Chapter 75: Sundered Calm

“What do you mean, there’s nothing there for you to take?” Björn asked, feeling as if his feet had slid out from under him, despite the fact the frigid, greenish water continued to meander slowly about his waist.

Gunvor glanced back at the boat, looking truly confused. “You can’t feel it? It’s empty. Lifeless.”

Björn’s heart skipped a beat. Then, fisting his hands, he said, “Check again.”

Helka snorted. “Odinson wants us to check again. We don’t bow to you, little man.” She tilted her head cruelly. “In fact, as I remember, you—”

“Go check again,” Gunfor said to Helka.

Helka and Signe glanced at each other, then made faces and stalked back across the water to jump back into the boat. Björn watched as they moved around Jessie in the towering flames, their bodies almost blending into the fire. After they’d left, Gunfor crouched beside Björn, the fiery wings buoying her feet keeping her boots just touching the water at his waist. The motion put them at eye-level. “The years have not been kind to you, Nökkvi. You smell…” She leaned close, sniffing, then wrinkled her nose. “Human.”

Björn went stiff all over, but didn’t flinch from her. “Go find the couch-man and take him to Ásgarðr.”

“I told you,” Gunfor said, “there was no soul in that boat.” She was squinting at Björn, looking curious. “But you…”

“You’re here for Jessie, you fire-fucking bitch,” ,” Björn snarled, allowing some of the shadows to roll from his body as he turned to bare his teeth in her face, “You want me, you’ll have to fight for it.” He smiled viciously, only inches from her. “And I’ll happily fuck your eyesockets bloody and shit on your corpse for old times’ sake.” His hands were balled into fists under the water, and it was everything he could do not to grab Gunfor by the throat, yank her off her fiery perch, and start pounding her face into a paste.

Gunfor looked taken aback. “Nökkvi, do you not remember the—”

“I didn’t come here to talk to Freyja’s hórur,” Björn snapped. “Take Jessie of Nowhere to the afterlife or I will rip those wings off your feet and do your job for you.”

A frown formed on the she-bitch’s face. “Nökkvi, Odin and Freya wait for you to complete your task—”

“Odin doesn’t want me anymore,” Björn snapped. He tightened his brutish, animal fingers into fists. “He’s made it clear enough. Give Jessie my place in Valhöll. He deserves it more than me.”

Gunfor was watching him very closely by the time Helka and Signe returned, sneering. “Still nothing. Shall we take the beast back, instead? Brynhilder’s throne has spot for him and she’s always had a fancy for pet barghests…”

“Stop, Signe,” Gunfor said, watching Björn warily, “he’s confused.”

Signe laughed. “What else is new of the Odinsons?”

Brynhilder’s throne… Björn thought, remembering the last time he’d seen his friend, chained in misery to Brynhilder’s throne, watching him escape in mute silence as Björn slipped out of Guðrhöll in the ultimate act of cowardice.

“What happened to Eirik?” Björn whispered. It came out on an inhuman chest-rattle that made the water around him freeze.

Gunfor stood slowly, looking uncomfortable.

“Wait. He doesn’t know we…” Helka said, frowning at Gunfor.

But it was Signe who laughed cruelly and said, “You wanna know what happened to your cockless war buddy? We bent him over and fucked him until he begged for mercy like all you sniveling cowards and we sent him home. Last I heard, they killed him because he couldn’t stop peeing himself whenever the wenches came to serve him mead.”

Signe was halfway through a laugh when Björn’s fist lunged out of the water and he grabbed her by a fiery leg and yanked her off her feet.

“What the—” Helka cried, as she and Gunfor reached over their shoulders for their swords.

But Björn didn’t hear anything else because he had taken the Valkyrie under the water and fully transformed into the Nightlander beast. Water simultaneously boiled and became ice sheets between their combined energies as Björn wrapped his animal fists around Signe’s delicate throat and started to ram her head into the gravelly river bed, roaring that rattling predator scream, splashing sheaves of water in arcs into the forest and over the onlookers as he slung her body around like a rag doll.

His vision blurred and went red on his rage, and somewhere in the middle of carving a new riverbed with Signe’s face and her sisters tearing him off of her, Björn had started mindlessly screaming, “Die! Die! Die! Diiee!!”

By the time Gunfor’s boot finally kicked him in the head hard enough to make him roll away, Björn was seeing nothing but crimson fury. He snarled and started towards Signe again, oblivious to her sisters, but the Valkyrie general lowered her flaming sword between them, scowling at him, forcing him to stop or be skewered.

“Get her out of here!” Gunfor snapped over her shoulder at Helka, who was holding an unconscious Signe by her arms. Seeing her face again, Björn started to walk around Gunfor, once more powered by a rush of total rage. Gunfor deftly stepped between them, warding him off with her sword. “Go!”

Helka hesitated a moment longer, then, with an unhappy look at Gunfor, dragged Signe back up the column of smoke and into the heavens.

Then Gunfor, the last Valkyrie remaining to have answered his call to Ásgarðr, was pacing slowly around Björn, keeping her flaming sword between them. “Eirik is fine, Odinson. Signe was teasing you.”

But Björn knew she wasn’t teasing. He had been there. He had experienced it. He knew that, in all the time that had passed, they would have broken his friend, snapped his mind like a dry twig. And, seeing Signe, that greatest tormentor of all, escape, he lunged.

Gunfor rammed her sword through his chest and held him there, gagging as his insides sizzled, so she could yank him close. “A truce was called—you remember?!” she shouted into his face, “We sent Eirik home in exchange for Valhöll’s prisoners. Don’t tell me you don’t remember. You were there.”

“Lies!” Björn snarled, viciously hurling Gunfor to one side. He pulled her sword from his chest and snapped it in half over a knee, his shadows already sealing the wound, then tossed the flaming metal into the water, where the river became a massive column of steam. “All you bitches lie.”

“It was the Pact!” Gunfor snapped, dancing out of his reach. “The one sealed by you and Mardöll at the boundary between our Realms. Two lives into one. Two realms into one. Freyja and Odin called a truce until we could see if peace could be made!”

Björn scowled at her, still easing himself closer through the water, hoping to get within arm’s-reach of the sword-witch. “Peace?” he laughed. “You hórur know no such word.”

Infuriatingly, Gunfor kept dancing out of reach of his claws. “You don’t remember?” she demanded. “How could you not remember?!”

“Remember what?!” Björn shouted, swiping at a flaming leg.

“Your fight with Pestilence!”

Remembering the wall of insects inside of the Wal-Mart, Björn laughed. “I got first blood.”

But Gunfor frowned. “First blood… No, you were sent to stop him eight centuries ago after he killed one of Freyja’s chosen and he—”

“And stop running so I can carve out your soul and eat it while I shit on your dickless remains!”

Gunfor’s eyes widened. “You’ve lost your mind.” She started backing towards the ship and the column of smoke and fire, which was even then headed into the deeper water. “Freyja be merciful, the Pact’s still unsealed and you’ve lost your mind…”

“I’ll show you whose mind is lost when I put my claws through it,” Björn laughed in a rage. He waded out after her, sloshing through water over his shoulders, unable to feel anything but his fury.

Gunfor backed up some more, hopping aboard the fiery boat with Jessie’s corpse. “They said you’d probably succumbed to the isolation, but I’d still hoped…” Then she was in the pillar of smoke, watching him. “So many had hoped…”

“Get off the boat and fight me, she-bitch!” Björn snarled, his too-heavy Thirdlander bulk—a bulk not built for swimming—thrashing the water in a frenzy to get to her before she could escape. He grabbed the vessel with both hands, ready to haul himself out of the water and fight her in the fiery remains of his brethren.

The Valkyrie gave him one last, pitying look, then took the tunnel back to Ásgarðr. Realizing she was going to leave without his friend, Björn screamed as her image flickered amidst the smoke as she moved up the column. “No!” he shouted up at her, climbing into the fire-shrouded vessel despite the blaze. He grabbed Jessie’s charred corpse and held it up between them as the flame seared his own skin. “Take him!” It was as much a plea as a command, buoyed by fear and panic that he had ruined Jessie’s chances of an afterlife by not having the self-control to avoid a fight. “Come back here and take him! Please!”

The Valkyrie’s flickers receded up the smoke pillar until they had disappeared against the hazy green midnight sky overhead.

Realizing that the Valkyrie were gone and Jessie would never grace the halls of Valhöll, Björn had a moment of strange and total stillness fall over him as the boat around him crackled and burned.

Then, looking down at the crisped and headless corpse he now cradled in his arms, its soul broken and abandoned, the only person who had seemed interested in helping him in centuries charred meat, Björn felt something in his mind snap.

“Done!” he screamed, throwing the corpse to the burning pyre at his feet. “I’m done!” He started tearing at the rune that Odin had buried in his chest upon his acceptance to Valhöll, the glyph-marked scar just above the nipple. He sliced away skin, then the flesh, then, as the gray-black nugget of stone started to appear, he found it with his taloned fingers and ripped it out.

ODINSON the blood-soaked rune read.

Björn snapped it in half—to a resounding boom of shimmering Ásgarðr magic that hurled outward in all directions like a volcano’s shockwave, a dangerous thunder at the affront he’d just shown the gods. Björn didn’t care—he was beyond caring. This, after everything else that had been done to him, was the last straw. He dropped the shattered token on the corpse, then picked up a burning mass of gold and hurled it into the column of smoke at the departing Valkyrie. “Never again! Done! You hear me?! Done! Tell that fucker Odin I’m never coming back! I’d rather be unmanned by the twisted spawn of Loki than see that abominable hall again!”

And then, in his grief and rage, still receiving no answer for his torment, Björn screamed and started ripping apart the useless pyre, the gifts, and the dead man, casting their sizzling pieces into the river. So complete was his torment that he simply stopped thinking, riding that wave of unspeakable anguish in a howling fugue. Anguish for his home, his brother, his comrades, his new friend, his life… He had just finished breaking apart the last of the bottles of alcohol when something tapped him on the shoulder and he turned.

A tall, handsome, wiry, swarthy, and square-jawed Jessie stood behind him, covered in odd black tattoos, dressed in a flowing black and green robe of a magus of the Nightlands, arms crossed over his chest, looking amused. Björn’s mouth fell open.

Then the big guy in the boat with him sighed, reached back, and as Björn stared at there in daft incomprehension, Jessie hurled a punch at Björn’s chest that had the velocity of an asteroid impact. He felt Jessie’s fist go through him, then, before he had a chance to comprehend that, there was another massive explosion that had made his rune-breaking seem pale in comparison, and he was sailing backwards out of the boat, tumbling and skipping across the water like a flat stone. Then he was skidding under the water, sending up a spray like one of Shannon’s ‘Jet-Skis’ as his momentum continued to fling him across the mighty Susitna river, but under its surface. He descended in that bubble until the walls of gray river water towered over him and his head contacted something unspeakably huge and uncompromisingly hard about twelve feet under the surface. Björn, brought to a sudden mind-numbing halt after exhausting himself in his tantrum to the gods, shuddered and went still as the dirty glacial water folded back overhead to envelope him.