard that held his axe with its head flat against his shoulder blades. He drew a leather jacket over the arsenal and a black cap over his head, and he made his way to the Royal Stockholm Museum.

  The entry had not yet been made unfriendly by metal detectors at the doors, not the way the gates at other museums had. He was grateful for this one piece of luck as he was able to enter the place without attack and unimpeded.

  The lobby was wide and brightly lit, with smooth marble tiles that reflected the incandescent glow back upward into his eyes. In the center was the ticket sales and information booth, three desks wide, and to the left and right were open arches that led off into galleries. The merchandise store was ahead and to his left, with a narrow corridor beside it that led off behind a pair of drinking fountains. Directly past that was the banner announcing the ship burial exhibit and the Viking history collection beyond it.

  Nika was here to work with the ship burial and the Viking history collection, and she had said in her letters that Rahim Amari was interested in the same subject matter. He hoped that he might find them both by starting his search there. It nagged at him that he was risking finding them together. He shrugged off the sting of the thought, reasoning that his Chosen alive and unfaithful was better than dead and true.

  He passed by a cloth banner screen-printed with the image of the Rune Sword. He would have been happy to die without ever seeing that particular weapon again, but that was not to be his luck. One of the docents, a studious-looking young man in a blue button-down sweater, started to pass him, and Erik stopped him with a hand on his arm.

  “Excuse me. Have you seen Assistant Curator Graves?”

  The man stopped for him, mildly taking no offense to the uninvited touch. “No, not for days.”

  Erik felt his stomach go sour. “What about Dr. Amani?”

  “He’s in the second room of the history gallery, with the St. Olaf Collection.”

  Erik let him go with murmured thanks, wondering if he was supposed to know what the St. Olaf Collection was. He went into the history gallery.

  The scent reached him before anything else. It was the stench of salty musk and decaying fish, and it carried an undertint of power that he disliked immensely. It made his teeth itch. He walked more quickly, limbering his shoulders as he did, hoping against hope that there might be a fight.

  The gallery was full of the detritus of another Viking ship burial, including old, corroded swords and armor and lots of less interesting objects. There was also a figure in the room, bent over a particular display and scribbling notes in a wire-bound notebook, a stubby pencil scratching away at the paper.

  It was a Nøkken dressed as a man. Erik knew it from its smell. The Nøkken was not just dressed as a man – he was dressed as Rahim Amari. He recognized him from the photo at the briefing in Karlsborg. Erik wondered if Rahim had ever been Rahim since his arrival in Sweden, or if perhaps this shape shifter had adopted his face after he’d started work in Stockholm. It hardly mattered. Wherever it had happened, for the Nøkken to be wearing his face now, it meant that the real Amari was dead and Erik had a faery to kill.

  Silver bullets wouldn’t work. Neither would his axe, which had been forged in the traditional manner. He needed fire or cold iron, neither of which he had to hand. He backed out of the gallery and into the side hall with the drinking fountains. As he had hoped, there was a janitor’s closet there – they were usually to be found near plumbing – and it was an easy thing to spring the lock. Once inside, he found a nearly-full can of aerosol furniture polish. All he needed was a lighter, and he always carried one of those. You never knew when fire would be needed.

  He returned to the gallery, the can in his left hand and the lighter in his right. The Nøkken looked up briefly, turned back to his scribbling, and then looked up again. The first glance had been one of annoyance at an interruption, but the second brought the wary recognition that a heavily-armed Veithimathr deserved.

  The false professor put down his notebook and backed away from the display. He clearly knew what Erik was, and Erik just as clearly saw through his disguise.

  “What do you want?” the Nøkken asked, nervously.

  “To talk, to start,” Erik answered honestly. “I have questions, and I was hoping you’d have answers.”

  The man raised his chin pugnaciously. “I have nothing to say to you.”

  “Maybe not yet. Maybe in a while you will. Who knows?” He tucked the lighter into his jeans and shrugged his jacket down on his shoulders. He drew his axe. “Let’s find out.”

  The Nøkken turned and fled. Erik pursued as quickly as he could. No faery could compete with a Draugr in a footrace, and the fleeing creature resorted to flinging trashcans and furniture in his wake as Erik followed. He jumped over the obstacles like a hurdler, his axe in his hand, and when the Nøkken burst into the employees-only area, he was right behind him.

  They raced around a corner, and the false Amari shoved open a door. Erik was on him before he could close it again, and a swing from the axe, striking him with the flat of the head, sent the Nøkken tumbling head over heels down a short set of steps. Erik leaped over the steps and onto the landing, his feet on either side of the creature’s head. He dropped his axe, pointed the furniture polish, and pulled the lighter back out of his jeans pocket.

  “Don’t move,” Erik said firmly. “I’m warning you.”

  The Nøkken put up his hands in a protective gesture, guarding his face. “Don’t do it,” the creature begged. Now that he was this close to it, he could detect no whiff of a god riding shotgun on the monster’s spirit. This, despite his expectation, was not Loki. It was one of the Bluffmakare, though, and that was reason enough for him to have pursued this creature.

  “I won’t, if you tell me where to find Nika Graves.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re lying.” He sparked up the lighter.

  “No! Stop!” It was panting now, clinging to its composure on the brink of a full-out panic attack. “Don’t do that! You’re going to kill me!”

  “That’s the idea,” Erik admitted, “unless you give me a reason not to.”

  To the Veithimathr’s surprise, the shifter started to laugh. He moved as if he was preparing to stand, and Erik put his foot down hard on the creature’s chest.

  “What’s so funny?” he asked.

  “You. You really think that you can do this? You think that you can kill me?”

  He pressed with his boot, letting it slide closer to the monster’s throat. “I know I can.”

  “I can never die. I will outlive even you.”

  “Not likely, unless you start talking.”

  The Nøkken shifted slightly, and then a second mouth opened in its chest, grasping teeth reaching for Erik’s leg. The Huntsman pointed the furniture polish through the flame of the cigarette lighter. A jet of fire whooshed out, striking the supine creature where a human head should have been. The fire caught immediately, and Erik jumped back as the Nøkken burst into flame, screaming and flailing. He tossed the can into the corner and reclaimed his axe.

  The Nøkken writhed on the floor of the stairwell, emitting a greasy black smoke that smelled as foul as anything Erik had ever encountered. He gagged on the stench as the fire alarm went off. Sprinklers overhead doused them both with water, coldly expunging the suffering monster’s fire.

  Erik pressed the edge of his axe to the monster’s fore head, ignoring for a moment the second set of jaws that still gnashed beside his calf.

  “Where is she?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “When did you see her last?”

  “Days ago.” It writhed and tr
ied to bite him, but he kept his leg out of range. “I’ve answered you. Let me go.”

  “Do you know where she might have gone?”

  “I don’t know.”

  A thought occurred to him, and he asked, “Did she go to Ingrid?”

  “I don’t know!”

  The next question rose in his head from a source he could not identify, but which was probably Vidar. “Where is Loki?”

  The monster lunged at him, and out of reflex, Erik recoiled. His axe came up in an arc, then whistled on its way back down. The Nøkken lunged out of the way and avoided a direct blow, but the blade bit into its shoulder. It screamed again.

  “Those are woman sounds,” Erik mocked. He wrestled the axe back out of its body.

  The Nøkken wrapped its hands, long and amphibian-looking, around the vampire’s ankles and pulled. Erik landed hard on the steps, his tailbone taking the brunt of his fall and snapping beneath him. He hit it again, and this time the axe head was buried between the creature’s eyes. It transformed into sea water and rolled away, dripping down the steps to the basement.

  Erik wiped the axe on his jeans leg and returned it to the scabbard on his back. This had not exactly gone according to plan.

  ***

  He found his way to Snake Eyes, the last place he wanted to go today, but the first place he probably should have gone after all was said and done. If you needed to find a lost Valtaeigr, you went to a Valtaeigr for help. Too bad this particular Valtaeigr hated him.

  Even at this time of the morning, the club was occupied with Draugr. The music was no longer pumping as it would be after dark – Stockholm’s human ordinances on noise pollution had to be respected, after all – but there were still patrons scattered around the room. The blue lights in the floor lowlighted their ghastly pallor, these immortal barflies, clinging to their hightops and swigging their dreyri straight.

  Immortal dissolutes, all of them.

  Erik went to the bar, aware that his presence had once again set off the ward at the door. Whatever little alarm system Magda had installed was already telling her that one of the First was here. The closed-circuit cameras behind the bar would tell her which one of them it was. As far as he knew, there were still eight of the First alive and kicking. He wondered if any of them would be less welcome than he was.