by A. J. Aalto
Golden appeared behind Harry to announce that our go-bags were packed in the limo where Viktor was waiting to drive us to the airport. Viktor was an undead Chukotka ogre, a revenant bodyguard whom we had utilized several times; he scored a solid eight on the Creep-Me-Out Meter, in that he had more than a passing fondness for cold bodies, he was practically non-verbal, he would have dwarfed most WWE wrestlers, and his black-eyed inspection of me was far from comfortable. I was glad that he remained in the limo, and did my best not to cast a worried glance at my baby brother. Viktor would guard Wes when Wes rested in VK-Delta during the daytime while we were gone, because Viktor did not require rest. At least I knew nothing would get past Viktor, so the only thing to worry about was Viktor himself. I told myself that Wes would be fine, and I almost believed it.
I gave Golden the crook-eye. “Since when does an FBI agent load your bags for you, Lord Dreppenstedt? That’s a perk I hadn’t realized was available. Is she going to play stewardess, too?”
She smirked. “Harry bought the Boulder field office a new private jet. Chapel lets him borrow it if he keeps it fueled up. I thought you knew.”
“I don’t know a lot of things,” I retorted, then heard it. Golden just smiled.
Harry bowed with a little flourish of his hand at her. “And are you quite ready, yourself, my dear?”
I blinked with surprise. “She’s coming to Hammerfest?”
“She has a name, my pet,” Harry clucked. “She’s not the cat’s mother.”
I sighed, having no idea what a cat’s mother had to do with anything. “Fine. Bitchface is coming to Hammerfest?”
“Being our Second, I should say Ms. Golden will be joining us on the entire journey, through draft and disaster, to face the fogbank of uncertainty, and I cannot envision a more stalwart advocate.”
I spluttered in confusion. “Hold yer nuts, there, dead guy. Let me get this straight. You asked Golden to be our Second instead of Batten? No offense, but he could totally take her in a fight, as long as she didn't throw any spiders at him.”
Harry’s pale, elegant hand made a flippant gesture, as if flicking aside my concerns, and he practically purred, “While I’m sure your loins would have preferred that I invite your little love-toy along, my pet, I think you’ll find that the carrion hunter did not suit my purposes, nor would he have been a fitting advocate to present before our house and before the court. I had to call in with your Second’s name for approval, and not a soul complained about Ms. Golden. I fear the result would not have been the same if I’d announced Mr. Batten to our prince; Wilhelm prefers to be the hunter, not the hunted. Besides, absence makes the heart grow fonder.”
“But he’s already been absent!” Dammit, I should have porked Batten in the office.
Harry flipped his Devonshire Bowler hat deftly atop his hair and challenged me with an innocuous smile.
“I see,” I said, folding my arms over my chest. “And do you expect me to inform Batten that he’s not joining us?”
“You may suppose that I am gentleman enough to have already broached that difficult conversation on your behalf.”
“Uh huh.” How had that gone? Probably with lots of crisp English twaddle and archaic gobbledygook, punctuated by Batten's grunts. I wondered if Batten was still Googling whatever the hell Harry had said.
Harry’s cashmere grey eyes caught mine, waiting expectantly, daring me to continue kvetching. When I balked, he nodded, satisfied. “I am nothing if not your uxorious companion and most ardent admirer.”
“Some days, you exhaust me, Harry.”
He gave a one-shouldered shrug. “This in no way surprises me; of late, your resilience leaves much to be desired, and your concentration is likewise lacking.”
I opened my mouth to retort, saw that he was waiting for me to prove his point, and chose instead to show him my sour-puss we-are-not-amused face.
Golden’s grin was surprisingly smug, even for her. “I hate to interrupt, but we need to get going, right?”
“Fine.” I huffed. “Let me settle the jar and then we can go.”
“We shall be away for some time, I suspect,” Harry told me. “You may have a moment or two to call Mr. Batten up and say goodbye.”
“Oh, may I? Pretty please?” I asked, clutching my gloved hands in a faux-plead under my chin. “Thanks for your kind permission, Lord Dreppenstedt.”
“So much sass,” he lamented on an unnecessary exhale, glancing meaningfully at Golden, “whilst I am willing to put my own needs and wants aside and grant her nothing but patience and time. Madam, do you see it?”
“I’m aware of the sass,” Golden agreed, giving me a cheeky grin. She knew she was going to hear about this later, but seemed unable or unwilling to resist the urge to mock me. She gave Harry a commiserating sigh. “That sass is all I ever see.”
“You’re both gonna see a whole fuckbucket of sass if you keep this shit up.” I dialed Batten’s phone, but as I rather expected, he didn’t pick up. Instead, I got a terse reply via text: Busy. Will talk soon.
Great. I would have preferred to have Batten along with me, especially for the troll part. I remembered BugBelly’s guidance: this scout had to be made to believe that an invasion would go badly for him. I had to put on a good show. Batten would have helped that show.
Golden jogged down the frosty driveway and disappeared into the warmth of the limo. I aimed my phone at Harry when he glanced at me with a sheepish smile. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
“Dearheart, you mustn’t doubt me so,” he said with an innocent flutter of his lashes. “Only, I am always thinking of what is best for my beloved pet.”
“And what’s best for me is Heather Golden?”
“As our Second?” Harry said carefully, and I felt the subtle sinking deep in my bones that indicated that Harry was blurring my access to his feelings through our Bond. “In this instance? Oh, absolutely.”
I glanced at Wes, who was not doing a very good job of pretending he wasn’t reading Harry’s mind like it was a neon sign. He nodded once, as subtly as possible. Beside the porch was a disturbed mound of soil and a very nice little hole in the frozen ground; being a revenant with immortal strength, it had taken Wes only a minute to perform the task that would have had me scraping and sweating and grumbling and possibly failing. I settled the jar into its new home and covered it over.
I twisted the turquoise lock of ghost hair at my temple and tucked it into my braid; black and blue, it reflected my mood. “Harry, you’re not bringing Golden along to toss her in a volcano or feed her to a dragon or anything, are you?”
“If that were my plan, would you prefer to sacrifice Mr. Batten?” he asked, and seemed genuinely interested in my reply. His preternatural probing flooded my brain cells with cold pressure.
“I’m not answering that.”
“Please do, my sweetest sugarplum,” he encouraged, indicating that I should get in the limo. “This conversation has taken a turn toward interesting, and one wonders which of your mortal companions you’d be most willing to part with should the need arise.”
I marched down the porch steps. “The need shouldn’t arise.”
“But if it does…”
I shot him an admonishing glare over my shoulder and caught the glimmer of teasing in his eyes. But that wasn't all that was there, either.
Chapter 7
“I can’t believe Golden is our Second,” I said with a big sigh, taking my iPad out of my go-bag to fetch my email. “Must everything go wrong?”
Golden looked up from her notes. “I think you meant to say, ‘Wow, I can’t believe she agreed to take time out of her busy schedule to go who-knows-where, into weird danger, just to have my back.’ Right?”
“Busy schedule? You PCU peeps haven’t had a case in two months. De Cabrera blabbed. He blows up my phone when he gets bored, and half the time, it's nothing but emojis. Was he a mime in a previous job or something?”
“There’s that sass,” Golden com
mented.
“Sorry. I over-feathered my hair this morning and can’t think past it.” I smiled at her and she smiled back, sticking out her tongue.
Harry settled into a wide, white leather seat and began to remove his grey cashmere gloves one finger at a time. “Under no circumstances are you to forget: needs must when the devil drives.”
“Yeah, well Old Scratch better not be our pilot,” I said, “on this plane or on this journey. He can’t fly for shit.” Golden cast me an inquisitive glance and I said, “Fallen angel joke. Never mind. Did you get a chance to read those notes I gave you?”
“Going through them now. Kind of a lot to wrap my head around.” She shifted papers on her lap. “What are you working on?”
“Was going to make some damn sense out these old maps. What’s this say?” I squinted at our itinerary. “Not sure I want to go somewhere called Turgid-ogre-butt.”
Harry’s thrice-pierced brow twitched with amusement. “Perhaps you mean Turgonorjbatt, Dearheart?”
“Isn’t that what I said?” I turned the print-out upside down, but that didn’t seem to make things clearer. “How about Axel-fo-sho? Lots of car dealerships there or something?”
“One presumes you refer to Askelshofoi,” Harry said.
“That word is unnecessarily complicated,” I informed them. “The coastline takes a hard hook around Nerd-loading-a Ford-with-dung, but then the map goes blank.”
“Nordlendingafjordungr,” Harry corrected.
I drummed a finger on my bottom lip. “I feel like I’m missing a lot today.”
Golden looked up from her notes again. “Only today?”
“Pumpkin-wizard…no! Gizzard.” I said. “Damn. It’s only Pumpkin-gizzard.”
“Pumpkin-wizard is more fun,” Golden agreed amiably, glancing at the map.
“I need this properly translated.”
“You don’t speak that language?”
I waggled the iPad at her. “Of course not. I don’t even know what language it is.”
“Figured you wouldn’t be trying if you didn’t.”
“Well, I guess I showed you, didn’t I?” I told her.
“The genius gene isn’t connected at all to your mouth, huh?” she asked.
“Only the swearing parts. Does this look like 'Poop-hamper-booger-biscuit' to you?”
Golden grinned and went back to her notes. “Yes.”
Harry closed his eyes, and exhaled loudly and unnecessarily. “Must you encourage her, Ms. Golden?”
“Sorry, Lord Dreppenstedt.” Golden had picked up on SSA Chapel’s knee-jerk habit of calling Harry by his title, and Harry was in no hurry to correct her.
We left the limo, waved goodbye to Viktor the ogre, and hopped aboard the PCU’s private jet. Once settled into a nice, wide seat, I turned my attention to my email; I had fourteen serious business messages for Bare Hand Services already. Post-holiday stress, maybe. I assumed some people would send me real mail along with the odd personal item to Grope, but so far, it was emails. I read one aloud. “Dear Ms. Baranuik, I have not been able to find my lucky socks since my husband moved out. Did that bastard take them and give them to his new whore? Should I kill her?” I squeezed my eyes shut. When I opened them, the world was just as disappointing as it had been two seconds ago. “Yes, Susan from Tacoma. Yes he did. And I’m glad, Susan. I hope she wears a hole in the toe, you petty, vindictive, but understandably cold-footed--”
“You’re not typing that, are you?” Golden checked, leaning over while I jabbed an angry finger at my iPad.
“This lady is gonna kill someone over a goddamn pair of socks. What is wrong with people? I can’t work with the public. They’re deranged!”
“If Harry left you for another DaySitter and gave her your favorite froggy socks, you wouldn’t hit her with a two-by-four?” Golden asked. When I glared amphibian doom at her, she just grinned. Harry chuckled, acknowledging Golden’s point. I hated them both with the fury of a thousand crochet tadpoles.
“This is going to be a nightmare,” I muttered. “Why did you talk me into this, Harry?”
“I merely pointed out,” he said primly, “that you could run your own business, not that you should. Flames and ether, my fair bird, a person who cannot even keep her own Ritchings laced shouldn’t be running anything, let alone a business.”
“Harry, all running shoes are not ‘Ritchings.’ These are Keds,” I reminded him for the billionth time. “Also, when we talked about me leaving the FBI, you said, and I quote, ‘Marnie, you should totes run a business because froo-fritty-froo-froo yammerty-hammerty.’”
Harry cut his grey eyes at me over his pince nez. “Do try to calm your lunatic ravings.”
“Okay, I’m paraphrasing a little,” I allowed.
“Elian would remind you about positivity,” Golden said, “but I enjoy your little freak outs. Are you sure you’re not just freaking about the monster stuff and blaming the mundane shit?”
“Of course I’m worried about the monster stuff and blaming the mundane shit! I was trying to have a semi-normal life in a small town with a digital shingle and a picket fence and a hunky coworker, but here I am, the harbinger of a monster invasion. Again.”
Golden frowned. “You’ve done this before?”
“No,” I admitted, “but it sounds like something I’d do.”
I closed my eyes during take-off, wondering if I should grab a nap or if that would mess with my jet lag. I wished I had more time to prepare for this trip, but the Overlord hadn’t left much time for dilly-dallying. I’d scribbled a few notes for Golden to read on the flight: what little I’d picked up about the habits of the Falskaar Vouras over the years, tidbits I’d gleaned from listening to Harry’s ramblings, anything she might need a heads-up on before joining us in the land of ice and darkness to waltz among the immortals. Though Harry tried to hold his secrets close to the vest, it was inevitable that he’d slip up and flash one now and then, especially in those long, cold nights when I was warming his casket, or in his post-feeding haze when he was blissed out, on those occasions when he asked me to indulge him in a bit of pre-feed absinthe. Those tidbits I’d promptly stored in my memory, because he wasn’t likely to repeat them.
“Where exactly is this court?” Golden asked.
I wasn’t sharing any more than I felt she needed to know; surprised that Harry didn’t immediately tell her to mind her own beeswax, I watched him consider whether or not to answer.
“The Norsemen called it Svikheimslending,” he said at last, smiling tightly. “Referring to us: people of the treacherous place.”
I knew the Bitter Pass was somewhere along the Finnmark, where the extreme north of Norway brushes the Baltic Sea and bumps up against Russia. The island of Svikheimslending itself was probably somewhere north of the Svalbard archipelago, but there was a whole lot of icy nothing up there on the maps, even on the few I had that Harry said would be helpful. Google had, somehow, not even gotten around to doing street view of it yet. Of course, Harry was known for being less than forthright, so his honesty surprised me.
He continued, “It was officially gifted to the Falskaar Vouras by Magnus Haakonsson, Magnus the Law-mender, King of Norway, in 1264, though the immortals have had strongholds there for much longer than the Norsemen ever knew. In appreciation, the revenant king renamed his stronghold Skulesdottir, after the Law-mender’s mother, because she cautioned Magnus to keep peace with the Falskaar Vouras. He took his mother’s counsel to heart, and to this day, the more traditional of my kind shy away from accepting less-than-enthusiastic feeds from Norwegian veins.”
More traditional? I smirked. How could anyone be more traditional than my ultra-traditional Harry? Well, except for the eyebrow piercings. And the fast cars. And the iPhone. Okay, maybe he was a bad example, and just seemed stodgy and old-fashioned to me; he was some kind of rebellious revenant whippersnapper to the old farts, much less the ancient ones.
He sensed my lips were mocking him and aimed a chiding ey
e at me. “Scandinavian seamen know the two words that will make an immortal pause in his step, should his ship need to pass too close to a dark area during polar night, and a flag raised with these two words will hold them safe: ‘Law-mender’s man.’”
I informed her, “You know we won’t see the sun, right?”
“Like, ever?” she asked.
“We’ll be sailing into the Arctic circle in late December. Polar twilight extends for almost a month. The sun doesn’t get all the way above the horizon between the eleventh of November and the thirtieth of January, at Svalbard, anyway. There probably won't be too many lights either; the immortals can see in the dark, because they're supernatural assholes and don't own Lego to step on when they get up at night. I’m sure some of the DaySitters have oil lamps or something in their private chambers. Eventually, DaySitters' eyes are supposed to adjust to require less and less light; with long enough exposure and proper Bonding to a significantly aged immortal companion, their eyes can see as well as cats in low light. Some also lose pigmentation, especially elderly humans, since we kind of go nocturnal, and long-enough v-telomerase exposure gives us some sympathetic revenant properties, which makes tanning kind of a bad idea. So, the DaySitters we meet are probably perfectly healthy, and not a whole pile of anemic albinos or something.” I remembered the first time I’d seen an old man who’d served for decades in darkness. It was like someone had bleached him from head to toe, though his step was youthful and lithe, and the strength of his Talent was breathtaking. And Ruby Valli, despite being over a hundred, had packed a nasty right jab and could bound up and down stairs like a meth-coked ferret.
“What about in summer?” Golden asked, her eyes cutting between me and Harry for the answer. “What happens to the DaySitters and revenants when it's light all the time?”
