by P. W. Child
Her heart raced uncontrollably inside her chest and her skin crawled as she looked back down at the picture and saw that the raging warriors had breasts. Hearing the bikes outside starting up and revving, she peered from the tower window. She beheld The Brotherhood in the same dress as the etching, all female, awaiting their Chieftain, Val Joutsen.
Chapter 17
Sam raced to get to the address Nina had told about. He did not want her to go off half- cocked on Val with that fiery little temper of hers. What if Val and her husband decided that Nina was too smart for them, that she could pose a threat? All sorts of terrible scenarios possessed his thoughts as he sped along past The Meadows on his way to Newington. He called a friend at The Post as he drove.
“Peter! Hey, it’s Sam Cleave. I’m well, thanks…ye-yes…lis-listen….” he tried to tolerate the obligatory formalities and pleasantries until he could ask for a favor. Then he gave Peter the names of Val and Gunnar and the address he had from Nina. He then asked Peter, who was still at the office, if he could do some less than legal searches on the couple as urgently as he could and get back to him.
“Magic, Sammy, just like the old days, hey?” Peter chuckled on the other side.
“Aye, just like the old days. Look, I really appreciate it, Peter. I’ll even out with you sometime, alright?” Sam said cordially, trying his very best not to sound as drunk as he was. He had to admit that the very strange and frightening occurrence at home sobered him up quite a bit, as well as the subsequent call from Nina, which only boosted his adrenaline. But his blood alcohol level would still get him arrested if he was to be pulled over for speeding. He lifted his foot off the accelerator and kept a close eye on his speedometer.
A text came through from Nina.
“Oh thank God you’re still okay enough to send a text message,” he said out loud in the white noise of the slightly open driver’s window that allowed the chilly night wind in and lapped his wild locks into a state of disarray. He held his phone up to the steering wheel and tried to read while he was driving, something he detested in other drivers, but this was urgent. These were special circumstances.
‘Sam, all okay.
Will explain when you get here. This is big.
Nina’
“Big? What the hell is big?” he frowned, but truthfully he was relieved that Nina was alright. After the incident with the vial, he did not want to be alone for a long time. He arrived at Denton House and saw that a window in one of the flanking towers was illuminated.
“What is big?” he said when she opened the door. He could not wait to hear what she was on about.
“Good evening, Mr. Cleave. I am fine, thank you. How have you been?” she reprimanded. Nina had always had a problem with Sam’s neglect of basic conversational skills and she never let him forget it.
“They just let you stay in their house?” he asked.
“Val trusts me,” she replied as she switched on the kitchen light to make some tea before she would go upstairs and show Sam what she had discovered.
“Oh, I see. And does Val know how much you trusted her before?” he reminded her mockingly.
“I had good reason to distrust her. And besides, you agreed with me, so stop being such a hypocrite,” Nina retorted. “So tell me why the flask is evil.” She twisted her full lips in an attempt not to laugh at him. His breath smelled faintly of beer and toothpaste and she knew that he had been drinking, so the story would be very entertaining. As the kettle labored to heat the water, she leaned against the wall, crossing her arms over her chest. Sam could still smell her skin as his eyes found the dip in her collar bone there where the ends of her hair played. Her beauty had only matured since he had met her, not in age, but in strength and appeal.
Sam ignored her ridicule of him and explained what had happened. The things he mentioned were so sincere and the words he chose to describe the dark hold it had on him, down to the odor of the substance, struck Nina as too accurately fantastical to be fabricated. Sam was the most cynical man she knew, his points of view were always rooted strictly in reality and he never paid mind to fanciful notions or resorted to supernatural excuses when he lacked the rationalization of incidents. It had to be real, she thought. He looked spooked even while telling her about it.
“Do you even know anything about that thing? What did she say when she gave it to you?” he asked, as she poured the water into the two big mugs she had selected for them.
“She said it was a gift. But you know, tonight she flipped when she heard I left it with you,” Nina said as she pondered on the way Val reacted. “Hey!” she exclaimed suddenly, “I think I know where we can look up what it is!”
Nina took Sam up to the tower room, where he exhibited pretty close to her own reaction when she first beheld the interior of the heathen room. Immediately, Nina opened the huge old book. Sam stared at the pages as if he knew they were not made of paper. Her fingers trailed the slightly thick pages and she started her search from the middle of the book, while she explained the purpose of The Brotherhood to him.
“All women?”
“Yes.” Nina could not help but smile, her eyes glinting with amusement.
“The Brotherhood,” he blinked, trying to make sense of it.
“Isn’t it fascinating? Don’t you see how smart that is, Sam? Their enemies, and everyone who knows them by reputation, look for men. It is the perfect disguise,” Nina beamed. For some reason, she found this beyond captivating. Sam smiled and shook his head as she flipped through the book. A few pages before the back of the book, they found it: ‘The Vision of Kvasir’
“Aye! There you are, you bastard!” Sam cried out when he recognized the devilish flask on the sketch. He pounded his fist on the table next to the book as if he had won a bet.
“Sam! Be careful!” she warned. “You don’t know how strong the wood of this table is! Now, let’s see what is in the flask she gave me. And why she would have given to me in the first place.”
In the small sections of English and German text they could find among those in Icelandic, Danish, Swedish, and Norse, they put together the information on the contents of the vial, gathering the necessary knowledge that Lita had also obtained from the writings on her scroll.
“Unbelievable,” Sam gasped as Nina pieced together the German parts for him. “This is next level alchemy. How the hell did they know this stuff back then?”
“One thing I have learned from studying the past is that nothing has really changed in the way of mind capacity. As a matter of fact, I believe that our discoveries during the 19th Century and all the technological development since had made us lazy. To tell you the truth, these ancient civilizations were as smart as, if not smarter than, us. We have machines thinking for us,” she said as she looked over the recipe and the compounds, sipping her tea. She shook her head slowly in awe, “These people could fuck us up on every level if they had to wage war on us today. Actually, that is what this Lita chick is apparently trying to do – use this kind of knowledge to undermine and override our methods and hit us with weapons we cannot combat simply because we don’t know how they work.”
“Can’t fight what you can’t see,” Sam muttered as his eyes passed over the sketches in the book.
“Precisely,” Nina agreed. “People fear what they don’t know for a very good reason.”
Sam’s ring tone sounded. It was Peter at The Post.
“Cleave, I checked out that couple you asked me to spy on,” Peter said jovially.
“And?” Sam asked, although, since his inquiry he had no more reason to investigate Val and her husband.
“They don’t exist.” Peter chuckled. “If you met them in person, I suggest you run like hell, because they might just be skin-walkers!”
“What do you mean, they don’t exist?” he asked, pretending not to notice Nina’s questioning look.
“There is just no record of these specific names, no marriage certificate, no vehicle registrations, no criminal offences. Not
hing. Are you sure you have the right names?” Peter asked.
Sam gave a long sigh and rubbed his brow, “Alright, Peter, that’s okay then. I was just curious. Thanks so much for all your trouble, though. Appreciate it.”
“No sweat, Cleave. If you need anything else, don’t hesitate and all that, righty?” Peter said in his cheerful way.
“Will do.”
From a distance, they could hear the rumble of motorcycles. Like a swarm of mechanical bees they grew louder and louder in their approach.
“They’re back,” Nina exclaimed and she went to the window to see the white lights float through the night like ghostly lamps drifting on a black river.
As she opened the door downstairs, she could immediately tell that something had gone terribly wrong for her new friends. From the dark, she could hear Gunnar scream, “Open the door wider! Get out of the way!”
He appeared from the cloak of darkness outside, carrying Val’s limp body in his powerful tattooed arms. His cheeks and hands were stained scarlet and his face twisted in terrible pain. Frantic with dread, he rushed into the house to lay his wife down on the couch. Following him closely, the rest of the club stumbled through the door, all bloody, and some of them injured. A few of the men and women had sustained serious injuries, but Erika called emergency services to send help while Nina and Sam aided the others with towels and hot water. Nina went and got the first aid kit Purdue kept under one of the seats of his 4x4..
“What happened?” Sam asked Erika after she completed the call.
“Who the hell are you?” she asked with a defensive frown.
“He is a friend of Val’s and mine,” Nina snapped in her trademark cattiness. Erika immediately loosened up and nodded. She looked at the attractive stranger whose curiosity glistened in his smoldering dark eyes.
“We were ambushed by an arm of their little gang on the road to the location we got from the vehicle trace we ran,” Erika explained. She reported on how the Sleipnir riders raced to rescue Gunnar, but on their way two of the black cars pulled out from the side of the road from opposite sides. The first few motorcycles had swung to avoid crashing into the vehicles. Some of them hit the back and sides of the SUV’s at full speed, while the next group who saw this, tried to swerve as well and went off the road. Some hit the trees, others crashed in the gorge on the right side of the deserted road.
It was not until Val noticed at a distance that something horrible had happened as The Brotherhood caught up with Sleipnir that they slowed down on her gesture. As was their protocol in such situations, some of the flanking riders broke away from the group and moved in the dark past the scene of the accident. Val was in front, followed by her eight main riders and they passed through the awful sight of their fallen men, to pursue the vehicle that held Gunnar on its way to the address they had acquired.
According to Erika, Gunnar had overpowered his two captors . The driver could do nothing and the skinny imp absconded as soon as the car came to a halt. Gunnar relieved them of their guns and finished them off, because he knew from experience that bad men had a tendency to resurface if left unattended to. When Val and her nine sisters approached from a distance, a bullet ripped through her front tire and sent her through the cold dark air and onto the tarmac at full force. Slokin had hidden and waited for Gunnar’s associates to show up. With his Beretta he shot at them when they came over the far hill of the road. Erika sank her chin and whimpered.
Gunnar was in the background, holding his wife’s broken and ravaged hands while Erika recounted. Nina wanted to see to Val, but she thought it would be inappropriate timing with her husband in the throes of trepidation. Val’s eyes stared into Gunnar’s, bloodshot and fading. Her lips moved with a faint quiver and he turned and bellowed, “Nina! Quick!”
She had previously told him about the historian who, like them, would do anything to vanquish the Black Sun’s intentions. Nina rushed to her side.
“Hey, badass,” Nina smiled and winked, but inside her a deep sorrow filled her as she held back the tears. The sight of Val’s skinned face and bloody, matted hair made Nina’s heart ache. Val tried to smile, but her split lip stretched to a gaping wound and she winced with a jolt of pain.
“Listen, Nina,” she panted in a whisper, hardly moving her mouth as she tried to speak perceptibly, “you h-have to keep that vial safe. G-guard it with your life. That redhead bitch … knows us, but she doesn’t know you. If she s-s-should drink…”
“Take your time. I’m listening,” Nina soothed, uncertain where she could place a consoling hand on the devastated body of her friend without evoking excruciating pain.
“Ifff she drank from it, she will f-find Valhalla, N-n-ina,” Val warned, her voice shivering with terror at the thought and she shook her head as much as she could to convey to Nina how this could never be allowed to come to pass.
“Alright, got it, Val. Don’t you worry, I won’t let that…”
“Redhead bitch…” Val smirked, and Nina entertained her defiance.
“…that redhead bitch get to Valhalla,” Nina smiled menacingly. She looked at the rune tattooed on Val’s forearm, the symbol that looked like an arrow pointing up, Tiwaz. Right there she secretly made a vow.
Gunnar knelt by Val’s side and tried to place his forehead against hers as gently as possible, as she did when he was in hospital. With his clear blue eyes drowning in tears, he looked into hers and whispered, “You are my sky. Without you the stars will fall. Without you I have no heaven.”
Nina’s hand clutched Sam’s arm. Like the others who had gathered around the dying Chieftain, they looked on in silence. Sam felt something burn in his chest and he battled the unrelenting tears.
“Your s-sky is always above y-you. All you h-h-have t-to do, is look up. I’ll be l-looking down on y-ou when you get battle-weary,” she said, flinching as her husband’s tears splashed onto her eyes.
Sam put his arm around Nina and he felt her hand slip into his. Val licked Gunnar’s earlobe as she always did to tell him she loved him.
“See you in Valhalla,” she smiled through tattered lips, her pain impotent to her spirit now, and with that Val Joutsen, Chieftain of The Brotherhood, closed her eyes for good.
Nina buried her face in Sam’s chest. Within the room, whimpers of sorrow and jerks of sobbing could be heard as those who were capable, embraced one another under the mournful bellow of the weeping Viking.
Chapter 18
Lita had finished analyzing most of the artifacts she had stored in her cold concrete vaults. The laser and x-ray tests yielded nothing. She had destroyed several precious antique artifacts in her relentless hunt for the vial that would help her find the location of Valhalla. Their shattered casings and ripped beading lay strewn across the floor where she walked with her bare feet on them, oblivious to the blood they drew from her. Lita was a maniac of intrepid beauty, her mind dismissive of the perceived impossible and her will unbending to any external hazard. In her favorite jeans, with her red hair in a long braid down the middle of her back, she paced the laboratory in her endless quest to inspect each and every old piece she could lay her hands on.
She had not slept in three days, but it hardly perturbed her. Along with psychological maladies, there sometimes came helpful side effects, like the imperviousness against the toils of sleep deprivation. The longer she did not sleep, the more she slid into states of contemplation, with waking dreams and visions, purely the product of her weary mind. However, many times this level of dangerous daze helped her think outside the box and to find her ideas with most clarity.
The last of the loot brought to her after the latest robbery proved to be void of what she sought. Filled with hopeless fury and frustration, Lita growled with her damaged voice, bent her knees to a crouch and flung the late Bronze Age Scandinavian urn hard against the wall. It clanged against the hard surface, dented, and clattered several feet across the floor.
“Fuck!” she screamed. She fell back on her ass on the cement fl
oor and looked at the mess she had been making in the last few days. Among the battered and broken relics and beads, shattered stained glass, and crumpled up print-outs, patches of her dried blood stained the floor. Surprised, she realized what had happened and one after the other Lita checked the soles of her feet. They were dirty and in the dark grey residue that covered her soles she saw the welted dark brown wounds, some still wet from a fresh tearing.
“Well, shit,” she mumbled nonchalantly. She looked up at the blinding fluorescent lights that hummed in a mesmerizing key and she began to hum with them. The vibration of her breath on this note soothed her sore throat and she stood up to prepare another cup of coffee. Only when her maddening scrutiny had ceased with all the relics checked and found lacking, did she realize how exhausted she really was. Coffee would not suffice anymore. Lita left the place in a bloody mess of chaos and history, flicked the Off-switch on the machine and as she left the lab, she switched off the buzzing lights. She kept on humming in the dark corridor outside where she made her way to the black iron fire escape stairway.
“You had better have fantastic news for me, Jasper, or I’ll be publicly hanging you by your teensy little balls,” she threatened on the square device in her palm. He was on speakerphone and sounded somewhere between excited and terrified.
“Miss Røderic, you will not believe where The Brotherhood hides!” he spilled nervously.
“That’s not what I want to know, is it?” she barked with a mouthful of apple she had just picked from a bowl on the upper story dinner table.
“They hide in the bodies of women,’ he laughed frantically.
“Control yourself!” she yelled and swallowed. “Did they tell you where the vial is? Where are my men?”
“The remaining men are with me,” he said. “The others expired at the hands of those eight Valkyries we could not outrun, but we killed their leader. I’m almost positive!”
