by Greg Sisco
He jerked his head around. The nameless vampire. The guy the newspapers called The Wandering Butcher. A few weeks earlier they barely knew who he was, now he was everywhere at once, pulling strings and making the rest of them dance on the stage.
“Butcher. How like you to stop by uninvited.”
Thor was terrified. None of them knew who this enigmatic vampire was or why he’d taken the sudden interest in them. He could have been Chosen, or a hopeful vigilante looking to get Ofeigr’s attention. Whoever he was, he’d just witnessed a conversation between Thor and Heimdall that gave him more than enough to incriminate both of them if he was so inclined.
The Butcher climbed into the front and took a seat. “How have you been? Sounds like things are a little rough.”
“Why don’t you cut through the bullshit for once? What’s your interest and what do you want from me?”
“My interests are broad and general. I just like to watch, same as you and your Brothers. Well, maybe not your Brothers.” He laughed. “Seems like they’re not satisfied with watching anymore; they want to participate.”
“It’s true. They’re getting irresponsible. That’s their problem, not mine. If you’ve got an issue, take it up with them.”
“I don’t. I don’t have an issue. It’s a good time watching them. You too. It’ll be a shame to see you go.”
“Well, that’s the way it is. They get their shit together, maybe I’ll come back. But it’s time I stepped aside and let them sort it out.”
“So you side with Loki and go?”
“I’m not siding, I’m just going.”
“You tracked Tyr down, set his house on fire, tied him up, left his girlfriend with Loki…”
“So you’re on Tyr’s side? You think I should have helped him? Is that your point?”
“You think Loki’s gonna kill them?”
“What do I know?” The truth was he hadn’t let himself think about it. He couldn’t see Loki killing his Brother, but Eva… well…
“The girl for sure, right?”
“So what’s my stake in it? What’s yours?”
“Oh, nothing. I’m just interested in relationships, and the one between you and your Brothers is fascinating.”
“Yeah, well, maybe get your own relationships and don’t worry about ours.”
The Butcher laughed. “Fair enough. Of curiosity though, what’s with the black rose tattoos you’ve got on your chests? I’ve noticed them a couple times. Some sort of gangland insignia, or is it supposed to be some kind of bond? Something to do with loyalty or something?”
Thor put his hand on the tattoo. “You know you’re pushing your luck stalking us. You’re older than I am, maybe even older than them, but there’s four of us and one of you.”
“Four? I count one and one and one and one. They only make four if you put them together.”
“If you have a point, reach it. If you’re gonna kill me, do it. Your lectures are boring.”
The Butcher gave another short, snide laugh. “It’s all about killing with you three. All those casualties over the years have fucked you up. No, I’ve no point. Drop me at the corner here. I think I’ll spend the day here and speak with your new friend when there’s time.”
Thor put the car in park. “Are you going to kill him?” He was more bothered by the idea than he would have expected.
“Listen to yourself. ‘Are you gonna kill him?’ ‘Are you gonna kill me?’ ‘Should I kill him?’ ‘Will he kill me?’ Do you ever stop thinking about murder for ten minutes?”
The Butcher got out of the car without giving an answer.
Thor could have refused to drop him off. He could have put up a fight. But it didn’t feel like he had the upper hand and short of killing the Butcher there wasn’t much he could do to prevent whatever he had in store.
He put the car back into drive and headed for Excalibur, but he had to pull over in a parking lot a few blocks down the road and loathe himself. Ten minutes ago he’d been happy to bail on everything. Now he felt he was leaving Tyr in an unfair position. The conversation with the Butcher had left him none the wiser in regards to the stranger’s motivation, but he knew damn well he was being led in the direction of setting Tyr loose—evening the odds.
He unbuttoned his shirt and looked at the tattoo, contemplating it for the first time in ages.
The Black Rose.
It didn’t mean as much as it used to, and the events it stood to mark were long before his time, but the mark was still there and it would be as long as he walked and bled.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Tale of the Black Rose, Part II
The Birth of the Blood Brothers
They came at dusk. Dragonboats. Hundreds of them. Minutes after the sun passed under the horizon they were there on the sea, out in the distance where you might have spotted them in the light of day but where at night they were invisible. An hour later they came adrift on English shores, all over the east coast, and the men who stepped ashore had spears and axes and hard ons. They were called Vikings. In the eleventh century, it could be assumed that a large man with a spear and an erection was a Viking.
Off the hundreds of dragonboats stepped thousands of Vikings with tens of thousands of weapons and they marched into Yorkshire headed for the city of York.
Among them was a young Viking man called Ragnar with few characteristics more likable than herpes, the kind of man more interested in torture or rape than in meeting new people. Marching with a group of four friends near a farm village, he whispered to them in Old Norse something that translates roughly to, “I want to get my fuck on. Let’s go get us some English pussy.”
“Fuckin’ ay. I haven’t shot my wad in weeks,” came the reply, though in Old Norse it sounded slightly more proper and far more frightening.
Ragnar and his friends broke off from the group and found their way to the streets of the nearby village. They picked a house, more or less at random, and broke in. There were three generations of a serf family in the house, and Ragnar and his group slaughtered the children and the men and took turns raping the women before they killed them as well. Ragnar even forced himself on the fifty-year-old grandmother of the house while two of the others held her down.
An hour later they had caught up with their group and their march for York continued as if nothing had happened, the brutal crime against a family just an aside in their lives, a few fun minutes to laugh and speak lecherously about on the boat ride home.
This was the nature of Vikings.
When the Vikings killed Eleanor, Tyr was watching through the window and the only reason Ragnar and his goons were allowed to live was because of Odin. Had Odin not been there to hold Tyr back, spears and axes and fangs would have spilled blood all night until Eleanor and her family stood over the bodies of five Viking men. Then, more than likely she would have pointed at Tyr and screamed ‘Demon!’ and his legend would haunt the village for years to follow.
Tyr could have lived with that turn of events. It would have given Eleanor the closure he wished he could give her when it came to their relationship, and though it wouldn’t end in a positive light, at least her life with her family would go on happily. But that sappy story of bloodshed didn’t happen. Instead, a far less pleasant one took place.
Tyr and Odin were just arriving at the house when Ragnar kicked open the door. Leaving his spear outside, he drew his axe and shouted at the family in Old Norse, of which neither Tyr nor Odin spoke much, but threats sound roughly the same in all languages.
As Tyr rushed to defend Eleanor and her family, Odin caught up to him and pulled him to the ground. They rolled and landed in the grass some fifty meters from the house.
“We have to save her!” shouted Tyr.
“It’s not our place. The world of humans is their own. This is between them, no matter how painful it is for us.”
Tyr struggled to get up and run, to break free from Odin’s hold. “I will not stand idly and let these beasts do as th
ey wish—”
“If you go in there, if the Norse don’t kill you, you’ll expose us to the family and we’ll have to kill them ourselves.”
Tyr went limp. “You wouldn’t. She would keep our secret.”
“I would! This is our relationship to the world. We only watch. We’re predators in the human world, not saviors, and we must never try to be.”
“We can help them, Father. We can pull them quietly to the shadows and fight them in hiding. Or we can draw them out, lure them to the woods.”
“We will do nothing. We will watch humans behave as humans do. And that will be all.”
The expression of surrender found its way to Tyr’s face and Odin released his hold. They stood together and moved toward the house, this time at a reserved pace with their heads hung.
For the better part of an hour they watched Ragnar and his boys stick axes in the chests and necks of children and women and men. And when Eleanor’s youngest, her sixteen-year-old son, managed to slice open Ragnar’s face with a knife he took from the kitchen, Ragnar castrated him with his axe and stepped on his neck until he stopped breathing.
One woman of each generation was left alive at first; Eleanor, her daughter, and her daughter’s daughter. The Vikings took turns on the women and every so often Tyr made a move to stop them and Odin held him back. When all the men had taken turns with all the women they cared to take turns with, they brought the axes down on their necks.
They mimicked the Old English cries of “No,” and “Please,” and “Save us,” which they did not understand. They laughed and slapped each other’s backs and said “Dude, that shit was legit” in Old Norse.
They gathered their axes and their shields and left the house, where they collected their spears. Then they laughed like naughty eighteen-year-olds—which was exactly what they were—and they rushed to catch up with their brethren.
Tyr thought of going after them when they left, but he rushed into the house with Odin instead. The storm having passed, the only sounds that remained in the home were of death rattles and a screaming infant, and the boys rushed between bodies looking for survivors.
Eleanor was dead and not coming back, in fact her head was removed completely from her body and had been kicked across the room. Her body was stripped naked beside the bodies of the other women who’d gotten the worst of it and they were as dead as she.
Other than the unharmed infant, whom the Brothers ignored for the time being, the only survivor was a ten-year-old boy, the son of Eleanor’s eldest daughter. He’d been struck in the side with an axe and his eyes were glassy in the throes of death, but he was breathing and seemed vaguely conscious of Tyr’s presence when Tyr knelt over him.
“Black roses,” said the boy, perhaps stuck in an old memory. “They had black roses.”
And then he died.
The infant was a girl, and so the Brothers left her on the steps of the church. A boy they might have raised to become one of them, but the Augury made perfectly clear that this was not an option with the female gender. Left there on the steps, the baby would be found in a few hours and looked after, even if the murdered family should go unnoticed for a few days. She wailed as they carried her through town and she wailed in front of the church and Tyr thought she’d wail all night and he didn’t blame her.
Better than ever he understood his place was no longer in the mortal world. This was mortal life, subtle and ignorant and over too quickly. And if he gave it value in his mind it would only cause him pain. That was all he felt now—rage and grief and pain, all over humans behaving as humans do. Humans being human. Killing and raping. As they do. As they have done. As they will do.
Part of him cried out for revenge, but the prospect was hopeless. Marching with thousands of other soldiers, it would be a miracle to find those particular Vikings again. The tale of Eleanor was over. And it ended with chilling words that ran through Tyr’s head night after night for days.
“Black roses. They had black roses.”
Tyr didn’t feel like killing English women anymore. When a few days had gone by and his thirst was getting to be too much, he didn’t want to return to the village and take some poor woman out of her house and do to her what the Vikings had done to Eleanor. The memory was too recent. The beheadings. The rapes. The black roses.
He thought he’d rather starve than kill another innocent woman out of that village, but he didn’t have to starve. The coast was barely five miles away, and that was the direction from which the Vikings had come. He couldn’t bear the guilt of killing an English serf, but by God he could cope with having killed a Viking soldier. He could enjoy it, even.
He brought his sword and a bow and set out walking and found the dragonboats as soon as he got to shore. Dozens of them. Two men from each ship stayed behind to ensure no harm came to it. The ships were all beached close together, so the Vikings standing guard were a small army. They paced the shoreline in front of their respective boats, and some sat on the gunwales and smoked pipes and sharpened their spears. They’d built a fire on the beach where they were cooking some animal or another and they were eating and laughing and making foul jokes about the English as soldiers will do in wartime.
Tyr stayed back at the tree line and watched for some time. He was forty meters off, but couldn’t get closer without risking being seen. He readied an arrow and drew back the string of his bow, doing his best to take aim at the crowd gathered around the fire.
The arrow struck a Viking boy in the neck, a boy in his late teens who’d come to England hoping to make his first kill and who instead earned the ultimate Viking honor of dying in battle. Before he’d hit the ground a few Viking soldiers had stood up and begun running for the trees with their spears in hand. In a few seconds, after the rest of them had processed what was happening, a large portion of the group ran with them.
“Stop! Wait!” shouted an older Viking man. “They’re trying to draw us out, to attack our ships.” He selected five soldiers to look for the archer on top of the five or so who had already taken it upon themselves. The rest of the men stayed back and hoped not to be hit with arrows.
The woods were dark and the search was hopeless. They yelled for the archer and swung their weapons at shapes they thought might have been him.
Tyr, on the other hand, could see fine. Every few minutes he came up behind another soldier and stabbed him through the heart. He did this repeatedly until all but one of the soldiers were dead, and he disarmed the last one and stood in front of him.
“I am surrender,” the Viking said in an attempt at English.
Tyr smiled a mouthful of fangs and the Viking shouted a Nordic word that meant “monster” before Tyr bit into his neck and drank until the Viking’s pulse stopped completely.
Having fed, he could have turned and gone. The walk home would take at least two hours and the sun would be rising in five. But he’d come all the way here and the killing was masking the pain he’d felt since Eleanor’s death, so he stepped out of the woods and fired a second arrow into the Viking camp.
This cycle repeated several times, Tyr killing roughly ten by sword and one by arrow in groups as the number of Viking soldiers steadily fell. When there were only two dozen soldiers or so remaining, they rushed the woods, shouting and swinging their weapons, some of them carrying torches they’d taken from the fire. Some stood back to back and Tyr fired arrows at their heads from the dark. Some spun in circles as they walked and he let them see his face just before he cut their throats.
He gathered their torches, and when only one Viking soldier was left wandering in the dark, he stopped hunting and let the man see what happened next. He took the torches to the camp and placed the first one in a dragonboat and kicked the boat out to sea. Then he did the same thing with a second boat and a third and a fourth.
In twenty minutes, when the confused Viking soldier came out of the woods and back to the beach, there were lights on the ocean. The ships were burning—some far out at sea, some washed
up on the shore. At least ten of their ships were pillars of flame reflected by the ocean’s water.
“No!” screamed the Viking warrior and with his spear in front of him he ran at Tyr, at the one man who had singlehandedly executed all the friends who had held this post with him, who was now in the process of setting fire to the thirty boats they’d been asked to protect, the transportation home for a good 1,500 of his countrymen.
Tyr parried the spear with his sword and grabbed the Viking’s neck in his right hand.
“What are you?” he asked. “You come to our country, kill our children, rape our women, for what? Power? Property? Recreation? I slay you now and burn your ships for a reason your culture should understand. For sport.”
“We’re here on orders, most of us,” said the terrified Viking in surprisingly strong English. “We’re not here to cause harm, not by our own desire. We’re here because our leaders have taken arms against your leaders. We’re small people like you, dying for the greed of greater men. Please spare me.”
Tyr growled. He took away the Viking’s weapons and threw them into a ship. Then he dropped a torch in the ship and sent it to sea.
The Viking fell on his knees and sobbed. He watched Tyr gather more torches from the fire and drop them into the remaining boats, going about business until only a few more sat onshore.
Maybe that’s what I’ll do, Tyr thought. Maybe I’ll find all the camps where these bastards have housed their ships, destroy every last one of the damned things, trap them here in my country and spend the next few years hunting them. Why not? It’ll give me something to do with eternity. Maybe I’ll even go to their country and keep the job going. Maybe as long as their people last, I can—
He stopped in front of one of the last few dragonships, a torch in his hand. He stopped breathing or thinking and stood in shock. He dropped the torch in the ocean instead of into the boat.
He looked into the distance in the vague direction of Eleanor’s home, lost in memory. Then he rushed to the Viking who was kneeling on the sand in front of him and took away his shield. It was an unremarkable shield, wooden, with sections of black and red like four squares off a checkerboard.
