by A. J. Aalto
I was tempted to slide it off the shelf and finger through more than a hundred years of her experimentation, her lethal mistakes and even more terrifying successes, plunging ever deeper, layer by shadowy layer, into the murky, forbidden, world of necromancy, demonology, flesh magic, and death magic that would present a whole different level of power to me. The cure for the dhaugir bond had to be in there; I knew she had enslaved her own daughter with the spell, so surely Ruby knew how to conjure and, presumably, dismiss it.
The book, which should be mere inanimate paper bound in a cover, now emitted a low vibration as though it sensed me nearby, and if I put my hand on it, I'm sure it would have felt like brushing against an amplifier at a Metallica concert. There was a lure there, a low, pumping tempo barely felt under the warm spell of early afternoon that even a mundane human would have felt, though they wouldn't understand the terrible danger of its source. Bring down our sad-sack defenses, MJ, the dark corner of my brain suggested, a papery whisper. Go ahead, toss our innocence in the trash, there. Slip that book onto our lap. Pick a spell, any spell, and we'll have some fun.
Like it had a mind of its own, the Blue Sense awoke, stirring in my belly with anxious fluttering. I snapped the cabinet shut a little harder than was necessary. So far I'd resisted the grimoire's lure. This was a continuing source of astonishment, since I tend to have all the moral competence of a tarantula.
The candle holder on my desk was shaped like a squat frog in a bowler hat, straddling a log and holding a trumpet. The artist had pulled off a hungry glaze in the frog's eyes, forever frozen in paint, and his belt struggled against debilitating obesity. It wasn't the weirdest frog collectible in my house, but the belt baffled me even more than the trumpet; the frog wore no pants, and had no holster for a gun, so why the belt? When I lit the cheap white candle in it, wax dribbled on the frog's snout. This frog was new enough that Batten hadn't had a chance to scribble fangs on it in black permanent marker.
“Blessed be this tiny light,” I said softly. “Guide my hand to do what's right.”
For a moment, there was palpable resistance by the black energy in the cabinet, and again that papery whisper, defiant. I let my hand sail along the stirring air currents, feeling the warm snap-spark of psi tickling along my arm and slipping through my veins. When my hand arched to the right, and pulled toward the bookcase, I let my feet follow to where dust motes played in the fragrant fog left by Harry's wood cleaner. My palm landed on the phone book. I finger-tipped it onto the floor and waited for the pages to flutter open. The ad that caught my eye wasn't a big surprise.
the organization
Simple ad, simple lettering, no capitals, no explanation. It needed none. If you didn't know what it was, you wouldn't need it. And if you did know, you might still find yourself reluctant to avail yourself of their services.
Before I could touch the phone, it rang. That's almost never a good sign, especially after the calls I'd been getting. I relaxed a bit when the decidedly phlegm- and French-free operator put me on hold; the recorded message was smooth and sultry, and yet, somehow, still boring.
“Your call is important to us. Please stay on the line while our operator finds the perfect temporary guardian for your home, pet, revenant, DaySitter, clutch, bleeder, or gimp. Thank you.” I kicked my feet up on the desk and twirled my pencil in what I hoped was a sufficiently devil-may-care manner.
“Miss Baranuik? I've spoken to Prince Dreppenstedt—”
Yikes. If I wasn't alarmed before, I was now. I choked on my espresso, sputtering. My heels dropped off the desk. “Woman, who told you to do that?”
“I took the liberty,” she said pleasantly.
“Don't take the liberty! Leave the liberty where it is,” I urged.
“Prince Dreppenstedt would like to know if there is a reason you cannot perform your appointed duties where Lord Guy Harrick is concerned?”
I attempted to swallow, hearing a dry click in the back of my throat. “Let's pretend I didn't call. Really, everything's fine. I can do it. Nooooo problems here.” I pressed the heel of my palm into my forehead hard, as though I could condense the brain cells into a functional lump that thought things through.
There was a brief disconnect, and the last strains of “Muskrat Love” bled into the opening piano accompaniment to Dean Martin singing “Blue Moon.” In my panic, I considered hanging up. The operator clicked back on.
“Miss Baranuik, Prince Dreppenstedt assures me that he's well aware of the issues with Lord Guy Harrick's recently broken Bond,” Oh, fuck. “as well as the intrusion of another fledgling Bond, and the insufficient attempts you've both made at re-Bonding.” Fuckanut! “Despite his busy schedule, his highness would take great pleasure in assisting in Lord Guy Harrick's advanced Bonding needs, if it is required of him.”
Little black stars whirled in my field of vision. “I really, really don't think that's necessary.”
“His highness has sent Viktor to assess the damage and act as temporary daytime guardian. You should expect Viktor within the hour.”
“Well, that's fine but—” The dial tone in my ear meant big trouble. “Wait! Is the Prince …oh, holy rolling shitballs,” I whispered into the phone uselessly.
I hung up, quilling with dread. What was I going to tell Harry if his maker, whom he just finished visiting, came all the way from who-knows-where, popping into our home for “advanced Bonding needs,” whatever the hell those were? And when Harry found out it was all because I was trying to keep a job I hadn't originally wanted and was only now determined to keep because someone else could be doing it? What then?
I didn't have too long to dwell on it; before I could sink my forehead to the desk blotter, someone tried to blow my front door down with what sounded like a pile-driver.
The front hallway shook with repeated knocking as I scooted down it in sock feet. “Satan's sack, would you hold on a second?”
The knock came again, turning my little cabin into a Hollywood set for a sci-fi bombing raid or a dinosaur stampede. Looking through the peep hole, I could see nothing, literally. No front porch, no yard, no covered motorcycle, no trees. I searched downward as well as the peephole allowed and finally spotted a pair of boots encrusted with numerous decorative chains, straps, and buckles, in size holy crap and a half. Slowly, I looked up and was met with black leather as far as the eye could see. Even rolling my eyes as far up as they'd go, I didn't find shoulders. I cautiously cracked the door.
He could have made a fortune as a professional wrestler. Or maybe an armored car. Each of his arms was easily my height, roped with muscle that strained under preternaturally pale skin and ending in hands that could have palmed my torso. Gargantuan legs built for rampaging through downtown Tokyo were clad in restrictive leather. His jaw was long and sturdy but slightly unnatural in its shape, the lower mandible jutting out from his face as if he had too many sets of teeth in there.
He didn't bother with the façade of breathing for me; the leather shirt didn't move except when he rotated a shoulder, rolling his head to one side to stretch his neck, looking stiff and uncomfortable, as if he'd just climbed out of a clown car. In his case, even my old Buick would have been a tight fit. If he tore out one of the seats (maybe by looking under it for a pack of beef jerky a tad too enthusiastically), he might have room to get comfortable in my new Humvee once it was delivered.
“I am Viktor.” His accent was pure Ukraine, and his voice was cavernous, subterranean, and came out thickly, as if his tongue was too big (or trying to fit around extra teeth, my brain added unhelpfully). “Viktor Moldovan Domitrovich. I am expected. You invite me in.”
It wasn't a request. His eyes were deep beyond dark chocolate, true black, as if some funky drug had permanently dilated his pupils. This tamped the final piece of the puzzle into place; if he'd ever been human, then I would have suspected he'd suffered from gigantism before being made a revenant, but this was no man. He never had been. There probably wasn't a human being in his family woo
dpile for generations.
“What, no ‘honored DaySitter’ or ‘hail and well met’?” I joked.
Silent, he blinked; I could have sworn his eyelashes created a breeze.
“Okay then.” I shrugged. “Viktor Moldovan Domitrovich, you are welcome in my home.”
The massive revenant half-breed moved forward across the threshold, encroaching like an invading glacier, slow and sweeping, dwarfing me in the hall. I had no choice but to shuffle backward as he overran my space. It was my first in-the-flesh ogre encounter; the scientist in me was dizzy with anticipation, expectation, and plain, honest fear. The knowledge that this guy could easily rip my arm off and clobber me to death with it while neatly sipping a martini in his free hand, pinky lifted, was frankly a little exciting. I suspected he was considering it, too, as he sized me up with predatory eyes. Ogres don't have a wide emotional range, and I felt nothing empathically from his direction. His inspection of me was similar to the cold gaze of a crocodile, eyes just above water and everything else submerged, watching something just big enough to put up a fight. He was wondering if I had teeth; I was wondering if the gun in my drawer would even give him pause. Probably best not to count on it.
I also couldn't help but wonder, who the hell would make a Chukotka ogre into a revenant? Seemed like overkill, but brilliant for this position. Except for being indigenous to the harsh cold of the so-called Zone of Absolute Discomfort in the extreme north of Russia, and far less comfortable in this temperate climate, he'd make the perfect bodyguard. Chukotka ogres, unlike their Magadan counterparts, had a life-long pecking order inherent in their pack structure; once this guy knew who the boss was, as long as it was another male, he'd never question or challenge it. The only problem there was: I had indoor plumbing, and he was unlikely to take a female seriously.
Staying sideways in the hallway so as not to knock the pictures off the wall, he lifted his face to the air. There must have been two inches between his skull and the ceiling. I put him at just under nine feet tall.
“Many revenants.” The big chin came down and a massive eyebrow, like a black cat's arching back, questioned me.
“Ah, yes,” I told him. “There are two revenants at rest. The organization sent you to watch them for me today, while I'm unavoidably busy elsewhere. Correct?”
He gave one solemn nod, sizing me up again with those crocodile eyes. “The other?”
“No, just the two revenants. Right? Just two?” Could he smell Gregori Nazaire's ashes? Viktor didn't answer, he just watched me, his primeval inspection giving me the willies.
“So, how did you get here so fast?” I asked, giving him a thorough once-over. So much leather covering so much body. Sweat pooled in the hollow of his throat, glistened there, making me speculate about the physiology of an undead ogre; Harry didn't perspire. My brain refused to accurately chronicle his size until he took another step toward me, and his arms, in the act of hanging up his bag, nearly swept me aside. I ducked his limbs easily, since he was at least three feet taller than me; we were practically eyeball-to-bellybutton.
“In the middle of the day …?” I prodded.
“I translocate.” He waved this off as though it were nothing. Since it was a talent I didn't know revenants had, didn't even know was possible, I had to place one hand on the wall to keep from toppling over in surprise. “Dematerialize in St. Petersburg. Rematerialize here. You show me resting place, now.”
I hurried to do so. Viktor barely fit down the stairs, and the way they creaked under his weight made me think we were going to collapse in a heap of treads and risers any second. Seeing him looming over Harry's bed, examining the latch on the casket where Wes lay, running big hands along the walls, checking for the unknown, sniffing the air with his eyes closed as though tasting their very souls, it all made me acutely uncomfortable. I'd once visited friends who had an unpronounceable breed of dog; all I knew was that the thing was huge, it was smart, and if it didn't like me, there wasn't a damn thing I could do about it; Viktor was like that, turned up to about sixteen on a scale of one to ten, and I didn't think he'd be charmed by a bacon and peanut-butter sandwich.
I sidestepped closer to Harry's prone form, pale and still like an alabaster carving behind the white sheers. Harry's latent energy dominated the entire room, including the corner he'd given up to my brother; even as he rested, it seemed Harry's enormous presence and dormant power was only a heartbeat away. There was a complete absence of Wes in the room, so prevalent was Harry's resting aura. Fine tendrils of sandy hair swept Harry's forehead. His sleeping area smelled faintly of his fresh, lemony 4711 cologne and an ashtray full of cigarette butts. But Viktor filled the area with something new, something lively and musk-like, something that belonged covered in furs, crouched deep in a cave. Gnawing on a hunk of mammoth, maybe.
What exactly would I do if this guy turned on us? Die, probably. The thought startled an audible giggle from me, and I turned it into a cough. He was a revenant, and I knew better than most people how to kill those, but I wasn't in the habit of keeping rowan wood stakes in Harry's chamber, and I sure as hell wouldn't make it all the way up the stairs to my bedroom closet to fetch one.
Viktor finally nodded, satisfied. “What is Bonding problem?”
This posed a quandary. I couldn't tell a complete stranger that Harry refused to have sex with me on the grounds that he didn't trust me not to abuse the power our intimacy would grant. On the other hand, attempting to lie to a revenant, any revenant, was plain stupid; they could smell my sweat, hear the sudden, guilty acceleration of my pulse and feel the fluctuation in my body temperature, all the human physiological signs of lying.
Thinking fast: not my strong suit. “Well, see, he's not well. I wouldn't call him well. He's tired, and has a terribly low sex drive. That's his age, right? We don't have nearly as much sex as I'd like. He doesn't seem too worried about it. I guess it's injuring me more than him. It's killing me, that's the truth. Heh heh.”
Viktor did not share my amusement.
“And he can't feel love. I know, revenants are denied love as a price of immortality, but I think it's injuring our Bond, technically. If he were able to love me, he'd wanna sleep with me more often, right? But, not a problem you could fix. Unless you can make me loveable. Er, you can tell that I'm not lying, right?”
The black eyes studied me from under quirked brows, without blinking, for nearly a minute. “No.”
“No, it's not his age? No, you can't make me loveable? Or no, you can't tell that I'm lying?”
Viktor didn't look like he gave a hoot about any of it. Maybe he'd only asked to be polite. “Where is television?”
I let out the breath I hadn't realized I was holding, and led him up into the living room, slightly embarrassed but otherwise relieved. I showed him the remote and how to use it. He turned it to the Food Network and sat. I heard my couch groan and the frame gave a threatening crack. His tongue lashed out and swiped his bottom lip as Gordon Ramsey started dropping f-bombs on a battlefield kitchen full of students hacking up chickens.
“Are you hungry, Viktor?”
His big hand dropped the remote in his lap in what I took to be surprise; his terribly intense black eyes impaled me from across the room. “This is offer?” he clarified thickly.
“I didn't mean … no, not me. I have blood. In bags! Not in my body. I mean, I do have blood in my body, of course, but I have bagged blood. For you. From Shield. If you drink blood. Do you? Drink?” I swallowed hard. “Blood? You must. I could warm some before I go?”
“I take cold.” He waved me off to fetch it, and I was happy to go. Those eyes had gained a hungry sheen I didn't like one bit.
CHAPTER 11
NEVER MIND THE SILVER LINING; every cloud brings a shit-storm, and today was no exception. If I had paused long enough to listen to the late summer storm lumbering in on the air, I would have worn what Harry calls my slicker: a long white raincoat with big black snaps, gingham collar, and a rubber hood with a draw
string. I also might have considered waiting an hour or so for our new cars to be delivered, or called a cab, instead of cramming the spare helmet on and borrowing Harry's Kawasaki. To be fair, the sky gave reasonable warning, I just hadn't paid attention. Not that it stopped me from cussing Mother Nature out long and loud when the clouds tore open twenty minutes into my ride, making visibility a bitch.
By the time I cruised down into Ten Springs to stop at Claire's Early Bird for a coffee to go, I was so truly and completely drenched that I felt like I'd peed my pants. Maybe I had. I was not used to driving the motorcycle, and wasn't used to its heavy, animalistic power. Harry always made handling it look easy. Of course, Harry made everything look effortless.
I could have gone home. No one would be the wiser. I stood at the counter, willing my bare wet knees to stop shaking, heart slamming energetically, causing enough activity in my chest that my lungs forgot what they were supposed to be doing and I had to talk them through it; this is particularly tricky when one isn't breathing. I told myself that scaring my pants off counted as a healthy dose of cardio. Watching Claire doctor my coffee, I figured that terror had burned enough calories that I could afford to order a cherry Danish, too; if I was gonna die by road rash, I could at least go to the grave with sweet stuff stuck in my molars, assuming they didn't end up embedded in a 4x4’s grill or a guard rail.
