Waking the Queen

by Saranna Dewylde

  Turning sideways to squeeze through the door without jostling the hinges, I slipped inside. It took a few moments for my eyes to adjust to the dark and I expected it to stink of mildew and rot. Instead, it smelled unnaturally homey. Like a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie version of Christmas: pine needles, a slow baking ham and gingerbread with a splash of vanilla. Perhaps even notes of a warm, mulled apple wine. Good bait to lure the homeless and starving—the promise of home and hearth, a warm meal.

  The faint sounds of men’s voices drew me forward until I found myself at an open doorway. Warm light spilled from the room out into the dingy hall, gleaming and golden. I debated calling for backup, but one woman couldn’t be that hard to take down. Bullets were the universal equalizer.

  I didn’t know what I was walking into, and by all rights I should have gone in with my weapon drawn, but something told me to holster it. If these men were still alive and they believed Astrid was helping them, they would probably defend her to the death. I didn’t want to kill men who didn’t deserve to die. Taking those who weren’t mine was anathema to me.

  With the gun back in my holster, I peered into the room and tried to take in the game and the players before I laid my cards down and revealed myself. Fires blazed from several strategically placed trash cans, painting the room in gold and orange. A long table was in the middle and it was laden with things like steins of dark beer and platters of turkey legs, ham and roast.

  Astrid Johanson stood at the head of the table, her palms braced on the scarred wood. She was waiting for something—her eyes constantly scanning the room. She was also batshit crazy. Had to be. Unless she really was a Valkyrie. Then that would change the game considerably. I’d never seen any of the things my father had told me about—though I trusted they were true. Astrid was wearing a short Grecian style dress that barely glanced the tops of her shapely thighs. Over that she wore a silver armored bodice, with matching braces on her forearms and shins. There was a giant sword on the table in front of her. I couldn’t tell if she was going to a Renaissance Fair or a World of Warcraft Convention.

  I had to admit the armor was lovely, it appealed to me, so bright and perfect. There wasn’t even the dull smudge of a fingerprint on the mirrored surfaces of the armor. I noticed strange whorls and raised marks on it then as the firelight flickered and shadows merged and shifted. They were runes and the shape of them roused something cold in my memory.

  But I couldn’t worry about that at the moment. I had a missing partner, murders to solve and a crazy bitch playing dress up with sharp blades. I had to think about the dead men even if those runes made me think of home and safety. I couldn’t let her get in my head just because I was having Daddy issues. I’d do that shit on my own time.

  The previous murders had looked like heart failure: there’d been no slicing and dicing involved. Perhaps whatever Astrid’s delusions were had escalated? But I didn’t see any evidence of murder; the sword was as bright as her armor. No obvious evidence of blood or that the homeless men she’d killed had ever been here in the warehouse. Though, I had just heard men’s voices echoing into the corridor from this room. My partner was still nowhere to be seen either. If Astrid had hurt him, I’d hang her with her own intestines and use her bones for a wind chime.

  “Come in, Brynn,” Astrid spoke.

  I knew she couldn’t see me. Bitch was almost as creepy as I was. I didn’t see any point in denying my presence, so I stepped inside the room and into the light.

  “Officer Hill,” I corrected her. We weren’t friends; we didn’t function on a first name basis. I didn’t need her to identify with me and I didn’t want to identify with her. As soon as I had any hard evidence, I’d slap cuffs on her and then she’d cease to be my problem and I could move on to the next scumbag. Of course, it would be easier to get said hard evidence if she trusted me, but I didn’t have the patience for that shit today. I still wanted an excuse to shoot her for getting me up this early.

  “As you say,” she agreed cheerfully.

  Damn, I hated the perky ones. The happier they were, the crazier they were. Which effectively killed the glimmer of hope that Astrid Johanson was actually a Valkyrie—living proof that all my father told me was true.

  “It’s not safe for you to be here. This is condemned property. You’re trespassing.”

  “You know human laws don’t apply to you and me.” Astrid smiled at me, but it was more a fierce baring of teeth than it was a genuine smile.

  Yeah, completely batshit. Only she’d recognized the difference in me the same as I’d seen it in her. That could be a problem.

  “I need you to leave the premises.”

  “Always business, huh? That’s good. It will serve you well.”

  For the millionth time, it occurred to me that it was too fucking early in the morning for this shit. I rolled my eyes and that was when I noticed the pile of combat boots in the corner.

  The sight of those boots filled me with more dread than any dead body ever could have. The dead were just rotting meat, but those boots were the evidence of the life that had inhabited the body. Life that had been taken and destroyed by the woman in front of me.

  Not all human life was precious to me, but these warriors’ lives were. They were the good men I was supposed to protect. The ragged pile of boots was like an accusation and a testament to my failure to do just that.

  It reminded me of when I was little and my father had taken me to see the Holocaust Museum and the display of shoes there. Only they’d ranged in sizes and the smallest ones had been the most damning. When he’d asked me how it made me feel, I’d had to think about it very hard. I’d already detached myself from most emotion and I’d told him the same thing. It was a testament to the failure of man that the world had stood by and allowed so many of their own to die. I’d asked my father if maybe he’d been wrong, if the world was full of things like him. Like me. Maybe things worse than us, torturing and murdering, feeding on pain and suffering all masking themselves as prey. Otherwise, how could the world stand by and let this happen? And he’d said with such pride shining in his eyes such horrors lived and breathed because I hadn’t been born yet.

  I drew my gun. “Hands in the air, Miss Johanson.”

  “You’re arresting me?” Her laughter was light like silver bells. “For what?”

  For what, indeed? “Trespassing.”

  “Your father didn’t tell you, did he?” She smiled, a strange inner light blooming on her face. As if some happy memory had bubbled up to the present and brought joy with it. “Erik was always one to put things off.”

  Her words echoed my earlier thoughts and they were like a shotgun blast in my gut. I comforted myself with the knowledge she was a manipulator and my father’s name and crimes were common knowledge. It was why I was good at my job. Everyone knew that, and she wasn’t the first to try to use him against me.

  “No, he didn’t tell me.” I humored her while I focused on my breathing and prepared to fire. My training had taught me to shoot center mass, but she was wearing armor. I could shoot her in the thigh, but that wouldn’t guarantee I’d neutralized the threat. The head was my only option. Especially seeing as she’d put her hands in the air, but her eyes kept flickering to the sword on the table in front of her. I probably should have drawn her away from the table before I’d shot off my mouth, but part of me was looking for an excuse to shoot her. She’d never be convicted in court. She was too young, too pretty, and too goddamn manipulative for a jury to ever see through her machinations.

  “Pull the trigger,” she dared.

  How original. Suicide by cop. I wanted to know where the bodies were, though. “How about you tell me where the men went first?”

  “Valhalla.”

  Valhalla? Valhalla was a place in Norse mythology where warriors went when they died.

  She answered me so quickly and so easily, for a second I didn’t believe I’d heard her correctly. Her blue eyes were clear; there were no micro-expressions on
her face to signal she lied. Her body language was open. She believed every word that she spoke.

  My first impression of her burst to the forefront of my memory yet again. How Astrid looked like every single illustration I’d ever seen of Valkyries in my father’s books. She was tall, golden, and fierce. With a wide, smooth forehead and hair like a pennant down her back. She was obviously strong, but blatantly feminine. There was a specificity about Astrid as well; the lines of her cheekbones, the hard ridge of her nose and even the raven tattoo on her bicep that marked a Valkyrie as Odin’s that reminded me of one particular Valkyrie. My namesake, Brynhildr.

  The realization struck home like a dagger that we were not so different, both in personality and appearance, but where she was golden like the sun; I was dark as the night sky.

  Fuck, but crazy was contagious. I believed everything my father told me, but I needed more than some armor and a couple comments about my father before I’d believe this woman was actually a Valkyrie. I jerked myself back into the game. “What about my partner? Is he on your list for Odin’s Ever After Party?”

  “No, but I’ll be back for him.”

  From that, I couldn’t even tell if she’d seen him. For all I knew, he could have been hit by a falling beam and passed out on an upper level.

  “You don’t believe me,” she continued sadly. “Your father was supposed to tell you. Selfish bastard.”

  She kept saying that, but there was no proof she actually knew him. “Move against the wall,” I directed her.

  “I can’t let you cuff me.”

  “And I can’t let you leave, so it seems we’re at an impasse.”

  “It seems we are.” She sounded strangely reasonable and was quiet for a moment before she spoke again. “It’s your birthday today.”

  Again, something that was common knowledge—information that was easily attainable. “And?”

  “It’s time.”

  Then she moved so fast, I never saw it coming. I only felt the cold steel of the sword as it split through my chest and bisected my heart.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I fired wildly, my finger jerked back on the trigger more out of cellular memory than any actual intent. I couldn’t feel my hands and all I could hear was my blood thundering through my veins like a tsunami, but I knew the .40 had fired because I watched the bullets rip through Astrid Johanson’s pretty forehead.

  The back of her head should have exploded as my bullet tore through her skull, but it didn’t. Her smiling face peered into mine and the gaping wounds in her head closed like the tide washing away footprints in the sand. She caught me as I fell, my eyes focusing on the strange glint of the firelight on her armor. For a moment, I thought I saw the faces of dying men, but maybe it was my own death I was watching. My own face.

  I kept waiting for the pain, but it didn’t come. Only an arctic chill that was heavy like sorrow until Astrid drew back and took the sword with her, along with my heart. It was surreal to see it there, beating and pulsing outside of my body. More surreal still when it stopped and I was alive.

  This had to be a nightmare. My goddamn alarm was going to go off any minute and pop me from this hell into wakefulness. Or what passed for wakefulness until I had a cup of vanilla bean Folgers.

  Voices raised in song echoed inside my skull. I was damn sure those voices weren’t a choir of angels singing the angelic host to welcome me to Heaven, but there were no accordions, so I didn’t think I was in Hell either. The melody was soft and lovely, like butterflies flitting over my skin—a physical manifestation.

  Although, the more logical explanation was that the phenomenon was simply the mind’s way of coping with the trauma of death. Any minute, everything would fade to twilight and shadows and I would be nothing more than an empty meat sack in an abandoned warehouse.

  It wasn’t death that pissed me off; it was failure. I was supposed to ascend, I was supposed to be a goddess. Dying here hadn’t been part of the plan.

  The murderess’ hands were cool and soft on my face. “Don’t listen. I know it’s pretty, but stay with me, Brynn. Stay with me.”

  I wondered wildly why she’d say something so stupid after she’d pulled my heart out of my chest with a fucking sword. Dumb bitch.

  Maybe I was the dumb bitch because I was still alive. Or just so fucking stubborn, I didn’t know when to lie down and die.

  She pulled my hands up to cross them over my chest and I could see my fingernails were a strange shade of blue and the tips of my fingers purple. The rest of my skin had blanched to an alabaster white like the marble of some ancient statue. There was still no sensation there, only the absence of such that comes with the bitter cold.

  The music continued to reverberate in my awareness and I was flooded with sounds, scents and sights of things that were woven like a tapestry into every note. The white sands of Greece under an impossibly blue sky, the deep green of the sea and the scent of brine and figs. Visions of the sky as it shifted into black velvet and the foamy waves crashing over my feet beneath a gravid moon calling me out into the unknown and promising this for eternity if I surrendered. The green sea became the eyes of a man and he called to me, urged me to wade deeper into the water.

  I knew it wasn’t real.

  None of this could be real.

  Perhaps this was death, seconds stretched out in eternity as the brain ceased to function and all that was impossible became possible as we waited for the end.

  Well, it could hurry the fuck up. Dying shouldn’t be like the goddamn DMV. It was a simple series of actions. Breathing. Not breathing. Fuck you, you’re done.

  The music stopped and Astrid smiled at me. If I could have raised my arm, I would have hit her in the face just to make that saccharine smile go away.

  “Did the music stop, Brynn?”

  I found myself able to nod my head and I struggled to sit up. It was a certainty now that I was dreaming; there was no way I could live without my heart. Unless this was my first step to ascension, although I thought the lack of a heart would be more metaphorical.

  She yanked me to my feet and just as Astrid pulled me vertical, a man’s face loomed behind her. His visage was a horror—the left side a twisted and ropey monstrosity, the burned scar tissue stretched tight across his bones and the scarred half of his mouth twitched as he smiled. It wasn’t his face that held my attention though, awful as it was—his eyes were the ones I’d seen beckoning me out into the deep water as I lay dying.

  Astrid’s mouth curved into a pink O as those ruined lips whispered in her ear and she seemed to be lost in some kind of trance.

  He stepped out from behind her and I found myself unable to move. I couldn’t shake the imagery of seaweed tangled around my legs pulling me down. The unknown man was one of the biggest I’d ever met, taller than my 6’1 by at least five inches. His shoulders and chest were so broad he reminded me of a brick wall.

  Astrid suddenly crumpled, blood spread across her chest like the bloom of an English rose—petals reaching out underneath her armor. It didn’t surprise me that this stranger killed her; the hatred in his eyes was a wildfire. Any horror he could have perpetrated wouldn’t be any great shock, no, it was the bright light that erupted from her body. Waterfalls of silver and green sparks that consumed her.

  In moments, it was as if she’d never been. Astrid’s flesh, bone, everything gone.

  I shouldn’t have been surprised because I was dreaming. Any matter of the fantastic could happen and it meant nothing.

  But I remembered my alarm clock going off, I remembered guzzling a protein drink and I remembered pulling the last sealed envelope out of my father’s possessions. I left it on the bed. Had I dreamed all of that, too?

  The other choice was this had all happened. I was walking around without a heart in my chest. Cute, blond and deadly had disappeared and the scarred man in front of me thought he was the goddamned Phantom of the Fucking Opera singing songs in my head.

  “Do you know me?” he asked, hi
s voice like whiskey sex, sliding over my skin in a caress.

  I found I could speak now, but I was still frozen where I stood. “Should I?”

  A bleak smile splashed over his twisted mouth. “Oh yes, Darkyrie.”

  My father had told me stories of Darkyries, Valkyries, werewolves and faeries. Myths and monsters were my father’s favorite topic. He’d told me stories no one had ever heard of before, yet this man had. I wondered if he, too, was something different, something else. Something like me. “Why is that?”

  “You really don’t know me, Helreggin?”

  He knew me. Not as Officer Brynn Hill of the KCPD, but as Helreggin, Darkyrie and shield maiden of Hel. Something warm and unnamable surged inside me at the knowledge that I wasn’t alone. But I didn’t know who he was and he’d just killed what I suspected was a Valkyrie.

  “My name is Officer Hill. My credentials and badge are in my jacket pocket.” I would have pulled them if my limbs hadn’t been frozen in place. Or maybe my .40. He was obviously a killer and I valued my own life more than I did the knowledge there were more things like me on the earth.

  His eyes narrowed in on where my shirt had been torn open when Astrid stabbed me. He grabbed at the opening and jerked it wider, the fabric ripping in his big hands. His fingers were on my chest, reading the lines of my newly healed wound like Braille.

  “She took it,” he growled, still tracing his fingers over where my heart had been. “When I find her, I’m going to kill her.”

  “You already did,” I blurted, wanting him to stop touching me. His touch was like nothing else, not even his sinful voice was as terribly wonderful as his touch. I’d never understood the big deal about touching, fucking. It was all a mechanical exchange of fluids to me. Until now. I had no control over my body’s reaction. This want. It intrigued me and pissed me off at the same time.

  He drew his gaze back up to my eyes and his fingers stilled, but he didn’t stop touching me and I didn’t want him to stop.