by J L Aarne
“What do you mean, ‘something else’? You mean… something out there?” Wyatt asked, gesturing out the window at the dark. “Like these judges were kids from women who had sex with demons and things?”
“It’s one theory,” Silas said.
“What about American Indians? Or Chinese people? Or people from tribes in Africa or Australia?”
“The theory includes them, I was just using the bible as the most well-known example,” Silas said.
“So, what does that have to do with my blood and me being the key?” Wyatt asked.
“If you carry the serpent’s blood, you would be a key,” Silas said. “One of them.”
Wyatt stared at him, shocked, but the shock didn’t last, and he could feel himself becoming afraid. “What?”
“The Midgard Serpent,” Silas said. “The trap that holds it is a rather ingenious one. It can only be opened with the blood of the monster inside it. The idea being that you can’t open it without already getting inside it to get the blood, which you need in order to open it. See?”
“I thought the blood was its own poison,” Wyatt said.
“I’ve heard that too, but you can’t kill something that can’t die,” Silas said.
“So, my blood…?”
“The serpent had children and those children had children and so on.”
“And I am… one of them?”
Silas shrugged. “Maybe.”
Definitely. Wyatt remembered the feeling he had standing in that dark, cold cavernous wasteland with the serpent demanding its freedom. Every time it spoke to him, he felt it. There was a connection to it, an attraction, and it made him sympathetic to the creature even knowing that to set it free would mean the end of everything. There had been times, especially upon waking from one of those dreams, when he laid in bed wondering about it. How could he set it free? It believed that he could or it would not ask him, so how could it be done? He told himself that he had no intention of doing it, he just wondered, he just wanted to know, but was that true? Maybe.
“If it makes you feel any better, I’ve known others,” Silas said.
“If there are so many others, why doesn’t it bother them?” Wyatt snapped.
“It might be bothering them,” Silas said. “There are a lot of missing and dead people out there. You think that snake thing came into your place, killed your cats and threatened your life just for fun?”
“No.”
It occurred to Wyatt that Silas might have known about his connection to the serpent all along if he had known his Aunt Tallie when he was little. If he had known, wouldn’t he have tried to make friends with him to keep him close? It made sense. It also made sense that a lonely, messed up guy like Wyatt would readily accept his friendship and not worry too much about it. He hadn’t known about night people or black-eyed children or Midgard Serpents or familiar demons or judges or vanguards or any of it before Silas, so he wouldn’t have thought to be suspicious then.
Wyatt closed his eyes and rubbed them with his fingertips. He was tired of it. All of it. “Silas?”
“Yeah?”
“Did you ever actually like me at all?”
“Whoa.” Silas sat forward and put out a hand, which he dropped back into his lap when Wyatt gave him a warning glance. “Where did that come from?”
“Did you?” Wyatt insisted.
“Yes, I liked you,” Silas said. “I like you. We’re friends, huh?”
Wyatt put his head back and let out a deep breath. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m tired. You said you have a spare room?”
“Yeah, I’ll show you, but look, Wyatt, I didn’t walk away from you because we’re not friends,” Silas said. “I didn’t—I don’t—want to make up your mind for you. It started to feel like that’s what I was doing.”
Wyatt laughed and rolled his eyes down to look at him without lifting his head. “You know I had kind of a ferocious crush on you, right?”
Silas looked uncomfortable and that made Wyatt laugh again. He had rarely seen Silas look anything but calm and confident.
“I guess I did know that,” Silas admitted.
“Yeah,” Wyatt agreed. He had suspected that he knew. “It probably made it easier to lie to me and not tell me shit I needed to know.”
“That is not what I did at all—”
“It’s fine. Doesn’t really matter anymore you know, because now I know you’ve slept with my aunt, and I’ll never be able to unknow that. But look… I’ll train with you or do whatever you want me to do, but from here on out you don’t get to decide what I need to know. All right?”
“Fine. Understand that I know a lot though, so I’m not lying to you if I forget to tell you something or it slips my mind and you learn about it elsewhere.”
“Fine, but don’t do it to protect me. I’ll die from your protection at this rate.”
“Fine.”
“Good, then I think—”
The world began to shake and they both stopped talking and gripped the armrests of their chairs. The books on the bookcases rattled and a few fell off on the floor. The glass in the windows shook and Wyatt was alarmed to see a crack streak across one of the panes, though it didn’t shatter. He and Silas exchanged a look and Wyatt opened his mouth to speak, thinking to ask, Is this the serpent? Is it doing this? but he closed his mouth with a click of his teeth and said nothing, afraid that with the room shaking so violently he’d bite his tongue off.
When it stopped, it felt like it had been going on for a long time, but a look at the clock over the kitchen sink told them it had lasted less than a minute. Neither of them moved at first, waiting to see if it was actually over, but when the world remained still after about thirty seconds, they relaxed.
Silas got up to put the books back on the shelves.
Wyatt licked his lips and sat up. “Was that…?”
“I don’t know,” Silas said. “Probably. It’s getting restless.”
“I thought you said it was locked inside of a trap,” Wyatt said. “How can any of this be happening if it’s locked in?”
“It’s locked in, but it’s awake. It wakes up from time to time and locks… well, locks wear out,” Silas said.
“You know, I don’t even understand how any of this can be happening,” Wyatt said.
“It’s happened before,” Silas said.
“I know,” Wyatt said. At the questioning look Silas gave him, he shook his head. “Not now, okay? I’m tired. You’re tired. You have to work in the morning, so you can’t even sleep in. We should go to bed.”
“All right,” Silas said. He made an “after you” gesture with one hand and walked with Wyatt to the back of the apartment. “My room’s here, you can stay in that one across the hall, bathroom’s at the end.”
Wyatt thanked him, went inside and closed the door. He was exhausted, but he lay in the strange bed staring up at the ceiling, waiting for another shake. The earthquake hadn’t been as bad as it could have been, but he couldn’t remember ever being in one before. It wasn’t the kind of earthquake that toppled cities, but this was just the beginning. If they didn’t do something, that lock Silas had talked about was going to break and before that happened, the earthquakes were going to start bringing buildings crashing down. It had scared him, if he was being honest with himself. It still scared him because of what it could mean.
He wished he was home in his own bed so he could talk about it with Thorn. He would have felt a whole lot safer. So thinking, he fell asleep. To his surprise, there were no dreams.
Morning light was peeking through the blinds when Wyatt woke up and he groaned when he rolled over and saw the light from the numbers on the clock by the bed. He had been asleep only a few hours and he had to work late that night, so he was going to be tired all night if he didn’t get a nap in later, but there was no point rolling over and trying to go back to sleep because he was wide awake. He almost never slept in beds other than his own and, though the bed in Silas’s spare room was com
fortable, he was ready to leave it.
There was a box of cereal on the counter with a clean bowl and a spoon. Wyatt poured himself a bowl and ate standing at the counter. While he was eating, he began to think about the earthquake and wondered what the news had to say about it, if anything. He carried his cereal over to the chairs in front of the TV, found the remote control and turned it on. He had to search, but he eventually found a channel with the morning news on it.
They were talking about Donald Trump, which seemed like the only thing they ever talked about on the news anymore. Wyatt waited it out and finally one of the smiling, talking head morning people said, “How about that earthquake last night?” to one of his co-hosts.
The earthquake that Wyatt and Silas had sat through all the way up in Washington had shaken things up all along the west coast. It had caused some damage in California and there was footage of cracked roads, sidewalks, and damaged homes. In one picture, a tree had uprooted between two houses and fallen across the road, smashing the cars parked by the curb. The earthquake had been a magnitude 4.6, which was classed as a “light” quake, but it had caused millions in damage. The smiling morning people were quick to add that no deaths had been reported and there had only been a few, mostly minor, injuries.
Horrible, mangled bodies weren’t what people wanted to see on their TV early in the morning and Wyatt was glad to hear that there hadn’t been any. He expected the next quake wouldn’t be such a love tap though. That giant snake at the center of the earth was through screwing around. He was getting restless alright. Restless, impatient and angry. The next quake wasn’t going to be “light”, it was going to knock down bridges and buildings and squash innocent people like ants. When it said, “Set me free,” it hadn’t been asking. Wyatt doubted that he was the only person out there that it had been making such demands to, but so far, they had all refused because it was still locked up.
He gave himself and those other people a mental high-five for sticking to their guns, but it was only a matter of time before one of them caved or one of the shadow snakes got them. Which meant he was on a clock.
He had stopped wondering why it had to be a him. He’d been wondering that a lot, probably from the moment he met Silas out on the road, and it had taken him a while to realize that it didn’t matter. It wasn’t only him, there were others out there, but it was him too, so he couldn’t just sit back and expect someone else to fix it. If someone fixed it and saved the world before he did, that was great. He would throw that unknown person a party. No one would show up, but he’d still do it, and then he would relax. In the meantime, it was him and it made no difference why.
He put his bowl in the sink and decided he should find Silas, thank him and tell him goodbye. He left the apartment and went around the side of the building into the dojo.
Inside, the dojo was as clean and tidy as Silas’s apartment. The floors were polished wood with matts laid over them. A wide-chested man with dark skin and tribal tattoos on his shaved head was using the free weights. In the middle of the floor, a woman with her red hair braided back from her face was doing something that looked almost like dancing. There were heavy bags toward the back along the right wall and punching bags a few feet away from them. There were swords and staffs on the back wall. Some of the swords were made of wood, but some of them weren’t. Wyatt walked to the back where he could see Silas on the phone in the office through a window that took up half that wall, and he looked closer and noted that some of the swords were tipped for fencing, but there were a few that weren’t wood or tipped; they were real and meant to cut.
The door was cracked open, but Wyatt knocked on it to let Silas know he was there. Silas glanced over at him and nodded.
“I’m sorry, Teddy, but I can’t come out for a funeral right now,” he said. “You know what’s happening right now. She wouldn’t want us to come with the way things are either. You know how she was.”
Whoever Teddy was, he didn’t sound happy and Silas looked both irritated and sad as he listened to him. Teddy wasn’t yelling, but it sounded like he might at any second.
“I know,” Silas said. “I know. Goddamn it, Teddy, she was my friend too, but something’s happening. Something bigger than her or us. I’ll cry for her later, okay? Now, I’m sorry, but I have to go.”
Silas hung up and stood staring down at the phone on his desk. He shook his head and glanced over at Wyatt. “Sorry. That was a friend of mine. His wife was killed yesterday. It’s happening all over. It’s what they do, you know. It’s a tactic of war. You take out the first soldiers, the ones there to stand guard in the first wave. It leaves the enemy’s defenses down and, in this case, the enemy is already weak because they don’t even believe you exist.”
Wyatt almost said he was sorry; she had been his friend, whoever she was, and it was an automatic thing to say in the face of death. He stopped himself though and instead said, “This has all happened before.”
“You said that,” Silas said. “Why?”
“I have this journal. Tallie gave it to me,” Wyatt said. “It talks about it. It’s almost exactly like this. Everything.”
Silas leaned his hip against his desk and gave Wyatt his full attention. “What journal?”
“Some old journal from Jamestown. John Bledsoe was the guy’s name,” Wyatt said. “I haven’t finished reading it yet, but the stuff he talks about… it’s like what’s happening now.”
Silas’s expression didn’t change from the look of mild interest he’d been wearing, but his face paled beneath his tan and he went very still. “John Bledsoe,” he repeated.
“Yeah. You’ve read it?” Wyatt asked.
“No,” Silas said.
He stood away from the desk and went by Wyatt out of the office. “Come on.”
Wyatt followed him, and Silas tossed him one of the wood swords from the wall. Wyatt flinched from it, tried to catch it, almost caught it and dropped it with a clatter on the floor.
“Sorry.”
Silas took down another one and held it loosely in one hand. “Don’t worry about it. Just pick it up,” he said.
Eying him cautiously, Wyatt bent down and picked up the sword. He held it in both hands and felt like an idiot. “Okay, now what?”
“Adjust your grip. Your hands are too close together,” Silas said. “You’re not chopping wood.”
Wyatt adjusted his grip. He still felt stupid. “Okay.”
Silas grinned. “Okay,” he said.
He swung his sword and knocked Wyatt’s out of his hands.
Wyatt hissed as the vibration of the two swords clashing rocketed up his arms. The man lifting weights and the woman doing Tai Chi had both stopped what they were doing to watch. They laughed, and Wyatt’s face heated.
“Pick it up,” Silas said.
“This is stupid,” Wyatt said.
He heard the petulance in his voice and wished he hadn’t said anything. He resolved to keep his mouth shut and picked up the sword.
For the next twenty minutes, Silas knocked the wooden sword out of Wyatt’s hands. It was awkward and heavy, and he wasn’t used to it, so he swung, and he was slow and off-balance. Silas moved like he was playing a game, one that he was winning. A game that he usually won. He made Wyatt think of a cat playing with a bird. A bird that was dying. He seemed to be enjoying himself and Wyatt couldn’t remember the last time he had been so miserable. When Silas called an end to it, he had barely broken a sweat while Wyatt’s heart was hammering, he was flushed and sweat was running down his face and the back of his neck.
“Not bad,” Silas said. He took Wyatt’s sword and put them both back on the wall.
“Not bad? Are you kidding?” Wyatt asked. “That’s not even a real sword and I can’t imagine ever holding a real sword after that. I can barely hold onto the thing. I’m hopeless.”
“You’re not hopeless,” Silas said.
He went over to a shelf and got a couple of towels. He tossed one to Wyatt, who almost dropped it.
“The wood sword is good for building up the muscles you need to use a real sword without any danger you’ll cut yourself or me before you learn how,” Silas said. “You’re out of shape. Your reflexes are slow.”
“Hey,” Wyatt said. It was a feeble protest; he knew Silas was right. “I’m going to get killed, aren’t I? The next messenger demon shadow thing that shows up in my place is going to gut me like a trout.”
Silas patted him on the back. “Nah, I think you’re a fighter.”
“I think you’re wrong,” Wyatt said.
“You remember how you were when I met you?” Silas asked.
Wyatt shrugged. “I was me. What do you mean?”
“You weren’t the same you then that you are now,” Silas said. “When I left you that day at the diner, you had some choices to make. You could have gone a few different ways, but you’re here. You don’t have to be, but you are.”
Wyatt wiped his face with the towel and thought about it. Maybe Silas was right. He might only be a little bit right, but he was still right. When they had met, Wyatt had been terrified of everything, he carried flashlights with him everywhere, he panicked when he got stuck in line at the market too close to dark, and he would rather believe that he was insane than face the truth. Being crazy had felt safe and he had hated it, but he had embraced it too. That Wyatt hadn’t been a fighter, he’d been a coward. That Wyatt didn’t argue with people or stand up for himself or attend family dinners. So, maybe Wyatt didn’t see himself as a fighter, but maybe he was. Stranger things had happened.
“I just came down to say thanks for letting me stay last night. I have to go home, I need to—”
Wyatt stopped. He had been about to say that he needed to feed his cats, but that wasn’t true anymore. It hit him just that quick and it was like he had been socked in the stomach, all the air knocked out of him.
Silas saw it, but he didn’t say anything. He pretended not to notice until Wyatt got himself together. “You could always get a dog,” he said.
Wyatt glared at him. “I hate dogs.” He didn’t really mind dogs as long as they belonged to other people. “I’m not getting a dog.”
