Authors: Ilona Andrews
“The glade is northeast from here.” I pointed to a tall oak to the left.
Curran pulled me close.
Ghastek’s vampire rolled his eyes.
“Remember the plan?” Curran said in my ear.
“Get in, get the information, and run like hell out of there.”
“See you in a few hours.”
I brushed his lips with mine. “See you.”
I grabbed my backpack and headed up the path.
The mist grew thicker. Moisture hung in the air, tinted with the odor of rotting vegetation and fresh soil. Somewhere in the distance a bird screamed. No movement troubled the still woods. No squirrels chattered in the canopy, no small game scurried away at our approach. Nothing stirred except for the vampires gliding alongside the path, their emaciated shapes flashing between the trees.
The path veered right and opened into a small glade. Tall pines framed it, the enormous dark trunks scratching at the sky. A carpet of dark pines needles sheathed the ground. Here and there rocks thrust from the forest floor.
“Put the deer right there.” I pointed to the center of the glade. The vampire unloaded the deer and hopped aside.
“I suppose we wait until the magic returns?” Ghastek inquired.
“You got it.” I sat on a fallen pine.
The vampire’s shoulders rose up and down. Ghastek must’ve sighed. “I suppose we might as well treat this seriously.” The vampire raised his left forelimb. A long yellow claw pointed at a tall birch on the left. “Observation Post there.” A claw moved to the right to a pine on the other side of the glade. “Another OP there. Give me a perimeter assessment.”
Two purple vampires scattered, took a running start, and scrambled up the indicated trees. The third dashed into the bushes. Only Ghastek and Tracy remained. His vampire sat on my right, her vampire sat on my left. Peachy.
A minute passed. Another.
Ghastek’s vamp lay down. “If half of the things said about draugar were true, it would revolutionize necromantic science. According to legend, they’re the spirits of warriors who rise from the grave to guard their buried possessions. They see the future, they control the elements, they shapeshift into animals. They turn into smoke and become giants.”
“Not at the same time,” I told him.
“What?”
“You said they turn into smoke and become giants. Not at the same time. They’re solid in giant form.”
“You’re still clinging to this fallacy?”
I leaned forward. “What would you have done if you had found a draugr in Norway, Ghastek?”
“I’d have tried to apprehend it, of course.”
“Suppose you live in a small village in Norway and you know a draugr is nearby. You bring him live game once in a while and you hope to God he leaves you the hell alone. Now some geeky hotshot foreigner shows up on your doorstep and explains to you how he’s going to go annoy this terrible creature for the sake of ‘necromantic science.’ You try to explain to him that it’s not a good idea, but he treats you as if you’re an idiot child.”
“I never treat people like infantile idiots,” Ghastek said.
I looked at him.
Tracy cleared her throat carefully.
“Go on,” he said.
“Would you take this foreigner to this undead monster and risk pissing it off, or would you steer him as far away from the draugr as possible and hope he’ll go away eventually?”
“That’s a sound theory, with one exception. I’m not that gullible.”
Fine. “Bet me.”
The vampire stared at me. “I’m sorry?”
“Bet me. If the draugr is a hoax, I’ll owe you a favor.”
“And if he’s real?”
“Then you will bring me a quart of vampire blood.”
“And why would you need vampire blood, Kate?”
Because I needed it to experiment with making armor out of it, that’s why. “I want to calibrate the lot of new m-scanners the Pack bought.” He didn’t need to know I was practicing to see how much of Roland’s talent had passed to me.
A hint of suspicion slid into Ghastek’s voice. “And you need a quart of blood for that?”
“Yep.”
The bloodsucker became utterly still as Ghastek mulled it over.
“If I win this silly game, you will tell me why Rowena came to see you after the Keepers affair.”
Sucker. “Deal.”
“Excellent.” He put emphasis on the “x” and the word came out slightly sibilant.
“You need a fluffy white cat. That way you can stroke it when you say things like that.”
Tracy’s vamp made a small noise that might have been a clearing of a throat or a choked-up laugh.
A purple vampire popped out of the bushes, dragging something behind it. The bloodsucker strained, tight muscle flexing across its back, and heaved what looked like a large collapsed leather tent into the open.
“We found human bones,” the vampire reported.
“In the ravine?” I asked.
“Yes, ma’am.”
I knew about the spot. Immokalee had described it to me this morning, trying to scare me into not going. A few dozen yards to the north, the ground dropped sharply into a narrow fissure lined with human skeletons. Some still held their weapons. When a draugr sucked the flesh off your bones, he did it quick, like jerking a shirt off a body.
“We also found this.” The vampire indicated the tent.
Ghastek’s vampire raised the top edge, exposing a dark opening, and vanished into it. The leather shifted, mirroring the vampire’s movement inside it. The bloodsucker emerged into the clear air. “The design is ill-conceived. It is clearly too large for one person, but it has no structure or method of remaining upright as a tent, and besides, this side is completely open to the elements. Perhaps it’s some sort of communal sleeping bag?”
“It’s not a sleeping bag,” I told him.
“Would you care to enlighten me?” Ghastek said.
“Look at it from above.”
The purple vampire leaped onto the nearest tree and
scurried up into the branches. A long moment passed and then it dropped on the ground next to me without a word.
“What is it?” Tracy asked.
The vampire’s face was unreadable, like a blank wall. “It’s a glove.”
The wind stirred the tree branches. The world blinked, as the tech vanished, crushed under the onslaught of a magic wave. Cold froze the glade. The other vampire burst from the bushes and came to rest by Tracy.
In the distance something wailed in an inhuman voice, its forlorn cry rising high above the treetops.
Gloom claimed the clearing. It came slowly, like molasses, from the dark spaces deep between the roots, washing over trees, leaching color from the greenery, drenching it in shadows, until the shrubs and foliage turned dark, almost gray. Behind the gloom, mist rose in thin wisps, tinted with an eerie bluish glow.
A crow cried overhead, its shrill caw impossibly distant.
“They are putting on quite a show,” Ghastek said.
“Yep.” I nodded. “Going all out. Viking special effects are out of this world.”
I pulled a canvas bundle out of my backpack and untied the cord securing it. Four sharpened sticks lay inside, each three feet long. I picked up a rock and hammered the first of the sticks into the ground at the mouth of the path. That was the way I’d run when it came time to get the hell out of there.
I moved along the edge of the clearing, sinking the sticks in at regular intervals.
“What is the purpose of this?” Ghastek asked.
“Protection.”
“Have I given you a reason to doubt my competence, Kate?”
“No.” I pulled a black box out of my backpack, took a black cloth out of it, and unfolded the cloth to extract an old pipe. The medicine woman had already packed it with tobacco.
“What is this?”
“A pipe.” I struck a match, puffed to get the pipe going, and got a mouthful of smoke for my trouble. The pungent tobacco scraped the inside of my throat. I coughed and started to circle the clearing, blowing smoke as I went.
“What sort of magic is this?” one of the journeymen asked.
“Cherokee. Very old.” If life was perfect, I’d have Immokalee herself do the ritual. It took years of training for the medicine woman to reach her power, but none of the Cherokees would go near the draugr. Unlike me, they had common sense. All the chants over the sticks and the pipe had been said already. All I had to do was follow the ritual and hope Immokalee’s magic was potent enough to work when an incompetent like me activated it.
I finished the circle, put the pipe away, and sat back on the log.
A pair of tiny eyes ignited by the roots of an oak to the left. No iris was visible—the entire eye was an almond-shaped slit of pale yellow glow.
“Left,” Tracy said. Her voice was perfectly calm.
“I see it,” Ghastek said.
Another pair sparked to the right, about a foot off the ground. Then another, and another. All around us the eyes fluoresced, clustered around tree trunks, staring from the underbrush, peering from behind rocks.
“What are they?” Tracy asked.
“
Uldra
,”
Ghastek said. “They’re nature spirits from Lapland. They live mostly underground. I wouldn’t provoke them. Stay in the clearing.”
The eyes stared at us, unblinking.
A blast of icy cold ripped through the clearing. The
uldra
vanished as one. On the ground, the deer moaned, coming up out of its drugged state.
Here we go.
I reached into my backpack and pulled out a small leather satchel, a small plastic bear full of honey, and a canteen. No turning back now. I got up off the log and walked over to the center of the glade where a large stone waited. Ghastek’s and Tracy’s vampires trailed me.
I brushed the leaves from the stone. The inside of the rock had been hollowed out into a stone basin, large enough to hold about three gallons of liquid.
“When the draugr appears, don’t talk to him,” I said. “The longer we talk, the more time he has to lock onto our scent. We’ll have to fight to get clear anyway. No need to make things harder.”
No response.
“Ghastek? Do you understand me?”
“Of course,” he said.
“The Cherokee have set protective wards on the mountain. If we make it to the pillars by the road, we’re safe.”
“You said this before,” Ghastek informed me.
“I’m just reminding you.” This wouldn’t go well.
I set the canteen on the ground and loosened the drawstring cord securing the pouch. It opened into a square of leather in the palm of my hand. Inside lay six rune stones chiseled from bone, and a handful of beat-up silver coins: two etched with a sword and hammer and four with the Viking raven.
I cast the runes into the basin. They clicked, rolling from the stone sides. It took me a second to unscrew the canteen. Ale splashed on the runes, drenching the bone in liquid amber. The scent of malted barley and juniper wafted up. The bluish mist snapped at it like a striking snake.
“Patience, Håkon. Patience.”
I poured in the rest of the ale, emptied the honey into the basin, and stirred it with a branch. Magic spread from the runes into the honey and ale. I reached in and pulled the runes out, all except two: the rune of enemy binding and
Þjófastafur
, the rune that prevented theft.
The mist hovered by me.
I took a deep breath, grabbed the deer by the head, and heaved it onto the basin. Moist brown eyes looked at me.
“I’m so sorry.”
I pulled a throwing knife out and slit the animal’s throat in a single quick swipe. Blood gushed into the basin, hot and red. The deer thrashed, but I held its head until the blood flow stopped. The basin was a third of the way full. I stepped back and hefted the coins in my hand. They jingled together, sparking with magic.
“I call you out, Håkon. Come from your grave. Come taste the blood ale.”
Magic pulsed through the glade, ice cold and shockingly powerful. It pierced my skin, ripping its way all the way into my bones. I recoiled. Panic crested inside me like a huge black wave. Every instinct I had screamed, “Run! Run as fast as you can.”
I clenched my teeth.
The air reeked of fetid, decaying flesh. It left a sickeningly sweet patina on my tongue.
The mist congealed with an eerie moan and a creature stepped forth to the basin. A thick cloak of half-rotten fur hung off his shoulders, shielding the chain mail that covered him from elbow to the knee. The fur had thinned to long feathery strands, smeared with dirt. Long colorless hair spilled from his head in a tangled mess. His skin was blue, as if he had an intense case of argyria.
The draugr dropped by the basin, dipped his head, and lapped the blood like a dog. Death had sucked all softness from his flesh. His face was a leathery mask of wrinkles, his nose was a misshapen nub, and his lips had dried to nothing, baring a mouth full of long vampiric teeth. His eyes were awful: pale green, and completely solid, as if made of frosted glass. No iris, no pupil, nothing. Just two dead eyes behind an opaque green membrane.
I gave him a couple of seconds with the blood and squeezed the runes. They warmed my skin, forging a link to the two left in the blood ale. “That’s plenty.”
The undead raised his head. Blood dripped from his chin. A voice came, hoarse, like the creaking of trees in the wood. “Who are you, meat?”
Not good. “I’ve come to trade. Fair trade: fresh meat for an answer.”
The draugr dipped its head toward the blood. Magic pulsed from the runes. The creature let out a long sound halfway between a sigh and a growl.
Ghastek’s vampire moved to stand next to me.
The undead swiveled to the bloodsucker. “You bring me dead meat?”
“No. Dead meat guards me. Dead meat has no power over the ale. If you want to talk to dead meat, that’s between you and it.”
The draugr rose above the basin, shoulders hunched over. “Dead meat speaks?”
Ghastek shifted the vampire another step.
“I wouldn’t,” I told him.
The vamp halted. “Who are you?”
Would it kill him not to screw with my thing?
The draugr leaned on the stone. “I’m Håkon, son of Eivind. My father was a jarl and his father before him was one. The
blood ale calls to me. Who are you, meat, that you interrupt my feeding?”
“I’m Ghastek Sedlak, Master of the Dead.”