Chapter 57: The Subtle Approach

“So you actually think that this will help me subdue her.” Björn held up the flimsy blue ‘jeans’ over the blood-caked, shredded black combat gear he had taken from his vanquished foes. He had thought that being bedecked in the blood of his enemies would improve the fire in his vampire’s loins, but Jessie had spent the last thirty minutes arguing that it would do the opposite, after convincing him that before they could go back to the house to meet his queen, he had to be ‘presentable,’ whatever that meant.

“‘Subdue’ is the wrong word, and if she ever hears you say it, you can bet your ass she’s not gonna cooperate. Come on, man. We talked about this. You gotta think about how she feels, okay? Rule Number One.”

Björn grimaced, feeling the couch-man’s words grating on his spine like the bitter icicles of a jötnar’s hammer. “Bed her,” he managed. “You think it will help me bed her.”

“This is America, so there’s generally some courtship involved,” Jessie reminded him. “Take it from me—if you go in there expecting to get laid, she’s gonna laugh in your face.”

“Then I’ll eat her!” Björn roared, feeling his control of the shadows slip and slithers of blackness dribble to the floor in a wash of ice.

Jessie carefully sidestepped the rolling pool of shadow and gave him a flat look. “Dude, what did we talk about?”

Björn showed teeth and, through them, bit out, “No…yelling…”

The couch-man raised a brow.

“…or releasing the shadow around witnesses…” Björn muttered, reeling the blackness back in.

“Progress! Awesome, Björn.” The couch-man actually sounded pleased, which made Björn feel a little wash of pride that he’d managed to do something in this forsaken, sun-washed hellhole right.

“But why these plain, disgusting, clean clothes?” Björn demanded, hefting the jeans up again. “Surely the women here want to see the carnage of my enemies as proof of my fitness as a mate!”

“Uh, no,” Jessie said. “Girls don’t go for the uber macho slasher shit here. They actually find it kind of disgusting. And illegal.”

Björn frowned, lowering the jeans. “I could make her go for it.”

“And we’re back to that again.” Jessie sighed. “Look, Björn, if you want her to willingly spread her—” He choked as a woman with three daughters pushed a cart past him, all four of them staring up at Björn with wide-eyes. Bjorn bared his teeth at them and the mother hastened her step, propelling the cart full of kids down the aisle.

Cowardly peasants, Björn thought, irritated. Why did everything run from him? He hadn’t noticed before, but after an afternoon with Jessie, he was beginning to think the couch-man was right. Women and children feared him. Needlessly. When he wasn’t even hungry. It was annoying.

Getting closer, Jessie lowered his voice and said, “If you want her to bed you, there’s rules all women go by. They’re softies, real chickenshits at heart, so you’ve gotta remember to treat them the way you would want to be treated, if you were a softie and a chickenshit.”

Björn still didn’t understand that one. He wanted her to bite him. He couldn’t imagine a time when he wouldn’t want her to bite him. “Fuck their stupid, mind-bending rules,” Björn growled. “I want to throw her down, spread her legs, and plow her like the sharpened till to the field—”

“Right,” the couch-man interrupted. “And that…” he gestured with a scrunched face at Björn’s gore-crusted state of attire, “…is not going to get in her pants.”

Björn glanced down at himself again, noticed the talon-marks along the chest and thigh where he had shredded his enemies with his bare hands, then squinted back at the human. “You’re sure?” He thought it looked undeniably manly.

“Yeah. I’m sure. Pretty sure I see part of an eyeball clinging on to your left nipple there.”

Björn looked down, wrinkled his nose, and flicked it off. Then, realizing he really had nothing to lose, then sighed and started to strip.

“No!” the couch-man cried, lunging to grab the waistband of his pants. “Keep those on. Wait for the dressing room.”

Totally perplexed, Björn blinked at him. “Why?”

“Because nakedness is a crime here,” the couch-man said.

Björn squinted. “A man is born naked. How can it be a crime?”

The human held his mouth open like he wanted to say something, then just closed it and shook his head. “Never mind. Just trust me. You don’t want to attract unwanted attention. It will embarrass her. Put her life in danger.”

Björn scoffed. “I can protect her from the ineffective flailings of mortal apes.” He started to change anyway.

“Okay, look,” the soft, chubby man grated, his face reddening. “You want me to solve this problem for you? You put the goddamn jeans in the goddamn basket and keep your goddamn pants on or I’m outta here, right here, right now.”

“You leave without solving my problem and I’ll eat you, little man!” Björn snarled, still undressing.

“Yeah, well, you haven’t paid me yet, so fuck it.” The softling turned and started walking away with the cart, his pudgy body jiggling as it went.

Björn, in the middle of unbuckling his belt, frowned at the mortal’s impudence. Then, the act grating against his very core, he re-buckled the belt and followed him. “You irritate me, couch-man,” Björn snarled down at him, once he’d caught up.

“Look,” Jessie said, stopping the cart with a sigh in what must have been the sprite aisle, the clothes made for tiny people in a disgusting profusion of pastel pinks and blues, “you obviously don’t like me, but if you want me to be able to do my job, you’re gonna have to at least trust me to give you good advice.”

Björn felt his brow crease. “Why do you say I don’t like you?”

“What do you mean, ‘why’?!” The human squinted at him, looking baffled. “Because you’re constantly threatening to eat me!”

“You’re alive, aren’t you?” Björn pointed out. “And contracted in my service. Few mortals in the history of Man could ever claim the same.”

Jessie squinted up at him for some time, and Björn could see the cogs turning in the man’s mighty mind. That, Björn knew—but would never admit—was why he had hired this man who solved problems. It was clear that Jessie-of-Nowhere had the labyrinthine mind of a magus, constantly working, puzzling, thinking… Whereas Björn was simply baffled by his queen’s repeated rejections, he could easily imagine this man finding him the solution to his soulmate’s stubborn refusal to breed.

And that, Björn knew, was worth any minor degradation. To have her submit to him, spread her legs beneath him as he drove his cock into her…

“You threaten to eat people you like.”

“Of course,” Björn said, shaking the image of his willing soulmate from his mind. He cocked his head, realizing there was a deeper meaning to the couch-man’s words. “You don’t?”

“That’s generally not acceptable in my world, no.” The human was still watching him, the magus’s mind working those gray eyes with incomprehensible complexity. Then, clearing his throat, he said, “I think we need to work on our communication. This whole time, I was pretty sure you wanted to eat me. It was…distracting.”

“I was hungry. Talking about eating people calms me.”

“With this girl of yours, you need to be calm without threatening to eat people. It’s more relaxing. And here, ‘relaxing’ means more sex.”

Björn supposed he could see that, considering how abominably pacifist this vile realm was. “So…” he offered, struggling for the right response, “…in this Firstlander world of softlings, it relaxes people when I pretend I’m not hungry?”

“I guess threats in general are frowned upon,” Jessie said. “I mean, you definitely shouldn’t be threatening people you’re not intending to hurt.”

“Oh.” That was new to him. “Why?”

“Because we’re not immortal and we don’t come back a thousand times in a row when you kill us,” Jessie said.

“Sure you do,” Björn said, his frown deepening as the magus’s mind once more outpaced him. “You simply find another body and forget about the last.”

Jessie opened his mouth to say something, then, casting him a curious glance, closed it again. “All right. Point is, you want a girl, you’re gonna have to play by her rules. Unfortunately for you, her rules are different than your rules because she grew up here not in the Nightlands.”

“Then I’ll kidnap her back to the Nightlands and introduce her to my rules.”

“Pretty sure that would go over like a shit-filled bottle rocket.”

Björn squinted, then scowled down at a woman who inched forward to reach for a set of tiny socks near his chest, just out of reach. Björn didn’t move, daring the filthy mortal to touch him so he could tear off her arm for the offense.

“Say excuse me,” Jessie said, watching the interaction.

Björn snapped around to look at him, fighting a stab of panic. “Why? You want to leave me already?” As irritating as he was, Björn had already found himself growing used to the couch-man’s guidance and company in this baffling realm. In a few short hours, he’d made more progress in the human realm than he had in a decade of hunting and slipping between bars, getting invited to drink by men who, invariably, wanted him to pay afterwards. Like rag-carrying alcohol whores.

The couch-man gave him an odd little frown, those mental cogs turning again. “No, that’s what you say,” he said. “Excuse me. It means you’re sorry to be in someone’s way.” When Björn’s face immediately twisted to tell him he wasn’t ‘sorry’ to be in a mortal’s way, the couch-man quickly held up a hand and said, “Trust me. Work within the boundaries she knows.” He gestured at the woman in the aisle with them pointedly. “Excuse me. Try it.”

Narrowing his eyes at the couch-man, Björn nonetheless sauntered up to the woman. “Excuse me,” he snarled.

The woman’s eyes widened and she quickly pushed her cart from the aisle, never to bother him again.

Feeling proud of himself for solving the problem, Björn grinned and turned back to his couch-man friend. “There. She left.”

“Yeah.” Jessie sighed. “She did.” Surprisingly, instead of excited by their ‘progress,’ however, Jessie looked…tired. Probably because the mortal hadn’t gotten any sleep that night. He’d actually fallen asleep at a stop light on the drive to Wal-Mart, and by the time a honking car had woken him up, he’d already drooled all over the driver’s seat of the limo.

The couch-man yawned, touched his temple with a groan, then seemed to shake himself. “Okay, gotta figure out…” Jessie hesitated, giving him another of those analyzing looks. “Empathy. Hmmm. Do you like to be scared, Björn?” He started walking again, pushing the cart.

“I don’t get scared,” Björn chuckled.

Jessie laughed—laughed—and for a moment, Björn almost ripped off his head. Almost. He fisted his hand instead, remembering the couch-man’s caution that ‘showing your strength only shows your weakness’ in this disgusting realm.

The couch-man must have seen his fury, because he reddened and said, “So the Valkyrie didn’t—”

“I said don’t say their names!” Björn roared, his heart instantly stabbed with panic as he dropped into a hunting crouch.

Jessie gave him a flat stare for so long that Björn realized he must have said something wrong. Straightening from his crouch, Björn backtracked in his mind. “Oh.” He used his ‘inside voice’ to whisper, “Saying their names lets them see you in the pool within Guðrhöll. If they can see you, they can find you.”

Jessie continued to stare at him, before slowly lifting a brow and clearing his throat.

“What?”

The couch-man shook his head. “Okay, so avoidance issues.” He sighed and looked at the artificial lights of the ceiling, then leveled his stare back at Björn. “Look. Björn. My head’s been pounding for hours. See these rings under my eyes?”

Björn did.

“I’m about to pass out. Think we could take this up later, when I’m not about to fall over?”

“But I need to know how to make my woman want to fuck me now!” Björn snapped. “Before we go back to her hovel of a home.”

“You’re not trying to make her fuck you, you’re trying to make her like you.” At Björn’s confused blink, the couch-man raised a palm between them and shook his head. “Ugh. This is just too much for one day. Let’s get you to the dressing room, buy your clothes, and get out. Much more of this and I’m looking at a complete mental break, and then I won’t be able to help you at all.”

Björn grimaced, but agreed, if only because it was clear the mortal’s feeble body was about to collapse beneath him. He allowed Jessie to lead him to the ‘dressing room’ and was about to go inside and change when he caught a ripple of flittering, unnatural movement out of the corner of his eye. He frowned and looked.

Striding through the shoe department, heading in the opposite direction, was a man in all-black attire, from his black, silver-embroidered boots to his silver-trimmed hat. Björn, who had been sniffing the air to try and locate the source of the flittering, stopped, dead in his tracks, as the wave of despair washed off the man, like a tide of blood and rot.

It was a smell that Björn had taken in once before, on a bloody, intricate gold timepiece that Odin had solemnly held out for him to inhale.

“Look past the blood,” Odin had said with sober gravity. “The blood belongs to another.”

It’s him… Björn thought, on a wave of shock.

Beside him, Jessie was saying, “…rule that you can only take in four at a time…”

Björn ignored him and, transfixed by the overwhelming reek of several millennium’s-worth of despair, followed the man in the hat.

#

Jessie was getting the last pair of jeans ready for the dressing room, fighting an exhaustion-headache from hell, when the barghest simply walked off.

“Hey!” he called at Björn’s back. If the barghest noticed him calling to him in any way, the man-beast showed no indication. If anything, he moved faster, ducking down amidst the clothing racks to keep from being noticed. Realizing the monster-man was just gonna leave him there, Jessie almost threw the jeans down and walked away.

Then, as Björn hastily turned a corner, beelining for something on the other side of Wal-Mart, Jessie realized he probably needed to intervene. “Oh goddamn it,” he muttered, throwing the jeans back into the cart. “I’ll be right back for these,” he promised the lady at the dressing rooms, then hurried after the barghest.

Björn was going fast, but still walking, so at a brisk jog, Jessie was able to catch up. He got within ten feet of the barghest when he realized Björn was making a bee-line for an Arab guy in a fancy cowboy getup. The stranger, oblivious to Björn’s rapid approach, was pulling a novel off the shelf in the ‘Books’ section, back to them. Björn walked up, fast, and as the guy was turning, an amicable smile on his tawny face, the barghest raised a brutish, tattoed arm the size of Jessie’s leg and batted off the man’s head.

Jessie stumbled to a startled stop in the middle of the aisle, watching the Arab cowboy’s head bounce down between the shelving units and finally come to a stop by the Travel section at his feet.

“Oh. My. G—”

Before Jessie could finish, the guy’s body exploded in a blast of finger-length crickets that roiled out of the aisle in a swarming, writhing cloud. A moment later, the head did the same, and the two insect clouds combined overhead, shaping themselves into the form of a very pissed-off-looking cowboy.

“CHOSEN,” their slippery wings and bumping bodies hissed in a mind-numbing roar. “YOU. WILL. DIIEEEE.” The bug-man made a snarling face and a rattling growl vibrated the very air in Jessie’s lungs.

Then, translucent wings flashing as the man-shape ducked and boiled under the artificial lights, the cloud of yellow-orange crickets spun suddenly as one and churned towards the front of the store, a seething mass of insects that made people near the cash registers scream and bat at their face and eyes.

Björn turned back from the would-be corpse with a smug, self-satisfied look on his face. Wickedly-curved, pitch-black talons the size of Jessie’s pinkies had slipped through the tips of the barghest’s fingers, and Björn was grinning as he wiped bug-gore from them onto his shirt. “I got first blood,” he chuckled, walking back to Jessie.

“—od.” Jessie swallowed, blinked twice, then the pounding headache he’d been fighting all morning intensified by a magnitude of thirty, he felt a weird pressure suddenly streak between his temples, and he felt his knees slide out from underneath him as he slumped to the floor.