Chapter 61: A Hidden Pestilence

Jessie opened his eyes to a splitting headache. He groaned and reached up to touch his temple, but his hand was stopped by a beige, leather-clad steering wheel. “Huh?” he managed, disoriented. He wasn’t in his bed, instead propped up in somebody else’s once-fancy-but-now-beat-to-shit car, and he could’ve sworn he just had the worst fucking nightmare…

“Hello, couch-man,” a spine-chillingly familiar voice said from behind him.

Jessie made a full-body cringe, then, with the slowness of a recovering psychotic hoping the delusion would go away before it could be made real, lifted his eyes to the rearview mirror.

The barghest sat sprawled comfortably in the back of the limo, dressed in black jeans and T-shirt, surrounded by a wall of stuffed animals, pots and pans, brightly-colored blankets and towels, camping gear, clearance winter jackets, gaudy dime-store jewelry, and other seemingly random Wal-Mart merchandise, merrily eating a bag of Cheetos. “Good,” Björn said, as soon as their eyes made contact. “You’re awake. I have ‘decent’ clothes. Go take me to my queen. I will present her with gifts.” The big man spread his arm wide to proudly include the random assortment of crap, then gestured with a Cheeto at the steering wheel.

Jessie didn’t even want to know how the barghest had acquired his ‘gifts’ or his new clothes. In fact, the only thing that was currently going through his mind, over and over, was that he wanted out. He’d seen Björn tear someone’s head off with no more warning than if he were slapping him amicably on the back.

And then, as if that weren’t bad enough, the guy Björn had insulted had become something straight out of an Egyptian horror movie and had flown off in a house-sized swarm to start eating crops.

Wow, I am in so far over my head right now, Jessie thought, watching the barghest dump the last of the Cheetos into his mouth and crunch up the bag, then throw it out the open window. So completely out of my—

Jessie frowned as the Cheetos bag hit the Wal-Mart parking lot, his brain suddenly clicking into gear. As a follower of Buddha, there was very little in this world that would genuinely irritate him, but casual littering by negligent idiots got under his skin every time. “Pick it up,” he blurted.

Björn, who was yawning and stretching comfortably, stopped with a blink. “Huh?”

“The bag,” Jessie snapped, jerking a thumb at it. “Pick it up.” After the last twenty-four hours Jessie had had, he was so far beyond giving a shit about being rational at this point that he scowled at the barghest through the rearview, daring him not to comply.

Björn blinked his cream-pale blue eyes, then looked out the window at the discarded Cheetos bag, looking genuinely perplexed. “I don’t want it anymore.”

He doesn’t want it anymore… Jessie spun in his seat so he could glare at the barghest directly through the divider. “This isn’t the fucking second century, Björn. You wanna look like a stray dog fresh off the landfill? Fine. She’s gonna see you as a honorless, shit-flinging barbarian if she sees you throw your own leavings around like a flatulent hillbilly. There are trash receptacles for those things. Grow some class. Fucking goat-ass savage.” Scowling, he spun back to face the front, his whole body stiff with annoyance.

Behind him, Björn hesitated. “But…” Through the rearview, he saw the barghest glance out at the bag.

“But?” Jessie all but shouted. “This planet was already on its death throes before you and your friends showed up to ruin what’s left—deserts expanding, polar bears starving to death, diseased little children gasping for goddamn air like dying fishes because we stuffed the atmosphere with so many fluorocarbons we’re giving them cancer because we’re overpopulated and can’t feed everybody and, gee, we’re poisoning what’s left with pesticides and our own blind stupidity, smearing the indelible stink of humanity across everything our ancestors once considered sacred, a necrotic virus on the skin of Mother Earth, and you just had to go show your indifference to the whole soul-crushing rot all around us by casually adding to it with your single goddamn bag of Cheetos like an asshole.” Fuming, Jessie yanked his seatbelt off, got out of the limo, snagged the Cheetos bag, and threw it back through the window at Björn.

Björn blinked up at him. “Sorry, couch-man…”

“And don’t call me couch-man!” Jessie screamed. “I’m a goddamn psychologist, you dumb fucking brick, not your Stockholm-Syndromed, happy-go-lucky, you-betcha gopher-boy slave.” Then, without another word, he climbed back into the limo, slammed the door shut, started the car, and wordlessly started driving them to the address the woman had left with him, ‘in case of emergency,’ fully intending to dump the striped cinderblock on somebody else’s hands and get back to his wife and kids.

Björn said nothing for so long that Jessie thought maybe he’d, oh, teleported out of the car and saved him the hassle of finding a new babysitter. When he looked, Björn was staring at him through the rearview, pale.

“I had no idea the situation was so dire,” Björn said.

“We’re like locusts,” Jessie muttered, a little mollified. “I mean, even fucking Antarctica is falling apart.”

“Then it’s as Odin warned…” Björn said soberly. “Pestilence has gone unchecked in this realm too long, and now his sickness has spread to every corner of this realm.”

At first, Jessie thought the striped ingrate was talking disease and sickness in general, but then, upon catching Björn’s worried, thoughtful look in the rearview, remembering the bug-man composed entirely of ultra-large crickets…

“You mean that literally, don’t you?” he breathed. “Pestilence. The horseman. Humans are his locusts.”

Björn frowned. “I thought it was obvious.”

Apparently it was obvious to a meatbrained savage, but not to one of the bugs running around happily destroying the crops. Jessie went quiet, watching the road ahead. Eventually, he looked back up at Björn. “Why did you attack him?”

Björn shrugged. “It is my duty as one of Odin’s Chosen to kill him. He breaks the balance.”

“But…” Jessie swallowed, trying to piece together how you killed something made of bugs. Pesticides, maybe? “How can you kill one of the Four Horsemen?”

The big man in the seat shrugged again. “Demigods are never easy.”

Demigods. Great. “And you thought you could just waltz in there and bash his head off, end of story?”

Björn chuckled. “Of course not. I wanted first blood.” The big man got almost wistful. “No, his death will be much more difficult. It will require planning and weapons. I might even have to reclaim Skofnung.”

“But…” Jessie asked, glancing back at Björn, who had no weapons but the wickedly-curved talons that grew from his fingers and the way the shadows boiled out of his tattoos when he was angry, “…how? You’re just…one guy.”

Björn grunted. “Nemesis and Freyja and Ra should also be sending their Chosen to help, though I’ve not seen them yet. I was told Gaia and Psyche would assist me, too, but you couldn’t get a feylord within a hundred feet of a barghest, much less one of Psyche’s limp-dick, blunt-toothed, brain-twisting book-fuckers.” Björn chuckled to himself, waving disgustedly. “And I’m fine with that—sniveling mindweaving cowards should all be skinned alive and made to choke on their own shriveled dicks. They have no place in a battle.”

Jessie studied Björn through the mirror. “I thought your soulmate was from Freyja’s court.”

Björn snorted with complete scorn. “She’s no warrior.”

“Oh, okay then,” Jessie snorted. “Matter settled.”

“Yes,” Björn said, with extreme confidence. “By the way, I meant to ask you… Do you think the soft-hearted woman will like my gifts?” He held out a big pink teddy bear with a red CANCER AWARENESS heart on it for him to examine.

“You want my honest answer or do you want to feel good about yourself?”

Björn blinked at him, then blinked at the bear. Sighing, the barghest turned to throw it out the window, then, at Jessie’s sharp look, hesitated, then sheepishly tossed it into the back of the limo. “How about this one?” the barghest asked, holding up a multicolored umbrella. “If you push the ring up the stick, it turns into a butterfly.” He demonstrated, grinning widely and showing doglike canines. “Women like butterflies, yes?”

“Pretty sure she’s not going to be as impressed with that as you are.”

Björn’s face fell and he glanced around him at his gathered loot. “She won’t like any of this, will she?”

“Well, from what you told me—and from the fact we’re driving in a limo that probably cost more than somebody’s house—I’m pretty sure if she wanted to buy herself stuffed animals or umbrellas or kitchen sets, she would have done it already.”

The barghest looked devastated. “I spent hours collecting these things for her.”

Jessie gave the barghest a long, considering look, debating whether or not to ask him what horrors he had perpetrated to fill the limo with shrink-wrapped shit from China.

After a bitter internal battle, Jessie chose against it, deciding he liked his conscience clean. At least he hadn’t seen any girl scout cookies.

They finished the rest of the short drive up Eagle River Road with Jessie item-by-item nixing Björn’s ‘gifts’ until there was just one little multitool from the camping aisle left.

“This?” Björn had demanded, holding the plastic Leatherman packaging up in confusion. “Of all of it? Why this?!”

“Every Alaskan girl needs a Leatherman,” Jessie said, quoting one of his best friends at UAA. She’d been an outdoors nut, the kind that disappeared in Denali for weeks on end. Then, seeing the suspicion forming on Björn’s face, he quickly added, “And no, it’s not a man, it’s just the name of the manufacturer. The brand.”

Björn squinted at the multitool as Jessie pulled them off the main road and took the gravel driveway slowly, so as to not throw rocks against the paint. Though, at this point, with the inside of the vehicle slashed, drenched in alcohol, the passenger door missing, and bloodstains all over the front half of the driver’s compartment, Jessie didn’t know why he really cared at this point.

He pulled the limo to a stop outside the massive, dark wooden house looming within a shroud of birch and spruce forest, but saw no other cars parked in the circular driveway out front. “Looks like nobody’s home,” he offered, on a pang of disappointment. He had actually been looking forward to some answers—or at least someone else to take over babysitting duties. He unbuckled and reached for his seatbelt.

Björn’s hand, suddenly driven through the partition between them, stopped him. “Sshhh,” the big man rumbled. “Don’t move. I hear boots.” It was the low, creepy sound of a predator. Sure enough, when Jessie looked into the rearview, the barghest's face had shifted to something between canine and feline, and shadows were boiling out of the creature’s body as he watched the house.

The barghest’s tension infecting him, Jessie lowered his voice to a whisper. “Boots are a good thing, right?”

“My woman doesn’t wear boots.” The house had Björn’s complete attention, now. Then, a moment later, the barghest’s head snapped to the right, taking in something in the forest. Then to the left. Each time he looked, his body bristled, and that low rattle in his chest increased like a pissed-off alien. “Prepare yourself, Jessie,” Björn said, those long back talons extruding from his fingertips and the insides of the limo losing a few dozen degrees. “There’s about to be blood.”

#

Shannon took a lot longer to thaw this time than the last, because this time Angus didn’t help her. Instead, he had fallen to a crouch a few feet away, a full-grown man squatting on his hands and knees like a dog, shivering all over. She could tell through her blurry vision that he wore some sort of embroidered yellow vest, and that his bare arms and face were tinted green, with his hair, lips, and eyes a deeper emerald. The blazing firefly-green of his blood web was even then writhing with those black tapeworms, jerking and tugging at his limbs and body, trying to drag him out of the house.

Can you hear me? Shannon thought, for her lips and tongue were still frozen from the extra-long journey.

Slowly, with great effort, the man on the floor nodded. He was trembling, his green fists tight to the floor, his head down as he panted.

I need you to help me, Shannon thought, desperate. It was taking her body too long to melt the ice. At this current pace, it might be hours, and they didn’t have hours… Please…

Trembling all over, the green-skinned man crawled towards her and, with what was obviously a massive effort on his part, lifted his hand to her shoulder.

Instantly, a wash of warmth hit her in a welcome flood, the stiffness in her limbs beginning to ease, first in her smallest digits, then outward and into her deeper joints. As her vision cleared, the man’s green skin faded, replaced by the fur and muted brown bloodweb of a dog. Gasping, the feylord pulled away and collapsed back into a huddle on the floor, shivering like he was dying.

Though he hadn’t managed to concentrate long enough to melt her completely, Shannon nonetheless found she could uncurl from her fetal position, her bones still aching with cold, her body awash in the burning fire of thawing limbs. “How…” she croaked, eyes on the writhing black tapeworms thrashing within his veins. “How do I get that stuff out of you?”

Angus shook his head. Fighting the blood magic seemed to be taking his full concentration.

It’s trying to make him leave, Shannon realized, watching the blackness push at his limbs, compelling him to move. To go back to the Duke…

She decided to make it easier on him. “Stay here. I’ll be right back.”

The command actually made the feylord’s body relax with a gasp of relief.

“Can the Duke follow us?” Shannon demanded.

Angus shook his head, his jaw clenched with tendon-tearing tightness.

“Talk to me,” Shannon said.

Instead of speaking, however, Angus’s furry body went into a sudden convulsion and he made a low moan as his eyes started to roll into the back of his head.

“Never mind!” she cried quickly, realizing that it must have been a direct contradiction of whatever Buðlungr had told him to do. “Never mind, you don’t have to talk.”

The feylord let out a low sob of relief and curled in on himself, shuddering violently as he hyperventilated on the floor. He started crawling towards the front door, those same jerky, unnatural motions.

Not looking good, Captain…

She needed that book, and she needed it now. But she also couldn’t leave him alone, just in case he lost control and wandered off. Apologizing, Shannon picked him up and, as he weakly tried to keep crawling, carried him down into her parents’ basement.

It was two stories under the house, through a foot-deep metal vault door, then down a concrete staircase that ended in a horror show of cages, sadistic devices, whips, chains, and iron maidens.

She saw a part of Angus register his surroundings, because his droopy mastiff eyes went wide and he started to struggle in earnest, gasping and panting.

“Hold still, dumbass,” she muttered, holding him easily in place. She picked one of the biggest cages and pulled the gate open.

But she must not have given him a very strong dose of venom, because he was thrashing and biting her and Shannon, startled, dropped him, checking to see where he had punctured skin on her shoulder.

Angus, free, was already scrabbling up the stairs, fast, and Shannon realized she had to catch him, now, or lightning-fast leafy bastard was going to outpace her. She lunged just in time to grab one of his legs by the ankle, dropping him on the stairs. He kicked at her wildly—catching her in the face—as she then started dragging him back into the basement.

“Angus, what the hell?!” she cried.

But he obviously wasn’t thinking at this point. He was flailing, kicking, snarling…

Hissing at the bruises he was randomly delivering all over her body, Shannon threw him into the closest cage she could find and locked him in.

Once inside, Angus froze. He was panting again, whining, thrashing at the bars…

“Just chill,” Shannon said, wiping blood from her lip where a foot had connected with her face. “Odin’s nipples, man, just chill out. I just needed to hold you in place to keep you from running back to Buðlungr while I figure out how to fix you.”

Angus’s eyes met hers and she saw his anxiety laid bare, his naked fear, his pleading.

He thinks I’m going to trap him down here, Shannon realized, shocked.

“No way,” Shannon blurted. “Trust me, not my thing. This was my parents’ little hell-hole, not mine.”

He clearly didn’t believe her. He was making that weird sound in his throat again, his forehead pressed against the bars and shuddering with each labored breath. Even with his image masked as that of a dog, it didn’t look like he could take much more of whatever was going on in his head.

“I’ll fix you,” Shannon promised. “Just hang tight.” Then she went looking for the book her parents had left her…

#

Eyes closed, Tl'oghk'etnaeyen panted as he fought both the queen’s drug and the blood-seiðr, all while trying to keep his panic at suddenly discovering that Shannon Meeks, the vampire queen he had thought he understood to be an innocent, maintained a dungeon under her house, one that utterly reeked of death, carnage, and misery. The energetic imprinting of this place had been so extreme that it could only mean dozens—hundreds?—of creatures like him had died on those cruel metal devices lining the walls. Sifting through it was like wading through rotting sewage, and it was already staining his mind.

She’s got me now, Tl'oghk'etnaeyen thought, slung against the bars in defeat. He was already fighting the queen’s mind-magics with everything he had, and to be locked in a dungeon where he could feel the brutal deaths of his wretched brethren soaked into the walls…

He hadn’t thought such deceit to be within her rudimentary mental capabilities, but here they were. First Buðlungr, then a queen’s venom, now this… Stupid. So stupid! She would literally be able to do anything she wanted to him, and if she put enough punch in her words, he would love every second of it.

Gaia, what he wouldn’t give to open his mouth and claim his last two Favors. He even planned them out as he clung to the silver bars—which, at least, were silver and not iron—just in case he got a chance to use them.

Release your hold on me. Forget I exist. Two very simple, quickly-spoken, very effective Favors that, when used in conjunction, had oft gotten a young feylord out of a difficult situation many times before.

About five minutes later, Shannon returned with a massive book, one obviously very old and well-used. It was when Tl'oghk'etnaeyen saw the title that he froze, sheets of ice rolling over him, prickling his skin with a wash of goosebumps. He couldn’t read the words, but he understood the symbol of the Third Lander blood magi on the front: Freyja’s sacred boar, bound and bled on a wheel.

On the Use of Blood. The Third-Lander equivalent of a how-to guide on enthralling the unlucky, a very rare prize usually never seen in the First Lands, as they were highly guarded by the blood-magi of the Third Lands. Like all the books on seiðr, it had been originally smuggled from Freyja’s hall, stolen from the völvur, then copied by the vampires who craved the sorceresses’ power for their own, liberally altered for their own use. Copies were still being made, but only at great price, because those magi found with them in the Third Realm were slaughtered by Valkyrie, their souls cast from the Third Lands forever, their books burned as abominations. For that reason, once commissioned of a master, they were usually bound to the new owner’s soul so that no other magi could read them.

Great, Tl'oghk'etnaeyen thought. It gets worse. She wants to blood-bind me. Good thing she would be too young and inexperienced to read the words and work the magics…

Then, like a waft of fresh air in the reeking mental imprint of misery of this place, he heard, Okay, so now to find the section on releasing someone from a blood-bind…

Tl'oghk'etnaeyen sat up, watching her warily as she moved her finger down the incomprehensible Table of Contents. The book itself was written in the völvur’s arcane script, by a powerful magus, and despite Tl'oghk'etnaeyen’s training, its symbols moved and twisted in his mind, refusing to hold still for anyone but an accomplished and determined Third Lander magus trained in the language of the sorceresses.

But how could she read them? Vampires, due to their ancient Firstlands blood, were not naturals in the use of seiðr, and she was too young to have been taught the discipline by an established Third Lander magus…

Curious, now, he mentally tuned in as her mind seemed to skim what was on the page…

The Long-Distance Blood Binding…no. Seeing Through Your Thrall’s Eyes…no. Exciting Ideas on How to Bring a Stubborn Slave to Heel…no. How to Kill Via Blood…no. How to Induce Euphoria and Other Emotions for More Intense Sexual Harvest…ugh, hell no. How to Remove or Counter the Seiðr of Another…hey that might work.

Stunned, Tl'oghk'etnaeyen brought his eyes up from the nebulous, indecipherable text to study the little frown on the vampire’s face.

It takes her no more effort than reading a news bulletin, Tl'oghk'etnaeyen realized, stunned to the core.

Oblivious, the queen kept reading. …the issue of how to release a blood-binding made on your stable by one of your adversaries is a common problem with several potential solutions. The first—and obviously most desirable—is to kill the opponent who has bound your property. (Or, in the case of your own incursion into his territory, the lord whose property you have acquired.) The second is much more difficult…

“Here we go,” Shannon said, stopping her finger on the page. Then she grimaced and made a face. “Man… Okay, looks like I’m gonna need your cooperation for this.”

You have it, Tl'oghk'etnaeyen thought, more than a little stunned. Who is this child, who reads the books of a sorceress with the ease of a völva? He’d only heard of something similar once before, when a Champion of Freyja had been loaned to Gaia to help put down a minor water god who had finally lost his mind…

A völva,” the thought, getting cold all over again as he watched her continue to turn pages with effortless concentration. But if a völva was here and a Champion of Odin… He got goosebumps just thinking what that could mean.

The sages in the Second Realms had agreed for two millennia that something horrible was happening in the First Realm, and Tl'oghk'etnaeyen was beginning to think it was something that, if the fight with the river god had been any indication, could quite possibly end up leveling entire cities…

But then Shannon was looking up at him, innocent consternation on her face, and said, “How much blood can I take from you before it kills you?”