Chapter Ten

  Nika went to the hotel bar again, since it had proven to be such a good hunting ground. There were few people there this time, and she was about to leave when Dominic walked in, looking furtively around the room. His eyes met hers, and he started to turn away.

  “Dominic,” she called. “Don’t leave.”

  He hesitated, then turned back, a stormy look in his eyes. “What do you want?”

  “I want to talk to you.” She walked closer to him, and he stood his ground warily. She offered him a smile. “I wanted to thank you for the other night.”

  He nodded. “You’re welcome.”

  “Sit with me?”

  He hesitated and looked around again, then finally nodded his head. “Okay.”

  They took a booth in the back of the room, secluded enough that they could speak openly without fear of being overheard. The barmaid came to their table, and Dominic ordered coffee and a shot of whiskey. Nika declined. The silence stretched uncomfortably for a long moment before she found the words she wanted to say.

  “You could have delivered me to your pack, but you didn’t.”

  He folded his hands on the table. They were strong hands, square and powerful. He interlaced his fingers. “Well… you weren’t in your right mind, I think, and it’s not right to take advantage of someone when they’re in a vulnerable position.”

  “That was very kind of you.”

  “It wasn’t kindness,” he objected. “It was just...what was right.”

  The waitress returned with his order, and then Nika said, “I don’t know anything about the Ulfen. I know that your people and mine don’t get along, but I don’t know why. Can you help me understand?”

  He poured the whiskey into the coffee and took a sip. “It’s an old enmity.”

  “How old?”

  “Centuries. Ever since the first Draugr were made.” He cupped his hands around the mug. “I don’t know the exact details of what happened, but I know that the First attacked a pack in Sweden and eradicated them. They drank them dry and left their bodies for wild animals to eat. That pack had never done anything to them. The Draugr just attacked for the sake of attacking.”

  She frowned. “That’s terrible. I’m so sorry to hear that.”

  He looked down at his mug. “Ever since then, there’s been a kind of war between our kind. The Draugr expand their numbers and their territories, and they encroach on Ulfen lands and take our prey away. It’s become a fight over resources, I suppose.”

  “Do the Ulfen eat humans?”

  Dominic looked ashamed. “Sometimes, when we can. It’s harder to hide these days.” He sipped his doctored coffee again. “Draugr eat humans. We’re not that different that way. You must have killed your share of people.”

  “No,” she said. “I’ve only killed one person, on the night I turned.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “That’s not what I heard. I heard that you killed Loki in his Nøkken vessel.”

  “I just pinned him. Erik is the one who killed him.” She felt a twinge when she spoke his name, and she looked away to hide the tears that sprang into her eyes.

  Dominic said softly, “I had no love for the Huntsman, but I’m sorry for your loss.”

  She wiped her eyes. “Thank you.” Nika swallowed the lump in her throat and forced a smile. “The Veithimathr were sworn to protect humanity. I’m guessing that brought your pack into conflict with them.”

  “Good guess.”

  “How old are you, Dominic?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. We don’t keep track of such things. After a while, the years all run together, anyway.”

  “So, I guess that means you’re very old, if you lost count.”

  “Very old,” he nodded, “but one of the youngest in my pack.”

  “Who was ruling Finland when you were born?” she asked. “Human ruler, I mean.”

  He thought back. “The Russian czar, as I recall. Alexander the First.”

  “So, you were born sometime in the early nineteenth century.”

  “If you say so.”

  They fell silent, and he sipped his drink. She found herself staring at the scar on his throat, the obvious marks of a Draugr bite that had been meant to kill. From the look of it, he was fortunate that he still had a throat at all. Dominic noticed her attention and self-consciously turned up the collar of his jacket to conceal the mark.

  “Who bit you?” she asked.

  He frowned. “That’s personal.”

  “Sorry… I didn’t mean any harm. I’m just…”

  “Excessively curious?”

  “Something like that.”

  Dominic sighed. “I never knew her name. She was a female Draugr, very strong. She decided at the last minute not to kill me, and I still don’t know why. I almost wish she hadn’t stopped.”

  “Why?”

  “My pack thinks I’m tainted,” he said. “I’m the omega now. I’m not very welcome there anymore.”

  She frowned. “I’m sorry. How long has this been going on?”

  “Has anyone ever told you that you’re obsessed with time?”

  Nika chuckled. “No, but I suppose you’re right. I work in a museum, and history is important to me. I have a sort of timeline in my head all the time, and I like to put things in order.”

  He nodded. “You need a hobby.” The ghost of a smile flirted with his lips, but it vanished as quickly as it had come. “It’s been at least twenty years.”

  “I’m sorry. That sounds very unpleasant.”

  He took another swallow of his whiskey-laden coffee. “You have no idea.”

  She impulsively leaned forward and put a hand on his forearm. The leather of his jacket kept their skin from touching, but she could still sense his Ulfen power. “If you need a friend, I’d like to be there for you.”

  Dominic’s eyes widened. “You’re crazy.” He shook his head. “If any of my pack even saw me sitting here with you, we’d both be as good as dead. Friendship is out of the question.”

  “Maybe we can end this war, one friendship at a time.”

  He pulled away. “You’re a nice person. Too nice to be a vampire. But you’re crazy as hell, and you don’t know what you’re talking about.” He tossed some money onto the table and rose. “I have to get out of here. Have a good night, Rune Master.”

  She sighed. “Have a good night, Dominic.”

  He left the bar with an almost guilty slink to his walk, and she sighed. There was so much that she still had to learn.

  ***

  The basement of Bjorn’s house was equipped with holding cells and blood-collection vats. The body of a myling hung suspended above the vat, its throat slit and all of its blood long drained. Erik stood back and watched as the other First loaded their kidnapped troll children into the cells.

  This is wrong.

  The tingling from the ointment was gone and the mental fuzziness had returned. The celebratory mood of the other First seemed wrong and immoral, and he was deeply uncomfortable with what they planned to do.

  “When they’re drained, then what?” he asked.

  “Then the blood is delivered to the vala to be turned into dreyri,” Halvar said.

  “Which vala?”

  Bjorn pushed past him. “It doesn’t matter. We handle that part of it. Mia, take him upstairs.”

  The Valtaeigr put her hand on his arm, and he pulled free. “No. I’m staying.”

  Bjorn shrugged. “If you want to see us drain them, that’s fine with me.”

  “Faery dreyri is addictive,” Erik mused. “Are you sure you should be doing this?”

  “It keeps the customer satisfied,” Dag said, grinning.

  “It’s lucrative.” Kjeld leaned against the wall beside Erik. “The more faery blood is put into the dreyri, the more people drink. The more people drink, the more money we make. The more they drink, the more they need, the higher the price goes, and the more money we make. We’re fucking millionaires, Thorvald. Be happy.”

  “We’re pushers,” he corrected. “We’re causing harm to our own people.”

  “So what?” Halvar said, wrestling one of the weeping troll children into a harness. “We’re the First. We can do to them whatever we want. You know that.”

  He frowned. “Just because we can, that doesn’t mean we should.”

  Bjorn glowered at Mia. “Shut him up or get him back on track. It’s fading.”

  She took Erik’s hand. “Come on,” she said. “You’re having after effects from that linnorm dreyri still. Let me help you.”

  He shook off her grip. “I’m beginning to think that my problems are from you, not from the blood.”

  “Just go with her,” Dag said, sounding irritated. “We have work to do.”

  Mia stroked the back of his neck and whispered in the secret magical language of the Valtaeigr. All of his resistance fled in a rush, and he felt weak in the knees. She took his hand again and led him, unresisting, out of the room.

  She took him back into the bedroom where he had first awoken, and she guided him to sit on the bed. He obeyed, watching placidly as she bent to remove his boots and socks. He felt as if he was watching her from a distance, disconnected from his body and his senses.

  Mia urged him to lie back on the bed, and he complied. She left the room for a moment and returned with a bowl of warm water and a cloth. He looked up at her as she sat on the edge of the bed, her eyes locked onto his.

  With slow, sensuous strokes, she began to wash the troll blood from his chest and face, removing the evidence of that evening’s slaughter. She hummed as she worked, and the sound made his brain buzz. He wanted to reach up and stop her, but he could not move.

  It took all of his willpower and strength to murmur, “What are you doing to me?”

  She bent and kissed him, her lips soft and warm against his. It felt wrong, and he did not return the kiss. She straightened with a frown.

  “I thought you liked the Valtaeigr,” she said.

  He answered automatically, not understanding what he was saying. “You’re the wrong Valtaeigr.”

  “One Valtaeigr is as good as another,” she whispered.

  She straddled him on the bed and continued to wash his skin. He lay immobile, completely bound in her spell. She rocked her hips against him, but his body did not respond. She leaned over him and kissed him again. This time, he was able to turn his head away.

  Mia frowned. He felt her reach for the nape of his neck, and then she whispered, “Sleep.”

  Everything went blank.

  ***

  Bjorn was standing near the vat when Mia rejoined them. The first of the troll children was hanging upside down over it, her throat cut, blood pouring into the container below. The Valtaeigr looked at the dying faery child impassively, then told the First, “His will is very strong. He’s resisting me.”

  “Do what you have to do to keep him malleable,” he told her. “We have to have him with us when we go to the next raid.”

  “I’ll do my best,” she said, “but I’m telling you - he knows that something’s wrong. I can’t keep him drugged forever.”

  “You can and you will.” He shook his head. “Not much blood in trolls.”

  “I’m sure the Huldra will be more to your liking,” she said, looking at the cell where the faery woman was lying in a sobbing ball.

  “She has been so far,” Bjorn leered.

  Mia turned her back on the display. “I’m going to call our contact and see what she suggests. I didn’t expect him to be so difficult to control.”

  Kjeld smirked. “He’s Erik Thorvald. He’s never been easy to control.”

  She walked out of the room, thinking, We’ll see about that.

  ***

  Nika left the hotel and walked back to the cabin, her head full of questions. She had always been inquisitive, with a dedication to learning new things that had driven her adoptive parents insane in their attempts to keep up. She knew she had been pestering Dominic, and she regretted any discomfort she had caused him, but the chance to sit and talk to a real-life werewolf was not likely to come again.

  She felt a horrible twinge in her chest, and she stopped short, gasping. The pain was sudden and intense, and she was completely unprepared for it. The pain came with a sense of foreboding, and she was momentarily paralyzed by fear.

  That was when she heard the wolf howl. First one wolf cried, then another, and soon dozens of full-throated howls split the night. The sound was coming from the vicinity of the cottage. She broke into a run.

  Something black and furry leaped into her, tackling her to the ground and rolling with her into the edge of the forest. She snarled, her fangs and claws coming out in self-defense, but the Ulfen that had jumped on her was not attacking. He was holding her down, covering her with his own body, keeping his head low. He was huge, easily as long as she was tall, and he heavily outweighed her. She struggled to push him away, but even her advanced strength was not enough to dislodge him. She tried to bite him and came up with a mouthful of fur. He whined at her quietly, his green eyes sad in his black-furred face.

  She recognized the feeling of the Ulfen, the singular shimmer of his power. “Dominic?”

  He licked he face, then pressed down on top of her even more closely. He put his head down over her face, nearly smothering her in his thick ruff, and he called up his camouflage ability, hiding them both completely.

  “What are you doing?” She pushed against him. “Get up! My friends -”

  He whined, and she wished she could speak wolf. In the distance, she could hear a deafening chorus of barks and snarls, and then a pistol fired repeatedly. There was an animal yelp, and then a wordless shout from Lars. The cacophony was like a physical force, punctuated by the sound of smashing wood and more pistol shots.

  It sounded like a war. Lights were turning on in all of the other cabins, the humans inside marking themselves as voluntary collateral damage. Nika could smell blood and smoke, and her Valtaeigr senses reeled in the rushing feeling of death on all sides. She gripped Dominic’s fur tightly, tugging at it, but he refused to move.

  It seemed to last forever. Finally, with noise of a hundred paws, the Ulfen raced back into the forest and the quiet was restored. Only the scent of blood and death remained. Dominic slowly picked himself up off of her, releasing her from where he had been holding her in the dirt. He shifted back into his human form as he moved.

  Nika slid out from beneath him, her eyes wide with fear of what she was about to see.

  “What are you doing?” she asked him again.

  “Saving your life,” he told her, “and ending mine.”

  “Why?”

  He looked at her, confused and stormy, and admitted, “I don’t know.”

  He pressed a kiss to her lips, his musky scent blocking out the unpleasantness around them. She accepted the kiss, but she did not return it. He pulled back and looked her in the eye again, solemn.

  “Good bye, Rune Master,” he said. “Live in safety.”

  She wanted to say something, but she couldn’t find the words. He rose and hurried away, running back toward the hotel, still in human form. She let him go. She didn’t think she would see him again.

  ***

  The cabin where they were staying was a shambles of splintered wood and broken glass. The cabins on either side of theirs were much the same. A dead wolf lay on their porch, and three more lupine corpses littered the front room just past the ruined door. Lars’ pistol lay on the floor beside a pile of ashes, all that remained of him. In the kitchen, she found more dead wolves and another pile of ash. Sif.

  She was blinded by tears and wanted nothing more than to sit and sob, but there was a third member of their party unaccounted for. A quick check of the first floor did not turn up any sign of Magda, so she headed upstairs.

  She smelled nothing but blood. A mortally wounded Ulfen lay in the hallway, shifted back into her human form, her hands over her belly trying to hold herself together. She had been viciously slashed by a sharp blade and nearly eviscerated. Nika knelt beside her.

  “Hold on,” she said. “I’ll try to help you.”

  The Ulfen woman shuddered and gripped her arm with one hand, leaving a bloody print on her sleeve. She began, “I -”

  Death took her before she could say anything more.

  In the first bedroom, Nika found Magda. She was sitting on the floor, soaked in her own blood, holding a towel to her wounded neck. The Ulfen had tried to tear her throat out, but the sword she still clutched had saved her life. Nika knelt beside her and took up that sword, slashing her own wrist and pouring her Draugr blood into the open wound.

  Magda clung to her, tears in her eyes, her face streaked with blood. Slowly, the vampire blood Nika shed began to take effect, and the gaping hole began to close. It took more time and a lot more blood, but eventually Magda’s neck was whole again.

  She clung to Nika and wailed. “Sif! Sif!”

  Nika held her, understanding the pain that Magda was feeling. She kissed her hair and stroked her back while she sobbed, and tears of her own slid down Nika’s face. Magda pushed her away suddenly.

  “You smell like them!” she accused.

  “I wrestled one outside,” she said. It wasn’t exactly a lie. “We have to get out of here.”

  Sirens of the local emergency services wailed outside, and dozens of police and other first responders clambered into their cabin and the cabins around them. Nika pushed the sword under the bed and sat on the floor beside Magda, cooking up the lie she was going to tell when the mortals arrived.

  Vacation was disastrously over.

  ***

  He spent the day asleep, haunted by nightmares of the horrible things he had done. When he woke, the sun was setting and his mouth was filled with the taste of ashes and old blood. Erik sat up unsteadily, his head spinning as it had done nearly constantly for days. There was thick smoke in the room, emanating from a dozen incense trays scattered across the floor beside his bed. The Valtaeigr concoction was still burning.

  He pushed the curtain aside and opened the window as wide as it would go, then stomped out the burning incense. He used his pillow to chase the smoke out the window, then put his own head out to get a lung full of clean air.