Chapter 42: Taking a Chance

Shannon froze. When she turned, slowly, she saw that the barghest was gripping Masaaki’s hakama in a huge fist. His bleached blue eyes were meeting hers through a veil of ivory hair, sweat wetting his patterned brow. “Take me with you,” he said, every word seeming to be a struggle. “I’ll help.”

Shannon peered at him suspiciously. “Why would you do that?”

“You’re my first…mate,” Björn said. His pale eyes were begging her and he sounded desperate. “Want to…learn you.”

That sounded much too similar to exploring her body, biting her, and knowing her juices for Shannon’s comfort. She heard herself make a nervous laugh and she glanced again at the front door. Her old set of emergency-garb—swaddling for keeping off the sunlight—was where she had left it beside the door months ago. “Uh, to be honest, you scare the piss outta me, dude. I think I’d rather just leave you here and hire a helicopter to search for him or something.”

Though, growing up in Alaska, she knew how difficult it was to find a single person who was lost in the forest. Even if that person wanted to be found, and waved and signaled and set up bonfires to summon in rescuers, they often weren’t. Alaska was just too big, with too much terrain to cover. She’d heard of it taking rescuers days, even with an entire National Guard detachment out looking, to find someone they knew had survived a snow-machine accident on a river. Sometimes, whole planes weren’t found for over a decade.

And, she thought with increasing dread, this was early August, and Alaska was as lush as, say, Pennsylvania in the summer, so she doubted it would be easy to find a samurai who dressed, without fail, in dark blues and blacks. The color of shadow. Never mind the fact that, without Masaaki’s blood, she was going to have to hire a helicopter to fly her at night.

“At this point,” Björn growled. “I just want to be near you.”

Shannon swallowed. “Okay, yeah, but in two hours, are you gonna wanna be in my pants?”

“That’s the Nótt Danzleikr,” he muttered.

“Uh, no, I’m pretty sure you talked about planting your seed before I stabbed you,” Shannon said.

“I want to go with you!” Björn snapped. He still hadn’t gotten off his knees, though, and Shannon was pretty sure that was the only reason he hadn’t rushed her.

“And I want to not get attacked by a barghest while doing sixty on the Seward Highway,” Shannon said. “Sorry, but I just don’t feel comfortable—”

“You have my word I won’t touch,” Björn growled. “My word as the Dröttning Banamaðr I will not touch.”

“Touch what?” Shannon asked suspiciously.

“You,” Björn growled. “I won’t touch you unless you do it first.”

“Ha-ha, nice try,” Shannon laughed. “So I accidentally brush your leg getting into the car and you take that to mean it’s time to jump my bones?”

His face flushed red and he slammed a fist into the hardwood floor, pitting the boards, punching through the plywood underneath. “It is not your place to deny me!”

“Considering I’m the ones with the keys to the car—” she snagged the ancient keys to the limo off the wall beside the door where they’d always hung and began wrapping herself with sun-blocking swaths of fabric, “—I’d say you’ve got thirty seconds to convince me that you’re convinced you’re wrong.”

Björn narrowed his ghostly eyes at her.

“Twenty seconds.”

Björn waited to the until final seconds to say, “If you agree to take me with you, you have my word as the Dröttning Banamaðr, Odin’s champion, Nökkvi, that I will not touch you unless you desire it for one week. From there, we will renegotiate.”

Shannon peered at him a moment. Then, “So how do I know you’ll keep your word?”

“You don’t.” The barghest continued to glare at her. “It’s just the first step you must take to trust me as your lord.”

Shannon laughed, then sobered and gave him a long look. “One week, huh? And if I leave you here, you’ll what, go hunt me down? Eat the neighbors? Go through my phonebook and kill all my friends?”

His lip twitched in a smile. “That’s a good idea.”

Shannon took a deep breath, glanced out the door at the overgrown dirt track, then sighed and said, “Okay. You can come, if you keep your oath. You’ll be in the back. We’ll have to make some stops—the bank, Wal-Mart, Fred Meyers—to get necessities, and you’re gonna stay in the limo or it’s no deal. Got it?”

“Yes,” Björn said. He gestured with his nose at the grinder on the floor of the living-room. “Is that what I think it is?”

Shannon frowned, then lifted her eyes to the silver collar around his neck. “Uh, what will happen if you take that thing off your neck?”

He gave her a predatory smile. “You brave enough to find out, little queen?” He slid closer to the grinder.

“Will it help me find Masaaki before he guts himself?”

“Probably.” The barghest was poised over the grinder, waiting.

“Then okay.”

Immediately, Björn snatched up the tool, flipped it on, and started digging it into his own neck. Flesh and bits of metal went flying, gore coating the living-room wall every time his hand slipped.

“Uh,” Shannon said, after it was obvious that his coordination wasn’t improving. “Want me to do that?”

The barghest hesitated, giving her a suspicious look over the grinder. “Why?”

Shannon gestured at the spray of blood coating the wall behind him in a wide arc.

He frowned at it. “So?” Like she was pointing to the Antique Eggshell paint.

“Oh, for Chrissakes.” Shannon stepped forward and grabbed the grinder. “Gimme.”

Reluctantly, the barghest released it, then gave her a suspicious look as she knelt beside him and put a hand on the back of his head. “Lean down. Okay. Stay right there. Don’t move.” She pulled off one of the long-sleeved overshirts she’d been donning to keep off the sunlight and stuffed it between the metal and his jugular. Then she started grinding away at the silver band around his neck while Björn watched her from beneath his near-white locks of hair, distrust etched in the ivory tattoos upon his face.

Once she cut through, she got up and moved to the other side, where she repeated the process. Throughout it all, the barghest followed her with his eyes.

The grinder buried itself in the last of the thick silver band, then it fell away in two semi-circles, rolling down his back and chest to clatter upon the hardwood floor.

“There,” Shannon said, setting the grinder down and retrieving her shirt. “Now you can—”

The barghest interrupted her with a huge sigh. “Oh that feels better.” Suddenly, the shadows in the room seemed to shift and tug inwards, towards the man on his knees. Instantly, the tiger-like markings all over the barghest’s body transformed to a deep, light-eating black that seemed to smoke with darkness, casting a patterned cloud around him, making it hard to distinguish his body from the room itself. His eyes, which had been an off-white before, were now such a dark blue they were almost ebony. His hair, pale before, suddenly seemed to suck in the shadow of the room and started dripping wispy ebony in rivulets around his face, smoking trails of wispy blackness as the droplets of Void sank to the floor around him, obscuring his feet and ankles. When he turned, and his dark eyes found hers, Shannon felt that second layer of fear—the instinct facing a deadly predator—trigger again, and she took three steps back before she realized she’d moved.

The smoky shadows oozing from his body suddenly retreated, leaving him pale-eyed and ivory-haired once more. Björn grinned, slowly, showing his long fangs. “You think that’s frightening,” he snorted. “Just wait until I show you my hunting form.”

Her heart still thundering from the way he’d seemed to be wreathed in living, swirling shadow, Shannon gave a nervous chuckle. “Uh. Maybe some other time.”

Björn gave her a lazy smile. “Not until the next nightfall, at least.”

#

The vampire lord that Theo had come to kill was lounging on a luxurious pile of hides and sheepskins with two of his thralls. A yatagarasu and a fey, by the look of them. He didn’t bother looking up as Theo stumbled into the room in front of Svartr Buðlungr, instead intently watching a terrified human girl dance for him. She was a homely Caucasian, and did not bear the soft pink-silver of his venom in her blood, meaning that she didn’t even have the balm of enthrallment to ease her fear. Instead of the natural leather—or, in the case of the fey, woven grass and shells—of everyone else in the room, she was wearing skin-tight jeans and a ripped tanktop. Wide-eyed, she was awkwardly undulating her lithe body back and forth in what she must have imagined a vampire to desire, when Theo knew it was actually her terror that the lord was devouring. It was permeating the room, giving it a heady feel. The seven other vampires that were in attendance—all men, and all native, now that Theo was looking—all seemed to be in a half-trance, soaking in that power.

With a sigh, the vampire lord waved off the girl with an irritated flip of his wrist and turned to Theo. Behind him, the girl hastily pulled her tanktop back together and tried to rush from the room, but one of the vampires jumped up, grabbed her, and yanked her down to his furs with him. As she screamed and flailed, her captor ripped her jeans down her thighs and, as she struggled futilely, he crawled atop her and brutally shoved her legs wide with a knee.

None of the other vampires even seemed to notice her plaintive wails, or their comrade’s naked buttocks as he forced his way into her. All of them, including the ringleader, were watching Theo. Surprisingly, the lord looked to be a good portion Native American descent, a few inches shorter than Theo, but with a more athletic build.

When he spoke, it was with the slow, unhurried Native American drawl. “He arrives on time.” He gestured to a buffalo-skin rug in front of him. “Come. Sit. I am Pale Beaver.”

Theo ignored him, watching the vampire violating the girl in the corner, a cold, crystalline rage building in his chest. “That what happened to Mandi?” He would kill them. Grandmaster geas or no, he would kill them all.

Pale Beaver’s gaze didn’t even move to the struggle in the corner. He shrugged. “That one? No. That one, Walking Elk stole from her people and none of her menfolk were strong enough to take her back. She was given a turn of the moon, then he took her into his household. She belongs to him. What he does with her is his own business. It is our law. Mandi is mine. Sit down.”

“Mandi is yours.” Theo snorted and turned to the new lord. He looked him over, somewhat surprised to see that his first assumption—that he carried native blood—was correct. He looked nothing like the lords of the Third Realm. Surprised, he said, “You were born of a First Lander queen.”

The lord gave Theo a long look from his place on the furs, then said to the Duke of the Nightlands. “Tell him to sit.”

Svartr Buðlungr sighed. “Sit down, Theodore.”

Theo’s knees dropped from under him instantly, not even a conscious action. Svartr had won his blood in arcane combat—an ancient cord-magic of the Third Lands called seiðr—and in doing so, had woven a grandmaster’s geas on his body a thousand times more dangerous than a Nótt Danzleikr. The Duke of the Nightlands’ hold on Theo had thus been permanent the moment he bent over Theodore’s broken form and brought a fingertip of Theo’s blood to his mouth, knotting Theo’s essence to the spell, and would remain so until Buðlungr cancelled the seiðr.

Easily, Pale Beaver glided to his feet. He was dressed, head-to-toe, in leather and beadwork. Bone rattled as he moved. His thick black hair was tied with a wide leather band at the nape of his neck and falling to mid-back. He started pacing around Theo, looking. “He’s shared her blood. Are you enthralled or consorted?”

Theo wiped blood from his duel with Svartr from his face, but said nothing.

“Tell him to answer me.”

“Answer him.”

“Enthralled,” Theo said. He hadn't, after all, been told to tell the truth. The Duke cast him a sideways look, but said nothing. He, after all, wasn't here of his own bidding, and the less this young whelp knew, the better.

The man grunted. “What were your plans with the queen?”

Theo watched the man circle him, padding around him like a cat. “You mean before or after her bodyguard cut me in half with an enchanted blade?”

The lord gave him a long look. “This bodyguard…a vampire?”

“Why the hell do you want to know?” Theo demanded. But he knew why he wanted to know, and it was everything he could do to keep his heart-rate in check. That was one of the first things he’d learned in the Court of the Nightlands as a representative of his queen—control his heart, because others would hear it.

The First Lander lord lifted his head to Svartr Buðlungr.

“Oh for the love of Freyja, Theodore,” the Duke said, “just tell him.”

“Not a vampire,” Theo said. “A martial artist. Kenjutsu.”

“He carries enchanted blades.”

“He does,” Theo muttered.

“He is good?”

“Oh yeah,” Theo said, remembering. His ribcage still ached.

“Good.” The First Lander gave a nod of approval. “Until I can make her mine, she needs the protection. The Inquisition has caught whiff of her.”

That made Theo’s heart stutter. “It has?”

The younger lord ignored him and gestured at the other vampires in the room, all cross-legged in a rough circle, sitting on various skins and mats of their own—except the one who was even then driving himself—fangs and otherwise—into the sobbing girl in the corner. “Then you’ve seen her. She is a trueblood? Born here? She could make me more warriors like these?”

Theo glanced at the lifelessness of the native vampires’ blood and felt sick. Aside from their last meals—whatever that may have been—their blood was cold and black to his eyes. An emptiness waiting to be filled. Already, the sharp yellow flood of the girl’s terror was sinking into the vampire who grunted atop her, feeding what was otherwise a void. He’d never liked soldiers. They’d always seemed less…alive…to him. “She could, yes,” he said reluctantly.

“Good,” Pale Beaver said, his mouth spreading in a smile. “Now where is she?”

“What happened to the other vampires that were here?” Theo demanded. He recognized none of them. “Are they all in the harem downstairs?”

Pale Beaver’s face darkened. “They are all dead.”

…Oh. Theo’s eyes once again came to rest on the thrusting hips of the vampire across the room. The callousness with which this group treated their slaves was similar…but different. Less of a huge orgy and more of a codified system. Like they followed some sort of rules. “You took over their nest…just to kill them all?”

“It is time the white man returned to his own soil,” Pale Beaver said. “Or died to nurture ours.”

Theo’s eyes widened, slowly realizing what the First Lander lord had in mind. An army of vampires—to kill off the interlopers. “You can’t be serious.”

Pale Beaver smiled, slowly. “The white man has overstayed his welcome. Tell me where to find the queen.”