Chapter 53: Mead

“I must make sure my next meal doesn’t run from me,” Björn said, gently slapping the limo door shut. With a screaming twist of metal, it fell off the hinges. He and Jessie both paused and squinted at it as the passenger side door slid to the ground, then toppled over into the parking lot.

“You’ve put me into a bad mood,” Björn noted.

Jessie swallowed hard, “Sorry.”

“Mead will help,” Björn grunted. He started towards the building the little man had been aiming at.

“Uh, that’s the laundromat,” Jessie said, as Björn grabbed the door handle. “It’s the one next door.”

Björn squinted up at the incomprehensible sign, then at the steel drums inside, which he had mistaken for kegs. Articles of clothing were tumbling inside a couple of them, spinning inside a glass case. “Huh,” he said, allowing Jessie to steer him into the meadery, instead.

When Björn beheld the contents of the tiny cubby of a building, however, he felt his mouth go slack. Rows of bottles—nay, aisles of bottles—lined every conceivable open space. There was enough mead here to intoxicate even Thor, without the use of vǫlva magics.

His surprise must’ve shown, because Jessie laughed. “First time in a liquor store?”

“That can’t all be mead,” Björn said, his suspicion rising. “Some is green. And red.”

“It’s every liquor known to man, essentially,” a helpful man at the front desk said, grinning. “Welcome to Brown Jug. We have whiskeys and vodkas and microbrew beers and imported meads from Poland—”

“I’ll take it all!” Björn cried.

Jessie’s face fell. “You can’t take it al—”

Björn swiveled to face him and Jessie stopped. “All.” He retrieved his vampire queen’s debit card and handed it over. Reluctantly, Jessie glanced down and read the card.

“This says Shannon Meeks,” Jessie said. “This nice guy right here might have issues with you using it to buy an entire store worth of—”

Björn allowed some of his shadows to roll from him, pooling at his feet in a billowing wave that crystalized the fake stone flooring beneath him in a sheen of frost. “This is not a request.”

And, wise men that they were, the two began loading boxes into the limo, until the chariot-of-steel was so heavy it could not hold another box. Björn decided that was enough for now—far less than he had first envisioned—but definitely enough to enjoy for a few hours. With the passenger door busted, Björn rode in the back, in between the boxes. He plucked a brown one from a random box, opened it, and began swigging it back. “Oooh,” he cried, wiping his lips, “this one is strong.”

Jessie watched him through the rearview. “Pretty sure that’s aged Scotch.”

Björn held the bottle out, still feeling the fire in his stomach. “I approve of this ‘Scotch.’” He drank the rest of the bottle.

“Hey, uh, maybe you should slow down back there, buddy…”

Björn tossed the bottle aside and reached for another one. “It’s either this or listen to your prattling, girlish questions,” he growled.

“Just trying to get a better understanding of what I’m dealing with,” Jessie said. “It’s a couch-man thing. In order to fix the problem, we’ve gotta know the problem, you know?”

“What problem?” Björn asked, confused. “I have no problem.” He popped the cap from another bottle and drained the amber fluid to the last drop, then tossed the empty bottle out the window, where it hit another car and made it swerve. Grinning at this new diversion, Björn picked up another bottle, took aim at the other driver’s head and…

“Women problems,” Jessie blurted, watching him take aim through the rearview mirror.

Björn hesitated, frowning down at the bottle in his hand, remembering that first crushing moment where Mardöll had refused to approach him, where Odin had been forced to cross the boundary between kingdoms and drag her back to his land. He remembered the fine skin of her hand, trembling in his, the look of horror on her face as she stared up at him…

Saying nothing, Björn popped the cap and swigged down the bottle. So what if the only woman he’d craved in centuries looked at him with revulsion? He didn’t need her love, just her obedience.

He must’ve squeezed the bottle a little too hard, because glass crunched in his fist, biting into his hand. He caught Jessie watching him through the rearview and quickly dropped the broken bottle into an empty box, wiping the blood on the beige upholstery. “I don’t have women problems,” he said. Even as he spoke the words, however, he knew it was a lie.

“Are you kidding me?” Jesse demanded. “Every guy has women problems. You show me one guy who doesn’t have women problems and I’ll show you a gay man or a eunuch.”

Well, that was true enough.

Mulling that over in silence, Björn found a black bottle, opened it, and sniffed. Immediately, he made a face. “What kind of man adds cream to his alcohol?”

“Uhh,” Jessie said, “it’s a girl thing.”

“Figures.” Björn capped the bottle and tossed it out the window in disgust, to the screech of tires and a series of honks. As Jessie twisted to peer out the limo’s back, Björn pulled forth a bottle shaped like a jewel. “Now this,” he cried, tugging it free, “this is a drink fit for Odin’s Chosen!” He took a sip, gasped at the heat, and chugged it down with reverence.

Turning back from the sounds of crunching metal behind them, Jessie’s eyes fell on him a moment, unreadable, then the couch-man turned back to face the front, quiet.

#

Jessie watched the monster-man down his thirty-sixth bottle of hard alcohol before his eyes rolled up in the back of his head and he slumped forward against the partition, snoring.

Immediately, Jessie stopped the car and got out, heart hammering uncontrollably as quietly set the lock and started backing away.

Whatever the fuck it was, it was bad news.

And, he had discovered over the course of six extra hours and six loops around Anchorage, totally broken. Like PTSD on a galactic scale.

Jessie looked up at the area where he had finally pulled off the road. He’d taken the limo down Birchwood Loop and pulled onto the relatively abandoned dirt road that went to Beach Lake. He honestly hadn’t known what else to do—this thing was obviously capable of massacring police, and just who did you call on a guy who ripped off heads and dripped living ice-shadow like a fog machine?

About ninety-eight percent of him wanted to run. Just say ‘fuck it,’ bolt for the highway, and hitch a ride to New Zealand. The other two percent—the two percent that would be graduating from UAA with a Psychology degree this fall—saw an opportunity to do some good in the world.

But after listening to the monster drunkenly detail out the litany of abuse he had planned for his lovers and enemies alike, that ninety-eight percent of it was essentially beating it to death with a crowbar.

He couldn’t just leave the guy in the middle of nowhere for some unlucky Schmoe to stumble across, though. That was irresponsible, and definitely bad Karma, though he was definitely re-thinking the Karma thing when Buddhism had been so thoroughly trumped by severed heads and writhing tiger-stripes. There were still red smears on the passenger side of the limo from where the beast’s blood-soaked body had sat down after—he said—killing eight paramilitary Catholic guys out in the woods, getting shot multiple times, and dressing in their talon-shredded clothes.

Inside the limo, the monster was moaning, apologizing to somebody called Eirik. When Jessie leaned forward to look, the man’s eyes were shut, his shoulders quaking in some drunken internal struggle.

It was the wretched agony in his face, however, that kept Jessie from just turning and leaving him there.

Hands shaking, he got out his cell phone and dialed the number for Shannon Meeks, the one who had left him the message about a guy who ate people.

The phone never picked up. Damn. When it came to voicemail, he hung up and tried three more times. Nothing.

“Yeah, this is that guy you talked to at the gas station,” Jessie said, finally leaving a message. “Um, yeah, your creepy friend made me drive him back up to Eagle River. I’m out at Beach Lake right now—guy scared the crap outta me, didn’t wanna leave him somewhere populated.” He hesitated as the heavy sound of snoring began rumbling from the open window. “Was drinking a lot. Pretty sure he’s out cold.”

He hung up, waited, but nobody called back. Damn! He called the café, instead.

“Jessie?!” his boss demanded. “Why the fuck aren’t you at work, man?!”

Odd, Jessie thought, blinking. He would have thought the first thing out of his boss’s mouth would have been, ‘Gee, I see you left me a severed head on the cash register, Jessie. Are you trying to drop a hint about that raise we talked about?’

“I…uh…” He frowned. “Was there something on the counter in there when you showed up?”

“Like what?”

“Anything strange at all?” Jessie demanded. Then, wincing, “…blood?”

“What blood?” As if he’d just said the Pope had shat on his front porch.

Jessie flushed, but if it was with relief or embarrassment or sheer animal terror at the realization that someone had cleaned up the mess and he therefore had to be in the middle of something way too big for a line-dancing country kid from Ohio, “There was a weirdo last night…” he paused to glance back through the window at Björn, “…guy was making me nervous.”

“If you’re not gonna come to work, you call,” Dave snapped. “I’m here all alone, Jessie.”

Jessie, who had spent the last ten hours driving through the night, doing endless circles in Anchorage, stalling for time, peeing himself in terror, and head-fucking a demon, oddly found himself removed from giving much of a shit, probably because he didn’t really have the frame of reference to really care about Dave’s problems at the moment. He said as much.

“Frame of reference?!” Dave demanded. “Are you looking to get fired?”

“No, sir,” Jessie said, quickly backtracking because he needed that job, “I just had a long night and I can’t really—”

“Yeah, screw your excuses, Jessie. I don’t care you’ve got kids and you’re in school and you need this job, yada yada horseshit excuse, horseshit excuse. You’re gonna get here, in twenty minutes, or you’re fired, Jessie, you understand?”

“But I’m four hours away!” Jessie shouted, finally losing his temper. It didn’t happen often—after all, he’d been trained to never lose his temper—but the unrelenting terror and adrenaline of the overnight road-trip from Hell had left him feeling strangely distanced from his life of just the day before.

“Then you’re fired.” It was cold, efficient, brutal. “Don’t bother coming in tomorrow. You wanna go on a last-minute gallyvant across Alaska without so much as telling me? Fine. Find someplace else to work. You obviously don’t need this job.”

The sudden dial tone was like a slap to the face. Jessie pulled the phone from his head and stared at it, fighting the sudden impulse to throw it to the ground and stomp on it until it was nothing but pieces of glass and plastic.

“Is this that place that hires couch-men for gold?” Björn slurred from the car.

That the monster had heard the exchange was startling—he was over ten feet away.

“Uh, kind of,” Jessie said, quickly putting more distance—and sun—between them.

Björn groaned and dragged his head up to squint at him from inside the limo’s shadowy interior. “So your services are now for hire? You are beholden to no lord at the moment?”

That was…weird. And scary. Jessie swallowed hard. “I don’t think you tried the vodka yet. It’s that clear stuff in the back.”

“Fuck the vodka,” Björn slurred, sliding a burly arm through the collection of empty bottles in the back seat, shattering some of them and spilling others. “I need a woman.”

Pretty sure she doesn’t need you, Jessie thought, but didn’t say it.

“You!” Björn shouted, drunkenly pointing a massive finger in his direction. “I decided I do have a problem, couch-man. My woman won’t bed me, so I’ll hire you to solve this problem for me—”

Jessie grimaced and immediately started to say, “I’m pretty sure I can’t help you with—”

“—for three chests of gold and a First Lander villa I won from Loki in a game of dice three hundred years ago.”

Jessie’s denials died in his throat. All he could say was, “Huh?”

“My problem,” Björn insisted. “This woman. Mardöll. I want to stake my claim and breed her, but she runs from me. You will help me find a solution before it destroys me.”

Jessie flinched at the creature’s crude words. But even under the vulgarity, he saw a flash of those layers of shame and self-disgust that had been laid so naked in the drive, layers of trauma that the man-beast didn’t even seem aware he had, but seemed completely willing to share.

For a brief, crazy moment, Jessie thought maybe he could help.

…for three chests of gold and a First Lander villa…

“Well,” he said, his mind going into overdrive, “let’s start right there for a second. I’m not an expert, but I think part of the problem might be in your approach…”